THE SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT, 03/04/2007

Sermon on Luke 13:31-35, by David Zersen

At that time some Pharisees came to Jesus and said to him, “Leave this place and go somewhere else. Herod wants to kill you.” He replied, “Go tell that fox, ‘I will drive out demons and heal people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal.' In any case, I must keep going today and tomorrow and the next day—for surely no prophet can die outside Jerusalem! Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her checks under her wings, but you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate. I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.'”

BARING OUR BREAST FOR THE FOXES

“Swimming Upstream,” a 2003 Australian film, is the true story of a dysfunctional family which nevertheless produces remarkable children, one of whom becomes an Olympic medalist and a Harvard graduate. The father, who was abused as a child, vacillates between drunkenness and choosing victims from among his five children whom he will alternatively try to fashion into the man he never became. At times, he treats them brutally, verbally degrading them or physically beating them. Through it all, his wife tries to protect her five children, typically incapable of stopping the abuse without herself being bloodied and battered. After an encounter, she holds her brood and embraces them, assuring them of her love and support. “You are my hero,” she tells one. Before he leaves home for good one day, he hugs his mom and tells her what her love and protection has meant: “You are MY hero,” he whispers to her.

Today’s text is a reversal story about leadership and power. We sometimes imagine that those who are strongest are meant to be the real leaders. However, if we pay attention to this story, and to the larger story in which it’s contained, we may be surprised to learn where leadership and power lie. This is the old story about the fox and the hen, told with a twist which only Luke could have mastered. And in this story, the fox is not destined to have his way any more than he was in the movie “Swimming Upstream.”

There are many fables about foxes. Just check a search engine on the internet. In almost all of them, the fox is wily, deceitful, seeking to be in charge. His method of control involves strategies and power plays. He's in it for himself. He wants to get something in his chops. In one version, he runs in circles around the hen house until the hen gets dizzy watching him and falls to the ground, only to be thrown in a sack by the fox. However, when the hen revives, she replaces her weight in the sack with a rock, and the fox goes home with unsuspected booty. Foxes are often devious, yet dumb.

In Jesus' world and in ours as well, there were/are wily types who want to control people, to secure their personal advantage. The Pharisees tell Jesus, for example, that Herod is out to get him. One wonders, however, which is playing with the greater ploy. The Pharisees are not known for their love for Jesus who often challenges their self-centered religiosity. Some of them might be only too happy to send Jesus into Herod's clutches. On the other hand, Herod, known for his cruelty and devious mind, has long awaited an audience with this upstart Galilean. Both had their strategies, both their hope to acquire control by pulling the right strings. Both were foxy in their own way.

We have such people in our own time, people who seek their own advantage and use others only to secure that interest. Some of them occupy visible seats of power. Perhaps their names come too easily to our lips. We have been told that they have names like Hussein, Bin Laden, Kim, and Kdafy. We have to be careful, however, because sometimes the very people who want us to brand them the axis of evil, themselves have their own agenda for personal power. Additionally, some of these people are not among the rich and famous. They work in our offices, teach in our schools, worship in our churches, and live in our homes. They may rightly claim that they seek the best interests of others, the advantages of those nearest and dearest to them, but, in reality, they are controlled by self-interest, that base motive which has something to say about all our actions, leaving none of us without condemnation. We are all about power, so it is best not to point the finger. It is better to beat one's breast in confession and repentance.

Jesus minces no words. He knows exactly what's going on in the self-serving, conniving of those who seek to control, so he calls Herod the fox he really is! “Herod may want me to do this or that,” he says, “but I have my own agenda. I have various ministries to take care of and then I'm heading for Jerusalem, the holy city, where they kill the prophets!” Jesus knows where he's going and why—and it has something to do with us as well. He goes to Jerusalem because the foxes of this world want to have their way. He goes there because of us. And he goes there to bare his breast for us like a mother hen!

The holy cities of this world may give the pretense of leadership. Leaders who work in their self-interest, for that matter, sometimes give the impression of righteousness. However, Jesus knows that these are hollow claims and that such definitions of power ultimately lead to self-destruction. Herod who ruled as a deceitful oppressor was finally exiled to Lyon in 39 A.D. by Caesar. The Pharisees who claimed inherited privilege lost their control with the destruction of their sanctuary in 70 A.D. Those in our own world, ourselves included, who insist on idiosyncratic values and alien priorities may be oppressors for a time, but ultimately control is lost. The reign of the fox is sometimes brilliant and flashy, but inevitably short. Here and there prophetic voices may be raised to challenge control takers and self-seekers, and at times they are silenced. In the long, run, however, Jesus says that if the voices of reason and justice are silenced, the very stones will cry out (Lk. 19:40), especially if the prophets are killed. The fox is not destined to have his way.

It should be noted that Luke chooses to combine some sayings of Jesus in this text that Matthew places in other contexts. In so doing, he gives the reader a delightful comparison between the old fox and the hen stories, although the much-loved reference to the hen and her chicks is originally from Jesus himself. When you think of all the animals with which he could have compared himself, it is quite interesting that Jesus chooses the hen. Not only is there a lovely feminine allusion to a mother hen gathering her chicks in these words. There is also something bold and brave here which other animals could not represent for us. When the hen attacks, there are no fangs, no claws, no tearing of flesh. If the fox wants her chicks, he will have to kill her first—wings spread, breast exposed. And this is exactly what happens.

I am a city boy, and you can imagine that I gain such illustrative thoughts only from books. However, this last fall, I spent several months in Tanzania where each day and night I passed the chicken house on the way to and from the campus where I taught. Regularly, 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 attacked by 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 the own. 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!

I wonder whether you can think of settings in which such love is at work in your world. When our children, our friends, our colleagues do things to others or to one another that are wrong and hurtful, we cannot always stop them. At times we cannot prevent their power plays and control strategies because it may not be our role to do so. Wings spread, breast exposed, we stand visibly on the sidelines or in the backgrounds of their lives, reminding them of our concern, of the nature of our love, of the gathered communities we represent in which a different kind of power is celebrated. We choose not to be the lion, the eagle, the panther-- nor was Jesus. And often we can be surprised and touched when the foxes of this world back off or apologize or make amends later as they remember having once experienced at our touch a love which was bolder than their own force, a compassion which was greater than their might.

Four-hundred and eighty-two years ago this week, throughout the first eight days in Lent, 1522, Martin Luther returned from the Wartburg to his parish at St. Mary's in Wittenberg and gave us an example of this very compassion. He had heard that in his absence foxes had gotten into the henhouse and stirred up the flock. They had begun to use violence to initiate the reformation and, following false leaders, began to destroy property and lives. For eight days in a row, Luther preached to a packed house, encouraging, pleading, challenging, and gathering. At the end of those eight days, the revolution came to an end and the reformation of which all of us (whether Roman Catholics or Protestants) are heirs moved in quite different directions. The proper leadership is crucial. Calling and gathering one another into servant communities in which Christ's love changes lives is the most important task of the church. In the families, neighborhoods, cities and nations in which foxes seek to divide and conquer, to operate unilaterally and arrogantly, there has never been a greater need for the spirit of the gathering mother hen, the consolidating and compassionate Christ, who points us away from ourselves and to the needs of all humankind.

Of course, we know that not everyone comes when the invitation to such loving communities is given. Today's Old Testament and Epistle lesson remind of times when Abram and Sarah were suspiscious of God's love, and the Philippians had their doubts as well. For that matter, contrary to the politically-correct movie reviews of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ , many in authority in Jesus' day, including Herod's court and many of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, did not in fact heed Jesus' invitation to enter a community in which love held sway over privilege and law. Luke tells us that Jesus had dim hope for the future of these men and their style of leadership and power. (And it does not make us anti-Semitic for holding this perspective since we know that all people are capable of such inauthentic living, including the Jew's of Jesus' day.) “Your house is left desolate,” he cries out to them. And this is true for many in our own work and social settings as well, and perhaps for some of us too. If your style of relating to people serves your needs rather than theirs, your leadership will not last.

Jesus is calling us today to make some choices, knowing that many may reject his invitation. He calls because there are still money changers in the temple, widows and orphans without support and a Lazarus at the gate of rich men and women. He calls because there are wars and rumors of wars, religious leaders straining at superfluities and young people lost in the vast innocuous promises of virtual reality TV and the promiscuity of virtual reality lives. As long as the foxes roam unchallenged in our own backyards, Jesus calls to a new possibility. As long as Jesus sees us building lifestyles that use the foxes’ strategies of self-serving power, he will stand before us with wings outstretched and breast bared, gathering us and showing us his wounds. He will call us to the only life-style that builds lasting relationships. He will encourage us to consider the caring and loving practices on which holistic marriages, ethical companies and just nations are established. And when we are weary from battle, and questioning our success in going it our own way, he may hear us plaintively and longingly shout, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

Prof. Dr. Dr. David Zersen
President Emeritus
Concordia University at Austin
Austin, Texas

E-Mail: djzersen@aol.com

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