a sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent [Year C]
Luke 13:31-35
Today is the feast day of Patrick of Ireland, but we’re still in Lenten purple. This has never been a major commemoration on the Lutheran calendar—or even in Ireland, I’m told—and yet I feel like he and his holiday have become somewhat larger than life in recent years. Our kids are expecting leprechauns to show up today and leave evidence of their antics by leaving behind something green, and for one school project a few years ago our girls had to construct a leprechaun trap using their knowledge of simple machines. There are parties and parades in many U.S. cities this weekend. Rivers are died green. Krispy Kreme doughnuts are frosted green. Milkshakes are colored green (while supplies last!) and someone even bought me a green wig and dared me to wear it today knowing St. Patrick’s Day would fall on a Sunday.
The thing is, there is an awful lot of legend surrounding Patrick, most of which is probably not true. The part about his use of a shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity is just a legend. Turns out the story about how he drove all the snakes out of Ireland is not true, either. There have never been any snakes in Ireland. What we do know for sure about Patrick, though, is very interesting. He was raised in England in the 5th century and was kidnapped by Irish pirates when we was about 16. The pirates took him to Ireland where they kept him as a slave for about six years. During that time he became a man of prayer and deep faith in God. He managed to escape and make it back home, but then he entered studies to become a priest and then heard a call to go back to Ireland as a missionary and bring the gospel of Jesus’ love to the very people who had enslaved him. He felt compelled to head right into a land and a people who did not know his God, who had a proven track record of hostility toward people like him. He believes that if the gospel of Jesus is true, then God has reconciled him to his former captives. In one of his letters Patrick writes, “If I have any worth, it is to live my life for God so as to teach these peoples, even though some of them still look down on me.”[1]
That does not sound like a person who is concerned with pots of gold or trapping leprechauns, or making sure things are green enough. That sounds like a person bound to the mission of a loving God. That sounds like a prophet bold in faith to share God’s word of promise, even in the midst of hostility.
In fact, Patrick sounds a whole lot like Jesus as Jesus heads to Jerusalem. We hear him this morning leaving Galilee, the territory of Herod Antipas, who the Pharisees say is out to get Jesus. This is the Galilee of Jesus’ hometown and early days of ministry, the places where his family resides and where his disciples come from. Even with Herod on his tail it could have been easy for Jesus to stay there, but he heads on to Jerusalem, a city, yes, that has a track record of hostility towards prophets like him.
Jerusalem in Jesus’ day was a relatively cosmopolitan town, full of people from all over, but it was still the central city for the Hebrew people. It basically served as a capital of sorts, kind of like New York City is for artists and Nashville is for country musicians. They used to say in eastern North Carolina you learned three “R’s” in school: reading, writing, and the road to Richmond, because that’s where the jobs were. If Jesus is to bring the message of God’s kingdom to God’s people, he knows he is going to have to make it in Jerusalem. If Jesus is going to complete his mission to bring peace on earth and goodwill to humankind, he is going to have to get on the road to the city where the temple is. And yet Jesus all but knows they will not receive him well. He expects to be treated in the way they’ve treated others who go there because he’s got a message they don’t want to hear, a message of dying to self and loving the neighbor.
That’s where get this wonderful image of Jesus as a mother hen. He thinks about Jerusalem, the place he is compelled to go even though he knows it won’t go well, and he sees himself like an everyday barnyard animal that wants to shelter its young. So many times prophets can come across as firebrands and judgmental preacher-types who go around telling everyone what they’re doing wrong, but Jesus sees his actions among God’s people as a mother, as a soft, feathery, delicate bird who can open up her wings and shelter her babies, always finding room for one more.
Not every bird is like the chicken in this respect. Most birds spend a good part of their reproductive energy constructing nests, some of them very elaborately. Their young hatch from their eggs without feathers and with eyes still closed. They need to have a place that is secluded and safe and out of harm’s way where those babies can grow and develop. Maybe it’s a tree, maybe it’s the edge of a cliff, maybe it’s your mailbox. But some species of birds, like chickens, have chicks that are born fully feathered and basically ready to go from the start. They can peck on the ground and eat, they can run around, they can get into trouble, and get easily eaten up by predators. In those birds’ situation, the hen is the nest. She is the mother and the place of refuge at the same time. So wherever she goes, there is safety. It’s like a mobile home-base, accessible anywhere, always nearby. And, as most people would have known in Jesus’ time, hens will often mother their babies so much they will offer their own life keep them safe.
Wherever Jesus is going to go, then, he will be a place of rest and refuge—even when it means he will be heading into danger, into a threat. Wherever Jesus takes himself, people will be able to run to him, will be able to find God’s sheltering presence. And there will be nowhere that is off-limits for him. He’s not going to stay outside the city that kills its prophets and hope they come to him. He’s not going to build another temple somewhere else and declare God’s presence and safety there. He’s going to be instinctively accessible and raise his armspan for all of God’s people to find refuge, even when it means he will give his life.
The question he has is: will they come to him? Will the people of God recognize their inherent vulnerability in the world, their need for that guardianship, that care? Will God’s children understand it’s so easy to be gobbled up, soul and all, by all kinds of tricky, fox-like false ideologies before you know it?
One of the focal points of Lent is taking stock of ourselves and the overall human condition and our place it and realizing we’ve always got God with his wings open, waiting. We can return there, no matter how old we are or how far we’ve wandered. But part of that taking stock means recognizing our inherent vulnerability. It involves appreciating our own fragility, our own susceptibility to forces in the world and inside ourselves that will do us harm. It means realizing in some sense we’re all a part of Jerusalem, a headstrong city that thinks it has it all figured out.
I recently watched that movie Free Solo, about Alex Honnold, the first and only person ever to scale El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, California, without any ropes or climbing gear. El Capitan is a 3000 foot sheer rock face that is widely considered among serious rock-climbers as scary, daunting, perhaps the most dangerous rock-face in the whole world. Somehow Alex Honnold pulls it off, climbing from the bottom to the top in just under 4 hours one day back in October, and they caught it all on camera. It’s been called the greatest human athletic achievement of all of history. And yet what makes the achievement so remarkable, the film so gripping (pun intended) is that Honnold is so vulnerable as he does it. One little slip of a toe and he’s a goner.
I highly recommend the film, and I personally think that what Honnold did is amazing, but I do find it interesting as a way to reflect on the human fascination with pushing the boundaries of our vulnerability, of living on the edge, not just in a physical or athletic sense, but in any sense: socially, emotionally, spiritually. There is always going to be this innate captivation with our supposed invincibility, with this tendency toward individualism and self-sufficiency.
We get enamored with our ability to go it alone and we feel as though we’ve “made it” only when we’ve severed all the ropes and ties to the supporting things around us.
What’s worse is that relative privilege, whether it comes from race or social class or wealth or education, really adds to that tendency of masking our vulnerability. The people of Jerusalem were certainly susceptible to the false security that privilege affords. They were the temple city, the center of trade and commerce, the place where big things happened and important people gathered. But at their core they are just as vulnerable, too. I know when I’m forced to look closely at myself, I think of the ways that I, at 45 years old, am still so vulnerable to other people’s opinions, to the power of my own privilege, to letting the media in all its forms influence my views, words, and actions when I could just let Jesus rest his wings above me.
Because he is the mobile nest. He’s everywhere, wings up, ready to receive me, all around me. Like Patrick’s own words, which we will sing this morning: “Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me…” He doesn’t want to trap anyone like they’re a leprechaun. He wants us lift up those arms so we know how safe we really are there. How much refuge we will find, even in death.
This past week I visited Ms. Betsy in the hospital after her fall. Ms. Betsy is 91 and has been teaching the 2-year-old Sunday School class for something like 65 years. Even though her fall left her with one broken hip and another dislocated one, she was characteristically upbeat. Every Easter she holds an Easter Egg hunt for her class at her house over on Sleepy Hollow Road. It’s been called the social event of the spring, all these little kids running around on her yard looking for eggs and then gathering for ice cream and cake in her basement. I’m here to tell you Ms. Betsy’s goal in therapy is to have that Easter egg hunt.And on Monday when we were visiting, her daughter-in-law, Traci, was trying to brainstorm other options. Maybe they could find a way to host the egg hunt at her house, or maybe here at church. And Betsy interrupted her and said, “Oh, no, doll, they come to me.”
So, there you have it, from St. Patrick to Jesus outside of Jerusalem to the gospel according to Ms, Betsy. Jesus has gone everywhere, everywhere, so that we can come to him. Quite simply, like an egg hunt at Betsy’s house, he’s where we belong.
Said Another Way 