Hens and Chicks

Lent 2C; Luke 13:31-35 St. Paul’s, Smithfield 3/17/2019

Jim Melnyk: “Hens and Chicks”

Take a moment and consider what you think is the most enduring image for God. Okay. Now, what is the most powerful image for God you can think of right now? Good. Now, what is your favorite, or the most meaningful image of God for you, right now?

            I’m willing to bet that for all of us – or at least, almost all of us – the words “Chicken” or “Hen” didn’t spring to mind as an answer to any of those three questions. So, why not? Not regal enough? Not powerful enough? Not awe-inspiring enough – or at all? Are chickens too pedestrian for us to link them to God? Does it sound insulting to God?

            Again, why not chickens or hens? After all, it’s an image we just heard Jesus use in today’s passage from Luke! “Jerusalem, Jerusalem…. How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” Jesus uses a chicken as a metaphor for how much he cares about his people. More than that, Jesus uses a hen – a female chicken – as his metaphor of choice. How outrageously scandalous of him!

            Images for God are funny things. Almost every time we use an image for God we are immediately implying an image for humanity – and image for us. Shepherd, Shield, or Vine or Vine-grower for God becomes sheep, the shielded, or grapes or branches for us. When Jesus makes the choice of referring to himself as being as a mother hen, the implication is that we are like baby chicks – creatures completely dependent upon their mother for safety from the harsh world around them.

            Now, all this is not to anthropomorphize chickens – neither hens or chicks, nor even roosters. But apparently chickens do create friendships. They mourn when one of their group dies. And mother hens do risk their own lives to protect their young. Jesus knows what he’s doing when he chooses such an unusual illustration.

Some of you may recall a story from a few years back. A Lutheran professor told about a chicken house he passed each day during the time he spent in Tanzania. “Regularly, the mother hens had new broods of downy chicks that stayed close as they pecked around in the grass. At night, one by one they climbed under her breast and you could see nothing but the hen on guard, her chicks lost somewhere under her feathers. When a fox – [think about the nickname Jesus uses for Herod] – when a fox attacked at night, she could not run away. Not a mother hen! She bared her breast and the fox took her first.  In the morning, there was nothing but clusters of feathers here and there, and little chicks running around on their own.”

The pastor wrote, “The mother hen represents a new form of power and leadership, the one for others, the servant leader, the one whose extravagant love considers the welfare of her own foremost. Thus the means of survival over against the attack of the wily foxes of this world is provided not by retaliation or brute force, but by gathering the innocent, the victims, into a community in which the love of the mother hen lives on even after her death!” (David Zersen, Synthesis, 2/28/2010). This is God standing with us rather than God standing over us – a story that speaks clearly to the immanence of God.  Obviously Jesus chose his metaphor carefully!

Depending upon the metaphors we embrace for the Divine, God may seem distant and aloof, or caring and close. It’s difficult to have a relationship with a king or a shield. The former is socially way above us and totally foreign to our socio-political experience in America, and the latter is a seemingly inanimate object. Even a shepherd/sheep relationship lacks the intimacy of a mother hen for her brood.

Considering the closeness of God, theologian Diana Butler Bass writes, “Our institutions are still locating God in the very same place they did 500 years ago, in a far away heavenly realm. So I began to say, what if God wasn't really so far away? What if we took the Incarnation really, really, really seriously? And ... it was almost as if an entirely new spiritual path opened up for me” (Diana Butler Bass, Synthesis Today, 3/12/2019).

The season of Lent is meant to remind us how close God is to us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Tempted as we are, yet he did not sin. Like a mother hen who guards her chicks with her life – who stretches out her wings over her brood to keep them safe – just as Jesus will give his life as heavenly food for us – his arms of love stretched out on the hard wood of the cross. In the end, Jesus offers us an image of himself, the Incarnate Word, as One so deeply in love with the world that he’s willing to go to any lengths to draw us to his love.

We’ve talked a lot about tikkun olam these past two months – and Jesus willingly going to the cross is a powerful example of what it means to be repairers of the world – repairers of the breach that all too often exists between us and God – between one another as well.

The stories of our faith are stories about the extravagance of God’s love for us! To read the Holy Scriptures in the fullness of their pages is to come face-to-face with a God who is, indeed, head-over-heels, lost-to-the-world, can’t-get-you-out-of-my-mind, in love with us. And as we read through this witness of God’s love for us we can see it in all its glory – in everything from the tantrums and the love poems, the promises and the pleading, the wooing and the arguing, the sweet talk and the yelling – all of it, mind you, on both of our parts!

            The extravagance of God’s love: it’s the kind of love that takes Abram by the hand and walks with him under the midnight canopy of stars and promises a legacy of children and land; who promises fruitfulness in the midst of ancient barrenness – who promises the lushness of life in the midst of wilderness, and seals that promise through an ancient covenant of God’s commitment to Abram. 

The extravagance of God’s love: it’s the kind of love that takes a person like Paul – someone who was so sure of his theological views that he was willing to kill to protect those views – a kind of love that opens his eyes to a citizenship that transcends anything this world has to offer.  It’s the kind of love that captures Paul’s heart and moves him to challenge the Christians of Philippi to “stand firm” in their faith.

But most of all, we see the extravagance of God’s love for us in the witness of Jesus, who like a mother hen yearns to gather us all under the wing and protect us from the dangers of this world. We see in Jesus the extravagance of God’s love when he willingly risks encounters with not only that old fox Herod, but the dangers of Rome as well. In today’s gospel lesson Jesus is poised to enter Jerusalem knowing full well what happens to those who speak out against empire – perhaps even now seeing Roman crosses dotting the roadside like gruesome mile markers pointing the way toward his death.

Lent challenges us to decide what we are going to do with such an extravagant gift of love. Do we squander it by failing to believe that God can love each of us so richly and so fiercely? Do we decide there is no way God can love ME that much? Do we decide there’s no way God can love The Other that much unless they live the way I live and believe the way I believe? Our hearts should be heavy with grief over the death of so many at the Al Noor and Linwood mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand – people – some as young as 3 and 4 years old – shot to death just because they dared to worship God differently. Can we find ways to spread wings of safety over more than just our loved ones? In other words, do we choose to act as gatekeepers of God’s extravagant love, deciding who is worthy and who is not?

Or do we go about finding ways to repair the world around us – ways of repairing the many breaches that exist in this world? Can find in ourselves the ability to believe the circle of God’s love is wider than our own preconceptions and our own fears? Can we surrender ourselves with wild abandon to the outrageous, fierce and extravagant love of a God who calls all things into being simply because it is the nature of God to love?

            When we find ourselves willing and able to open ourselves completely to the extravagant love of God made known to us in Christ we can then sing out with bold voices, “Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest!