Monday - Thursday: 8:30 - 3:00
Closed Friday
Telephone
(503)640-1775
168 NE 8th Street
Hillsboro, OR 97124
The Spire Newsletter
Click here for directions
Welcome to Hillsboro United Methodist Church! If you are searching for deeper meaning in your life that includes lasting relationships, spiritual growth and service to the world you have come to the right place. We offer a safe place in which to ponder important life questions within an atmosphere of support. Our hearts, our minds and our doors are open. We hope that as you visit with us that you will find a place to call home.
Sermon - February 28th, 2010
Never Walking Alone
Rev. Gwen Drake
Luke 13:31-39
Prayer of Preparation: We give thanks, O God of sacred stories, for the witness of your word today. Through Scripture you challenge our assumptions, increase our awareness, nurture our imaginations, and touch our feelings. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
On the western slope of the Mount of Olives, outside of Jerusalem is a small chapel called Dominus Flevit. The name comes from Luke’s Gospel. It is Latin for “the Lord wept” or “the cry of the Lord.” Its design is in the shape of a teardrop. According to tradition, (and if you have ever been to Israel, the emphasis is, according to tradition,) this chapel was built where Jesus wept over the city, the city that refused to accept him.
Inside the chapel, the altar is centered before a high arched window looking out over Jerusalem. Iron grillwork divides the view into sections. On a sunny day it almost looks like a stained glass window except the city is alive and contemporary. The holy city is the city itself, with the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher sharing the same view.
In front of the altar is a picture of what never happened in Jerusalem. It is a mosaic medallion picturing a white hen with a golden halo surrounding her head. Her red comb looks like a crown, her wings are spread wide. Seven yellow chicks are crowding happily around her feet. The hen looks ready to spit fire, protecting her little ones. Being a farm girl, I know what that look looks like and it is unnerving.
This picture never happened, though. And the picture doesn’t pretend that it did. The medallion is rimmed with red words in Latin. Translated into English they read, “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!” The last part, you were not willing, is set outside the circle, in a pool of red beneath the chick’s feet. That chapel window and mosaic medallion is a picture of today’s Gospel reading in Luke.
Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem appears in the Gospel of Matthew as well, but Luke has a different view of Jerusalem than Matthew. Luke’s Gospel begins and ends in the temple of Jerusalem. In the beginning, Zechariah learns in the temple that he and Elizabeth will give birth to a child. Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to the temple when he is eight days old. Simeon and Anna deliver their prophecies there. Jesus returns when he is 12 years old, to take his place among the teachers of Jerusalem. Jesus’ ministry begins in Galilee. His destiny is Jerusalem—and the ending is another beginning.
Luke mentions Jerusalem 90 times—more than all the other writers of the New Testament combined. Jerusalem is important to Luke, so rich with history and symbol, so dense with expectation and hope and fear. Jerusalem is a holy, sacred place, where God dwells, where God’s glory will be revealed, where God is betrayed by those who hate good and love evil. Nothing that happens in Jerusalem is insignificant. According to our holy scriptures, when Jerusalem obeys God, the world spins peacefully. When Jerusalem ignores God, the whole planet wobbles.
If the city were filled with hardy and faithful old souls, the city would not be such a dangerous place. However, the city is filled with baby chicks and at least one fox and a rejected mother hen. Some of the chicks have taken to following the fox around. Others are huddled out in the open where anything with claws can get them. The mother hen is speaking for all she is worth and most cannot hear her, others do not respond. They do not recognize her voice any longer. They have forgotten who they are.
Have you ever loved someone you cannot protect? If you are a parent, I know you have. And I know you understand the depth and the anguish of Jesus’ lament. All you can do is open your arms. You cannot make them walk into them. To rescue them would be taking away their own power and learning and life. It feels like the most helpless position to take for a parent to trust their child to find their own way. We all have to do it one day, when it is time, or they will never grow up. It is the most vulnerable feeling. When the mother hen spreads her wings, she exposes her heart to be pierced. And that’s what a parent feels like, helpless, exposed, and vulnerable.
Why did Jesus choose to describe himself in this way? I’m not fond of chickens at all. I’ve been pecked one too many times when my chore on the ranch was to steal their eggs from under them. My Mom had to remind me everyday to go gather the eggs…every day. And on the way, I would find a long stick because there was always one or two of those hens who would not get off her eggs. Why the mother hen, Jesus? Couldn’t you have used the mighty eagle? That’s a great image and wonderfully biblical! And sounds so poetic and beautiful—we don’t sing about being raised up on chicken wings at the end of our service! Or what about the powerful lion? It was good enough for C.S. Lewis. You don’t see God portrayed in Narnia as the mighty mother hen, do you? Or what about the stealthy leopard? The prophet Hosea used the leopard, what about that? There are so many images from Jesus’ own scriptures he could have used.
Besides, I’m not sure if I want to follow a mother hen having grown up with a few. They are noisy and cackle all the time. My daily trip to the chicken coop was not a religious experience, believe me! It was not my special sacred space growing up. I might have prayed a few times before I went in, for my own protection! Then there is that whole pecking order thing, not pleasant to watch at all. It wouldn’t make a very flashy bumper sticker either—I haven’t seen a bumper stickers that say, Jesus is my mother hen!—have you? Nor, have I seen any church take up that metaphor lately and run with it. Honestly, Jesus, you could have picked a lot better metaphor!
Maybe that’s why we don’t hear much about Jesus, the mother hen. We don’t like it much. Pretty typical of Jesus, though, when I think about it. He was all about turning things inside out and upside down. Children, peasants and chickens wind up on top, while kings and scholars and foxes land on the bottom. Jesus just loves messing with our, oh, so human expectations! He gives prizes to the losers and pays the last first, leaves the flock to find one lost sheep, opens the banquet to street people, welcomes the prodigal home and throws a party.
So Jesus chose a mother hen, which was about as far from a fox as you can get. The options had become very clear; Jesus could live by licking his chops or he could die protecting the chicks. Either way, he was not going to be king of the mountain. He was the mother hen who stands between the chicks and those who mean to do them harm. She has no fangs, no sharp claws, no rippling muscles. All she has is her willingness to shield her children with her own body. If the fox wants them, he is going to have to kill her first.
And when all is said and done and thought about and studied and analyzed, isn’t the mother hen Jesus just the kind of savior we need? Not someone who scares the hell out of us, or controls us, or rescues us, or manipulates us, or guilts us into doing what we are suppose to do. Jesus is one who lives so fully in life and all its messiness and beauty, refusing to live up or down to our expectations, in total freedom to be himself and he says, “go and do likewise.” He says, I trust you to find your own life and live it as fully as you can. I have confidence in you. Jesus trusts us, eventhough some of us are not all that trustworthy, Jesus lets us go and we scatter. It breaks his heart. But it does not change a thing. It is up to us to find our way in the world and to live our lives to the fullest and with purpose. What we do know, or need to know and remember and trust is that we never ever are walking alone. Jesus, the mother hen, walks with us. Amen.