February 24, 2013 – Luke 13:31-35
Luke 13:31-35
Chicken Quest
2nd Sunday in Lent – February 24, 2013
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Why a chicken?
Of all the animals he had to choose from,
why does Jesus compare himself to a chicken, a female chicken at that, a mother hen?
Why not the mighty eagle of Exodus?
Or the stealthy leopard of Hosea?
Why not the proud lion of Judah?
If Jesus were naming a sports team, wouldn’t he do better with the Nazareth Eagles,
the Cana Leopards, or the Capernaum Lions, rather than the Jerusalem Chickens?
We are taken up short by this imagery, not just by the fantastic suggestion of the chicken,
but by the fact that Jesus is using here female imagery for himself and for God,
since he seems to be speaking prophetically here for God.
But then scripture does have a range of images for God, both male and female,
which makes sense, I guess, when you remember that
male and female were created in the God’s image.
So in Deuteronomy, God is compared not just to an eagle, but to a protective mother eagle.
(Deuteronomy 32:10-11)
Hosea compares God not just to a stealthy leopard, but also to a fierce mother bear (Hosea 13:8).
Isaiah even speaks of God as a mother giving birth (42:14) and breast-feeding her child (49:15).
Which brings me to my main point:
If God can be compared to a protective mother,
why can’t the head of the British Secret Service be a woman?
Yes: I am talking about the character of “M” in the James Bond films.
The actress Judi Dench has portrayed M in 7 Bond films.
Quite a few eyebrows were raised way back in 1995 when she first portrayed
James Bond’s boss.
A woman? James Bond’s boss?
In the latest Bond film, Skyfall, it has never been more clear what her true role has been:
M apparently doesn’t just stand for “Master” or whatever it stands for:
M stands for “Mother,”
and when James call her “ma’am” it certainly comes out like “mum.”
Orphans, she notes, always make the best recruits to the secret service,
because they are the most loyal: they have no other family, and their loyalties are given to
England and, of course, to M, the only “mother” they may know.
Early on the film, the baddie Silva destroys M’s office in MI6 headquarters in an explosion,
killing 8 of her employees.
We shortly see her standing behind 8 caskets, all draped in the Union Jack,
looking like a mother hen.
When Bond suggests that M has done what she had to do to protect those in her care,
she says, “Only I couldn’t keep them safe, could I?”
It turns out that Silva the one she’s trying to protect them from – and England from – is one of
her own former agents, and he wants his revenge for what he thinks was
her betrayal of him years earlier.
One of the mother hen’s chicks, it turns out, has left the brood and sided with the fox.
This is precisely what Jesus laments in the Gospel today:
that Jerusalem – and he’s thinking here of its leaders – have left the mother hen’s
family and have sided with the predatory foxes of this world,
foxes like Herod Antipas and his master, Rome.
And while we know that Jesus has a heart for all the vulnerable chicks of this world – the poor,
the hungry, the isolated, the guilty, the imprisoned, the dead – today he reveals that
his heart extends even to the foxes of this world and those who side with them.
Jesus the prophet laments here – on God’s behalf – the unwillingness of those who have rejected
him to turn back and return to this God’s embrace.
For protection, the religious and political leaders of Jerusalem have turned to the fox Herod and
to Rome, rather than the hen, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.
Herod’s will is to kill, and so Jesus calls him a fox: the Pharisees warn Jesus,
He wishes to kill you.
But God, on the other hand, God in Jesus wishes to gather all Jerusalem’s children together
under his wings like a mother hen, but they do not wish it.
The fox’s nature is to kill and devour. But the hen’s nature is to gather and shelter.
I’ve told you before the story of the medieval Sufi saint and the scorpion.
A scorpion is dangling from a branch overhanging a river, in danger of falling in.
An observer watches as the saint goes out on the branch and tries to lift the scorpion to safety.
The scorpion stings him.
Undeterred the saint reaches out a second time only to be stung again.
One more time the saint reaches out to the scorpion to save only to be stung a third time.
Finally the observer can’t help saying to the saint,
Why do you keep doing that? Don’t you know it’s in the scorpion’s nature to sting?
And the saint replies, I know it is in the scorpion’s nature to sting. But it is in my nature to save.
It’s Jesus’s nature to save.
Maybe it’s Herod’s nature to devour, to consume, to destroy regardless of the consequences.
But it’s not Jesus’s nature. Jesus doesn’t wish to destroy the city where he knows he’ll be killed.
Jesus’s nature is compassion,
and Jesus reveals compassion to be the fundamental character of God.
And so he looks down south from where he is, and he laments, laments on God’s behalf:
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!
How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing.
Here is the desperate, heart-wrenching cry of a God who time and again has
reached out to his people only to be rejected.
Jerusalem’s political and religious leaders – along with Herod – are sadly going to side with
Rome and its values: threat, intimidation, might, manna hoarding, exploitation.
Jesus, in line with Old Testament values, is going to side with God’s reign and its Gospel values:
repentance, sharing, compassion for those on the margins, service to the vulnerable:
the first becoming last, and the last becoming the first.
And service to the vulnerable is the second discipline in the Spiritual Renewal our
National Church is calling us to, which you have many opportunities to engage in at FLC.
And even though Jesus will have harsh words for those in positions of wealth and leadership who
exploit the poor, his ultimate desire, revealed here, is to gather all within his embrace:
the vulnerable and the mighty, the chicks and the foxes, the lions and the lambs,
the priests and the people, the centurion and the leper,
the Roman and the Jew,
and forge a new type of human community that won’t leave the city destroyed and
the landscape ruined but that will be a place of abundance and sharing and peace.
Jesus will pay the price for siding with the vulnerable of this world and seeking to protect them,
but when Jesus finally enters Jerusalem, he will welcome the foxes too into his embrace –
and the fox will snap his neck
On the cross, he will open his arms to all,
and his wings will attempt to include within their forgiving embrace not only
the vulnerable, but the ones who put him there as well as his friends who
abandoned him along the way.
Some of us here this morning are the vulnerable who can find shelter beneath the wings of Jesus.
We have been preyed upon by the forces of this world that seek to take life rather than give it:
some of us have been preyed upon by addiction, and illness, and grief, and apathy, and
cruelty, and guilt, and beneath the wings of this one we find freedom, and dignity,
and healing, and hope, and care, and kindness and forgiveness.
But some of us here know what it is to have the nature of the fox, too,
and have found a welcome here, and have had our natures changed.
The good news is that while we lament the plight of the vulnerable this morning as well as
the natures of the foxes of this world, the good news is that we all find a welcome in
the wings of the hen and have the opportunity to start over and
create something new, a new type of community beneath the shelter of
these grace-filled wings where all are truly welcome.
The good news is that the will of Jesus and the desire of Jesus are stronger than the
the will and desire of the foxes of this world: it is Jesus’s nature to save,
and Jesus will not stop until all are saved – until all are saved,
and that is very good news. But it is costly news.
It is costly for Jesus – and he knows it well – and it is costly for us.
A few years ago, we commissioned this painting from our very own Daniel Martin,
a painting that depicts a mother hen sheltering her chicks.
As Daniel and I talked about subjects for the commission,
he was very keen to do a painting of an eagle for us, for as he reminded me,
Isaiah speaks of God as an eagle who lifts us up on its wings.
I thought this was a great idea.
But then, I thought, perhaps a second painting would complement it well,
a painting of a chicken! Or, more precisely, a painting of a mother hen –
sheltering her chicks.
Daniel was a little unsure this was a fit subject.
“What,” I said,
“you mean when aboriginal youth go on the vision quest, no one wants to see a chicken?”
Daniel just smiled, and then went to the library to research chickens and chicken anatomy.
And he came up with this startling picture of a very strong-looking mother hen,
whose strength challenges anyone to try to snatch these chicks from her care.
I love this painting, and I love that it stands with the painting of the masculine eagle at
the entrance to our church building, because it says something about how we envision
what our community seeks to be: a place where all are welcome within the grace
of Christ, a place where all can live, for this is Jesus’s will for us.
Maybe no one wants to see the chicken on the vision quest,
and I have been to many congregations’ visioning retreats and no one has ever
suggested that the church envision itself as a big fluffy chicken,
but maybe we should.
Envision it:
Church as a mother hen that offers a home for all within the larger home of God’s embrace.
There’s a showdown at the end of Skyfall between M and Bond on the one hand and
the estranged son Silva on the other.
Skyfall is the name of Bond’s ancestral home in the highlands of Scotland, long abandoned,
the site where James first learned of his parents death in a climbing accident long ago,
and so the place where, for him, the sky fell in.
There they await Silva’s coming with booby traps and explosives and guns.
But if Jesus were telling the story – or I guess if Jesus were the director rather than Sam Mendes
– I imagine that the movie would have ended quite differently.
M and James would have instead prepared at this home a feast for Silva, killed a fatted calf,
and wrapped up some nice presents for him, like maybe a robe and a ring, and then
welcomed the fox into the mother hen’s embrace and sought to change his nature.
Okay: so maybe if Jesus were the director the movie wouldn’t have raked in over
a billion dollars at the box office like it has.
But it would have been truer to the purpose of our lives: to seek the reconciliation and
the rehabilitation of all lives.
Instead, just as Jesus predicts for Jerusalem today, the end is destruction.
Just as Jerusalem will lie in ruins as a result of the foxes’ predations 40 years after Jesus’ death,
so too Skyfall lies in spectacular ruins at the end of the film.
At one point in the movie, James is asked by a psychologist if he has any hobbies:
“Resurrection,” he says, for he had been presumed dead earlier in the film.
But it’s not really resurrection as we understand it: resurrection implies truly dying to an old life and being truly born into a new life with a changed nature.
It’s really Jesus whose hobby is resurrection.
And Jesus invites us to rise with him into a new life,
and here at the table he invites us into that life and seeks to give us a new nature.
Not with a shaken-not-stirred martini, but with the life poured out for us on the cross.
Yes: the body and blood are what’s left after the hen throws herself in the way of the fox.
The bread and wine are given to give us the nature of that hen.
And it is given to all who seek it, even to the fox, even to the Prodigal, that,
gathered at this table, we all might have our natures changed,
and that it might become our nature as a community of faith to shelter and to save.
So together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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