Be A Chicken

By

Reverend Litton Logan

March 4, 2007

Scriptures:

Luke 13:31-35 (NRSV)

³¹At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” ³²He 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. ³³Yet 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.’ ³⁴Jerusalem, 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! ³⁵See, 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.’”

Sermon:

As a youngster, my Sundays were full of routines.  We routinely went to Sunday School and church; we routinely went to my grandmother’s for Sunday lunch. Sunday afternoons my brother, after he was around five or so, and I routinely went to Rome, MS with my grandparents to visit my great grandfather Logan.  Great grandfather Logan lived just outside of Rome, MS on the forty-acres he and great grandmother Logan bought shortly after they were married.

I remember one afternoon at grandpas as my brother and I sat on the back door steps watching a mother hen and her brood scratching in the dirt near the cane patch.  The little chicks were cute and fun to watch as they pecked and scurried around busily discovering their world.

          Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of movement in a stand of cane near the barn and noticed a grey tomcat moving toward the chicks in a low, stalking crouch. About the time I was going to yell at the cat and throw something at him the mother hen noticed the cat. She went into high gear, flapping her wings, squawking, rearing up, and spurring at the cat. She charged the cat and landed atop his head, pecking and squawking to beat the band.  The cat retreated through the cane with the hen on his back. The cat eventually drug the hen off his back in the thickest part of the cane.  My brother and I laughed at this scene until our sides ached.  It wasn’t until many years later in seminary as I studied the book of Luke and recalling the incident of the hen and the cat that I fully appreciated the analogy of God as a protective hen.

          Once the danger was gone, the hen returned to her brood that had scattered at first warning.  The hen clucked and all but one chick hurried to her and ducked under her wings.  This one little chick stood fixed behind a watering jar staring at the ground. Mother moved toward the terrified chick with all these little yellow, peeping chicks darting in and out from under her.  The hen with soft clucking sounds hovered over the frozen and transfixed chick and gently lowered herself and brought the chick and its siblings back under her protective wings. 

The image of God as a hovering, protecting mother hen is the image that Luke holds up to his Christian community in today’s scriptures.  Luke recalls words from Jesus’ for his community of faith that was in fear of persecution and struggling for its identity.  At the time of Luke’s writing, Jew and Christian alike had suffered a loss of spiritual orientation with the destruction of the Great Temple at Jerusalem.  Jerusalem and the Great Temple were the center of the Jewish faith, Jesus’ faith, and symbolic of God’s ever hovering, protecting and loving covenant presence. Like the Jews and Jewish Christians before them, Luke’s gentile Christians struggled to understand God’s presence and power in their lives in the face of disaster, defeat, and persecution.

          In these passages from Luke, we hear that some Pharisees that were sympathetic to Jesus came to warn him that Herod, the Roman appointed Jewish ruler of Galilee, was about to seize Jesus and kill him.  Herod had John the Baptist killed for his offensive and troublesome preaching and it is believed that Herod may have thought Jesus was John’s spirit reincarnated.  Now Herod is out to silence John again by doing away with Jesus.

          Jesus tells the Pharisees to carry a message to Herod--the old fox.  Old fox is not necessarily a reference to Herod’s cleverness but rather to his relative unimportance to Jesus or  to his destructiveness—fox in a hen house type of thing.  Jesus sends the message that he is not going to be run out of town by someone as unimportant as Herod.  He has things to do and will leave in three days heading for Jerusalem.

Jesus reminds his audience that Jerusalem, the center of Judaism and symbolic of the presence of God, is hard on prophets. Prophets such as Uriah, Zechariah, and others meet ignominious deaths at the hands of the Jewish leadership and the people in Jerusalem.

          It is at this point, Jesus reflects upon the history and fate of the city of Jerusalem and its people. I believe that Jesus is most likely recalling passages from 2 Esdras 1:24-30, wherein the people reject God and God’s prophets.  The Books of 1 and 2 Esdras are not in our bible but they are in what is called the Apocrypha.  These Jewish books would have been in circulation during Jesus day even thought they didn’t make it into the Jewish cannon of scriptures, which we call our Old Testament. Let me share with you the scriptures to which Jesus may be referring:

2 Esdras 1:24-32  (NRSVA)
²⁴“What shall I do to you, O Jacob? You, Judah, would not obey me. I will turn to other nations and will give them my name, so that they may keep my statutes. ²⁵Because you have forsaken me, I also will forsake you. When you beg mercy of me, I will show you no mercy. ²⁶When you call to me, I will not listen to you; for you have defiled your hands with blood, and your feet are swift to commit murder. ²⁷It is not as though you had forsaken me; you have forsaken yourselves, says the Lord.

²⁸“Thus says the Lord Almighty: Have I not entreated you as a father entreats his sons or a mother her daughters or a nurse her children, ²⁹so that you should be my people and I should be your God, and that you should be my children and I should be your father? ³⁰I gathered you as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But now, what shall I do to you? I will cast you out from my presence.  ³¹When you offer oblations to me, I will turn my face from you; for I have rejected your festal days, and new moons, and circumcisions of the flesh. ³²I sent you my servants the prophets, but you have taken and killed them and torn their bodies in pieces; I will require their blood of you, says the Lord.

Jesus laments the fact that God’s people and their leaders— symbolized by Jerusalem, its history, and its eventual fate— have turned their back on God, persecuted, and killed those whom God has sent to call them back to their covenant mission to be a blessing to all the nations. Nevertheless, there is still time to repent, turn around, and embrace God’s will and ways.

          Jesus was deeply troubled that over the history of Gods’ people, they had more often than not sought power, revenge, national status, and prosperity instead of God’s will for them and the world. 

          It is obvious that many of the people of Jesus’ day and Luke’s day had become paralyzed with fear and self-interest in the face of the powerful, oppressive presence of Roman occupation. Many of the Jewish leadership and the people had sold out to their lowest common denominators of fear, survival, comfort, and materialism at the expense of their purpose as God’s people.

          Because the Jewish leadership would not take a stand of faith and trust God’s leadership, they had by Luke’s day lost all they had hoped to preserve through accommodation and compromise.   Those people who had asserted themselves in hostile, nationalistic, and rebellious fervor would not only loose God’s symbolic presence in their lives with the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem but as the writer of 2 Esdras says, “ ²⁷It is not as though you had forsaken me; you have forsaken yourselves, says the Lord.”

          During the Jewish rebellion of 66 C.E. to 70 C.E., many of the Jewish leadership and the religious Zealots took things into their own hands to defend their faith and free their land from Roman occupation. Their efforts met with disaster.  The Jews would not be a nation again until 1948. Just think of it.  What if during the Roman occupation, when Judaism had been stripped of all illusions of national self-determination, the Jews could have embrace God’s will and love for all humankind as proclaimed by Jesus, the Anointed One?  What if the Jews had seized upon the new thing God was doing in Jesus’ ministry.  What if the Jews as embraced the possibilities of the true power of God on earth and reclaimed their divine mission in a new way?  I venture to say this world would be a far different place.

          Think for a moment about your own life and those moments of possible monumental growth and self-awareness.  Those moments of our greatest possible growth usually came out of crisis, disaster, failure, or rejection.  In such moments, we tend to reach out and grasped for anything that will help us regain our balance in life.  In moments of despair, loss, and confusion, we are open to things and to people we would have never been open to otherwise.  Because we were open to something new in such moments, we found new ways of being, new levels of self-confidence, and direction in life.  We found new values and new relationships.  Trust this; God is always there for us but never more so than in our moments of fear, confusion, and danger.  When we are hurting, scared, confused, and doubtful, God, if you will, seizes on the opportunity to offer us new and holy ways of being and relating. In such moments, we may choose to take matters into our own hands and understandings and to do things our way, the world’s way, or to do things God’s way.  My experience has been that when my ways have failed, when the world’s ways have failed me, and I returned to my roots in God I have been blessed beyond what I ever dreamed possible.

Today in our world, in our nation, in our communities, and in our personal lives we are facing some of the greatest moral and spiritual threats ever faced by humankind.  I would say the greatest pressure on Christians to day is to compromise their moral and spiritual principles with the powers and principalities of this world.  The energy and sources of our moral and spiritual threats come at us not from outside sources but from within demonic, human pride.

          Through human pride, under the banners of globalization, so-called cultural diversity, pseudo-intellectualism, and political correctness we are being tempted to abandon the uniqueness of God’s presence in Jesus the Christ.  Jesus is simply becoming one mighty, holy man among many across the annuals of human history.  For many, Jesus, his teachings, his death, and resurrection are no longer the way to life and it more abundantly before God, but simply good, moral, and ethical ways to live minus the Christians mythology.

          In our communities, we are intellectualizing moral depravity under the rubrics of so-called human freedom and civil rights. Our moral, spiritual, and public leadership hide behind pseudo-intellectualism and so-called philosophies of tolerance. Tolerating the unrestrained impulses of humanity’s lowest common denominators is not freedom but slavery to sin.

          Today many of our religious and political leaders are encouraging us to compromise our biblical world views of morality and ethics for the sake of prosperity, belonging, cultural and religious accommodation, modernity, and the status of being political correct.

          Christianity on a large scale is succumbing to the forces of religious homogenization.  Christianity is becoming just one good religion among others.  The implications being that we Christians shouldn’t make waves about our distinctiveness least we offend some special interest or other religious group that may cause politicians and business people to take moral or spiritual stands contrary to their financial or political interests.

          We have excoriated many modern day prophets and minimized them under such names as fundamentalist, conservatives, religious kooks, spiritual eccentrics, etc.  We have ostracized them, mocked them, vilified them, and persecuted them to silence their accusations of our modern cultural and political accommodations. We’ve tried to minimize modern day prophets’ insights to the consequences of our life styles for ourselves, others, the environment, and for the future.

          I have no doubt God is saddened by the behavior of our nation whose people at its founding so arrogantly called themselves the New Israel entrusted with the divine, manifest destiny to bless the world in the name of God’s son, Jesus the Christ.

          Friends, I know these are politically, morally, ethically, and spiritually scary times.  I know many people may be morally and spiritually paralyzed with uncertainty, doubt, and fear.  Nevertheless, let us learn the lessons of those who took matters into their own hands and compromised with the forces of this world or chose the world’s solutions.  We must be willing to trust the Spirit of God in all our ways, even if it draws us toward Jerusalem or calls us into making an unpopular stand for God.  We must risk becoming involved in the problems of our world, our nation, our communities, and open our lives up to divine guidance and solutions in those problems and needs.  We must stand firm in the face of those that would try to scare and intimidate us with modernity, political correctness, permissivism, and pseudo-intellectualism.  We must be grounded in Christ the Solid Rock.  We have moral and spiritual work to do and not until it is done shall we be moved—and then we will only move on to new areas of work for God.

          Be true to that inner voice of God that calls you to stand for God’s will and ways. Be true to that inner voice that calls us to make a stand for what is moral and ethical come hell or high water.

          Be a chicken—committed to self-sacrifice if necessary against all those cats out there who seek to destroy the power and presence of Christ in the world for even the least of God’s’ little ones. Be a chicken--a comforting, protecting, and life saving presence of God in the world.

            Furthermore, don’t be anxious, because God’s presence will settle upon us in a very special way during times of distress, doubt, and struggle like a mother hen gathering her chicks from danger. God will sustain us, encourage us, assist us, guide us, and keep us as we do God’s will.  Remember our God is the One whose very spirit brooded over the face of the void like a mother hen and called forth the world by whatever understandings you choose. Therefore, in the final analysis, “…if God is for us chickens (Well, Paul didn’t say chickens), who can be against us?”  (Paraphrase Romans 8:31)