Lent is a time of getting close to God. Itʼs a season of intimacy. To that end, we try to

Transcription

1 Sermon for 2/24/13 Luke 13:31-35 Lent is a time of getting close to God. Itʼs a season of intimacy. To that end, we try to clear away the excess in our lives so that we might draw closer to God. Weʼve all made sacrifices - we decide to fast from something, give up something, or we dedicate ourselves to prayer and acts of charity. We make a concerted effort to live intentionally in a holy season. Thatʼs what Lent is about. We try to get close to God. Intimacy with God, much like intimacy with human beings, means we also spend time connecting, thinking about who it is weʼre praying to, who God is to us. Jesus gives us a number of descriptions, throughout the Gospels, about who he is to us. The Son of Man, the bread of life, the shepherd of the sheep, the light of the world. All these give us an imagination about the things that Jesus offers - authority, sustenance, guidance, illumination. Today, Jesus gives us a new description of himself: mother. O Jerusalem! How often I have desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, Jesus cries out to the Pharisees today. Mother Jesus. What a radical idea. A mother with many children, much like a mother hen with dozens of baby chicks scrambling around the barnyard. And Jesus is speaking as a mother in lament. He is considering the the great city of Jerusalem, all of its people, its politics, its sins and its hopes, and he is aware of the

2 destruction Jerusalem will face in the days to come. This is the city that rejects the prophets of God, he says, and he knows full well that there must be some serious repentance going on for the people to be able to hear Godʼs voice again. The people have fallen far short of living as Godʼs beloved children. They have forgotten the covenant God made with their ancestors. They have ignored the laws of God. The people have totally forgotten what Godʼs voice sounds like. Are we able to hear Godʼs voice in the life of Christ, in our own lives? Are we able to recognize Jesus when he comes? They say that a baby can recognize his mother within minutes of birth, that he can hear his motherʼs voice even if she is in the next room. In the same way that a mother hen has a special tone in her cluck for rounding up her chicks in the barnyard, a human motherʼs voice has a strong effect on her child. For months in the womb, the baby has been trained, over and over again, to hear his motherʼs voice, its particular tones and cadences. Even at 16 weeks in utero, the baby begins to respond to that familiar sound. So for the next nine months, his ears will become tuned to the frequency of her voice. In the same way, our ears are meant to be tuned to hear Godʼs voice. What is it that stops us from hearing God? On Ash Wednesday, we prayed and confessed to God that we have been deaf to your call to serve, as Christ served us. What is it in us that makes us unable to hear the voice of our Creator, unable to speak the words of love in our worship of God, unwilling to respond to the needs of others?

3 Perhaps it is our own selfish goals, our focus on ourselves. We start thinking that Christianity is about us, about being comfortable, about being accepted - so much to the point that we forget that God asks us to make sacrifices and change our lives. Or maybe itʼs the events of life that blind us to Godʼs presence - the griefs we endure, the losses we feel that keep us from hearing Godʼs voice of support and love. We start thinking that the grief in our lives is a wound that can never be healed, or we let the sound of loss ring in our ears so loudly that we can hear nothing else. Maybe we cannot hear God because we are so aware of the hurting of the world - We look around and see so many broken things: our economy, our political arguments over guns and safety and money, even our own legalistic attempts to take control of our lives. Itʼs easy to forget that God is in control in a world that seems so chaotic. How are we supposed to hear Godʼs voice when there are so many noisy distractions and so many great travesties in the world? How do we begin to hear him again? You do this by spending time, an intense amount of time, training your ears. Like a baby in the womb, you have to learn the particular cadences and tones of Godʼs voice. Lent can be a season of spiritual utero, for us as children who need to hear that parental voice of God, deep in our souls. And the practices of Lent are good spiritual ear training. The three biggies - fasting, prayer, and alms giving - are good ways to start hearing Godʼs voice in your life. When your stomach rumbles when you fast, you can hear the promise of Christ that he is the Bread of Life. When you spend time in prayer in the deep darkness of your heart, you can sense the illumination of the Light of Christ.

4 When you give your money to the church or to those in need, you can hear the call of Christ to serve others and give of yourself. All these disciplines are just practice, ear training for hearing Godʼs voice in the world. Godʼs response to our faithfulness is as one of a mother gathering her children together, bringing us back into right relationship with himself and with one another. But when we consider the context in which Jesus is speaking, heʼs not describing himself as the sort of mother who gently and sweetly sings her baby to sleep or brings all her little children to her skirts and gives them a hug. Jesus is the sort of mother thatʼs willing to go to bat and fight for her children, the Jesus who smartly tells the Pharisees, You go tell that fox, Herod, that Iʼm heading to Jerusalem, whether he likes it or not. This is the mother that laments her childʼs constant stubbornness, the mother that struggles to understand why her children will not follow where she leads, the mother who fights to keep her child. Thatʼs where we begin to experience the wrath of God. Wrath, as a topic, has a lot of bad press in the church and elsewhere. We hear that word and begin to think of punishment, of lightning bolts striking people down, and thatʼs not quite accurate. William Young talks about wrath as a good thing, that itʼs only because we were taught that itʼs punitive and retributive that we think of Godʼs wrath as bad. He says that wrath is about God pursuing us with a relentless affection, because thatʼs what love is.

5 A parishioner told me about experiencing the powerful feeling of Mother-hen mode when she saw her daughter was about to step out into a busy street - the kind of powerful energy where you draw strength from some unknown place to protect the little one. She told me that she was amazed at what she felt she could do when she thought her child is in danger. Seeing parents in the NICU when their baby is in an incubator, hooked up to all sorts of machines - youʼll see that kind of protectiveness in the parents and the nurses and doctors that care for that baby. Young tells a story about a mother running toward her son when he was being attacked by hornets in the woods - if I didnʼt know her, and and know who she was to me and who I was to her - I would have thought she was coming to kill me. The protective love of a mother running toward her son. She is coming to rescue the son from everything that is harming him. Thatʼs wrath. And thatʼs the wrath of God, coming to find us, coming to protect us. Itʼs about a God who, because of love, will come to us as a mother who wants to rescue the child. And in our Gospel today, itʼs about Jesus, knowing full well that he will have to sacrifice himself for the child, for all the children of God. Jesus says that on the third day I finish my work. He is looking ahead to the journey into Jerusalem, the steps he has to take toward the cross, steps that he takes on behalf of the whole world, out of a great, possessive, protective, wrathful love.