Outstretched Wings

Luke 13:31-35

2^nd Sunday in Lent

4 March 2007

 

Of all the images of God in the Bible, the ones presented in this morning’s Psalm provide some of the strongest reassurances:  The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?  The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?   When evildoers assault me, they shall stumble and fall. The Lord will hide me in his shelter; he will conceal me under the cover of his tent; he will set me high on a rock.

 

If we want any God at all, this may be the one we want the most – the protector, the avenger, the Rescuer God whose strength and might will keep us from harm.  This is the God we turn to when we need some help, when life gets tough and things get desperate.  This is the God who will punish the bad guys and vindicate the good guys.  This is the God we want on our side in a fight.

 

And when Jesus came, this seems to be what people were expecting from him – that he would stand up to the bad guys, help the good guys, and set everything right.  He would be the lion of Judah , coming to rule with God’s gracious power.  Only that’s not what happened.  Jesus did not come like a lion.

 

John tells us he came like a lamb.  Jesus himself used an altogether different metaphor, and it sounded so strange to us – even embarrassing –that we never, ever use it for him. 

 

It happened on the long road to Jerusalem .  Some Pharisees came to warn him of the danger that lay ahead.  “Get away from here,” they told him.  “Herod wants to kill you.”  Jesus responds, “You tell that fox for me, ‘I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.  So today, tomorrow, and the next day, I must be on my way….’”  Sounds good.  Sounds strong.

 

But he doesn’t stop there.  His defiance turns to lament: “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!”  The words are raw with his anguish.  They throb with his love.  But they are also strange. Did you hear it?  He compared himself to a mother hen.  Give us the lion or give us the lamb, or if you want to put us under some wings, let them be eagle’s wings, but a chicken?  No thank you.

 

Is calling someone a “chicken” ever a compliment?  Do we ever choose a chicken as our team mascot?  Not if we want to be seen as winners.  A rooster, sure.  Roosters are tough.  They have sharp little spikes on the back of their feet.  And those birds will fight.  People will pay money to see gamecocks fight each other to the death.  But hens?  They are not fighting animals.

 

When I was growing up, my dad raised chickens.  You could only have one rooster for the whole  flock of hens, because the roosters otherwise tend to fight each other rather than protecting the flock.  Anyway, one day while we were all gone, a pack of wild dogs got into our henhouse and killed every last hen.  But that old rooster survived.  When my dad discovered the slaughter, he found the rooster strutting around outside the fence.  His tail feathers were gone, and some of his skin, but he had flown the coop to get away from those dogs.  When danger threatens, roosters will fight, or they will fly, but they will not just stay there to get killed. 

 

But Jesus didn’t compare himself to a rooster.  He compared himself to a mother hen.  When danger threatens, the first thing a hen does is call her little chicks.  She has a very particular kind of clucking she does, and when the chicks hear it, they come running.  Then the hen stretches out her wings, and they take cover.  Once they are safely under her, you cannot even see them.  She covers them with those wings, almost sits on them just like before they were hatched, and then she fluffs herself up.  A rooster may fight to the death, but a hen will protect her chicks to the death.  For her it is neither fight nor flight – it is just love and protect. The stealthy fox may come to get her, but she will not budge.  This is what a mother hen does – she puts her body between her chicks and their predator, and she will die before she lets him get them.  When that sly fox Herod was on the prowl, Jesus declared himself to be like that mother hen.

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On the Mount of Olives, which overlooks Jerusalem , on the spot where Jesus wept over the city that rejected him, there stands a little Franciscan chapel called Dominus Flevit, which means “The Lord wept.”  The sanctuary is built in the shape of a teardrop, and over the altar is an enormous arched picture window that looks out onto the holy city, the city he cried over.  I have read that on the front of the altar there is a striking mosaic medallion of a white hen with a golden halo.  Her wings are spread wide, and underneath are seven pale yellow chicks, with little black eyes and little orange beaks.

 

Around the rim of the medallion, in red letters, are these words in Latin: “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 gather her brood under her wings!” Of course, that is not what happened.  Set outside of the circle [medallion], in a pool of red just underneath the little chicks’ feet, are the final words of his lament: “and you were not willing.”[i]

 

If you have ever tried to help or reach or protect someone who could not accept it or the love that came with it, then you know a little bit of the deep ache behind those words: you were not willing.

 

And why were we not?  Why are we not?  Why are we not willing to be gathered into those outstretched arms?  Is it because someone who gives himself over like a defenseless mother hen does not inspire our confidence?  Is it because in the end, we ourselves are more like foxes, ready to take what we can however we can get it, willing to fight each other tooth and fang?  Or are we simply too distracted, too preoccupied with our own concerns to hear his voice calling us, crying to gather us in?  What keeps us from going to him?  What keeps you from going to him?  What is the source of your own resistance to those great outstretched wings? 

 

Lent is the time for asking ourselves such questions, for examining our resistance to his love and to his call.  But in the end, maybe the sad truth is that we don’t fully know, we can’t really give an account for ourselves and our unrepentant unwillingness.  The mother hen clucks for all she’s worth, and we little chicks just go scurrying along, on our own paths.  In the end, Jesus died the way a mother hen does when a predator tries to attack her young – arms outstretched, body flung between us and the powers that meant us harm, and not a one of us huddled beneath him.

 

It’s not too late, though, to hear his voice and to answer his call.  Having loved us to the end, he loves us still.  The foxes did get him, but “the power of the foxes could not kill (his) love for (us), (and it) could (not) steal us away from him.”[ii]   He is still crying for us, beckoning us to gather under those great wings of his.  We will not necessarily find what we think we are looking for, or what we think we need there.  This is not a rescue in the terms we usually think in – our difficulties in life will not all be solved, we will not find ourselves set on a high rock out of harm’s way, we will not watch the storms of life come to a halt, our enemies will not all stumble and fall.  We will not find what we think we want.  What we will find under those wings instead is what we need – a love that is stronger than death, a power that redefines what power is, and a reality that subverts all we think we know.

 

What’s more, we will find under those wings – our own wings.  Not only as individuals, but as Christ’s Church.  Our call is to be Mother Church , following in the way of the Christ who compared himself to a mother hen.  With that same courage and love, we stand against the foxes of this world – refusing to run from them, refusing to become one of them, refusing to fight on their terms.  We stand against the foxes of the world and we stand with and for the chicks - the weak, the defenseless, the victimized, the vulnerable, the lost, the lonely, whoever needs a mother’s sheltering love.  We call out to those chicks in his name and we gather them in.  And then we love those chicks the same way we have been loved – by One who would give his own life to gather us all under his wings.