3-17-19
Grace and peace to you from God our creator and our Lord
and Savior Jesus the Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, amen.
My friend from college has a parrot has a favorite phrase:
“Where’re Daddy?”
One night when my friend and I were chatting on skype, I
could hear her two parrots in the background. On this particular evening, my
friend’s husband, a Lutheran pastor, was away at a meeting, and her parrot, who
is named Checkers, was not happy about it.
“Where’s Daddy?” “Daddy’s not HERE!” My friend answered.
“Where’s Daddy?” “Daddy’s at a MEETING!"
Last summer I got to visit them in Illinois and meet
Checkers for myself finally. And apparently, according to my friend, Checkers
really really likes me. So maybe he’ll be asking where I am next!
We all want something – sometimes they are little things,
like wanting your parrot to stop talking for five minutes. But sometimes we
long for things that are bigger than the names that we have for them – love,
belonging, safety, community. Things that will make us feel whole, wanted, and
at peace.
Last week, on the first Sunday in Lent, we learned what
Jesus didn’t want in the wilderness. This week, the second
Sunday of Lent, we fast forward to Jesus setting his feet and his determination
toward Jerusalem and the completion of his ministry - one step closer to the
hour of his death.
Herod, bad ruler in a long line of bad rulers, wants to
kill Jesus, like he did to John the Baptist. John criticized Herod and paid
with his life. And, like John, this Jesus is ruffling too many feathers.
By now in Jesus’ ministry, he has gone through “one town
and village after another, teaching as he made his way to Jerusalem” (Luke 13:
22) causing all kinds of “trouble.” He’s been healing on the Sabbath. He’s been
casing out demons. He has fed over five thousand people. He has been hanging
out with sinful people, healing women, and teaching things like “the first
shall be last and the last shall be first” while boldly making his way closer
and closer to Jerusalem, into the very den of the foxes like Herod and the
religious authorities.
Jesus, as the face of the love God has for us, longs to comfort those
who cast him out. He longs to reach
out to those who reject him. He longs to embrace those
who abandon him. He longs to gather the most stubborn of us underneath
the outstretched protection of his wings, like a mother hen. He longs for us to
return to God, the source that gave us life. And he spread his arms in order to
gather us, ALL of us - spreads his wings so far out to receive us. All are
welcome in the embrace of Jesus.
Julian of Norwich once wrote a beautiful prayer and often
quoted prayer, “In you, Christ, we have our restoring and our saving. You are
our mother, brother, and Savior. In you, our Lord the Holy Spirit, is marvelous
and plenteous grace. You are our clothing; for love you wrap us and embrace us…
“
This scares Herod and the powers of the world to death.
Because they can never have ENOUGH. Enough power, enough control, enough
riches, enough influences. And so, slyly and sneakily, the rest of us scared,
lost chicks are manipulated in every image we see, movie we watch, store we
visit, song we hear, every click and ever page we scroll through. Algorithms,
advertisements, everything is telling us, need
more, want more, get this and then you will be whole and valued.
And so, we are caught between the fox and the hen. If you
listen to the fox, you might believe that only certain types of people have
value, and some have more value than others, based on the color of your skin, your
physical and mental capabilities, your age, your gender identity, who you love,
and how you present yourself to the world.
But the hen tells us that a different world is possible.
After all, a hen is a mom who would lay down her life for her chicks. And if
you haven’t noticed, Moms can be fierce. And when they get together in the name
of God and children and justice, they beat the fox at his own game.
Have you heard of Leymah Gbowee? (No relation to David, her's is spelled with a G) She’s a pretty famous Lutheran who won the Nobel Peace Prize
in 2011 and spoke at the 2012 ELCA youth
gathering in New Orleans. She is a Liberian citizen who almost singlehandedly
brought an end to fourteen years of civil war in Liberia. Liberia had been in
the throws of a civil war when she gathered together both Christian and Muslim
women to protest for peace every day for years - and they did this along the
commute of Liberia’s president.
Peace talks finally started between opposition leaders,
but soon stalled when the men got distracted enjoying the fancy hotel rather
than what they were there to do – negotiate peace. Gbowee and a few hundred women marched into
the hotel and actually trapped the men inside the conference room where the
talks were supposed to happen – literally laying down their own bodies to
barricade them in. The women stayed there for days, singing and demanding to be
heard.
Because of their protest, the war ended a few weeks
later. This all came about because one woman loved her three children too
much to give them a future filled with violence and death. So, she put
her body on the line in order to fight
for a better future. And she and her “mom posse” got it done.
A mother’s love for her children, biological or and
chosen, is uncompromising and unconditional. You better not mess with the mom
posse, because this club has some mighty members. Mary, mother of Jesus. Hagar,
the mother of Ishmael. Rebecca, mother of Jacob and Esau. Hannah, Mother of
Samuel. Every day, everywhere, mothers feed, clothe, and care for their
children whether their children are naughty or nice, whether they are happy or
sad, whether they will become the next president of the United States or the
next in line at the unemployment office.
So, it is only natural that so often in the Old Testament,
God’s love is described to be as powerful as the love a mother has for her
child. God’s love for us is like a nursing mother for her baby, like a mother
bear protecting her cubs at all costs, like a mother hen extending her wings of
safety over her wayward young chicks. It is a beautifully tender image, marred
only by the fact that these chicks do NOT want to be gathered under the wings
of their mother hen. These chicks not only refuse the love offered to them,
they seek to kill the very one who wants to protect them. But still, the mother
hen continues to love her chicks, even her rebellious ones, whether they are
from first century Jerusalem or twenty-first Buckingham.
In a world that wants “Daddy,” We are under
the mothering and comforting protection of Jesus, who, through the giving up
and laying down of HIS body, we are saved, healed, and given a
future with hope.
And so, as followers of Jesus we too are called to seek
out the lost chicks, because we are lost chicks ourselves. We are called to but
our bodies on the line for the sake of others. And it might cause us to get a
little bit out of our comfort zones and might just makes us give something up,
which is why Lenten “practice” can be a good practice for life. It may not feel
like we have skin in the game, but we all do. We are all children of God,
siblings of the family of God everywhere. When one of us chicks suffers, we all
do.
In our own journeys through the season of Lent, we
remember that we too are on our way to die – to die to the ways of sin and
death at work in the world, to die to the way of the Fox. But because we follow
the crucified and risen Jesus, we can find hope in the face of suffering; we
see life in a tool of death. What was done on the cross needs never to be
repeated, but today, tomorrow, and the next day we all continue the work that
Jesus began. When the world tells us to leave the way because it is too hard,
we can press on - because there are still demons to be cast out and cures to be
given. There are Jerusalems to be saved and chicks to gather. And hopefully we
will find that day by day we too are being transformed into instruments of life
and hope. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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