SUNDAY SERMON

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

Wednesday, February 28, 2010

So Simple, Even a Chicken Could Do It

Luke 13:31-35

I miss you when you are gone. I'm much more of a relational guy than I think I often let on. I fall into the trap of traditional masculinity more often than I prefer to ponder. It is bad enough to be male, but to have also grown up a boy in a fractured home of origin leaves its scars. It was safer in my growing up years to stay away from my parents because physical and emotional abuse was what I could count on coming from them. So if being male isn't bad enough, I was taught from an early age to avoid closeness and intimacy. Years of counseling, learning from a few of the many mistakes I've made, and living with a practically perfect partner have enabled me not only to survive but to occasionally thrive in spite of myself.

I say all of that as a primer to my statement that when you are gone, when you are absent from this community and even more intimately, from ongoing personal relationship, I miss you. It has been a uniquely lonely week around the office.

Missing this past week has been our organist Ed Penhorwood. He and his partner Connie ran off to New York City to play Carnegie Hall. Ed is a fairly shy guy, humble, good looking, talented beyond measure, and just a nice man to connect with. I missed him last week both personally and professionally. Few people can play that organ or this piano like Ed does.

And then, our other two staff people, David and Caela, had the audacity to have a private life and went off to the hospital to have a baby. Caela will be off on family leave for another seven weeks. Work gets done. I'm not crying in my milk over lost work opportunities. I miss Caela and David, the people, when they are not around. Caela is just about as brilliant and strong and creative and caring as any one person can be. David is a master of understatement. He is equally as brilliant, well, perhaps, not as much as Caela, but no one has a sharper sense of humor that helps that the edge off the burdens of the world as David, and who does not enjoy his WFIU voice in our showers each morning, reading us the state and local news?

I have done hundreds of funerals in my career. I really do try to learn from what I glean from people as they prepare to die and from the families as we prepare final remarks. The tragic funerals are not so much those when someone dies unexpectedly. The tragic funerals are when a family and friends gather and the only thing they have to give me are stories of the dead person's work history, the books they've authored and the positions they've held. The saddest funerals, in contrast to the tragic ones, are those where relationships have now come to a closure and there is no way for them to continue except in the warmth of memories. I have come to value most the funerals where I never learn what a man or a woman did to make a living, but rather learn from all the family stories about relationship and intimacy and fun and laughter and sad times and times of giving and loss that help define the love between the recently deceased and those still living.

In my profession there is nothing more sad and more happy all at the same time than gathering in grandma and grandpa's house after one of them has died and we sit around the table or in a circle of chairs that are forty years old with stains and faded colors and stories are shared with tears and laughter and a few more coffee stains and food crumbs are wonderfully added to the upholstery and carpets. Children young and old are present, some of them playing with toys who appear not to be listening, but you know they are learning in those moments how true love is remembered. And, of course, true love is then lived out, replicated in their lives. True love being lived forth from those whose lives have touched ours is a crucial ingredient of one aspect of eternal life.

I invite you now to enter ever so briefly into a story told about Jesus in Luke's 13th chapter. It is a story about us—those who have gathered in community because we believe in something bigger than us—and it is about remembering that we are not alone, we have each other and we will need each other in the days of our lives that are yet to be lived as we seek to bring to reality God's vision for how the world could yet be.

We need to remember this morning that Jesus was not successful in bringing the reign of God, the fullness of God's peace and justice and mercy, to the city of Jerusalem. Nor was he swayed by the threat of violence from Herod. Herod had killed John the Baptizer. Jesus was one of John's earliest disciples and Herod was making sure that Jesus knew he had his spies' eyes on him.

Jesus is rather cute and funny in response to the Pharisees telling him that Herod wants him dead. He tells them, “Go tell that fox that I am busy today healing the broken hearted and I will still be busy the next day and the day after that. But, I will come to town with my message soon enough. But, I'm too busy to worry about dying today, I've got things to do and people to see. Tell Herod, I'll see him soon enough.” Friends, we need to teach our children and to remind each other in our deep faith community what it means to stand tall in the face of hostility and threats. We need to be teaching and demonstrating with our lives what it means to understand that death is an acceptable reality when we are fully living the reality of God's justice and peace and wholeness.

This past week I found myself reading some of the history of Dr. King during the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960's. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965 and a dinner, a gala celebration in his honor, was held to mixed reviews in Atlanta, Georgia. His young children were in attendance at what was then a strange gathering of southern whites and African Americans all singing We Shall Overcome. It was a moment suggesting tremendous movement forward for all of humankind, a non-violent revolution which had come to fruition as the result of following the way of Jesus. Dr. King said that night with tears standing in his eyes, “This is a most significant evening for me and for the South. I am tempted to stay here in a more serene life, but I must return to the 'valley of anger and prejudice.'” He was arrested again the next week in Selma , Alabama for peacefully escorting black Americans to register to vote. The spirit of God's justice emboldened not only Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement, but, as you know, his legacy, and that same spirit moves in many of you to this day.

Dr. King, a man of our time, understood that even in those most afraid, even in those death-dealing ones, even in those shouting the most obscene things, even these folks have the spirit of God dwelling in them, and he never stopped seeking for those doing the most evil to turn and finally do good to those whom they were actively hurting. He believed the fox could come into the hen house and be reformed. It is the replaying, the re-statement of the great biblical theme of the lion and the lamb lying down together.

Ironically, Rodney Clapp believes that these "surprising words" of Jesus help us to see even those who threaten him "in a new light": "Herod, these plotting Pharisees, the power players in Jerusalem, all the first who would be first, then and now—they want to see themselves as masters of the universe, invulnerable and imperial behind their relentless, foxy maneuvering. Jesus calls their death-dealing by name, yet he also sees them as barnyard chicks lost in a storm, too afraid and too stubborn to find shelter under the shadow of mother hen's wings. What these overlords want to be heard as a fearsome canine growl emerges as an almost comic cheeping" ( Feasting on the Word ). So the words are not surprising just because they present a feminine image for God but because of the poignancy of maternal tenderness that enables us, perhaps, to see that God loves all of us, and grieves even (or perhaps especially) those who most violently turn away. Margaret Aymer pushes us even further, if we consider how "remarkable" it is that Jesus laments the very ones who will reject him. How, she asks, would it affect our Lent if we took the opportunity to lament the most unlikely people? "What might Lent look like if one of our Lenten disciplines were a call to lament on behalf of the unjust? What might a lament look like for U.S.-based and global terrorists? ...For those who deny resources to the poor and who oppress those with no advocate?" (As I write this, states are considering making deep cuts in Medicaid.) And what about us—where would we put ourselves in this picture? What, Aymer asks, "if we were to lament our own silence and collusion with international crimes of poverty, hunger, and disease?" ( New Proclamation 2010).

Remember when we said that Lent presents uncomfortable questions and hard truths? What fate are our "city," our culture, our values and our rejection of what shalom requires, bringing down upon us? Richard Swanson observes that "Herod (in any century) has always found allies among people of faith" ( Provoking the Gospel of Luke ), and we remember, for example, that "good" Christians owned slaves not so long ago, and today make decisions for the sake of things like "national security" (remember the fear of insecurity in Herod?) that would make Jesus weep over us in anguished lament. Swanson reminds us, then, that "Lent is a time to take seriously the ways we live as signs of death rather than of life, the ways we steal from the earth rather than sprout from it," a beautiful image in a church season named after "spring." In this story about Jesus' firm determination to face what lies ahead in Jerusalem “for our sake, not only for the sake of his people, in his own time,” we hear a call to stand firm ourselves, no matter what, when faced with risk for the sake of the gospel. Jesus' firm resolve reminds us not only of great heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr., but of unnamed "Freedom Riders" who were not deterred by ugly threats and violence when they integrated buses in the South during the Civil Rights era. Some were killed, many were beaten, and even more lost their homes, but they did not back down. Jesus doesn't back down or run away, either, not because he knows that he is "safe" from the cross (quite the opposite), but because he knows who God is, and what "the plan" is. This is the Jesus who accompanies us on our Lenten journey, and on every path of risk and faithfulness, no matter what we encounter along the way.

At the end of Black History month, we recall not only Dr. King and the Freedom Riders but also the unnamed slaves of antebellum America who, Michael Curry writes, "by virtue of their servitude, were compelled to cast their ken beyond mere sight—to extend their vision beyond things as they were, to a deeper, broader, higher vision, and dream of things as they could be." This, Curry writes, is what Jesus did so well: "For Jesus, God's passionate dream, compassionate desire, and bold determination is to gather God's human children closer and closer in God's embrace and love." Even the most unlikely people, on the margins of society, are gathered in under this mother hen's care, for "the gospel transcends marginality and creates the context for the emergence of a new humanity, a new human community, born not of social custom but of the Spirit of God" (Feasting on the Word).

It is something that we chickens are all called to do.