Cultivating Vulnerability
Luke 13:31-35
Delmer Chilton, a Lutheran pastor and writer, tells the story of going to get eggs from his grandmother’s chicken yard one evening. As he approached the coop, he heard a racket. “A sudden raising of dust,” that surely set him on edge, followed by a “flurry of feathers and scattering of hens and chickens, much screeching and squawking, and then, just as suddenly, things calmed down and an old gray hen emerged from the bushes with a large black snake in her mouth.”[1]
If you had known who her opponent was, would you have expected her to be the victor in that fight? I bet Elmer felt a mixture of cheers and shock when the hen emerged with that predator in her beak. Would she have prevailed as well against a fox?
The Pharisees come to Jesus with a warning. He needs to make himself scarce, get outta town for a while, fly the coop. Herod Antipas will kill him if given the chance, they say. He has after all just had John the Baptist murdered. This Herod is the son of the Herod who issued a decree that all Jewish baby boys should be killed when Jesus was born. Like his father, Herod Antipas is afraid the new kingdom Jesus speaks about will incite a rebellion. He is a jealous, power-mongering, Roman stooge.[2] He is their billy club among the Jewish people. And the Pharisees know how dangerous he really is. And though it is often thought that they were possibly colluding with Herod to trap Jesus, in this case, they are not. They know the chaos and violence that Rome poses to their people. In this scene, it seems that the Pharisees are Jesus’ allies. They are actually trying to protect him. Recognizing this unusual stance they are taking allows us to see what a complex scene this is as well as the complexity of Luke’s entire story. [3]
On this second Sunday of Lent, we are making our way toward Jerusalem with Jesus. These are the days that he is making his final stand. There are demons to be cast out and illnesses to be cured. As he says to the Pharisees, “After you go, tell that fox I’m a little busy right now.” I imagine his allies nervously laughing. “Sure thing! We’ll tell him just what you said as soon as we see the ol’ fox. Which will be… never!” They do not want to encounter Herod!
Jesus isn’t afraid of Herod. Herod is not the threat to him. The real threat is Jerusalem, what will happen to him there. When Jesus says, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” he is lamenting this place that he loves, where his family made annual pilgrimages. Just as the song, The Holy City, portrays, Jerusalem has been the center of the world with the Temple standing at its catastrophic epicenter and inside that the Holy of Holies, where Shaye Cohen illustrates, the finger of God touches the axis and keeps the world balanced.[4] This holy city, that has held them in faith with their God, is symbolic of what now stands in juxtaposition as a religion centered on Jerusalem with one centered on the Messiah. Jesus himself is the finger of God in the world now. He laments that the people of Jerusalem will never accept him as their Messiah.
In this interaction with the Pharisees, Jesus adopts an unlikely image for himself as a mother hen. How I wish I could gather you children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings. But you won’t let me.
Mother hens are attentive, caring parents that ‘feel’ their chicks’ pain. In studies, female chickens showed clear signs of anxiety when their young were in distress. Experts have found that adult female birds possess one of the essential attributes of empathy – the ability to be affected by and share the emotional state of another.[5] So Jesus likens himself to a mother bird who not only takes responsibility for her chicks, but feels their pain. What Jesus feels in this layered, complex passage is Israel’s suffering at the hands of Rome and those Foxes who collaborate with the Empire. Jesus longs to protect his brood from such suffering.
The ways he will do that looks like the old gray hen who demonstrated her courage and boldness when she protected her chicks from the snake in the barn. But Jesus chicks won’t follow him there. They won’t come under the Hen’s wings of protection. Jesus is not afraid of dying. He won’t wait for Herod to find him; he’ll go straight to Jerusalem. Because that’s what a prophet does, one writer said, goes bravely into the spaces of danger to confront evil. [6]
Barbara Brown Taylor has written about this passage, “If you have ever loved someone you could not protect, then you understand the depth of Jesus’ lament. All you can do is open your arms. You cannot make anyone walk into them. Meanwhile, this is the most vulnerable posture in the world – wings spread, breast exposed – but if you mean what you say, then this is how you stand… Jesus won’t be [ruler of the empire] 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 he does as it turns out. He slides up one night in the yard while all the babies are asleep. When her cry wakes 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 if you mean what you say, then this is how you stand.”[7]
[It is] the most vulnerable posture in the world.
Paul wrote to the Philippian church, He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory. It is an invitation to imitate Christ in vulnerability – to care for and protect others like a Mother Hen. It is an invitation to you and me, individually and to the church corporately to open we to heartbreak, to expose ourselves to pain, to face head-on the Foxes of this world in order to protect the least of these.
When I think of Mother Hens in the world whose chicks won’t come under their wings, I think of parents of children who have been stolen from the coop by the fox of addiction. I’ve heard these weary mothers and fathers say how many times they tried to bring their child back into the loving embrace of the family, of recovery, only to have them pulled farther and farther away.
So, when Rachel Held Evans suggests that the church would do well if it looked more like recovery groups, I think she is on to something. But it requires a posture of vulnerability, so it hasn’t exactly caught on. All we have to do is look at the introductions at AA meetings that usually go something like, “Hi my name is Chuck and I’m an alcoholic. I’ve been sober for 3 weeks…” Everyone around the room understands that the introductions in a recovery group are equalizing. And too often at church, we pretend like everything is okay, “Hi my name is Valerie and I totally have my act together.”
Maybe our southern culture has taught you and me that we don’t need to air our dirty laundry out in public, much less at church. Evans says this is “a cultural idiom, not a Christian one. We Christians [Christ-followers], don’t get to send our lives through the rinse cycle before showing up to church.
We come as we are – no hiding, no acting, no fear. We come with our materialism, our pride, our petty grievances against our neighbors, our hypocritical disdain for those judgmental people in the church [down on the corner]. We come with our fear of death, our desperation to be loved, our troubled marriages, our persistent doubts, our preoccupation with status and image. We come with our addictions – to substances, to work, to affirmation, to control, to food. We come with our differences, be they political, theological, [social], [economic].
Don’t we all come in search of sanctuary from the clamor and chaos of the world in hopes that we find here a safe place to shed the masks and exhale? What if we believed that we could air our dirty laundry before God and everybody because when we do it together we don’t have to be afraid? What if in our relationships with one another and in the church as a whole, we committed to practice honesty, above all, for the sake of restoration, for our collective recovery? I think that’s what is needed in this world. I think that’s what people are looking for. Many of you have been hurt by the church, some by this church. Let’s get honest about our own sin – if it’s self-reliance or fear, or false intentions, or complicity, or apathy. Lent is an invitation to honest confession for the sake of restoration. What do you need to let go, in order to be more honest before God and one another?
Wings spread. Breast exposed. If we mean what we say, Weatherly, then this is how you stand. Brene Brown brought vulnerability into the world-wide conversation several years ago (with her books and Ted Talk), but her premise is that you can’t have vulnerability without courage. You can’t get your heart broken if you won’t put it out there. Putting ourselves out there to protect and uphold the most vulnerable, makes us vulnerable. Being boldly inclusive, faithfully thinking and progressively Baptist is wings spread, breast exposed posture. This takes courage. The kind of courage that led Jesus into Jerusalem. The kind of courage that took him all the way to the cross. Cultivating vulnerability means we submit ourselves to be like this Jesus. What guts!— to choose to be the hen of God.[8]
[1] Schade, Leah https://www.patheos.com/blogs/ecopreacher/2017/05/jesus-mother-hen/
[2] Swanson, Richard W. Working Preacher commentary Luke 13:31-35
[3] ibid.
[4] ibid.
[5] Schade, Leah https://www.patheos.com/blogs/ecopreacher/2017/05/jesus-mother-hen/
[6] ibid.
[7] Taylor, Barbara Brown, The Christian Century, Feb 25 1986
[8] Garnaas-Holmes, Steve Unfolding Light Fox and Hen