The Second Sunday in Lent
March 4, 2007
Genesis 15:1-12,17-18
Psalm 27
Philippians 3:17—4:1
Luke 13:22-35
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills 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.” These words, spoken by Jesus in our Gospel lesson today tell us much about Jerusalem, but they tell us even more about Jesus. They show us someone different from the person we have come to know. Throughout our gospel accounts Jesus is a man of clarity and certainty in his preaching and teaching. He shows considerable strength and courage as he goes about his earthly ministry challenging those who disagree or oppose him. We see a gentle and compassionate side of Jesus as well in his healing ministries and, especially with women and children. But today we see Jesus in some new and different ways which are meant to prepare us for the Jesus who will become more present to us in the final week of his life on this earth. Today we see a Jesus who is vulnerable, even sick at heart. And we hear him speak publicly in a tone of lament over a situation he is coming to realize he cannot heal, or teach to, or change. We see the more feminine side of Jesus in the metaphor he uses to describe his deep pain and sorrow. And we see a Jesus who is somewhat stoical about what lies ahead for him.
This is not the Jesus you will hear about in some churches you might attend today. Churches whose primary approach to worship is incessant optimism and joy. Not that I am opposed to optimism and joy. In fact, I am all for experiencing optimism and joy as much as I can every day of my life. Optimism and joy are the good news of our Gospel, even today. But as we are well aware, the circumstances of our life do not always present themselves as optimistic and joyful. In fact, in my own life there have been times when optimism and joy were far from me and seemed out of reach. Those were the times when no amount of encouragement from people telling me to cheer up was going to accomplish that. Such words weren’t even helpful. Not only were they not helpful, they often made me feel worse. What I needed was someone who would acknowledge what I was feeling. Someone who would allow me to feel what I was feeling. Someone just to be present with me in it. That did not often happen for me, however, especially in the places you might think it would. It did not happen in many of the churches I attended in my life, and there were times it didn’t even happen among my friends or acquaintances.
But there was one source I could always go to for empathy. I could always go to the Bible. I could go to passages like the ones we heard today to feel Abraham’s frustration, to feel Jesus’ anger and profound sadness, to cry with Paul and to run the gamut of human emotions in the psalms. I am always able to find myself in such voices, and find myself closer to God when I let them speak for me.
So I have always been skeptical of churches whose primary focus of worship and relationship with others is happy optimism and joyful praise. I am skeptical that they are able to speak to us in our darker hours of need; and I wonder how the optimism and joy of the gospel can mean anything to our life when we avoid journeying with Jesus into the dark and vulnerable and painful places of his life. How can we cast a light on our own places of vulnerability and pain, our places of hurt and anger, loneliness and fear if we are only willing to praise God in our places of joy.
The great value of worshiping in a liturgical tradition is that it does not allow us to “cherry pick” passages of scripture to suit our own agendas. Our tradition requires us to read through most of the bible over a three year cycle and wrestle with scripture which is not so easy to hear, no less to preach. We also receive value in the change of liturgical seasons which make us walk with Jesus on his entire journey through his life to his death and resurrection. We worship in a tradition which honors every aspect of our humanity as we honor the real human stories of our Hebrew scriptures and the real thoughts and feelings of our epistle writers. Most of all, our liturgical tradition honors Jesus’ own humanity in his incarnation.
In our Friday evening study series for Lent, people of St. George’s and the friends they invite are discovering many of the joys of being the body of Christ in the Episcopal Church. We are watching a CD which features a panel of very diverse people who tell us what it means to be a child of God in this church. In our first viewing, not one of the five panel members was a cradle Episcopalian. Panel members came from very different religious backgrounds; Roman Catholic, Protestant, Fundamentalist and even charismatic traditions. Each spoke of the value of Episcopal worship and culture for inviting all of who we are into it, and all highlighted the best practices of our tradition. These are some of the things that they said: We don’t have to leave our mind at the door, nor our heart; we don’t have to leave the person we are outside or the real life we live in the world. We are all welcome and all that we are is welcome to the table of our Lord.
Ed, a former member of a Protestant Church, who taught at an Episcopal school for many years, told the story of returning from an all school outing one day with his wife and family in the car, when he turned to his wife and said, “You know, honey, I think we are Episcopalians.” After some animated conversation both came to realize that unlike their experience in their own church, anytime they were with Episcopalians, in worship or out in the world, they could really be themselves. They did not need to leave their life at the door of the church to enter it; they did not show themselves to be someone they were not. They did not need to worry about what they should say or how they should feel for the sake of fitting in to a culture with fixed expectations about how people should think and feel and express themselves. The other panelists agreed with Ed—heartily.
Certainly Jesus was not worried about what people thought about him that day as he spoke his mind to the Pharisees. He was not worried about his sarcastic response to these Pharisees who were trying to make Jesus believe they were looking out for his own best interest when they warned to stay away from Jerusalem. Jesus could see right through them, and it made him angry. Their devious ploy was meant to keep Jesus from Jerusalem so they could be free of the shame and humiliation they always felt by the ways he challenged them. The Pharisees tell Jesus he should not go into Jerusalem because Herod is out to kill him. As if Jesus would fear such a warning. So Jesus tells the Pharisees, “You go tell that fox for me...” that I have work to do, casting out demons and performing cures, but I will be back to Jerusalem to finish the work I have been given to do. Then he tells the Pharisees why he must return, “…because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.” To use a modern expression, Jesus gets right in their face, and what the Pharisees do not realize, is that there is more than one fox in this den, and Jesus has just confronted them.
Amazingly, directly after Jesus confronts these Pharisees with his bold response to their devious warning, his mood and tone change immediately to reflect his feelings. He speaks his lament over “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” Jesus knows he will be soon be one among them, and in that powerful moment a feeling of anguish overcomes him. Anguish over the unwillingness of his people to receive him for who he is. Anguish over their inability to grasp who God sent him to be for them. Jesus has hit a wall in his ministry, a wall which seems insurmountable at this moment, and I sense that it almost brings him to tears. Much as a mother is brought to tears over a child who will not listen to her wisdom, a child who goes his own way despite all her efforts to do right by him. In a sigh of overwhelming sadness, Jesus says these words: “Jersualem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem…how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing.”
In this moment Jesus has completed his metaphor for the world; it is a place of foxes and chicks—and hens who give their life for protecting their chicks from the devious and destructive forces which seek to undo them. The most important word in this metaphor, I think, is the word “gather.” Jesus sees himself as the one sent by God to gather God’s people unto himself. It is ironic, that Jesus will return to Jerusalem in just three days where he will soon be abandoned by the very twelve persons he gathered to be disciples. As Jesus makes his journey to the cross he will find himself alone and in the most despairing place of his life. Just moments before he dies on that cross, he will experience his most agonizing moment in that despair. But he will not die in despair. Jesus dies in the confidence of the last words he speaks, “It is finished.” All that he was able to be and do on this earth has been accomplished. God has accomplished his purpose of redemption in him and Jesus will return to perfect love and relationship with his father. And those of us who journey with Jesus in the darkness of his final days to the light of resurrection know that we can be redeemed by Jesus in our own places of darkness and need. If only we will go there with him.
Such honest feelings and truth telling is found in all of our scripture passages today. Put them all together and you realize that scripture truly is meant to reach us in all the places of our life, even the dark and lonely places, the vulnerable and painful places, the places of anger and despair, of doubt and denial. Our scriptures give us permission, not only to go to those places, but to express our feelings in them, even express them to God. In our Hebrew scripture Abraham is afraid and not a little angry with God. Abraham has taken a great risk in gathering his family to take them on a journey with no certain destination, and only a promise that God will make them a great nation. Abraham has kept his promise and stayed obedient to God, but God has not provided him with the most important and necessary thing he needs for inheriting the land he will settle in. Abraham needs an heir. In Abraham’s vision God promises that he will have an heir. And I believe that Abraham is able to have what God promises to him because he is bold enough to approach God and honest enough to tell God what he is really thinking and feeling. God meets Abraham in his fear and anger and supplies his great need. And so, I can’t help wondering, what good is a Church, or a liturgy of worship, or a communion table if we cannot bring our own fear and anger and our great need to them? What good is a God who would only hear our happy songs of praise and be present with us only in the enthusiasm of our optimism and joy? Our penitential season of Advent and our forty days of Lent bring us to Christmas celebration and Easter joy precisely because God brings all of himself to us in them. And God would have us bring all of who we are to him.
Today’s psalm reminds us that our psalms invite us to participate in the most complete expression of human thought and feeling we can share with God. There are no liturgical seasons for the psalmist. There is no limitation for how the mind and heart and soul can express themselves. The psalmist lays his life bare before God to reveal his joy and sorrow, anger and pain, hope and despair and all else which runs the gamut of human experience. It is no wonder that one of the great spiritual disciplines brought to us by the desert mothers and fathers of the early church is praying the psalms daily, at every office. This is the way persons in religious and monastic orders stay in touch with their own humanity and this is the way they stay in touch with God. This is why saying the psalm is so necessary to the integrity of our worship. Psalms will not let us hide from the darker aspects of our life, nor will they let us be stingy in the ways we celebrate our hope and joy in God.
Well, I can hardly complete this sermon without mentioning Paul. Paul, whose thoughts are almost always transparent and his feelings almost always passionate. In his letter to the Philippians Paul makes an urgent plea for his people to join in imitating him and others who follow Jesus in a world which is hostile to the ways of Jesus. Paul is in tears over those whom he calls enemies of the cross. “I have often told you of them,” says Paul, and now I tell you even with tears.” “Their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things.” Paul expresses his love and longing for people he calls citizens of heaven, who are his joy and crown.
Jesus would have been proud of Paul’s image of his followers as citizens of heaven. It is another image of how our life in Christ gathers us in community to serve higher purposes than the purposes of this world. And the purpose we are to serve as citizens of heaven is a prophetic one. We are the only voice God has for speaking to the world. We are the only heart God has for loving the world. We are the only soul God has for being present to others in their deepest need. We are the only mind God has for knowing who God is and for discerning God’s place and purposes for us in creation.
The Church should be the safest place for us to think our thoughts, feel our feelings and express them to God and to each other. It is the place we should be able to bring our whole self to. If the Church will not be the place where we can bring our whole self, how can we expect that God will be able to bring his whole self to us. God certainly wants to bring his whole self to us. He brought his whole self to us at is birth, and now as he moves nearer his death on the cross, he wants to gather us to him, not only in our good and happy times; he wants us to be able to come to him in our bad times, in our times of lament. He is not a stranger to lament. He is not a stranger to suffering or shame, sorrow or loneliness, anger or pain. He is not even a stranger to death. Still, we can become most estranged from God and from each other in our times of lament. And, ironically, the Church can be the most powerful agent for causing our estrangement when it will only allow us to bring our happy and optimistic and joyful selves into ceaseless praise of him. Churches can become mighty uncomfortable when people come with their doubts and fears, their pain and sorrow, their anger and disappointment and, most especially, when they bring their differences. The message we get from such churches is that we will have to go somewhere else to deal with the darker aspects of our humanity. Until we are ready to bring our joyful, acceptable selves back to the fold.
Unfortunately, I have spent too much of my life in such churches. Or shall I say only the acceptable parts of my life. But I found real happiness in God, and true optimism and joy when I became a member of the body of Christ in the Episcopal Church. Like the five panelists who were so enthusiastic about finding this church for themselves, I also found in the Episcopal Church the only church I have been able to bring my whole self into. I have to admit, I was skeptical at first about the good thoughts and feelings I was having about this church in my first several weeks of worship—until it came to Lent. That season in the liturgical year when the church puts away its “Alleluias” and its “Glorias” to embrace the more dark and difficult aspects of Jesus’ journey into darkness and death. My first experience of Lent in this church gave me the opportunity to risk taking my own journey with Jesus. To think the thoughts I really had, to feel the feelings I really felt and to say words that really meant something and mattered to me. It was not an easy journey for me to make, but it satisfied such a deep hunger for the ways I believed the Church might be present to me in my life, all of me. Needless to say, I celebrated the most joyful Easter of my entire life in a totally new experience of Easter Vigil. A celebration of Easter which helps us remember where we came from by our creation, who we are in our baptism, and where we are going as we journey through this world.
We Episcopalians are fortunate that real optimism and true joy come to us in a tradition which makes us remember that the fulfillment of Christmas hope begins in the despair of Advent and the light of Easter joy begins in the darkness Lent. On this Sunday in Lent, during these forty days of Lent, we are invited to bring our whole selves into worship and into our Lenten disciplines, to break open our minds and hearts and voices to a God who knows the desires of our hearts and from whom no secrets are hid. All we need to do is go there with him. Jesus would not have us be unwilling chicks. That will only bring him to lament. Paul would have us set the example for others, the same example which was set for me and for five panelists by a worshiping community in the Episcopal Church. Abraham would have us know that God is willing to satisfy our great need, if we only have the courage to bring it to him. And the psalmist reminds us over and again that we have nothing to fear and everything to gain by bringing our whole heart and mind and soul and voice to God, even in worship. If only the church weren’t always so joyful. But also— because it is.