Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Lent 2 Year C: March 4, 2007
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Luke 13:31-35
Some Pharisees came and said to Jesus, "Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you." He said to them, "Go and tell that fox for me, 'Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.' 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! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, 'Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.'"
Norman Mclean’s novella, A River Runs Through It, is the story of the Mclean family. In it, the Reverend Maclean, a Presbyterian minister, lives in the magnificent natural beauty of Missoula, Montana, with his wife and his two sons Norman and Paul
The story describes the boys as they grow up under the stern guidance of their father, a man whose passion is fly fishing. The two boys are very different. Norman is obedient and earnest and ends up leaving Montana to go to college. Paul is rebellious and reckless and stays in Montana as a reporter with a paper in a nearby town. After six years Norman returns home where he and his brother renew their relationship. But things have changed. Paul’s drinking, womanizing and gambling get him into trouble despite Norman’s constant advice that he keep his cool. Norman’s words, however, goes unheeded. Paul gets into trouble, is beaten up and killed.
This is some of what the characters say about trying to help others:
“Why is it that the people who need the most help won’t take it?...Either we do not know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and love and should know that elude us. But we can still reach out to them; we can love completely without complete understanding.”
I imagine that this is some of what Jesus must’ve felt in our gospel for today.
In that gospel, a group of Pharisees is warning Jesus about Herod’s desire to kill him. Jesus responds, mentioning Jerusalem, and as a part of this utters this lament: “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!”
This same lament appears in Matthew’s Gospel, but Jerusalem doesn’t mean the same thing to him that it does to Luke. “Luke’s Gospel begins and ends in the temple in Jerusalem. Zechariah learns in the temple that he and Elizabeth will have a child. Mary and Joseph bring their own child there when the time comes. Simeon and Anna deliver their prophecies there, and Jesus returns (there) when he is twelve years old to take his place among the teachers of Israel.
Luke mentions Jerusalem 90 times in his Gospel, while all the other New Testament writers combined mention it only 49 times….Luke loves the place -- so rich in history and symbol, so dense with expectation and fear. Jerusalem is the dwelling place of God, the place where God’s glory shall be revealed….It is also the place where God is betrayed by those who hate the good and love what is evil…Nothing that happens in Jerusalem is insignificant.” (Most of this description of Luke is out of an essay by Barbara Taylor.)
If you’ve ever loved someone you couldn’t protect, then you understand the depth of Jesus’ lament. You perhaps also know some of the painful and frustrating places it can take you.
Years ago I remember talking to Beth, a woman whose sixteen-year-old son was an alcoholic. Beginning to drink when he was fourteen, her son Jason had done everything in the book—stealing money from her purse, lying about his drinking behavior, taking booze from her liquor cabinet and replacing what he drank with water so as to go undetected, getting in trouble with the police.
Beth desperately wanted to protect him, to keep him from damaging himself. For a while she tried to do this by monitoring everything he did, by questioning him and checking up on him, by finding out was he doing and who was he with, by going into his room and through his things trying to find any evidence of his drinking.
And then she would grow tired of and resentful about doing these things. That was when she would go in the opposite direction. She would try to ignore him, not speak to him and act as if his actions or he did not matter to her.
This kind of obsessive engagement and then a corresponding distancing is not just something that occurs in personal relationships when we feel helpless to affect and protect someone we love. It can happen in other realms we have a stake in and in which we feel powerless to affect what we think is a positive outcome. This last week, for instance, with the latest news about the Anglican Communion’s pronouncements about the American Episcopal Church, I found myself obsessively reading on my e-mail the multiple responses coming out the mouths of American bishops one day and the next, quickly deleting them from my in-box and avoiding any of the news about it.
“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!”
To all of these situations, Jesus offers us some important images of God, and I would submit, no easy answers.
Jesus describes God as a mother hen whose very nature is wired to protect her chicks and who does this without hesitation in the face of danger. God is the one who without concern for herself puts herself between her chicks and a more powerful and violent aggressor. God is the one on the path to Jerusalem not to mount a political uprising but to be crucified.
Is this, then, what we are to do in our lives? And if so, how?
Back to Norman Mclean: “And so it is those we live with and love and should know that elude us. But we can still reach out to them; we can love completely without complete understanding.”
I long ago had to give up easy answers when it came to giving myself or others advice about what to do when you find yourself loving someone or something you can’t protect from danger. For I think the very experience itself is a trek to Jerusalem, is its own path to the cross. And so I find that the choice becomes whether we can in our souls continue to love and find some way to reach out though we may never fully understand what is going on and though we may often have to go through doing it poorly to find our way
I know that the illusion that we can prevent bad things from happening to those we love is just that, an illusion, and that for me to become obsessed with this protection does no one any good. I also know that for me to abandon those I love because I cannot help them is not a place I want to be. I can always hold them on my heart before God. I can always try my best to offer what I can offer out of my own integrity. I can always let them know I’m still here, open to renewing our relationship.
And when I get tired or disgusted with it all, I can come home, and be quieted a bit myself by the strange and wonderful image of God as mother hen, the one with no rippling muscles, with no sharp teeth, but with a warm breast and wings under which the whole world, and even you and I, can rest.
Works Cited or Consulted
A River Runs Through It by Norman Mclean
Taylor, Barbara Brown, "As a Hen Gathers Her Brood," The Christian Century, 1995.
