A Fox and a Mother Hen

2  Lent C        February 24, 2013             

Gen.15:1-12,17-18   Ps. 27

Phil.3:17-4:1   Luke 13:22-35 

 Lectionary Link

  When someone who has the power to exploit is given a position of power over the vulnerable and the helpless, we have an expression:  We say, “The fox is guarding the henhouse.”  It’s really means that the fox is plundering at will the ones whom he is supposed to be protecting.

  In our appointed Gospel today, we have a juxtaposition of the fox and the hen in the saying of Jesus.

  Jesus called Herod a fox.  And Jesus wished to gather up the vulnerable people of Jerusalem like a mother hens does her chicks.

  This imagery strikes me as images of resignation in the face of the inevitable.  Why, did not Jesus use the image of an eagle or some other bird of prey?  Surely a bird of prey would convey an image of strength and resistance.  Even if he had used the image of a rooster, at least a rooster would fight back and offer resistance to a fox.

  But Jesus chose the image of a mother hen, a feminine image.  And this is the image he associated himself with.  A mother hen in the dark of the chicken coop will hide her baby chicks under her wings and when the fox comes, she will not flee.   She will bare her breast and neck to the oncoming foe.  It is an unfair fight.  But the fox will find more than enough to eat in taking the mother hen, and so the little chicks are left alive but scattered after the attack.

  This imagery became the imagery for the early Christian community.  Jesus was the mother hen, who sacrificed his life so that those who followed him might live.

  Jesus, was a country boy from Nazareth in Galilee and his message and mission was at odds with the city of Jerusalem.  Herod was the foxy representative of the Roman authorities who wanted to manipulate the politics of Jerusalem to his advantage in power and wealth.  The Pharisees and Sadducees, too, wanted to manipulate the religious politics to their advantage and to their survival.  It was imperative that wise and foxy politics prevail to negotiate most favorable terms to the residents of Jerusalem who were trying to make the best of it in the midst of Roman occupation.

  Jerusalem, such as it was, had no time or place for a prophet with a message that they did not want to hear.  And for the most part, people who had political and religious power were not the ones who were won by the message of Christ.  The hearts that he won came from the people of the countryside and from the neglected and the powerless.  Those people were the “baby chicks of the mother hen Jesus.”

  The historical irony is that Christianity went from the countryside Jesus movement to a city religion in the Roman Empire, and finally to become a religion of the empire and of the many great cities in the empire.  So those who practiced Christianity learned also to be skilled practitioners of the foxy political arts.

  We know that even with the advance of Christianity the killing of the prophets did not subside.  We have a long history of the persecution and killing of heretics or reformers.  And it is not distant history either. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed by forces that did not want his message to continue and succeed.  We know in Anglican history rivalry between reform and Roman Catholic power bases created martyrs.  The person who wrote the first Book of Common Prayer, Archbishop Cranmer was burnt at the stake.

  It may be that Jerusalem and every city will always kill the prophets and the reformers who challenge the justice of those who hold power.  Because, it just so happens that justice works best on behalf of those who have money and power.

  The United States as a system of government tried to establish its form of governance to do away with the “killing of the prophets” mentality.  By separating church and state, no one is allowed legally to kill a prophet.  Any prophet has the freedom to gain their own followers and practice their own faith beliefs as long as they don’t impinge on the rights of others and do not break the law.  Our nation’s founders were filled with Enlightenment thinking and they were embarrassed by all of the religious wars that had plagued the continent for so many years.  They wanted America to be a new promised land where “no prophets” would be killed.   The America philosophy has been, it’s better that there be a thousand religions than any one religion be allowed to kill prophets.

  We, as Americans, should be proud about perhaps our greatest contribution to the world.  And yet we should not be so proud as to not keep up our vigilance when our laws and practices do not protect and promote the care of the vulnerable people in our society.

  If, we, in America have committed ourselves to the prevention of the killing of any prophets, how can these words of Christ have relevance for us today?

  First I think that there is a natural conservatism in everyone and every system that resists reform.  So the first impulse is to get silence the voice of the one who presents the need for reform.  Even on a personal basis, there are insight that each of us receive to change the direction of our lives.  And while we don’t actual kill a personal prophet, we may actually squelch the voice of reform in our consciences that is telling us to change the direction of our lives so that we can have more successful living outcomes.

  Also, I believe that there was a bigger fox than Herod that Jesus was addressing.  What was it that made Herod the fox?  Herod had the power to take the lives of those whom he wanted to get rid of.  In a sense, the fox that was bigger than Herod or even the Roman Empire was the fox of death itself.

  Just as the mother hen is easy prey to fox; so we too know that we and everyone are easy prey to death, because it is certain to come.  As pastors, friends and family we know the threats of that fox death in its many forms of disease and accidents.  We feel vulnerable and we know its power and we want to protect our friends and loved ones from its power.  And yet in our time we will have to offer up our breast and neck to that fox, death itself.  But we can do so in hope, because all that is good in our life that has been protected in the covering of our wings will live on forever.

  Jesus, as mother hen for his brood, offered his breast and neck up to that great fox, death, and yet his life continued strong in those who scattered yet who were drawn back together by knowing the continuing presence of Christ in his resurrection.

  The words of Jesus for us today, are sadly realistic, because unlike other religions that only allow positive thinking, we don’t try to whitewash the dark side of life out of the picture.  But in our sad realism, we know the great fox death does not win in the end; resurrection is around the corner.  Our sad realism is because our lives are such wonderful times to cherish that loss is poignantly felt.  And if loss is poignantly felt, how much greater will the gain of resurrection life be.

  And so today, we lament with Jesus, the sad realism of the apparent power of the foxes of this live to exploit and plunder those who are vulnerable.  May we, even like the vulnerable, mother hen, Christ himself, be ready to stand against the foxes in this life, so that what is good and right might continue and multiply.  Amen.

Daily Quiz, February 20, 2013

Daily Quiz

According to canon law King Henry VIII had how many wives?

a.four, Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Anne of Cleves, and Catherine Howard
b. six, four above and Jane Seymour and Catherine Parr
c. two, Jane Seymour and Catherine Parr
d. Henry VIII, had six weddings and two marriages
e. c and d

Daily Quiz, February 19, 2013

Daily Quiz

Venite and Beneditus es are

a. titles of canticles
b. opening words of canticles in Latin
c. titles retained from the Latin of chanted songs in Morning prayer
d. all of the above

Daily Quiz, February 18, 2013

Daily Quiz

Martin Luther, whose feast day is today, belonged to what religious order?

a. Franciscan
b. Dominican
c. Jesuit
d. Augustinian

Temptation: Acting on Misinterpretation

1 Lent C    February 17, 2013

Deut.26:1-11    Ps. 91

Rom.10:5-13     Luke 4:1-13

Lectionary Link 

Text:

  We begin the season of Lent with the famous show down between Jesus and Satan.  One wonders how this private temptation of Jesus ever came to textual form but it has and it ties in with numerology of the Hebrew Scripture.  The number 40 is the symbolic number for test and ordeal and wandering before arriving at an appointed place.  40 years in the wilderness for the people of Israel.  It rained 40 days and night in the big Flood.   

  The wilderness is also a symbolic place of making the lonely vision quest to test one’s calling.  Are you really sure you’re supposed to do this?  A vision of vocation and ministry is tested.  “Maybe I shouldn’t have left the previous familiar place.  Maybe I did not have any choice as circumstances forced me in the liminal state of betwixt and between, a rite of passage.  Maybe I’ve launch out into the new vision and I’m getting nowhere so in disappointment, maybe I should quit.”  The showdown between Jesus and Satan in the wilderness happened after his baptism by John the Baptist, when Jesus was to begin his ministry.  In his vision quest in the wilderness one can find revisited the place of human defeat, namely the current state of the Garden of Eden..  First Adam failed in his temptation with the serpent-Satan, the trickster, and as a result the entire creation was plagued with weeds.  The Garden of Eden was locked off; Shangri-la now but an ancient myth.  Now the dis-harmony with the plant world was expressed in the weeds that want to grow in our garden of wheat and fruits and choke off our labor.  The Garden of Eden as a friendly menagerie of animals with Adam being like a Dr. Doolittle talking with animals and giving them their names, had become the wilderness where the beasts were predators and humanity is a prey unless human beings can outsmart the animals who were originally created for eco-harmony and friendship.

  “God, we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” This was a visionary impulse long before Joni Mitchell wrote a song about the Woodstock hippie quest for a return to Eden.  The entrance of Israel into the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey was another attempt to get back to the Garden as are all human attempts at utopia for more perfect societies. 

   Adam and Christ stand as the totemic personalities for trying to understand human direction and in the story of Adam, we find a story that gives us insight about our moral failure.  First man and first woman, Adam and Eve are naively innocent creatures, who succumb to the superior stealthy cunning of the serpent, and the naïve pair went from being vegetarians to misbehaving fruitarians and as they say, the rest is history.  In the Biblical epic, there was one needed to progress beyond the state of naiveté and go again to a site of the original misdirection and that once Garden site has now become the wilderness haunted by wild beasts.  And a second Adam, a hero had to go in to confront the great trickster. 

  We in our biblical religion are so used to “externalizing” all things biblical as having happened out there in the external world.  The Greeks use a word, “Topos” to refer to both physical sites but also literary textual topics.  When we read the Bible we are reading about those “topoi,” those great human topics or literary topographical inner space sites of human angst and triumph.

   Perhaps the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness highlights most poignantly the notion of word, text and topic.  The temptation showdown was essentially an interior verbal sparring between Jesus and his interior trickster Accuser.  They exchanged words and so we had a debate or forensic discourse, verbal jousting.  And what were they jousting about?  They were essentially jousting about the great text of their known world, the words of their Bible, the words of the Hebrew Scripture.  The temptation of Christ shows us that Satan knew how to use the Bible.  The words of the Bible as written could be interpreted in a hundred ways and so Satan was using the words of the Hebrew Scripture to tempt Jesus to make the word flesh in coming to an actual deed.  The fullness of word being made flesh occurs when it animates an actual deed.  Just as the serpent trickster of old used flattering words to motivate Eve and Adam to the deed of eating the forbidden fruit, so too the trickster and eloquent devil tried to appeal to the good holy book to influence an action by Jesus.

  The temptations of life most often are about interpretation and timing?  Is eating an apple from the tree bad?  Of course not, it is timing of when the apple can be eaten.  A parent does the same thing with one’s child.  Are cookies bad for children, yes and no, it depends upon the timing of eating for good nutrition.  Is bread bad for Jesus or us?  Of course not, it has to do with the timing of throwing Jesus off his schedule of how he understood his relationship with God his father.

   The idolatrous form of self-esteem is the megalomaniac quest for the kind of fame when a person is dominated to define their very worth as a person by the number of people who can express devotion or adoration towards them.  Our media society certainly feeds this distorted view of fame as famous people complain about invasive paparazzi even while they use all of the distorted fame to get wealthy.  Worship and adore me in exactly the way that I want you to.  And you see how fame and the events that lead to fame often get labeled as a Faustian bargain.  “Jesus, you are clever enough to use your wisdom and your charisma and your ability to manipulate people and become as powerful and as famous as the Caesar, so why don’t you use your ability to get this kind of fame.”  The plan of God had Jesus becoming famous in the path of counter-logic; by getting crucified and then returning to countless numbers of people in resurrection manifestations. 

  And then there is the temptation trick of trying to get Jesus to be a fundamentalist literalist.  “Throw yourself off the building Jesus because the Bible says the angels will catch you.”  There was a time and a place for Jesus to die but not by being led into acting because of a faulty reading of the Bible.  Lots of people are led to hurtful prejudice and acts of injustice because of the way in which they read the Bible.  Our world is full of incredible cruel actions done because of the way that religious people of all religions have been tempted to read their Holy Books in distorted ways.  The temptation of Christ is a witness to us to be careful in how we seek to understand our Holy Book in our time and if our interpretation of the Bible does not pass the non-exploitative, love and justice and common sense smell test, then we need to be careful in the kinds of interpretation of the Bible that we are acting upon.

  The greater point that I would like for us to understand is that you and I are word constituted in a sea of words.  By this I mean our world and self-knowledge is constructed by the way in which we see or perceive through the word structures of our life.  We use Holy Books and “higher education” to inform the language lenses through which we see all of life outside of us and all of who we are inside of us.  So we have taken on lots of word usage that already result in automatic body language acts in our life.  Our body language follows the code of how we have taken on word use in our lives.

  So this temptation event of Jesus as a clash of competing interpretations is crucial in understanding that you and I live on a sea of words in how we are interpreting the meaning of our lives in each word and deed.  The parts of our life deeds that are already on automatic in our body rituals sometimes are hard to interdict and change.

  The reason we try to educate and bring into our lives new word events and new possibility of new interpretations is that we hope to cure in progressive ways the ignorance that our speech and body habits have taken on through being informed by less than ideal sources of information.

  This is why we are always within a textual temptation, a word battle for excellence in future speech and action.  Jesus won the battle of words against the one who wanted him to misinterpret and take the wrong actions in his life.

  We live the drama of this temptation too, every moment of our lives.  That is why the “ I.T. phrase “garbage in, garbage out” is relevant to our life of temptation.  What we take in as we live on this sea of words in some ways become flesh in the actions of our lives and so we need to be ever mindful of what we are taking in so as to influence what we will be expressing in the words and deeds of our lives.

  Friends, we highlight the temptation of Jesus today as we have begun Lent, but trust me, you and I are living this dramatic temptation in our word lives all of the time.  Let us ponder today how we are interpreting and acting out the highest ideals of our lives today, and let us follow Jesus in finding strategies against the temptation to “mistime” the words and deeds of our lives.  Amen.

Daily Quiz, February 17, 2013

Daily Quiz

Which Gospel does not mention the temptation of Jesus Christ in the wilderness?

a. Matthew
b. Mark
c. Luke
d. John

Aphorisms for Ash Wednesdays

Ash Wednesday        February 13, 2013

Isaiah 58:1-12         Ps.103       

2 Cor. 5:20b-6:10    Matt. 6:1-6, 16-21

Preached at a Joint Ash Wednesday Service with Advent Lutheran of Morgan Hill

Lectionary Link

     What are we doing here tonight?  Right now you are put in the situation of listening to me preach unless you can let your minds wander to much more exciting places to be, and I’m sure that there are many. 

    After preaching these same Ash Wednesday Scriptural readings for 31 years, you’d think that I’d exhausted them by now or at least exhausted lots of listeners.  But now I come with fear and trembling into a house of Luther where the preaching is exceptional and I am used to Episcopal listeners who don’t expect me to say anything profound because it’s all been said better in the Book of Common Prayer, preferably in Tudor English.

     The Ash Wednesday liturgy provides us with a challenge; we have hundreds of years represented in the Scripture lessons and 2000 years of church history that bring us to this event tonight.  We have a room of people who have some shared community discourse in religious practice but also a room of people all of whom have individually taken on faith vocabulary in very personal ways within your own spiritual histories.

  So how can I expect to speak and control the meaning of anything that I say?  My knowledge is only my partial knowledge and my partial knowledge reaches out to your partial knowledge to see what kinds of meanings can arise.

    I feel like the best way to be honest to this meeting of people, all of whom have but partial knowledge is to respond with a discourse that admits the state of having partial knowledge.  And so I choose the discourse of offering to you a string of aphorisms. At first,  I thought that I should pay tribute to Lutheran numerology by offering a 95 point sermon, in honor of Luther’s famous 95 Theses nailed to the Wittenberg Castle Church Door, but 95 points would take too long and if I just taped it on your door, it would surely be recycled in the morning.  So, no outlined sermon with 95 points. So I offer you aphorisms in response to the question what are we doing here tonight?

  As Episcopalians are we here in violation of our number one rule:  Thou shalt not be seen in church more than once a week, unless there is a funeral or wedding…and if the wedding is on Saturday, that’s close enough to Sunday to not have to go to church on Sunday.

  We’re here to offer thanksgiving that Orchard Valley Youth Soccer does not offer games tonight to affect our attendance. (Although there are probably teams practicing).

  We here to show our sacrificial beginning to the Lenten Season by missing American Idol.

  We are here to paint our foreheads with the ashes that simulate our bodies’ future state, something like Native American braves putting on war paint to frighten our opponent death not to come too soon.

  We here to pay tribute to the church calendar that offers us 6 different seasons as an annual curriculum with Christian knowledge divided up into seasonal emphases so as to give us a full review of catechesis each year.  And Lent is our Spring training when we promise to simulate the tests and ordeals of life so as to build different kind of faith muscles so that we might understand better our calling to follow Christ.

  We are here to ponder the appointed reading from Scripture particularly the conjunction “as if” raised by the prophet Isaiah.  “Yet day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness.”  We confront ourselves with the possibility of our own hypocrisy:  Do we perform and practice our piety as if it could be a replacement for practicing righteousness?  Do we do this as a way of convincing ourselves that we are okay with God?   Do we suffer a major disconnect between our churchly life and our life outside of the church?

   We are here to ponder our religious piety.   Do we take on the voluntary fast for religious devotion; and ignore those who have the involuntary fast of hunger and starvation forced upon them by their conditions of living?

  We are here to fast.  Which fast would you rather choose?  Giving up food for a day?  Chocolate or wine for Lent?  Or the fast that the Prophet Isaiah says is preferred by God?  Getting rid of injustice.  Feeding the hungry.  Releasing the oppressed.  Clothing the naked.  Bringing the homeless into my house.  God, I’d much prefer my own religious rituals as a preferred fast to really dealing with these harsh realities of the world.

   Do we see prayer as public performance with great worry about our liturgical correctness and we cannot hear the authentic prayer of desperate people who are crying, “help me God, help me somebody?”

   Do we fuss over our public clothing, our Sunday-going-to-meeting clothes, and robes and albs and chasubles even while others do not have adequate clothing for their own warmth or dignity?

  We are here to acknowledge all that is done in our names for which we take no personal responsibility.  Do we ponder the way we absolve our personal responsibility within our group identities?  It is the government that goes to war, not I; it is the government that denies health care, not I; it is our society that has the wrong priority about the general welfare of all people, not I.  I cannot be held personally responsible for that fact that my country is disproportionately the largest consumer of the earth’s resources.

  We are here to ponder utopia.  Isaiah suggests that if we ever start practicing righteousness and not just religious behaviors within our own religious communities, then it would result in the promise of God’s guidance in a restored world.

   We are here to think honestly about our sins?   Do we ponder the fact that the past is absolute; that it happened cannot be denied and that our absolute past includes our sins and short-comings? Do we come here to identify with the request of the Psalmist for God to cleanse us from our sins and to create new hearts within us?

  We are here to think about forgiveness.  Do we not feel challenged by our own remembrances of the hurt that others have done to us and the seemingly impossible task of forgiveness that we must seek as a gift from God?

  We are here to ponder the radical words of St. Paul about Christ.  Are we not in awe of the way that St. Paul states that Christ became our sin so that we might become the righteousness of God?  Christ represents God’s full identity with us in our human condition so that we can discover the godly and the spiritual within our human condition and not be defeated by our own imperfection.

  We are here to think about our role in being witnesses to Christ.  How many people allow them selves to be atheists because they have seen Christians acting badly?  Does the way in which we live our faith put obstacles in the way for others to believe in God and God’s goodness?

    Pastor Warner and I are probably happy that we don’t have to list on our ministerial resumes the list of suffering that St. Paul put on his list: great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger.  We should reflect upon our easy conditions in noting that suffering for the Gospel has been spread out unevenly throughout history and space.  We should put all of our problems in perspective:  Our problems are the problems of middle to upper middle class residents living in a Bay Area suburb.  How many people in the world would love to have our problems?

  We are here for corporate prayer and to ponder the meaning of such.  Public or corporate prayer is not to impress other people; it is to join in agreement with other people who share genuine concern for our world.  The reason that we do our religion in public is because there is more that can be done in sharing our gifts together than can be done if each of us tries to do our religion alone.  When we do our corporate prayer let us hope that the people who need mission and ministry will be the recipients of us doing public prayer together.  Collective effervescence can result in our worship attaining greater ministerial outcomes in our world.  Indeed let us be public in our prayer, but not to impress people but to be delivered from individualism and isolationism that says, “I don’t need you for my life of faith.”

  We are here tonight to consider our private lives.  Thankfully most of our lives and prayers are done in the closet and in secret.  God give us the grace to resist the publishing of all of our thoughts and deeds.  It is good to build our resumes in heaven and let God see both our secret sins and goodness.  It is good when we are hidden to ourselves and the secret effects of our own ministries.  I have many, many people and mentors in my past life that I never took time to thank (didn’t know how to thank them at the time)  but they were there for me and they have never known the value of their lives to mine.  I think that this is the kind of heavenly treasure that we build by just being faithful and not expecting visible reinforcement for being so.

  We are here tonight to ponder the witness that Jesus gave to his heavenly Father.  Have you ever thought that perhaps the most profound witness of Jesus is the example that he gave of knowing his heavenly parent?  As much as we like to build solid doctrine about how Jesus is the unique Son of God, I get the impression that Jesus wanted each person to know herself or himself as a unique daughter or son of God.  I get the impression that Jesus mostly wanted to share with us this secret place with God our heavenly parent and to know that this is the place where we can express our true honest authenticity.  And from the place of knowing a treasured relationship with God we go forth in our public lives, our religious lives trying to bring to them as much authenticity as we can.  And when we fail, we go back to the secret place of forgiveness and renewal and come out again ready to try to do God’s will of love and justice on earth.

  I do wish all of us a holy Lent; I wish us well in making strides in authenticity and I pray that each of us will know the esteem of being recognized as unique and valued by God our heavenly parent.  To know the secret of this recognition by God is indeed the greatest treasure of all. Amen.