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On Facebook this
week I noticed a post in which a friend said, let’s all play a game
this weekend, and in all caps she typed,
HOW DID WE MEET? You are supposed to post that as your status and all
your friends are supposed to reply with how they first met you. I look
at my Facebook friends and I notice that some of them are related
to me, four of them I met the day they were born. You may not know this
but I met John Bennet when we were neighbors in
New Orleans twenty years before we even went out on our first date.
Many of you I met the first
day I walked into
St.
Alban’s or the first day you did. You can imagine how the list plays
out, but I want to put a twist on it for us today, and ask you, How
did you meet Jesus? I imagine many of us remember having Bible
stories read to us in Sunday school when we were little, or told to us
by parents and grandparents, but being told stories about somebody and
meeting them are different.
When did you meet Jesus? When
did he become real to you? As you know we are reading Luke’s gospel,
and much as it is like Mark and Matthew especially, it is enlightening
to look at some of its unique qualities as well. We see a picture of
Jesus shot from a slightly different angle, in a different quality of
light, with a different soundtrack playing.
Just a couple of weeks ago we
read the story of the Transfiguration, the day when Jesus took his buds
up on the mountain and they met him in an altogether new way. Actually,
this story is pivotal in the Gospel. It begins a step or two earlier
when Peter all of a sudden blurts out, You are the Messiah of God. Like
a bell that cannot be unrung, these words, even as Peter immediately
backtracks, this truth, once spoken, changes everything.
Jesus’ immediate response
is to tell the twelve that discipleship means more than traipsing along
behind their charismatic teacher,
that it is life changing and that they cannot be disciples and even
imagine that there is an escape hatch. To be disciples is to stake your
life on this project.
Do you hear him speaking to
us? He is, you know. To be his disciple is to stake our life on this
project. And what is this project?
It is nothing less that what God called Abraham to do, to belong to God
and to show the whole world in this relationship how God loves all
creation. Can you imagine that love? That’s the hardest part.
God tried again and again to
convince the children of
Israel that his love was better – more powerful, more complete –
than anything the world has ever had to offer, but they kept getting
seduced by sparkly things, not much better than a bunch of magpies. Oh,
look at that rain god. Oh, look at that fancy statue. Remember how comfy
we were in
Egypt
? In time God sent the prophets to remind them. The prophets just wanted
to save their lives, to convince the children of
Israel
that they already had by right of their birth, more than whatever it was
they were running after, but they didn’t like hearing the truth, and
mostly they regarded the prophets as spoil-sports and they killed them.
Jesus came down from the
mountain that day, the one on which God spoke just as God had spoken at
his baptism. God said, this is my son, my beloved. Listen to him. Jesus
came down from the mountain and said We’re going to
Jerusalem
. The words Luke chooses to say this tell it all. He says, he set his
face towards
Jerusalem
. You can see the look in his eyes, the fierce determination, the
knowledge that this is going to get him killed, and his unflagging step
as he walks toward the storm.
The disciples’ blood must
have run cold. No, boss. Not
Jerusalem
. But then, they stop and think it through, depending upon where that
mountain was they were probably a good sixty, seventy miles from
Jerusalem and they were on foot, and that was plenty of time to change
his mind.
The trip on the road to
Jerusalem
takes up a full ten chapters of Luke’s gospel. This is where we hear
all the amazing parables that appear nowhere else. This is where he
stops to visit with Mary and Martha. This is where he teaches the
Lord’s prayer. Where he talks about the lilies of the field and how
the way to salvation is by a narrow door.
The road to
Jerusalem
is one of transition for everyone involved. The closer we get to the
city gates the more intimately we know Jesus. Not know about Jesus. Know
him. We know him because we are walking with him into the face of death.
They were going with him from one town and village to another when
suddenly and surprisingly some Pharisees run up to him and say, Turn
around. You’re on dangerous ground. Herod wants to kill you.
I imagine the disciples
pretty much hoped he’d listen to Pharisees who knew first hand what
Herod was up to. But no, Jesus more or less spits into the wind. He says
for them, the Pharisees, to go tell that fox to get over himself. Jesus
has work to do. He is too busy to worry about threats. He’ll keep on
healing and casting out demons. Calling Herod a fox is an insult. Foxes
are small and sneaky. They are dangerous to chickens, not the son of
God.
Jerusalem
!
Jerusalem
! The city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it.
For me these are the most plaintive words Jesus ever speaks, more so
than even his words from the cross. If you want to hear God’s heart
breaking, here it is. Jesus does not compare himself to a bear who could
kill the fox with the swipe of a paw. He doesn’t say he has the power
of a bull or a firestorm. No he says he is like the mother hen who longs
in her heart to gather all the silly chicks under her feathers because
she sees the hawk circling overhead. She hears its cries and runs around
the farmyard trying to sweep them up in the minimal safety she can
provide
but they won’t listen, they run from her.
If you have ever wanted to
protect someone you love, someone you watched as they made damaging
decisions, someone who would not trust to you shelter them, then you
might have an idea of where Jesus was speaking from. He was speaking
from the heart of God himself. He was speaking not from the heart of
might and power but from the heart of gentleness and vulnerability, from
the heart of solidarity and communion. And the response of this heart is
sacrifice.
The mother hen knows only one way to save the chicks and that is
to become the prey whether the predator is the circling hawk or the
sneaky fox. She doesn’t have a hooked beak to stab the eyes out. She
doesn’t have talons to rip at the jugular. All she has are wings to
open wide to distract the enemy with her juicy breast, to offer herself
as more delicious than the wiry chicks.
Jesus knew what he was walking into and who he was walking into
Jerusalem
for. He was walking to his certain death because anyone who lives the
kind of radical love that expresses the heart of God for creation is
going to get killed by the foxes of this world, the ones who have just
enough power to maintain the status-quo, the ones who are threatened by
the power of mercy, the ones who cannot abide the notion that God loves
everyone, not just the rich, the powerful, the ones with the most toys
or the most weapons.
What if God loves the heroin
addict as much as the Sunday school teacher?
What if God loves the terrorist as much as the policeman?
What if God loves the porn star as much as the nurse?
What if Jesus is willing to die for them as much as for us?
What if Jesus is willing to take on the fox, the hawk, the Herods and
Pilates of the world for the sake of our life? And not your life of
survival, so that the stupid chicks grow up unchanged by the sacrifice.
No what if Jesus offers himself so that we can be transformed into his
likeness, which is what God intended from the day he dreamed us into
existence?
What if Jesus offers himself
so that we can have our hearts not only broken like his but broken open
to be filled with love such as we’ve never known?
And so I imagine Jesus
looking at us with the same searching eyes that he focused into the
distance when he set his face towards
Jerusalem
. I hear his plaintive voice, the same tone as when he said,
Jerusalem
,
Jerusalem
. The longing. The love that could only become sacrifice. I imagine
Jesus saying to each and every one of us, searching our hearts and our
eyes: Do you remember the moment when you met me?
Amen. |
