Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Dear Friends in Christ, I’m so glad you made it today.

I’m so glad you’re choosing to gather with God’s people. Maybe you’ve come because it’s just what you do on Sundays. Maybe your mom made you come. Maybe you’ve come hoping to see a friendly face. Maybe you’ve come to sing, or to pray, or to lament for a hurting world, or for a country needing an intervention, or for yourself, in need of compassion, or forgiveness or hope. Maybe you’ve come looking for a miracle.

I’m glad you’re here, and I’d like to offer you a miracle. I’d like to assure you that God is majestic and marvelous and is ready to do a wonderful new thing in your life. I’d like to declare to you that God is almighty and all-powerful, and is going to turn this broken ship around, and just like that, make everything good. I’d like to tell you that by Easter, you just wait and see, our awesome God is going to rise all victorious, and all our problems are going to be solved.

But what I have to give you my friends, is a barnyard chicken[i]. Not majestic, or valiant; not all that mighty really, but a hen.

I don’t know any churches named Christ the Brooding Hen. We have an Immanuel up the street, which seems like a nice name. There are churches named Our Redeemer, or Christ the King, or Our Savior’s. We even call our chapel, the Chapel of the Good Shepherd, but the image of Jesus as a chicken just doesn’t seem to carry the same gravitas we imagine for a church name.

I remember my mother describing chickens being butchered before a family gathering. Her face would hold a mixture of both horror and wonder as she recalled an uncle beheading a chicken that could still jump around in its dying. Her descriptions sounded more horrible than comforting, and more coarse than divine.

Years ago, some of you joined me in reading Debbie Blue’s book, Consider the Birds: A Provocative Guide to the Birds of the Bible. Blue admits that the image Jesus uses here is “not especially dignified. A hen is a fussy old woman, a fat-bottomed grandma in an apron pickling cucumbers[ii].” Hardly the image we’d choose for the church stationery.

Debbie Blue reminds us that chickens have been domesticated over thousands of years to supply much of the world with a ready food source. Today’s mass marketing breeds poultry to be unnaturally meaty and top heavy. The birds become especially awkward as they grow. Broilers are often raised in large indoor warehouses. Laying hens can be so crammed in coops or cages, that they can’t move. Some say that’s a protective effort to guard the natural instincts the chickens use to establish “pecking orders[iii].”

And today, Bird Flu is causing widespread disease from backyard chicken coops to large corporate poultry operations, leading to inflated grocery bills, and ongoing fears of new epidemics[iv].

An awkward, common, disease-prone, unsophisticated, farmyard bird hardly feels like the kind of creature we need for our God to emulate, especially when we need a miracle in our lives.

Jesus’ friends were hoping for some kind of a miracle, too. Maybe a way to avoid the violence of political powers. Maybe a way to resist the chaos of a leader who was bent on silencing the voices of any who would stand up to him. Maybe at least a way to keep Jesus from dying. They come warning him that Herod, who has already killed his cousin John, is planning to do the same to him. Perhaps they imagined that Jesus would use that miraculous power he had to finally put Herod and all his foxy ways in his place.

But rather than see Jesus rear back to fight, the news his friends bring seems to break his heart: Not necessarily out of fear for his own life, but even more so out of despair for his people, his culture, his holy land. Jerusalem, the heart of Jesus’ faith community, is itself being cajoled again into silencing prophets, neglecting the care for the least, and supporting the work of the empire. It causes Jesus to mourn.

And rather than channeling his sadness into defiant determination to fight Herod’s power, Jesus offers the gift he’s always offered, the gift he embodies throughout his life, Love: Divine Love, mothering, shielding, sheltering love.

We have been fooled into thinking that if God were really powerful, we wouldn’t have so many problems in the world. But power has never really worked that way.

Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Rome were all extremely powerful, but none of them brought an end to the suffering of those who lived within their boundaries[v].

And even when world leaders have established so called, “religious empires” through the years they may have offered some safety to faithful people. But they weren’t consistent. The Crusades and the Inquisition they also led were anything close to compassionate or good. Czars, even ones who claimed a Christian faith, didn’t solve poverty for the Russian masses. Many Nazis professed religious convictions. Even in our own best days as a nation, citizens of the US have tolerated injustice, turned blind-eyes to racism, and white-washed military domination claiming we were protecting the world for democracy. Might has never made right.

Whether the world expects it or not, we don’t have a God who uses force or power to stop evil. Rather, we have a God who loves us. We have a God who is willing to be domesticated into our world to suffer alongside us[vi]. We have a God who is born in a manger, who associates with outcasts, who touches untouchables, who feeds the hungry, who carries a cross, and dies.

We may wish for a God who fights like a lion, combative, valiant, imposing, demanding, but we’re offered a mother who spreads her wings to gather the weakest ones in love. Vulnerability, tenderness and compassion turn out to be God’s greatest strengths.

Paul tells the church in Philippi[vii] that those who live in power serve only their own needs; their god is their own satisfaction and pleasure, their own wealth and comfort. “But our citizenship,” he reminds, is in a community that suffers humiliation, who empties itself in compassion, who offers life for the sake of others.

As it was for the Philippians, so it is for us. Just like them, we gather not to celebrate God’s might making the world right, but to sit with those who are hurting, to sing songs of hope and resistance, to see familiar faces, to lament for a hurting world and a country needing reform, to pray for loved ones who need healing.

We gather, in spite of the despair, to discover even here a miracle—not in amazing displays of power, but in a morsel of bread turned into a feast of life, a candle lit, shining wholeness against the shadows, a renewed commitment to engage in the work God empowers us to do, an embrace, or a smile shared with a stranger which somehow conveys resurrection peace, and a lasting conviction that the cross never finishes things, for even in our dying, we will dance in the love of our God who never stops caring for us, and who longs even now to shelter us under her wings.

What we need is here.

Thanks be to God.  Amen

 

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[i] Luke 13:31-35. Jesus says, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.”

[ii] ii Blue, Debbie, Consider the Birds: A Provocative Guide to Birds of the Bible, ©United Methodist Publishing House, 2013 p. 171.

[iii] https://proveg.org/5-pros/pro-animals/chickens-laying-hens-in-egg-factories/

[iv] https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/index.html

[v] Blue, p. 184.

[vi] Blue, p. 181.

[vii] Philippians 3:17-4:1