Chicks of Mama Hen Jesus

 3-13-22

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.

By now in Jesus’ ministry, Jesus 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 casting out demons. He has fed the hungry. He has been spending time with all the wrong people, teaching radical ideas like “the first shall be last and the last shall be first” … all the while boldly making his way closer and closer to Jerusalem, into the very den of the foxes like Herod and the religious authorities. No “circling around the city tooting his own horn” for Jesus…. He has the guts to dive right in, head first, clearly not afraid of what Herod might have planned for him. 

Too often we vilify the Pharisees as the enemies of Jesus , but really it’s Herod and what he represents - the puppet king of the powerful Roman Empire. And Herod now has it out for Jesus, just as he did for John the Baptist. Remember John’s head on a platter? That’s what John got for speaking up fearlessly against Herod, and he paid for it with his life. And, like John, this Jesus too is ruffling too many feathers. 

Here in this text, and out there in the world, we seem to be caught between the fox and the hen. If you listen to the wily and manipulating foxes - the Herods of the world - you might believe that only certain types of people have value, and some have more worth than others, based on skin color, physical and mental capabilities, age, gender identity, who they love, where they live, and how they present themselves to the world.

But Jesus the Mama 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.

I want to tell you about an amazing Lutheran by the name of Leymah Gbowee (No relation to singer David Bowie, hers is spelled with a G) She is a single mom who won the Nobel Peace Prize just over 10 year ago and spoke at the 2012 ELCA youth gathering in New Orleans (see more about her documentary HERE). She is a Liberian citizen who almost single-handedly brought an end to fourteen years of civil war in Liberia. Though she had a LOT of help - she gathered together both Christian and Muslim women to protest for peace along the commute of Liberia’s president. She did that every day. FOR YEARS, rain OR shine.

 When peace talks finally started between opposition leaders, they soon stalled when the men got distracted enjoying the fancy hotel rather than negotiating peace.  Gbowee and a few hundred women marched into the hotel and actually trapped the men inside the peace talks conference room – literally laying down their own bodies to barricade them in, blocking the door and sitting in the hallways. The women stayed there for days, singing  and praying and demanding that the peace talks resume. 

Because of their efforts, the war ended a few weeks later. All this 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, for herself and for them. She and her fierce “mom posse” got it done.

We don’t hear as much about the Love of God being like a mothers love as often we should, and it’s a real shame. In the Old Testament, God’s love is in some places compared to a nursing mother for her baby, a mother bear protecting her cubs at all costs, a mother hen extending her wings of safety over her wayward young chicks, as Jesus chooses to describe himself and his love for his people.  

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. The foxes of the world make a serious miscalculation when they choose to mess with God’s children. The fox Herod did not know the lengths to which our mother hen would go to get us back – all the way to death, even death on a cross. 

When Jesus is talking about “you will not see me until the time comes when you say ‘blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’,” he’s talking about when he will ride into Jerusalem on a humble donkey at the end of Lent, on Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. That is where Jesus is headed – to put himself on the line for his beloved children, even if it leads to death on a cross later in that week. But that’s not where that week will end. Holy Week doesn’t end in Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Holy Week will end in Easter. Holy Week will end in Resurrection and an empty grave. 

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 the Fox and all the lies that he tells us. But because we follow the crucified and risen Jesus, we can find hope in the face of Jesus’s suffering; we see life in a tool used for death. And we can fight with the same fierceness and loyalty as Mama Hen Jesus for ALL her beloved children. 

We’re seeing it all over the world - parents fleeing from Ukraine with their young children to keep them safe. Parents and allies gathering in state capitals to protest against legislation that harms children by making it illegal to acknowledge their belovedness or give them the medical interventions to help them become who they were born to be. 

Places like the Lamb Center are gearing up to be the protective wings over an expected influx of people in need, as the federal government ends emergency housing programs for the unhoused and the annual Hypothermia season comes to an end. A lot of “God’s beloved chicks” are going to need some protective wings in the coming days and weeks and months. 

And so, as followers of Jesus we too are called to protect the vulnerable, because we are lost chicks ourselves too. We are called to put our bodies on the line for the sake of others. It may not feel like we have skin in the game, but we all do. We are all children of God - when one of us chicks suffers, we all do. And everything we do for these “chicks of God” we do under the protective wings of our mothering God, lead on by the fierce love of Mama Jesus. Thanks be to God. Amen.