At the end of our time in Jerusalem, our seminary group stood
in the church “Dominus Flevit” and looked out over the holy city. This little
church, built in the shape of a tear drop and bearing the Latin name, “The Lord
Wept,” marks the spot where Jesus is supposed to have uttered the lament that
we just read in Luke’s Gospel. The altar sits in front of a clear glass window
that is framed in black iron designs so that a large cross, and just above it,
the dark outline of a chalice and priest’s host, are interposed right on top of
a spectacular view of Jerusalem. I stood there and looked out at the domes and
rooftops, glowing gold in the afternoon sun, and my heart twisted in guilty
complicity with the city’s inhabitants, as the black cross loomed to the fore
and Jesus’ words echoed in my own head, “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!”
In just a few days, I had visited
many of the most holy places in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and I had met
wonderful people on all sides of the present Middle East conflict who were
negotiating life together in this complex city. But the constant signs of entrenched
violence were what overwhelmed me:
the ever-present Israeli soldiers in
full army gear on the street corners;
barbed-wire spread around buildings like Christmas garlands;
barbed-wire spread around buildings like Christmas garlands;
the ancient stone gate where the
apostle Stephen was stoned, now pock-marked with modern bullet holes;
the sophisticated and tense security
barrage at the entrance to the Temple Mount;
the Palestinian kindergarteners lined
up at armed check points to get to school on the other side of that horrifying
concrete Wall;
Palestinian kids throwing stink bombs
at me—at me—in the East Jerusalem
market;
the curses raining down on a group of
middle-aged Israeli women holding up signs promoting peace at a busy street
corner;
and at the Church of the Holy
Sepulcher, the ladder that has stood in one spot for 200 years because the
various Christian groups come to physical blows over who has the right to move
it.
Killing and stoning, guns and terrorist
bombs, wars and curses. O Jerusalem,
Jerusalem. You are not alone in letting disparity and difference
lead to destruction. You are but a symbol for the human violence that fills our
world. Even today, you still reflect back to us Jesus’ painful longing—God’s
deep and painful longing—to save us from ourselves.
How do we, as Christians, show our
willingness to change? How do we live loving lives in a violent world? So
often, we choose the way of crafty, clever foxes like Herod Antipas, using
power and a self-interested kind of politics to achieve our ends. Or we hunker
down under God’s wings like baby birds, shut our eyes, and pretend not to see or
influence what is going on outside our doors. How do we find a model for our lives?
Are we really supposed to get out our “What would Jesus do?” bracelets and offer
ourselves up as mother hens, to be mauled
by the fox so that the other chicks can run for it? That doesn’t sound very practical.
Don’t those bracelets, and the whole “imitation of Christ” theology, end up leading
us astray, anyway? Don’t they, in the words of AKM Adam, “confuse the unique
office of Jesus in the economy of salvation with a disciple’s more general
charge … [and] produce clones or dilettantes in the name of discipleship?”[1]
It is a dangerous game to decide where to place Jesus in modern dilemmas, because
he usually ends up on whatever side we find ourselves.
The barnyard metaphors in Jesus’
words remind me of my daughter Maren’s favorite book when she was in preschool.
It was an old—and probably psychologically damaging—French storybook about a
bouncy baby bunny and the evil weasel who liked to eat the rabbit’s family
members for lunch. My daughter had a horrid fascination with this violent
weasel and would beg to stare at length at the page with his picture. Long and
almost snakelike, he had beady little eyes, a slobbering, hungry tongue, and a
big, powerful mouth filled with very sharp teeth. After the bouncy bunny was
orphaned, the bunny got together with his forest friends and decided to dress
up like a monster to scare the weasel away. Using the weasel as their model,
they fought fear with fear and made themselves into a dragon-like creature
covered in tree bark, with a mouth even bigger than the weasel’s. The final
page of the book showed the repentant weasel, who had fled too fast in fear
from the disguised animals, covered in hospital bandages and on crutches,
promising never to eat rabbit again.
Masterful preacher Barbara Brown
Taylor writes about Jesus’ metaphor of God as mother hen, “If you are like me,
it is fine in terms of comfort, but in terms of protection it leaves something
to be desired. When the foxes of this world start prowling really close to
home, when you can hear them snuffling right outside the door, then it would be
nice to have a little bigger defense budget for the hen house.”([2]) My sweet little
daughter, who used to beg me to read this rather violent weasel story at least
3 times a day, would have agreed with Taylor. To take power over what threatens
us is universally appealing. Just ask Gayle Trotter, the D.C. lawyer who stole the show at the Senate Gun Hearings recently when she argued that a vulnerable woman needs firearms to defend "her babies in her home" against male attackers (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/07/gayle-trotter-the-woman-who-called-gun-control-sexist.html).
In understanding our role in a
violent world, I would urge us, perhaps surprisingly, seek a model for our
actions, but neither in the sense of the WWJD bracelets... nor from the more
comforting “join the foxes” philosophy. I would urge us to turn to Paul’s words
in today’s lesson from Philippians. I know … the Apostle Paul sounds awfully
full of himself in today’s Epistle. “If you want to live a good and holy
Christian life, just imitate me! Form
yourselves to my ways, conform to the
ways of your leaders. Ignore my good-for-nothing opponents. I have this thing all figured out, and
all you have to do is obey your leaders!” Isn’t obeying Paul even more
dangerous than imitating Jesus? Passages like this one don’t help us to feel
warm and fuzzy about Paul and his annoying admonitions. They make faith sound
like nothing but conformism. They make the Christian life sound like bland and
boring homogenization. What can all of Paul’s puffed up piety say to us in a
violent postmodern world?
What we tend to forget in studying
this passage is that pious-sounding Paul
is in truth the metaphorical evil weasel with sharp teeth who ate bouncy
bunnies for lunch. Paul was literally one of the prophet-stoners who causes
Jesus to weep in Luke’s Gospel. Paul stood at that now bullet-marked gate in
Jerusalem and helped as the apostle Stephen was stoned to death in a pool of
blood. No one is more complicit in the world’s violence than the apostle Paul.
Paul himself confessed to the Galatians: “I was violently persecuting the
church of God and was trying to destroy it.” You might have learned in Sunday
School that Paul’s conversion on the Damascus Road was a move from being a
law-burdened Jewish Pharisee to a free and enlightened Christian. Instead, as
Kathy Grieb points out, Paul’s conversion is rather from a life of violent zeal
to a new kind of non-violent life. Writes Grieb, “it is not difficult to
imagine Paul the persecutor flying a plane into the Pentagon or committing hate
crimes against gays and lesbians for the sake of God’s holiness. But after the
action of God that broke into his life … everything of which he had been so
certain now had to be reconfigured in light of the crucified and risen Messiah,
who had turned his world inside out.”[3]
Paul, who killed for God, now writes for God.
Paul, who knows the miracle of transformation
first hand, is not merely asking that Christians follow him or their leaders in
a few half-hearted actions or in a couple of righteous deeds. Paul wants Christians
to follow him in the total conversion of life and being that Jesus proclaims in
the Cross and Resurrection. To model oneself on Paul is not merely to give up
wine for Lent or to “like” non-violent posts on Facebook. I’m afraid that he is
asking us to turn our lives upside down. He is asking us to allow ourselves to
be changed into Christ’s “new creation,” to become a community, a community at the mercy of the Holy Spirit, open
to reconciliation when we feel like retaliation, expecting the unexpected, and ready,
as Lucinda always says, to question ourselves just when we are most certain
that we have the answers.
How do we, vulnerable bunnies and
fragile chicks that we are, dare to crawl out from under the predictable cloak
of violence and fear-making that makes us look like leaders in this world? We cover
ourselves instead with the wings of the loving Mother Hen, accepting risk, leading
by serving, and practicing resurrection.
[1]
A.K.M. ADAM, “Walk This Way: Repetition, Difference, and the Imitation of
Christ,” in Interpretation, January
1, 2001.
[2]
Barbara Brown Taylor, Bread of Angels, (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1997), 128.
[3]
A. Katherine Grieb, “’The One Who Called You…’ Vocation and Leadership in
Pauline Literature,” Interpretation, 2005,
137.
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