Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on the Second Sunday in Lent. Based on Luke 13:31-35.
Today, we encounter one of the passages that reveals and celebrates the female nature of the divine. In the beginning, God created all people, male and female, in the image of God. So that must mean that God has both male and female aspects. In the Old Testament, there are two clear images of God’s female nature. First, ruach, the Hebrew word used for the Holy Spirit, is feminine. That’s why in The Shack, both the book and the movie, the character who represents the Holy Spirit is named Sarayu and is portrayed as a woman, but one that you can’t really look at directly because the Holy Spirit is always on the move. Second, Wisdom is personified in several places and portrayed as a woman. In Greek, Wisdom’s name is Sophia. Who exactly is Sophia? Well, if Jesus is the Word, the Logos as in the opening of the Gospel of John, then I suppose Jesus is Sophia.
In today’s passage, we see Jesus exhibiting that feminine nature. Although in a male body, he taps into his feminine side and likens himself to a mother hen. I’m going to try to use both male and female pronouns today. Usually, when I talk about God, I just avoid pronouns altogether. The problem with that is that we have been conditioned for centuries to think of God the Father as male, so if I don’t use a pronoun, most people will mentally insert a “he.” But God is both male and female—we are all made in God’s image, regardless of our gender. So we need to get comfortable talking about God as “she” to enable us to see the divine spark in not just men, but also women and people who are nonbinary.
OK, turning now to the text, we see Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. At that time, Jerusalem was the central focus of both the religious and political establishments. In modern America, there is no good equivalent, but perhaps it was something like London in the 17th century, where both the King of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury resided. Or like Moscow today, where the Kremlin is located and where the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church is located—also called the Moscow Patriarchate. As an aside, I read a compelling argument from Diana Butler Bass that one of the driving factors of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a desire to assert Moscow’s primacy as the seat of Eastern Orthodoxy in the region. Putin is looking to re-establish Moscow as both the political and the cultural center of eastern Europe.
The seats of both religious and political power are stereotypically masculine. Historically, most monarchs have been kings, not queens, and most dictators are certainly men. Returning again to Putin, he really leans into stereotypical masculinity—the shirtless horse rides, his dominance in hockey games and as a judo black belt. The Roman Empire had male emperors and governors and client kings. There were female Judges in ancient Israel, but the monarchy rule was all male. Similarly, until the last half-century, the religious establishment has been exclusively male. In fact, if you read the history of the church—not theology, but about the organization—it’s sometimes hard to remember that you’re reading about spiritual leaders, rather than power-hungry politicians.
Jesus gives us a different image of God, though. Some of his followers wanted Jesus to replace Roman rule with Messianic rule, trading out a brutal dictator for the true Son of God. But what kind of rule would Jesus have imposed if he had chosen to do so? Not another dictatorship, but the gentle care of a hen for her chicks.
We used to raise chickens. Occasionally, one of them would get the urge to nest and would hatch out a brood. Interestingly, the brooding hen would sit on all of the eggs, not just her own. I’ve been told that hens will sit on any egg, even fake ones, because that maternal drive is so strong. Anyway, once they hatch out, the brood hen will protect them and care for them. I’ve also been told that in other nesting situations where each hen needs to sit on her own eggs, once they hatch, one hen will take over and raise all of the chicks.
This is a great vision of church unity. We are all God’s brood. Whether we come to her by being raised in a church or by turning to God later in life, we are recipients of her love and protection. God desires us all to be in her family. Even if we are children of a different religious tradition, God will gather us all in.
Jerusalem was the seat of power, so Jesus’s followers expected him to co-opt that power for his own divine purposes. But that was not Jesus’s way. He proclaimed that the kin-dom of God is at hand, and he proclaimed that in the wilderness near the Jordan, and in Galilee, and in the Gentile Decapolis, and everywhere else he went. In today’s passage, he said he had to leave Jerusalem because he had work to do elsewhere. His message was not just for the establishment, but for everyone. And what was his message? In Luke, everything centers on Jesus’s proclamation of the Jubilee. It was a time when the world’s power structures would be turned upside down. As the great Israeli human-rights activist Uri Avnery is fond of saying, “When you are on the top, you love stability. When you are on the bottom, you want change!” Jesus had to leave Jerusalem to reach those who were on the bottom, those who were far from the seat of power but desperate for change in their lives.
The passage opens with, “At that very hour.” So let’s talk a little bit about the context. In the passages preceding today’s lesson, Jesus was teaching about the kingdom of God using parables. There was also a time when he healed on the sabbath. Then we have this interlude, and then he goes on to do more healing on the sabbath and more teaching about the kingdom of God. Well, Luke doesn’t jump around in the storytelling just for fun or just because he was a bad editor. He situated this story on purpose. So clearly he intended that this story would also tell us something about the kingdom of God or about healing on the sabbath. I think Luke perceived Jesus’s description of the triune God as our divine mother as another parable about God’s kingdom.
What is the kingdom of God like? It’s like being gathered as a hen gathers her chicks. God embraces us all, gathering us into her care and protection. Just like a hen with her chicks, God gently nudges us into safety. Chicks will wander around the coop and get themselves into all sorts of trouble. The brood hen can’t prevent that altogether, but certainly tries to protect the chicks from themselves. She helps them find food and water. She helps them grow into adult chickens. In the same way, God guides us to keep us out of trouble. She helps us find the spiritual food and living water that we need. She helps us fulfill our promise as images of God.
As I was working on this sermon, I kept thinking about mothers and how we describe them. A Google search will find you many, many poems about the love and care that a mother shows. Now, I have been blessed with a wonderful mother, but I recognize that not everyone has. Mothers are human, and so they are subject to all of the same limits and weaknesses as every other human being. We all fail to love as we should, some in subtle ways, others in dramatic ways. Jesus was holding up the ideal mother as an image of God, just as God is our perfect father and our perfect sibling. If you take any of the warm-hearted Mother’s Day poems and put “God” in place of “Mom” or “mother,” you will get an understanding of God’s true nature. God’s love is like a mother’s love—made of deep devotion and of sacrifice and pain, endless and unselfish, patient and forgiving. God, like the perfect mother, tells us all the things we need to hear before we know we need to hear them, and teaches us to be unafraid. God’s love is like moonlight turning harsh things to beauty. God’s motherly love and protection is the example that we should all aspire to.
The brood hen will also protect her chicks from predators. Sometimes the predator is too strong—like Herod, that fox, who ultimately has a role in Jesus’s death. But the hen does her best to protect her chicks. In the same way, God is our perfect mother—nurturing us while also protecting us from the predators of this world. Perhaps like a mother bear. Bears usually won’t attack people, but the most dangerous thing you can do is to get between a mother bear and her cub. Bears won’t go out of their way to pick a fight with a person, but will definitely defend their children. In the same way, Jesus was not a warrior who attacked the establishment, but laid down his life to defend and protect his people.
Throughout this passage, we hear echoes of Holy Week, the time when Jesus would finish his work. He says that he has to leave Jerusalem because that’s where prophets are killed, but he implies that he will return when the time is right. He says that he won’t be seen again in Jerusalem until the time when people say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’ Hosanna! the people shout, as their victorious king enters the city on a donkey. He is indeed coming to triumph over the establishment, but not in the way everyone expected. His entry was triumphant, but humble. His victory was not over the Roman government, but instead over sin and death, achieved by taking them on himself. He will protect all of God’s people as only he can: by sacrificing his own life.
I’ve also been thinking this week about martyrs. We normally associate martyrdom with the great turning points in Christian history. First at our founding—the martyrdoms of Stephen and James that we read about in the book of Acts, the Christians sent out to fight lions, and so forth through the first centuries before Christianity became the Roman state religion. Then the Reformation—Luther was almost martyred but was rescued; other reformers weren’t so lucky. Well, if martyrdom is associated with turning points, we must be in another turning-point age. The 20th century had more Christian martyrs than the entire previous nineteen centuries. As in the first few centuries, they were killed because they proclaimed God’s supremacy over the political powers of the world. They were killed by autocratic regimes around the world—Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and many lesser states who sought to enforce their rule over all aspects of their citizens’ lives. Christians proclaimed that they were part of God’s eternal kin-dom, and that God held ultimate sway in their lives, not some worldly power or principality. As it is stated so clearly in the Theological Declaration of Barmen, “We reject the false doctrine, as though there were areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords—areas in which we would not need justification and sanctification through him.” Or as I read in an article about the topic,
Perhaps the most important witness the new martyrs gave in their heroic fidelity—inexplicable apart from their simple love and trust in God—is the witness to the truth that the politics of power is not all there is. They demonstrated that human beings are not what the totalitarian project said they were: merely machines to be manipulated, for whom faith was an opiate and scientific materialism would be liberation. That human dignity could be preserved by the death of human beings is a paradox of the highest order. It is also, not coincidentally, a paradox at the heart of the Christian religion.
“Martyr” means “witness.” The martyrs of the 20th century were witnesses to the ultimate truth of God’s reign, first demonstrated by Jesus’s death at the hands of the Roman Empire. Jesus triumphed not as a warrior, but by laying down his life as a sacrifice. Like a hen protecting her chicks from a fox, Jesus did the only thing he could do to conquer all of the evil of this world for all time: he gave himself to save us all.
The Pharisees were Jesus’s sparring partners, but not really his enemies. Like Jesus, they were seeking the best way to follow God. They knew that Jesus was on a path that put him in conflict with the worldly powers. They wanted him to hide, to run away and save himself, to take the easy path. But he knew a better way. He kept working to show his love, God’s motherly love for all her children, knowing that God’s love was the only thing powerful enough to defeat the powers of sin and death. Let us now live into that love, embracing God as our perfect mother as well as our perfect brother and perfect father, and sharing that love with all of God’s children. Amen.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
One Reply to “Gathered Into One Brood”
Comments are closed.