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Well, it has happened again. The sermon that was rolling around in my head on Wednesday, when the bulletin gets submitted, was titled, “Expect to Die”…died. It withered away in the sun…maybe I didn’t water it enough, or maybe too much. At any rate, it’s something else now. So, for those of you playing along and needing to adjust your scorecards, the title now is, “Under Her Wings”, or, if you prefer, “Jesus is My Chicken”.
It’s kind of a trend, you know? Urban chicken farming. I have a pretty disturbingly high number of friends who are doing it. And they all report to me the same things. Chickens are dumb. And stupid. And dumb. And they poop a lot. So…nice choice on metaphors, Jesus.
I mean he sets us up by calling Herod a fox, and so what might we expect? Some kind of creature that is stronger than a fox, right? In a great piece on this passage, Barbara Brown Taylor wonders out loud why it is that Jesus chooses a hen as an image of his protective care, and not a creature more powerful like the mighty eagle of Exodus or the lion of Judah. Either, one might think, would be a better option than a hen. But I am also told by my chicken-ranching friends, like Sarah, that a brooding chicken is a formidable foe. This may be true, but I’m also guessing that while you might just figure out how to distract the “formidable” chicken for the eggs, an eagle gets to keep whatever eggs she has.
Yet, some friends say chickens are very brave. And that while the claim is a sort of “herd mentality”, chickens are actually quite independent and group together for good reason. Nancy reports that, “[When the seasonal owls return], they are a definite threat to the chickens. When one of the chickens spots an owl, she sounds the threat alarm. Usually the chickens all run for cover under the same bush, but on rare occasions, one of them is off doing her own thing and has to run for cover under a different bush. When they are all under cover in the same place, they stop the alarm call. But when one of them is elsewhere, they keep it up continuously, until they are all back together.” So, for the chickens, there’s something about a lack of safety until everyone is in…
Taylor writes:
But a hen is what Jesus chooses, which – if you think about it – is pretty typical of him. He is always turning things upside down, so that children and peasants wind up on top while kings and scholars land on the bottom. He is always wrecking our expectations of how things should turn out by giving prizes to losers and paying the last first. So of course he chooses a chicken, which is about as far from a fox as you can get. That way the options become very clear: you can live by licking your chops or you can die protecting the chicks.
The image of God as hen is finally one that lays bare God’s vulnerability. When you are the mother hen, all you can do is open your wings wide and gather as many as you can, but you cannot make the chicks come in regardless of how open the invitation.
Thus, Taylor writes,
Jesus won’t be king of the jungle in this or any other story. What he will be is a mother hen who stands between the chicks and those who mean to do them harm. She has no fangs, no claws, no rippling muscles. All she has is her willingness to shield her babies with her own body. If the fox wants them, he will have to kill her first.
Which the fox does, as it turns out. He slides up on her one night in the yard while all the babies are asleep. When her cry wakens them, they scatter. She dies the next day where both foxes and chickens can see her – wings spread, breast exposed – without a single chick beneath her feathers. It breaks her heart, but it does not change a thing. If you mean what you say, then this is how you stand.
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often have I desired to gather your children together, Jesus said, and you were not willing. What keeps us from gathering under these wings? Is it our fierce independence? Our warranted suspicion of organized religion? Maybe it’s our love of doing things our way and no one else’s? Or is it our discomfort with vulnerability in the first place?
I’m not sure that we appreciate how much Jesus is re-imagining all at once with his gospel – image of God, the nature of God, the power of God, power itself, what faith really means, what holiness or righteousness looks like, what constitutes “clean” in the eyes of God…and on and on and on. It’s not just a tweak…blue shirts instead of red…this is wholesale change. One might even call it revolution, being “born again”, or death…and resurrection. This is why it is so disconcerting to all those who hear it…why it gets labeled as the “upside-down gospel” that turns all things on their heads. It is why it begs to be domesticated…and why it has been. It is too threatening to a worldview that brings chaos and war and death, but which is still comfortable…the way it’s always been.
The context in which Jesus lives is one where his spiritual practice puts him at odds with culture. Our context is one where the generally accepted rules of good, Christian practice put us squarely in lockstep with culture. I spend last week going to the capitol to speak in favor of legislation that would give families time off work to care for newborn children, and which would seek equal pay for women. I was at a rally in support of a young woman who has claimed sexual assaults on her during her time at the county jail and is being ignored. I then attended a workshop on how we might help deal with the scars of racism. Why in the world would I be doing this if we had flocked to the spread wings of Jesus? But our house is left to us, as Jesus said, and we will not see him until we can see him as having something for us to follow.
It is Nancy Eggen’s family, and the Morice-Brubakers who I mostly got chicken stories from. And, through the eyes of Annelise, Nancy and Mark’s daughter, there is another edge to this story. Nancy wrote, “Tulsa doesn’t allow roosters, so we haven’t hatched our own chicks. In fact, our chicks came through the USPS from mypetchicken.com, but Annelise was definitely the surrogate mother hen, which is why they follow her everywhere now. She even carries one in a baby sling my mother made for her dolls. All they have to do is see Annelise through a window, and they come running across the yard. They are intensely loyal and chicken snuggling is a daily part of Annelise’s routine. As the civil war in Syria geared up last year (one of her close friends is Syrian-American), while we were watching the news one night, she said that if everyone in the world had a few chickens they could snuggle every day, we could probably have world peace because everyone would be too relaxed to fight.”
That seems like a lovely sentiment – too relaxed to fight – but how far into our ears does that get before it is rejected as an impractical, “pie-in-the-sky”, wishful dream…the folly of children who don’t understand how the world really works? This metaphor, the mother hen guarding her chicks, changes our whole notion of how divine power, the power at the heart of creation, works. It asks us to see power in vulnerability. But we don’t think of power and vulnerability as linked at all. At worst, we see vulnerability as a sign of weakness, something to be avoided at any cost. At best, we may recognize the need to be vulnerable to those we care about most deeply, but we don’t see vulnerability as essential to living not only a courageous life, but a life following the model of Jesus. The threat that faces us in this story of Jesus, the weight that hangs on us as he heads towards what we know Jerusalem will bring…it isn’t the threat of death. It is the threat of trusting that God is stronger than death, that death doesn’t have the final say. It is the threat of resurrection.
We know that the cross awaits Jesus in Jerusalem. And we know that love is stronger than death. And we know what happens when the stone is rolled away. It ought to be easier for us to build a life around this than it was for Jerusalem, living before the Easter tale was told. But it’s not, is it? It has always been and is still very hard to live this way. It’s why God is still speaking, still longing for us to remember who we are again, where we can imagine the foolishness of the gospel that sees us too relaxed by God’s love and beauty to consider fighting. I know it sounds crazy, but God keeps trying to take us under Her wing, longing to gather us together. We’re the ones who aren’t willing.
You may say I’m a dreamer…but I’m not the only one. I hope some day you’ll join us…and the world will live as one.