March 16, 2003

St. Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. John Fleming

A preacher friend of mine and I met for coffee a few days back. We became fast friends while we were in seminary. He was in town visiting at the hospital, so met at Barnes and Noble to catch up. We both have daughters. He and his wife got a jump start on us. Their daughter is now eight years old and in the third grade. He wanted to see a picture of Annie Grace, so I pulled out my wallet, flipped to the place where my pictures live, poked out my chest with pride and showed him one of the latest pictures of my daughter. And then, of course, we talked about what the little genius is doing and saying these days. My friend looked at the picture, smiled, and said, “Being a father is better than any class we took in Seminary.” I said, “What do you mean?” He answered, “I want to tell you what happened to my little girl the other day.” He said, “Every morning she gets ready and goes to school. She gathers her things in her backpack and meets the school bus by the curb. Usually she climbs the three steps of the bus, greets her driver, and finds her seat near the back of the bus. It is her routine. She does it every day that school is in session. But she never sits in the same seat. She likes to sit in different seats. The other day, she found a seat and sat in it. She was minding her own business when the school bus made a stop just outside of our neighborhood.” My friend said, “There were two rambunctious bullies who got on the bus. The two went back to where my little girl was. They grabbed her by the arm, slung her to a seat behind them, and said, ‘This is our seat, don’t you forget it!’ Of course, the bus driver did not know that this was happening. She completely missed it.” My preacher friend said, “By the time I got home from the office, she wanted to tell her daddy all about it.” He listened as she recounted what happened. My friend said there were two emotions that came to his mind and to his heart. Do you know the two? The first was sadness. How could someone do that to his little girl? He said, “I wanted to cry right in front of her, but I didn’t do it. I know that her daddy needed to be strong.” Do you know what the second emotion was? Anger! Grr! Grr! He said, “What I wanted to do is find out who those two boys were, go to their house, make sure that they weren’t church members, make sure that the father was a little smaller than him and punch him right in the gut.” He said that is what he wanted to do, but he said that is not what he did do. He said, “I knew what to do. I knew what to do at that moment.” He said, “I reached for my daughter. I pulled her into my arms, and I let herself get lost there. I held my little girl. And I told her if those bullies ever did that again to let me know because I was her father and I would take care of it. Yes sir! Yes sir!” And he said at that moment that was all his little girl needed. That is all she needed, to be in the safe arms of her daddy.

Most of us are young enough to remember the days when we needed that sort of thing. Can’t you remember the days when you just needed to get lost in your mama’s arms or your daddy’s arms? Maybe you fell and scraped your knee or something like that. I talked to some parents in preparation for our sermon today. When I told them that opening story, they nodded their heads and said, “I know that feeling.”But then I talked with a parent or two whose kids are older, now teenagers, who said that it’s different for them now. One of them used these words, “Sometimes all you can do is to open your arms and reach for your children. You cannot make them walk into your arms.” “Sometimes all you can do is open your arms and reach for your children. You cannot make them walk into your arms!”

That line, I think, is a nice little bridge to our lesson for this morning, taken from the thirteenth chapter of Luke’s gospel. If you will turn back a few pages in this gospel to the end of the ninth chapter, you will find these words, “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” Between that verse and the end of the nineteenth chapter, Jesus starts his journey towards Jerusalem and the cross. While they walk along, Jesus tells his disciples and those who hear him teach and the ones who he heals, that if they want to be his disciples, then the trip takes them all the way to Jerusalem and the cross. Now I don’t know if you will remember this or not, but Luke has his gospel begin and end in Jerusalem. It is at the temple where Zechariah learns that his elderly wife, Elizabeth, is pregnant. It is at the temple where Joseph and Mary bring their child just after he is born, to dedicate him to the Lord. It is there, at the temple, where he returns when he is twelve. Luke is the one that is fond of this city. He is so fond of it, that he mentions it ninety times in his gospel. If you are interested in this little known fact, the other gospel writers combined, mention the city only forty-nine times.

Everything that is important happens there and in our lesson for this morning, Jesus is making his way to the city. Luke tells us that when he arrives there, after he enters the city with a parade of palm branches and loud ‘hosannas,’ Jesus looked at the city, from a hillside, and wept. That story happens a little later in the gospel. In our lesson for this morning, Jesus still has six chapters to go before he arrives there. We catch up to Jesus and his disciples while they are on their way. Jesus is teaching and healing and casting out demons when a group of Pharisees arrive on the scene to warn Jesus of a death threat. I do not know about you, but I find that fact interesting. All the while I thought that the Pharisees were out to get Jesus and to trap Jesus. Here they come to warn him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” Friends, it is not an idle threat. Herod had the power to do it. It would have thwarted the whole plan of God on the cross, but he had the power to do it. He has already seen to the death of John the baptizer. And now there were rumors flying around; the more popular one was that Jesus, somehow, was John brought back to life. Just when Herod thought that he had ridded himself of the pesky prophets Jesus’ presence is strong and known. I do not usually try to redeem the Pharisees. I am not sure if Herod sent them in hopes that a warning would help send Jesus on his way. I do not know if there were a group of them that were sympathetic to Jesus and his ministry. What I do know is that they came with the warning, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” I do not mind telling you that I love what happens next. I do not about you, but I have a lot of visual pictures in my mind of what I think Jesus must have looked like. When we think of Jesus, we often think of him as meek and mild, with few things that upset him. A lot of times, we think about him in a pasture with sheep surrounding him with the smallest of a lamb in his arms. Sometimes when I think about Jesus, I think about him sitting on a rock, with children all around him clinging to his words. I do have that picture of Jesus in my mind of the day that he walks into the temple and notices that it’s set up for selling things. There, you will remember, Jesus walks in and flips over the tables in anger. And now that I have read and studied our lesson for this morning, I have another picture of Jesus that could be a cousin to that one. Jesus hears the warning. I think that he is mad. I think that it upsets him. I think that he knows the divine plan and this threat will not deter that. I would have liked to have been there when Jesus turned to the Pharisees and said, “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.” Which flies, really, in the face of Herod’s threat. It is as if Jesus is saying, “Go ahead and try. You cannot kill me, not here.” “Go and tell that fox for me...” Just in case you are wondering, calling Herod a fox was no compliment. In the Old Testament, a fox was considered destructive and dangerous. In the New Testament, foxes are portrayed as conniving, sly, and clever.

Then something happens, did you notice it? As quickly as the anger appeared on his face, sadness comes just as fast. Maybe Jesus was near tears when he said, “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.” Do you know this? Foxes and hens are on opposite ends of the scale. In fact, farmers do their best to keep foxes out of hen houses. Could there be a sermon in there somewhere? You see, the problem is that the world is full of pale, yellow chicks and at least one fox. I do not know much about hens, but there are some things that I have heard. I have heard that a mother hen will protect her young. She will wrap her wings around them and gather them up. She does not have fangs or any claws or ripping muscles to protect her young ones, but if the fox wants them, they will have to go through her first. And says Jesus, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her young, her children, under her wings, and you were not willing.”

What are we supposed to do with these words this morning? How can they speak to us? Maybe the best way to go about answering that is to give you a geography lesson. You see, there is a geographical problem in Luke’s gospel. Luke has Jesus saying, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her young, her children, under her wings, and you were not willing.” The problem with that is this, Jesus had not been to Jerusalem. He had not tried to gather any children. That is the problem and it is a significant one. What shall we do with it?

Commentators have tried to say, “oh, well, it’s like the resurrection, Jesus is foretelling what is going to happen.” That makes sense to me, but I am not buying it! Here is what I think. I do not think that Luke cares about geography. I think he puts this lesson here, six chapters out from Jerusalem, on purpose. I think that he does that to say to his first readers, but more importantly to us, “It is not too late. There is time to let what happened in Jerusalem change your life.”

I do not know about you, but when I see someone cry, I want to do something about it. In my lifetime, I saw my mother cry only twice. The first time it happened, I was a little boy. I suspect that she was upset with my father. She went to the back part of our yard, sat down, and cried. After a few minutes, I went to sit beside her. I wanted to take my mom’s tears away. I would have done anything to stop her tears. Mother could have even gotten me to clean my room if she promised that doing that would stop her from crying. The second time I saw my mother cry was a few days ago. I was visiting her when her dog ran away. She was full of tears. I said, “Mother, I don’t think that you ever cried over me and here you are crying over a dog!”

Tears have the power to change us, to affect us, and sometimes even to turn us around. Will Willimon, the great preacher, told a story from his life about the time when his son was young. Will often preaches in other places and when he can, he takes his family with him. He took his wife and soon on one of these trips. Will came in one night, after preaching, and noticed that there were comic

books piled five or six deep in his son’s suitcase. He asked his son where the books came from. He said, “I got them downstairs, in the store.” His father asked him where he got the money for them and when he did, his son lowered his head. He knew then that his son had stolen the books. So he took his son and the books down to the store and asked the owner if she would be willing to talk to his son about stealing. She agreed and they did that. A few weeks later, Will came home. His wife told him that they needed to talk. It seems that while she was cleaning his room, she found more comic books and their son had admitted to taking them. The preacher was frustrated. He did not know what to do. His mother happened to be visiting and he asked if she would talk with him and she agreed to do that. And the stealing stopped for a little while. But then, a few weeks later, the preacher came home to the news that his wife had discovered more comic books. He was at the end of his rope. He thought to himself, “How can I be a good pastor if I cannot even keep my own son from stealing?” He knew what he had to do. He went up to his son’s room, closed the door, and talked with his son about stealing. Then he spanked his son and told him to stay in his room the rest of the night. Then the preacher went to his own room, laid down on his bed, and cried. A few weeks later, the son and his mother were sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast. The preacher was already gone to be with a family having surgery. The boy looked up at his mother and said, “Mom, you know that I haven’t stolen any comic books in a long time.” His mother looked up and smiled. The son said, “Mom, do you know what I don’t do that anymore?” She answered, “Sure, it is because your father spanked you. He said, “No, Mom, that’s not the reason. I stopped stealing the comic books because I saw daddy cry” 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 young, her children, under her wings, and you were not willing. My prayer is that in this lenten season, the tears of Jesus will change your life. Let us pray.

(Special thanks to Will Willimon for telling the last story of this sermon. It came to me in a sermon that I heard at a church that I attended in seminary. Special thanks also goes to my mother, who I am sure, cried many times in raising her children. I hope that she often had tears of joy).