I know a little something about a fox in the hen house. Jesus calls Herod a fox and likens himself to a mother hen. We’ll get back to that image in a moment. But what I know firsthand about a real fox in a real hen house goes back to my memories as a child. My grandmother raised chickens for the eggs they laid. The money she made from her chickens’ eggs was hers alone, as I understood it. In a world of nearly absolute male dominance in those days women often found little ways to stash away a little cash of their own. A friend we had back then called such money her “going away fund,” just in case things got really bad.
My grandmother hid her egg money in secret places and occasionally would tell us that when she died we’d better check between pages of the Good Housekeeping magazines under the bureau, or, especially, in the old Hoover, a vacuum cleaner that no longer worked and that, I guess, she thought would be a clever foil for any would-be thief. Who would think of looking for money in an old Hoover vacuum cleaner? I can’t remember now whether the old Hoover still existed at the time of her death or that we really found any money hidden away. What I got from her estate was her old Bible and about all the love I ever could have asked for along the way of her living.
But of chickens and the eggs I knew that a fox could pose a very real threat. Farmers tried to secure the hen house from middle-of-the-night prowlers, but on a hot summer’s night they had to allow somehow for air for the chickens to breathe. Occasionally, then, they might hear squawking to beat the band from the chickens, and that’s when my grandfather would grab his shot gun and make a beeline for the hen house. Chances were that the only reason for such squawking was that a fox had managed to break the security of the hen house. And that, obviously, meant real danger. The hens seemed to know that almost instantly.
Long-term memory sometimes retains the broad stroke rather than the precise detail, so to tell the truth I can’t remember any particular night in which a fox wreaked havoc in my grandmother’s hen house, but I do remember the constant threat they faced. That some night a fox would make his way in and kill any number of the egg-laying hens, some for food but others, no doubt, just for sport. Foxes are like that. They’re sly and greedy little devils. But hens have different traits, it would seem, especially as I learned from another pastor’s experience with foxes and hens when he spent some time in far-off Tanzania.
Lutheran professor David Zersen writes: This last fall, I spent several months in Tanzania where each day and night I passed the chicken house on the way to and from the campus where I taught. Regularly, mother hens had new broods of downy chicks that stayed close as they pecked around in the grass. At night, one by one they climbed under her breast and you could see nothing but the hen on guard, her chicks lost somewhere under her feathers. When a fox attacked by night, she could not run away. Not a mother hen! She bared her breast and the fox took her first. In the morning, there was nothing but clusters of feathers here and there, and little chicks running on their own.
Commenting on the meaning he deduced from that image from nature, he continues: The mother hen represents a new form of power and leadership, the one for others, the servant leader, the one whose extravagant love considers the welfare of her own foremost. Thus the means of survival over against the attack of the wily foxes of this world is provided not by retaliation or brute force, but by gathering the innocent, the victims, into a community in which the love of the mother hen lives on even after her death!
And in response to Professor Zersen’s observation, we might say that Jesus the Mother Hen finally did gather all of us baby chickens together that day on the cross when his love knew no limits in yielding his own life that we might see beyond death to a redeeming day of liberation from the darkness of the world.
So what do we say about these things – Jesus, the would-be Mother Hen and Herod, the fox among us? On this second Sunday in Lent we are confronted by an unabashedly political text, one that calls attention to part of the reason Jesus met his death that afternoon on Calvary’s hill.
If we were to imagine ourselves as part of the crowd overhearing Jesus’ confrontation with the Pharisees the day of our Gospel story, we might very likely be feeling fear, tension, anger within us and around us. And we might be challenged to wonder how we might become part of the story. What do we do when we sense danger in the world around us or when we feel as if people we love are caught in a moment of danger? How do we bear witness and tell the stories of courage and risk, hoping that they engender a resistance to violence? How do we find the courage to step into the storm or to follow God’s invitation to continue to walk the journey?
Today’s Gospel story is a step toward the suffering that is to come in Jesus’ life and in the lives of those who followed him. And what it tells us about Jesus is that in the face of danger and the threat of violence to himself and others he would hold his ground and refuse to be moved either to complicit retreat or to reactive violence. Whether Jesus knew precisely what was ahead of him or not, it is clear that fear would not rule his life. If we can see and understand that, then the challenging question for us might take its clue from Jesus himself: How do we not let fear either immobilize us or cause us to react in violence?
Whether it’s the brutality of war, indifference to poverty and its threat on human life, the urban reality that human life is expendable and can be erased by pulling a trigger, or the active hostility expressed to those whom we perceive to be “different” from us, we are met in our world by multiple acts of cruelty and viciousness. Much like those who accompanied Jesus, we make choices about how we will respond in the face of danger.
Often we hear of two competing theories about people who do take responsive and responsible action in the face of danger. One theory suggests that when people feel that there are no other options they are moved to take a risk or speak a truth. Another posits that when people feel safe enough to let go of one thing and embrace another, even if it be unknown, they are more likely to step out or to resist something that is potentially destructive to themselves or others. Probably some truth resides in both of these theories. Both have merit. But the undeniable witness borne out in Luke’s Gospel this morning, whatever the cause, is that Jesus and the disciples continued to move to Jerusalem even in the face of fear and hostility. We can only surmise that the promise of God’s sanctuary – like being beneath the wings of a mother hen spread over her brood – empowered them to take risks on behalf of God’s love which is larger than any hate or injustice.
Jesus’ response to the Pharisees indicates that he would not be distracted from the ministry to which he was called. In the face of peril and the threat of violence, Jesus stepped into the storm. Neither the threat of Herod nor the words of the Pharisees would distract him from his vocation to do good in a hurting world and to preach hope in the midst of despair. In a similar way, we are called to take risks on behalf of the gospel, trusting that God’s presence ultimately is our refuge and our strength. How do communities and individuals prepare to pursue God’s vision of the world in ways that are risky? I know this much at least. With God’s promise of refuge we who call ourselves Christian are challenged to move into Lent in a spirit of confronting our fears and challenging our assumptions about what it means to walk the journey.
I wish someone could tell me what’s really happening in Washington right now. That’s a Jerusalem I still want to care about, though day after day political machinations and maneuvering challenge active involvement by any of us who feel we might have the influence to change anything that needs correcting. Legislators of both parties square off against each other, staring and smirking across the table over issues purportedly having to do with health care reform. Hostility could hardly be sharper and more divisive. Yet if asked, many there would claim faith and allegiance to the same Messiah. How can that be? What is not being said? What basic, fundamental differences separating these people are not being admitted or articulated? For those of us merely observers – though still retaining the power of the vote and the power of God in standing for what we believe is right – the scene can appear disheartening at best.
But precisely in such times we are called back to the gospel and to the confrontation Luke tells us about between Jesus and some Pharisees who warn him about the fox in the hen house. It is then that Jesus does not falter, does not fade, does not give in to powers of darkness intent on extinguishing the light. Jesus knows full well the reputation Jerusalem holds, how it kills prophets who challenge the halls of power and wealth. For all that it has been and all that it might yet be, Jesus loves the wicked city. That is, Jesus is able to see beyond the evil destructiveness of the city’s power holders to the worth of the people in it. He bewails the city’s history of repudiating God’s messengers, the prophets. And he cries with a sadness lodged deep within for all of sin’s grip on our better impulses.
Abraham Lincoln called those better impulses our “higher angels,” steeped as he was in biblical imagery. It is said that he, too, lamented deeply over the divisiveness that had come between us as people and the estrangement that had come between us and God. On dark, lonely nights in our nation’s capital a century and a half ago he brooded over the fate of our nation. We came through that crisis, though we still bear its scars, even as others now come upon us clothed in other issues and causes.
It is then that Jesus’ lament over what is and yet his hope for what still can be becomes most poignantly realized in that image of God as Mother Hen. As only a mother can know – as only a mother embraces the strength to protect to the point of sacrificing her own life so that those whom she has birthed will have a life of their own – so God broods over us and protects us in her loving, warm caress beyond our deserving and outside all expectation. Friends, in such promise still lies our redemption and our salvation. Amen.