A Sermon Based Upon Luke 13: 31-35
By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
Lent 2, February 24, 2013
“How often have I desired to gather our
children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not
willing!” (Luke 13: 31-35).
On June 16th, 2012, Nik
Wallenda walk into history on a hire wire as he walked over the rushing waters
of Niagara Falls without a safety net. Others have walked over Niagrara River, but
no one has ever succeeded in walking 200 feet above the falls itself. When Nik reached the other side custom
agents were waiting on him. “Passport,
please!” agents demanded. Nik handed
them his passport. “What is the purpose
of your visit, sir?” Nik ansnwered, “To
inspire people around the world!” (http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/niagara-falls-high-wire-walk-nik-wallenda-fulfills/story?id=16584774).
Most of us would never dream of trying a
feat like that, but the truth, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, is
that sometimes our lives are filled with high tension, and can be like walking
a tightrope. To put it another
way, the music of our lives is often
played out on the high tension strings of life.
Our lives are made up of many pushes and pulls in many directions,
demanding our constant attention, time and effort.
Several years ago, when my Father was
dying of aggressive thyroid cancer, the Hospice worker handed the family some
information to help prepare us for his impending death. Part of the information that was shared with
us is that my Father was now living in the pull of two worlds. In the next days he would be making a
transition from one world to focusing on the next. He would pay less and less attention to what
was going on in this world. He wouldn’t
care about what was on TV, the news, or even what was going on down the
street. The transition to the next life
would be gaining more and more of his energy and attention. We needed to understand this and help him
make the journey as comfortable as possible.
It is not only at death that our lives
must deal with the tensions of life and death; between what is and what will
be, between what should be verses what really is, or between the life we want
and the life we get. When we don’t get
the life we want, or we have to let go of the life we have, we grieve and
suffer loss. This is part of our lives,
living in the world where we have much joy, which one day we must surrender to
the powers that are out of our control.
One thing that is most profound about
the Bible is that tells us the truth about the world we all have to face. The story of Jesus is also a story of a life
lived in great tension, great grief and great sorrow. Early Christians believed that Jesus
fulfilled the ancient prophet’s understanding of suffering servant who would
bear the sorrows of his people. The
prophet did not believe that this vicarious suffering would get rid of all our
suffering, nor that he would show us how to live beyond all grief and pain, but
the prophet believed that this suffering one would enter directly into the world
we all know and experience too often, becoming a “man of sorrows, acquainted with grief” just like us. The only difference is that he would not
only suffer with us, but he would also suffer for us, bearing our sin and grief
upon himself like a blameless lamb without a blemish (Isaiah 53.3).
As Christians we understand this
language as the language of our salvation and our hope of redeeming the grief
we know, by the Savior who came to suffer, grieve, and pay the price for
sin. But the world still wonders and so
do some of us. We wonder about what
good is all this talk about grief bearing, shared suffering, and sin carrying. What good does it do? And what good is the grief we have to endure
in life that God doesn’t take away from us? Why do we still have to live in such a world
filled with the high wire tensions of good and evil, joy and pain, and right
and wrong? Remember the question in that
popular 70’s song, when Burt Bacharach once asked: “What’s it all about Alfie? That song still asks what many still wonder
when they find themselves caught in the high tension moments of life:
“What's it all about, alfie? Is it just for the moment we live?
What's
it all about when you sort it out, alfie? Are we meant to take more than we
give
Or are we meant to be kind? And if only fools
are kind, alfie, Then I guess it's wise to be cruel.
And if life belongs only to the strong,
alfie, What will you lend on an old golden rule?
As sure as I believe there's a heaven
above, alfie, I know there's something much more, Something even non-believers
can believe in. I believe in love,
alfie. Without true love we just exist,
alfie. Until you find the love you've missed you're nothing, alfie. When you walk let your heart lead the way, And
you'll find love any day, alfie, alfie.”
Using Burt Bacharach’s question, “What’s
it all about?”, this text requires that we ask this of Jesus. “What’s it all about, Jesus?” Our text contains two great tensions playing
out in the life of Jesus. Do you see
them. On the one side, Jesus is being
hunted down by Herod and others.
Strangely enough, some of those Pharisees, Jesus often found himself up
against are warning him that Herod is out to ‘kill him’. This is why Jesus is always on the move. His messages of truth were getting him into more
and more trouble. Even his hometown people
tried to throw him off a cliff. Now, Herod wants Jesus dead to. “Go tell that Fox for me”, Jesus says, that I
haven’t finished my work, just yet. We
all know what’s coming. We know the
grief that the world will give Jesus, but we are not there, just yet.
But the other tension in the story
another kind of grief; not only the grief the world is giving Jesus, but it’s
the grief Jesus has for the world. We
see it revealed as the focal point of this passage in verse 34: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills
the prophets an 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!” This very word from Jesus
about the grief God has over this world, our lives and the situation we all
must face every day, is the major headline of this text. We all know more than we want to know about
the grief we must be willing to face in order to have life, but what do we know
about the grief God has to face. In this
text, Jesus has not only come to bear our grief, but he’s also come to share
about God’s grief.
Before we try wrestle with the meaning
of God’s grief over this world, let stop and reflect for a moment about what
this means. Having a mental picture of
Jesus weeping or God grieving is not what we normally carry around in our
head. When I once took my G.I. Joe doll
and crafted into a crucifix, with Jesus bleeding and hanging on a cross, my
Father looked at me and said Jesus is now resurrected and no longer hanging on
that cross. I wanted my Father to bless
my effort, but evidently he did not what that image to have the final. He wanted me to see Jesus as now victorious
over sin, not still suffering under sin.
I got the picture.
But the image of a grieving and
suffering God is still important, even though we do live in the hope of
resurrection. The image of God grieving
is important because there is still a lot of pain, suffering and grief in this
world. The glorious resurrection of
Jesus did not get rid of the great tension in all our lives. Even though Jesus lives, we still suffer, we
still hurt, we still suffer loss, and we still must grieve over how things
are. Whatever the gospel wants us to
know about the good news, the good news must still be preached in a world of
very bad news, which still grieves God too.
But this image of God grieving over what
goes on in this world is not the usual one we think about. I think Julie Adkins is right to say that the
God we often carry around is our heads and hearts is more like the God Jonathan
Edwards imagined in his great sermon, “Sinners
in the Hands of an Angry God?” In
that sermon preached in the early 18th century, the graduate of
Yale, spoke of how people are like insects compared to God. We are much like spiders, spinning our webs
to construct our world, but we are oblivious to the fact that our lives are
really in God’s hands. In this life, we
are all much closer to fire of Hell than we realize, Edwards preached. It is God who holds us up by a thread, and
if we sin, we could make God angry enough to drop us into that fire so we will
fry in the flames. That’s a very
powerful, unforgettable image. It’s no
wonder that when people first heard it they were falling out of the pews and running
down the aisles to be saved. With this
image of an angry God, Edwards literally scared hell out of a lot of
people.
There is certainly a truth to be
understood in his image of God’s anger about sin and the threat of hell. Our lives are much more dependent upon God’s
grace than we could ever realize. But
while there is truth that God is angry about sin, it is not good theology, says
Jesus, to carrying around in our head that God is angry with us. God is hurt, God grieves, and God even
suffers with us in our sin and for our sin, and God will even hold us
accountable for our sin, even allowing us the free will to kill preachers,
prophets, which will bring judgment, hell, death and destruction to us, if we
persist and are unwilling to change.
Jesus wants us to know that God is much less angry with us, than he
grieves over us. “O Jerusalem,
Jerusalem, you that kill the prophets I sent…
How often I have desired to gather your children together, as a hen
gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” It is only after we read those tragic words,
“and you were not willing!” that we finally come to the terrible pronouncement
of judgment: “See, your house is left to you.” Some translations, add the word “desolate”
to clarify the meaning that, ‘what you get is what you deserve.’ This is not what makes God angry enough to
get you, but it is what makes God grieve over what we humans continue to do to
ourselves.”
Thus, the first truth of this passage is
that Jesus wants us all to see how and why God grieves over us. Just as God grieves over the impossible
situation of self-destruction coming to Jerusalem, God still grieves over the
evil, the sin, and the situation of our world as we too, bear the weight of
what we too often do to ourselves. Just
as Jerusalem should have lived up to its name, city of shalom, or peace; it
didn’t. Instead it had become a city of
pain and provocation. But this is not
just the history of Jerusalem, even up to this day, this is the unfortunate
story of our world, even today. We all
live is a world, like the garden of Eden, which has so much promise, so much
potential and so much possibility; but to get to this we still have to deal
with so much pain, so much heartache, so much stress and so much struggle. We all know how much hurt and pain is
involved in the possibility and potential giving birth to life, and God does
too. How God ‘wants’ it to be
different, to gather all his children together and to protect them all. God is so willing to bring about a different
world, but the world is not willing, and so we keep grieving, and so does
God.
During the terrible Nazi time, when so
many innocent Jewish people were suffering and dying unjustly in the
incinerators and concentration camps,
Elie Wiesel recalls in his book, The Night, how one innocent child did
not quite die quickly and continued to hang, and hang, and then struggled and
cried out for help, and all those others waiting for their own death, had to
listen to his cries. Finally, in that
dark place, someone was heard to cry out, “Where is God? Where is God?
If there is a God in heaven, where is he? Why won’t he come to help us? After a deafening silence, another
desperately and perhaps even sarcastically answered, “There is your God, there
is your God, he is dying on the gallows!”
This image of God suffering and grieving
with us is an image Jesus wants us to hold firmly in our minds. While God does get angry over our sin, God is
more angry and hurting for us, than he is angry at us. This is the image Jesus wants to put into
the hearts and minds of the people of Jerusalem and it is still the primary
image of God that we should carry around with us. God grieves over the evil that happens, like
the evil at Columbine, Nickel Mines, Aurora, or Sandy Hook. God grieves over the evil that happens in our
own worlds, in our families, our communities and even in our churches. If God is angry, it is not because he is
angry at us. He is a grieving God, who
is still ‘acquainted with our grief’ and ‘bears our sorrows’. He sees what is, and it grieves him as much
or more than it grieves us.
The second important message about God’s
grief, which we should take from Jesus, is not only about the evil that humans
do to themselves and to each other, but God also grieves over the good we don’t
do for ourselves or for each other. What
we must understand is that Jerusalem has not only become a city so bent on evil
that it will kill anybody who tries to bring change, it has also become city
completely unwilling to change. This is graphically at the center of Jesus
image, when he grieves, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, ….how I would gather your
children like a hen gathers and protects her own, but you are, in a lack of a
better word, ‘unwilling!’ It is this
‘unwillinginess’ accept the truth that brings God great grief. It is not just what people do wrong, but it’s
also our unwillinginess to change and do what needs to be done.
Several years ago, when I was a pastor
in Shelby, we had a missionary couple come and speak to our congregation. They had spent 30 years plus on the mission
field and were now back in the U.S. to retire from their work. I wanted to asked them one question: “What is
the difference in churches of America now, than churches you 30 years ago. What difference to you see? They both answered with one word: “repentance”. They said, we do not feel any real
seriousness about change, repentance or about sin, which we used to know in the
churches.
We certainly do see reflected in much of
our culture, as well as in our churches, we see a very stubborn resistance to
any form of challenge or change that appears from any kind of differing point
of view. Whether it be about differing
religious viewpoints, differing political viewpoints, or differing perspectives
or lifestyles, we, it is becoming more the rule, than the exception, that we
will be intolerant of each other. We
live in a world of growing extremes, impossible compromise, and dog eat dog
politics. Where all could lead us, is the
same place it lead Jerusalem, to a place where both religion, politics and
community were so different from each other than all where ‘unwilling’ to
change to help the other or in the name of God. Our unwillinginess to change quickly leads
to an inability to change, and that will, in the end, lead to a world situation
that grieves God and will bring grief to us all. Without a willinginess and openness to hear,
to understand, to accept, to repent or to be with and for each other instead of
against each other, we end up in a city or a world that has no hope. It is our constant ‘unwillingness’ to change
for good, for God and for love, that still grieves God.
The final message about God’s grief is
the strangest of all---at least it is to those of us who believe and trust in
God. In this final angle of Jesus word
about God’s grief, we must finally face not only a God who grieves over the
evil in the world, and the God who grieves over the good and needful things we
are unwilling to do, but Jesus also wants us to imagine the strangest picture
of God of all. We are asked to imagine
that there is something that God grieves over because can’t do it, at least not
yet. It is much easier to believe in a
God who is able to fry us all in Hell than to imagine a God who has his hands
tied when it comes to dealing with all this grief we have to face in this
world---the suffering, the pain, the evil and of course, death. The very last person most of us would want
to trust, is the one who appears powerless instead of all-powerful, isn’t it? What
good would it do to imagine there is something that God grieves about because
he can’t do anything about it? What kind
of God is it, who has the power and knows what needs to happen, but does not
make life turn out differently than it does?
It is the greatest question of our
faith, isn’t it? It he right there at
the middle of our faith, suffering on the cross, unwilling to save his own son,
that Jesus also had to accept. “My God., My God, why have your forsaken me?”
This is the feeling and the question
none of us can fully answer and don’t want to have to face, but we will. Someone put this question this way: How can a
God who is all powerful also be all loving, when he lets all this evil
continue. Why doesn’t this God who
loves us, who has all power, honor and glory-- why doesn’t he do something
different? Why does life have to seem
as if God has forsaken us?
If we are honest, none of us who believe
in God know the full answer such a question.
When people suffer and when we suffer, sometimes the best answer is to
be silent, to wait, to hold on, and to have faith. Job
didn’t know the answer to his suffering, and God even told Job that if he was
told the answer, he still couldn’t understand it. Jesus does not give us all the answers about
evil, sin, and suffering either. What Jesus
tells us is all Jesus can tell us, for now.
What Jesus tells us, is that God grieves
and has the power to make turn out different, as he has the power to protect us. Just like a mother hen, God has the will and
the power to protect his children. He has this power to gather us together and
shield us from so much evil, but most are unwilling to come to God in this
way. This is what grieves God the most.
But this truth begs one final question:
What kind of power does a hen have against a fox, against a hawk, an eagle or against
a hungry raccoon? Of course, the hen does
not have any power to stop the predators from coming and taking her children,
unless the chicks run to her for cover. But if they will come to her, she will fight to
protect them, even to her own death.
Why would a mother hen do something like this? What kind of power is this, really? It is not the power that will stop everything
bad from happening, but it is still the power that makes life worth living, and
the power that turns the worst grief into grief that we too can bear. This is the power that Burt Bacharach sung
about to Alfie. It is the power that
caused Jesus to weep and grieve over Jerusalem.
It is the power that God has change us all, and this world too, if we
will come to him. This is the greatest
power that still transforms the worst the world can put against us---the power
of God’s perfect love. Amen.
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