Lent Day 11: Lament!

"As a Hen Gathers"  Cara B. Hochhalter, 
 http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=58926

The following is (more or less) the sermon preached on Sunday March 16 at Union Presbyterian Church, Endicott, NY. upcendicott.org 

Scripture           

At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” He said to them, “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.’ 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! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’”
~Luke 13:31-35  

Sermon           

When have you engaged in lament? By which I mean, when have you sat down with God for a conversation in which you told God exactly what you think of some terrible thing that has happened?

Notice I didn’t ask, “Have you?” I asked, “When have you?” because, I think we do this, knowingly or not. We read the news and say, “How can this be?” and whether we’re aware of it or not, we are asking God that question. Or we collapse on the couch and ask, “Why is this happening to me?” after we have been fired, or transferred hundreds of miles away, or left by someone we loved. Or we weep on the pillow after we turn the lights out and ask, “How am I going to get through this?” after we’ve heard a diagnosis we did not want to hear.

When have you engaged in lament? In today’s passage from Luke’s gospel, we hear Jesus lament, but it is tucked into a conversation with some witty one-liners. But it’s in there. And of course, Jesus laments—he grew up in a tradition in which psalms were everyone’s prayerbook. Guess what proportion of the psalms are laments? The answer is about one third. Approximately one third of the time the singers and harp and lyre players were making music in the temple in Jerusalem, they were singing songs of lament.

Jesus is in Jerusalem; he has made his way there, teaching and healing in towns and villages along the way. But this is not yet Passover, and Jesus is not here for the last week of his life. Almost as soon as he gets there, Pharisees come to find him, to give him a warning: Herod is planning to kill him. 

It’s good to remember that Jesus and the Pharisees had more in common than they had disagreements. The fact that the Pharisees seek him out to save his life isn’t highlighted enough in our study of the gospels, so I’m highlighting it now. As it happens, Herod believes that Jesus may be John the Baptist reincarnated—his killing of John in the middle of his birthday party is weighing on him. What if the prophet is back?

Jesus’ response to the Pharisees is somewhat hilarious. Listen, he says: You tell that fox that I am busy. Look at me. I’m casting out demons. I’m healing people. I’m teaching people about the kingdom of God here, and my calendar is quite full, thank you, for at least two more days. But then… I guess I have to go, because Jerusalem is definitely the place where prophets get killed, and I’d like to avoid that this week, anyway. 

Then Jesus stops being flippant, and a true lament comes forth from his mouth. 

Jerusalem, Jerusalem. City that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings for safety. But you would not have me as your mother hen… 

Jesus does not envision himself as a mighty lion or as a soldier on a warhorse in opposition to Herod. Instead, he identifies with a vulnerable mother, desperate to save her babies. He identifies with the prey of foxes. He does not make any moves to retaliate, or to threaten. He simply names the truth: He will not fight back. He will die a prophet in Jerusalem, if that is what God is calling him to do. 

Jesus names Jerusalem as a city that kills the prophets, and scripture confirms that both Isaiah and Zechariah ben Jehoiada were killed there, both at the orders of kings. And Jesus names this piece of Jerusalem’s history, not because he is angry, but because he is heartbroken; not because he hates the city, but because he loves it.

For Jesus, as for his fellow Jews, Jerusalem is the center of the world, and the temple is at the center of Jerusalem. At the center of the temple is the holy of holies, where the Ark holding the Covenant resides, and therefore, where the true presence of God resides in this world. Jesus has spent his life traveling to Jerusalem with his family and the other families of his community for the great festivals of their faith. He has gone there for Yom Kippur each year, the day of atonement for sins. He has gone there for Passover each year, the joyful celebration of liberation from enslavement in Egypt. He has said prayers and sung psalms there. In fact, I wonder whether Psalm 27, didn’t come into his recollection at this very moment: As he, the hen, is under threat from Herod, the fox, isn’t it possible that Jesus would sing, “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?” Isn’t it possible that Jesus would have the same kind of longing as the psalmist, singing 

One thing I asked of the Lord; this I seek:
to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple.
~Psalm 27:4

Even the singing of this psalm could be a lament.

Have you lamented someone or some place you love? Have you told God how very unhappy you are with the way things worked in for a particular situation? Have you been angry with God and gotten it off your chest?

Theologian N. T. Wright said in an interview that engaging in lament is actually an experience of the glory that is revealed in humanity.[i] In Romans 8, Paul writes,

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us…We know that the whole creation has been groaning together as it suffers together the pains of labor, and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies… Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with groanings too deep for words… ~Romans 8:18, 22, 26

The prayers of lament we pray, the songs of lament we sing, we never sing or pray alone. The Holy Spirit is with us, muttering incoherently, just as we are—the Spirit, groaning with us. And all of it is witnessed and held in love by the one who has lived and died all the suffering right along with us, and before us, and for us. Lament is glorious, because in it, we are so intimately held and accompanied by Jesus Christ, and by the very Spirit of God. 

Jesus goes on with his lament: “See, your house is left to you.” Jesus is talking about the temple. This is one of those moments when the timelines of both when Jesus was being warned to flee and when the writer of this gospel was recording the story are important. The temple has changed. The leadership of the country—all puppet leaders, beholden to Rome—have changed. The temple may no longer be able to fulfill its central role in the people’s lives, and Jesus connects its corruption with Herod. For the writer of the gospel, writing somewhere between the years 80 and 90 CE, the temple is already gone. It was destroyed during the Roman crackdown that leveled Jerusalem in the year 70 CE. Jesus’ worry for the city he loves is prescient: Jerusalem will be completely destroyed in fewer forty years after he speaks these words. 

As his lament ends, Jesus throws in a “be back soon.” “And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’” That will be the day we call Palm Sunday, and it will be the beginning of the week we call Holy Week.

Jesus sees so much wrong with the world he is living in. He sees that he is heading toward the ultimate confrontation with the evil human beings can do. And yet, he still holds dear the roots of all he loves: The temple. The holy of holies. The covenant of God with God’s people. And most of all, the people, whom he longs to gather in his arms—or under his motherly wings. And he is gathering them together—every time he heads out to teach, or heal, or cast out demons. He is offering people the very same love of God that we are called to offer one another, through good times and through bad. And one of the ways Jesus offers this love is through his lament.

There is power in lament. In naming the things that are wrong, we speak with God with great honesty and clarity. In creating spaces where we can lament together, we strengthen the body of Christ by our openness and our shared love and support. 

When was the last time you engaged in lament? When was the last time you participated in the glorious and utterly human act of groaning together with the Spirit, held in the love of Christ, our Savior?

Thanks be to God. Amen.

[i] N. T. Wright in “The Mystery of God,” October 10, 2023 in Everything Happens, presented and produced by Kate Bowler, podcast, 48:03, https://katebowler.com/podcasts/the-mystery-of-god/.

Lent Day 6: Nervous Laughter, Part I

Scripture passages can be found here (Zechariah 3:1-10, for today) and here (2 Peter 2:4-21, for tomorrow). Hold on to your hats!

When I finished the last verse of this morning's passages, I mumbled, "Wow, talk about deep cuts." I mumbled this aloud, to myself, as there was no one else there (though there may be a squirrel lurking in the attic just above where I read in the morning...). Deep cuts, as in, less frequently heard tracks from albums. As in, I bet myself a nickel that neither of these texts was in the lectionary, because, boy howdy, I'da remembered them. I won. They're not there.

The prophet Zechariah is a post-exilic truth-teller, whose great concern is the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem and the re-establishment there of prayer and worship, under the authority of the priesthood. This is a bittersweet time in the history of God's covenant people. The exile is over, and the people-- those who have survived, and the new generations that have arisen-- are returning to Jerusalem. And there is joy about the rebuilding of the Temple, though it is not and will never be the Temple of Solomon. That loss remains a permanent scar on the communal psyche.

This passage from Zechariah (which is attributed to the prophet, but...???) involves the high priest Joshua and an angel and Satan. Now, because this is the Hebrew Scriptures, Satan isn't The Devil, as Christians have learned to think of him; here, he's a member of the heavenly court whose job it is to make sure mortals are as moral as they try to appear. In Hebrew, it's Ha Satan, which means, literally, The Tempter, or The Tester, or The Accuser. (A little like that guy Jesus ran into in the wilderness.)

And now that it's afternoon and I've refreshed my memory about all this (ahem), the scene as it unfolds makes a little more sense. But at 6:45 this morning, it was kind of like...

Joshua, the High Priest.* Note the turban.

OK, there's a priest named Joshua (vaguely familiar). But his clothes are dirty? And we're gonna take them off.. ok, I guess. They're stand-ins for guilt. IT'S A METAPHOR.

But then, even in my early morning stupor, there was something oddly moving about "Let them put a clean turban on his head." And suddenly, to me, Joshua was every homeless man I've seen on the streets of the city, filthy clothes, rotting teeth, who had a mother who loved him and a job after the army for which he wore a jacket and tie. And even in my semi-conscious state, I could envision this man, realizing he had another chance after it had seemed as if that was someone else's life, an existence he could only dimly remember. And the gravity of his office is engraved on some kind of stone (jewel?), and it represents his promise that, yes, yes, we can make this our home again, yes, I promise to walk in God's ways and keep these requirements, and is it true? That all of us are welcome here, and we will, truly, live, each one, under their vine and fig tree (or, in their little apartment), in peace, unafraid?



* Image: From "Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum," published by Guillaume Rouille (1518?-1589). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.