Sermon on Luke 19: 28-40  | Palm Sunday

Here’s the thing about English majors:  we believe in metaphors.  I don’t just mean we like them or appreciate them.  I mean we believe in them.  In Franz Kafka’s story, The Metamorphosis, when we read about Gregor Samsa waking up one morning to find that he has transformed into a giant cockroach, we are physically unable to sit back from the story and analyze it “as if” he’s a cockroach.  We don’t want to talk about the person who “thinks” he’s a cockroach.  We want to go deeper:  what does it feel like and how did he know and will his family accept him if he opens his bedroom door?  We accept the premise – the metaphor – and everything else follows from there.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

When Jesus gets to Jerusalem, the place he’s been headed since the beginning, he sends disciples to procure a colt.  He rides the colt into town, amidst a throng of cheering, palm branch-waving people.  The crowd is throwing down cloaks on the road for his colt to walk on.  The excitement builds and the crowd starts shouting out about the miracles and wonders they have seen.  They reach back to the Psalms to praise him, saying, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” (Luke 19: 38; Psalm 118: 26).

I imagine this scene as just shy of chaos.  The full press of crowds, the inner circle of disciples thrilled with the reception, thinking they are finally all getting the recognition they deserve, people shouting over top of one another, palm branches swaying and sometimes smacking people in the face.  I hear individual shouts that finally come together into this recognizable praise:  “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!  Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!” (Luke 19: 38).  Everyone chanting this familiar poetry together in one booming voice.

It’s making the Pharisees nervous and a few of them get close enough to speak to Jesus over the roar.  They say, with concerned looks on their faces, Rabbi, you’d better tell them to stop.  This is getting out of hand here.  Please have them quiet down (v. 39).

And Jesus responds, “I tell you, if these [people] were silent, the stones would shout out” (Luke 19: 40).  In other words, Even if I shushed them and they all fell silent, these stones here on the path would shout out in their place.  Those stone arches into the city would shout praises.  The stones would take their place and continue the chorus.

He doesn’t say The crowd’s too big and I’ll never quiet them down.  He doesn’t say Who them?  But they are praising me and it sounds so gooood.  He doesn’t say anything about whether he could or would quiet them; he simply says that someone else would speak up.  The stones would cry out.

Ah, metaphor!  What is Jesus trying to say by invoking the stones here?

What would that sound like?  Do they all know Psalm 118?  Would we recognize the words?  Would it sound beautiful and scary to us, the way the crowds sounded to those Pharisees?

Since our earliest days as Christians, Lent has been a time of preparation, of being intentionally formed into more faithful disciples.  Easter was originally when we baptized new members into the body of Christ and in the very beginning that was after 3 years of preparation.  One of our United Methodist liturgical scholars called Lent of year 3 “the home stretch” – after “three years of learning how to pray, how to listen to and learn from scripture, how to care for the poor, the sick, and the orphans, how to care for and advocate for the needs of older persons, and how to overcome addictive patterns in their lives…” (Taylor Burton-Edwards, 3/20/13).  Maybe some of you working on 4-year degrees can relate a bit to that kind of a home stretch.  It’s a long time to be focused on one life-changing goal.  It’s a long time to submit yourself to transformation and refining.

Some things take a long time and it’s hard to see what has happened until later.  Like becoming less human one moment at a time until you wake up and find you are a cockroach.  Or becoming more Christ-like one prayer at a time, one verse at a time, one relationship at a time, one visited prisoner at a time…  Some things take a long time.  Like water dripping onto stone, wearing it away drop by drop over hundreds and thousands of years.

Or like stones being formed in the first place.

One of my favorite songs is by Beth Nielsen Chapman and it’s called “Sand and Water.”  It’s from her album of the same name, written in her grief after her husband died way too young.  Her voice is a little shaky and vulnerable as she describes the shifting sands of life after his death, the crashing waves of grief, the difficulty in finding a solid place to land or stand.  But the chorus goes like this:  “Solid stone is just sand and water…and a million years gone by.”  Some things take a long time, maybe even a million years.

Maybe the stones know something we don’t.

It’s interesting to me that the stones are quiet in this story.  Jesus warns that if the people are hushed the stones will speak up.  That would imply that they are fully able to speak up and ready to praise.  Are they waiting for that moment, then?  Do they hear that the people have it covered so they’re just lying low for now?  I find myself thinking Hey, stones, Jesus is only coming by this way once, so if you’re going to join in the praises, you’d better pipe up.  But when it takes “a million years gone by” to exist, perhaps your perspective isn’t human.  Perhaps you have patience and vision that we humans don’t have access to yet.

One of my favorite writers is Annie Dillard and one of my favorite essays of hers is called “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” in a book by the same name (pp.67-76).  Annie Dillard is a novelist, essayist, professor, nature-lover, and friend of God.  In “Teaching a Stone to Talk” she tells the story of a man she once knew named Larry who was, truly, attempting to teach a stone to talk.  Dillard commends Larry in this, his life’s work recognizing his sacrifice and devotion, recognizing how much we long to hear from the rest of creation and how much we doubt that anything is being said.

She writes:

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.  It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind.  The very holy mountains are keeping mum.  We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.  Did the wind used to cry, and the hills shout forth praise?  Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of earth, and living things say very little to very few.  Birds may crank out sweet gibberish and monkeys howl; horses neigh and pigs say, as you recall, oink, oink.  But so do cobbles rumble when a wave recedes, and thunders break the air in lightning storms.  I call these noises silence.  It could be that wherever there is motion there is noise, as when a whale breaches and smacks the water – and wherever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God’s speaking from the whirlwind, nature’s old song and dance, the show we drove from town.  …At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready.  Now I will stop and be wholly attentive.  You empty yourself and wait, listening…We are here to witness…

I don’t know if Jesus meant that the stones would literally shout out praises or not.  But I believe he meant what he said.  I believe he meant that we aren’t the only ones who recognize the presence of God.  Surely these stones would cry out.  All of creation is part of this story and – silent or not – all of creation witnesses and praises along with us.  If need be, instead of us.

The arc of God’s story arc is long and we are somewhere in the middle of it all, thinking that 3 years is a long time to wait to be baptized.  We aren’t the first, we won’t be the last, and we aren’t the only ones right now.  The stones may be silent but they are biding their time.  Jesus is passing by today, on his way to scarier territory this week.  It’ll be tempting to stand here full of praise and then to stay here empty-handed, remembering the parade.  Don’t.

Follow where he goes, praising, silent, faithful.  Trust that the journey is longer than you know or think you can stand.  Keep following.  Trust that out of simple things like sand and water, God can make stone.  Out of a simple thing like dust, God makes you.  Submit yourself to transformation and refining, to the stony path of discipleship.  Know that whatever you did or didn’t do for Lent is one drop on the hard surface of your heart.  There will be others.  And know that you have all the time in the world to cry out in praise.

Thanks be to God!

Apparently fig trees are like the scrappy underdogs of the tree world.  They have “aggressive root systems” that do whatever they have to do in order to find water and nutrients in the rocky, arid Middle Eastern soil where they grow wild.  These aggressive roots have a strong need for groundwater and will find it deep down, if it isn’t readily available from rainfall or surface water.   Fig trees can tolerate drought and make do in nutritionally poor soil, though they have been cultivated since ancient times and thrive with just a little tending (Wikipedia, “Common Fig” entry as of 3/1/13).

If fig trees wrote psalms, you could imagine one of them writing Psalm 63:  O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water (Psalm 63: 1).  I can make do with this rocky, dry, marrowless soil, but, God, I could really use you right about now.  I am holding on for dear life.  Can you come by here?

Don’t you think the fig tree wanted to bear fruit?

The one that Jesus tells about in the parable.  It had been fruitless for 3 years and though the tree’s owner wanted to get rid of it, the gardener intervened.  The gardener said, Give me a year with it.  See what happens when I dig up this hard, dry, compacted soil and add some fertilizer.  Wait another year and see what happens (Luke 13:6-8).

This is what happens.  Figs!  I’m going to pass them around so you can taste and see what we are talking about, so you can literally take it in.  This delicious, chewy, nutritious, surprising fruit is what comes from a place that just last year seemed lifeless and beyond hope.  Please keep passing them around – don’t be shy.

A fig tree is made to bear fruit.  That’s its purpose.  That’s the goal of its existence.  It’s important to remember that:  the parable is not about getting an apple tree or a pine tree to bear figs.  It is not about expecting something impossible.  It is not about expecting the tree to be anything more or less than what it is.

Again, I ask:  Don’t you think the fig tree wanted to bear fruit?  Its whole purpose is to make figs.  It’s not confused about its purpose.  It is not trying to write a novel instead.  It is probably trying to work itself up to a fig.  But for whatever reasons – drought, poor soil, neglect – it hasn’t been able to muster a single fig.  For 3 years.

It can be a little trickier for us to figure out our “fruit.”  What am I meant to bear or produce, that will show that I am fulfilling my purpose?  What is the goal of my existence?  How many years have I been fruitless and when is the nice gardener going to show up and help me out a little?  How much time do I have – gulp – before it’s Zero Fruit Thirty?

Even when you know your major or you are a fabulous fourth year “coasting” towards May with a job offer clinched, the fruit question can linger.  Is this what I am supposed to be doing?  How does this degree or job allow me to live out my calling as a disciple?  Is my whole purpose –  my whole fruitfulness in life –  measured by my work?  If not, how else do I engage in fruitful living?

Asking questions like these is your first step to bearing fruit, to living out of your purpose.  Remember that the fig tree had been fruitless for 3 years already?  And fig trees know what their purpose is!  For 3 years, this fig tree sat withering and suffering and not fulfilling its purpose, probably writing something like Psalm 63 while it waited for that gardener to finally show up and give it some help and encouragement.

Who knows what went on in the mind of the fig tree during that long wait, but you can imagine it, can’t you?  You can imagine working and striving and feeling a little lost and feeling pretty parched and wondering if God is paying attention.  Can’t you?

During times like that it can be tempting to look for signs.  That’s what the first part of tonight’s reading from Luke is about.  Were those Galileans who Pilate killed worse sinners than the other Galileans?  Is that why God allowed that to happen? (vv. 1-2).  It’s tempting but Jesus rejects this line of thinking.  He brings up another tragic event, when people were  crushed under a falling tower and he also rejects that as evidence of God’s wrath.   To questions about events like these, he says, No, that’s not how God behaves.  The lesson from those events is that life is fragile and unpredictable and the best path to fruitfulness is to repent – turn around – and go in the direction of God  (Luke vv. 1-5 and People’s New Testament Commentary p.231).

You might say that Jesus does give a flying fig.  Because after he’s gotten all that straightened out, he tells the parable about the fig tree.  Fig trees don’t wait for signs.  They use all of their energy to make figs.  And when they don’t have enough energy left for that, they wait – sometimes for a long, long time – for a gardener who knows his way around fig trees.

We don’t like that part, either, do we?  The waiting for a long, long time part.  The waiting while we are thirsty beyond our own abilities to quench our thirst.  The waiting when we are not sure what we are waiting for….Am I waiting to become an engineer?  A parent?  A volunteer at the homeless shelter?  The fig tree got at least 4 years to come up with some figs – 3 years plus the year ahead with the gardener’s help.  Hmmmm….What else takes 4 years?  College, anyone?

How much pressure do you put on yourself to have it all figured out by the time you get your degree?  Don’t you think we get at least as long as a fig tree?

And when the wait is over and the gardener finally shows up, it is still “up to the tree itself to feast on this extended care [it receives]”  It’s not like the fig tree can just put its feet up and wait for figs to be brought to it and placed on its branches.  The God-given work of a fig tree is to work with the God-given gardener to make figs out of itself, to bear fruit.  I don’t know how long you get to become fruitful but “[t]he parable is just as clear about the gracious intervention of the gardener as it is about the possible one-year deadline if no improvement is found” (General Board of Discipleship “Lectionary Planning” pages as of 3/1/13).  In other words, God is on our side.  God made us for fruitful living and God does not leave us to our own devices  either to figure out what fruit we are called to produce or to come up with it entirely on our own.

Neither is God inclined to thwart our fruit-producing abilities.  God wants our lives to bear fruit.  God sends the Gardener Jesus to give us some extra help.  You are not meant to do this alone, with no resources, endlessly relying on poor conditions and your own reserves.  You are scrappier than you think you are and God, with a trowel and some gardening clogs, is  just waiting to dig in and help you grow, thrive, bear fruit.  But you have to be part of it.  You have to do something, too.  You have to reach your aggressive roots as far as you can and take the life-giving assistance you find.

I don’t know that our deadline is a year from now but I do know that we all have deadlines.  Towers fall, cancer grows, floods rise.  Life is shorter than we think and a lot of things are out of our control.  But at each and every moment of life we are moving closer to God or further away.  Closer bears fruit.  Every time.  And you can repent/turn around/move closer even when you are still asking questions about what kind of fruit tree you are, and even when you are dying of thirst and writing psalms to God in the desert.

I know you want to produce fruit.  Like the fig tree, you are aching for it.  If that is all the path you have right now, then go with the ache.  It will take you where you need to go.  It will take you through and beyond the places that seem lifeless and purposeless.  It will take you closer and closer to God.  Go with that ache to be fruitful.  Who knows what delicious morsel your life will yield by this time next year?

Thanks be to God!

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photo credit: ©  2005 Anthony Majanlahti, CC BY 2.0

I am completely fine with it if all you walk away with tonight is the thought that Jesus is your chicken.

It’s a gift from Jesus himself, this image of him as a mother hen and us as his baby chicks in need of protection.  It’s an exclamation of longing, Jesus’ longing for us to come to him, to nestle into the warm safe place under his wing.  Why don’t we use this divine chicken language more often?

He’s talking with his disciples and a few Pharisees approach to warn him that Herod wants to kill him.  Jesus says, Go tell that fox Herod that I am busy casting out demons today and tomorrow and on the third day, too.  But then I’m on my way from here (Luke 13: 31-33).  Does that sound familiar to you – “third day”?  It’s supposed to.  It’s for us, the readers, and it’s supposed to remind us that Jesus was crucified and then, on the third day, resurrected.  It’s a way of saying that Herod’s plan will eventually work – but so will God’s.  The third day is when the story makes sense and God has the final word.

Anyway, Jesus tells the Pharisees that that old fox Herod will just have to wait for that day and while he’s in the middle of going over all the days and his plans for prophecy and healing, he mentions that he’ll be killed in Jerusalem eventually.  And then, at the mere mention of the name Jerusalem, he completely sidetracks himself, like a lover who hears the name of his long-gone beloved, like a mother yearning for her children.  He stops addressing the Pharisees, and talks to Jerusalem instead.  He blurts out, with pain and longing, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and 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!” (Luke 13: 34).

I mentioned to y’all last week that my dad grew up on a farm.  I called him this week as I was working with this passage.  For those of us who haven’t been around chickens that much, there isn’t much to go on here.  Jesus wants to gather us up under his wing.  I wondered how often chickens do this and in what circumstances so I called to see what my dad could tell me about chickens.  He said, “They’re dirty and they poop a lot.”  When I explained why I was asking and reminded him of the story he said, “Any time it’s raining or overcast or the weather seems bad in any way, that’s what the hen does.  She opens up her wings wide and shelters her chicks.  She does it when she’s trying to hatch eggs, too.  Just completely covers them up in her feathers.”

Since before the eggs are hatched, the hen is mothering them, sheltering them, protecting them.  When the fuzzy little chicks are running around the barnyard in inclement weather she flaps open her broad mama wings and calls them back home again.  This is the image Jesus applies to himself.  It’s not like he was in a debate and got called a chicken and then made the best of it, bending the image to suit his own purposes.  He starts the whole thing.  He refers to Herod as a fox – sly, cunning, clever, a thief, chicken-hungry – and then continues the metaphor by calling himself the mother hen.

I am pretty sure that if any one of us in this room were writing the lines for Jesus, we would have chosen something fierce and fox-eating.  Herod’s a fox, but I have a taste for fox meat, Jesus retorted.  I’m an eagle/wolf/panther!  Not a vulnerable mother animal with babies to protect.  And if it had to be a mother with babies don’t you think we would have gone all mama bear on him?  But Jesus gives us a chicken.  Unglamorous, somewhat comical, not strong or fast.  An ordinary squawking barnyard mama chicken.

Jesus is our chicken.

Barbara Brown Taylor, the Episcopal priest and writer who lives on a farm in north Georgia and, I believe, has chickens there, has some insight on this image Jesus gives us.  She says (originally “As a Hen Gathers Her Brood” in The Christian Century, 1995, referenced online, 2/19/13),

If the city were filled with hardy souls, this would not be a dangerous situation. Unfortunately, it is filled with pale yellow chicks and at least one fox. In the absence of a mother hen, some of the chicks have taken to following the fox around. Others are huddled out in the open where anything with claws can get to them. Across the valley, a white hen with a gold halo around her head is clucking for all she is worth. Most of the chicks cannot hear her, and the ones that do make no response. They no longer recognize her voice. They have forgotten who they are.

If you have ever loved someone you could not protect, then you understand the depth of Jesus’ lament. All you can do is open your arms. You cannot make anyone walk into them. Meanwhile, this is the most vulnerable posture in the world –wings spread, breast exposed — but if you mean what you say, then this is how you stand.

They no longer recognize her voice.  They have forgotten who they are – who their mother is.  Jerusalem, Jerusalem!  How often I have yearned to gather you up underneath my wings…but you were not willing.

Remember what I said last week about trying to do everything ourselves?  It would be tempting to rewrite this image and claim Jesus the panther as the one who protects us.  It would be tempting to try to protect the chicken herself, since she is so flappy and foolish-seeming.  It would be tempting to follow someone else or to fashion some other sort of god who better suits our needs, rather than accepting this Savior who turns the other cheek and embraces sinners and tax collectors and prostitutes, and who leads the way through death.  It is tempting to long for God to be more like we think God should be.

Remember Jesus, poised on the hill above Jerusalem?  Remember the moment when he interrupts his own train of thought to blurt out with messy love and longing Jerusalem, Jerusalem?  That’s the God we get – one who is thoroughly familiar with longing and who, despite all of the ways we little chicks go off running in the wrong direction, continues to emphatically yearn for us to come back and snuggle under his wing.  You want a different image, a different kind of god?  God gets that – God had something different in mind for us, too.

And you were not willing….we were not willing.  We go off half-cocked, like chickens with their heads…well, you get the point.  We like the stealth and sleek fox.  We admire his clever cunning.  We are easily lured into thinking he won’t hurt us, that we are exempt from his voracious appetite for chicken meat.  That’s how we start to think when Mama Jesus seems too exposed and vulnerable, too chickeny.  How can we give our lives to someone like that?  If not a panther, what about the fox then?  How are we supposed to build our lives around the one who just stands there, open, jugular exposed, loving us like that?

How can we not?

We know that love is stronger than death.  We know what happens on the third day.  It ought to be easier for us to build a life around this than it was for Jerusalem, living before the tale was told.  But it’s not, is it?

It makes no difference.  It has always been and is still very hard to live this way.  It’s why God keeps calling us, longing for us to come back to that embrace, where we can remember who we are again.  Living after this tale has been told makes no difference in how hard this is for us.  But it also makes no difference to God; it makes no difference in how God loves us.  The same God who stood with tears and longing on the hill opposite Jerusalem, calling our names with arms open wide, is the one who is doing that right now.  For you.

This is the God we follow.  This is the God who is our home.  This is the God who persists and perseveres in loving us, no matter how unlovable we sometimes are, no matter how stubborn, no matter how much we would rather be loved by a panther.

Jesus is your chicken but you can turn your back on Mama Jesus’ longing and try to follow or fend off the fox and the rain solo.  Or you can run as fast as your teeny chick legs will go into that embrace.  It’s raining but under those feathers it’s warm and dry and feels like home.  Like Mom.

Thanks be to God!