Fox and Hen
Genesis 15:1-18; Luke 13:31-35

March 4, 2007


In days of yore, Ralph Klein was involved in another election and hot on the campaign trail in a rural district he arrived at a church barbecue in the late afternoon, absolutely famished.

As he moved down the serving line he held out his plate to the woman serving the chicken. She put a piece on his plate and turned to the next in line. “Excuse me,” said Ralph, “do you mind if I have a second piece of chicken?” “Sorry,” the woman replied, “I’m supposed to give only one piece of chicken to each person.” “But I’m starved,” said Ralph. “Sorry, only one to a customer.” “Do you know who I am?” said the exasperated Ralph. “I am the premier of this province!” “Do you know who I am?” replied the woman. “I’m the lady in charge of the chicken. Move along, mister.”

The church chicken lady wasn’t awed by the premier of the province and Jesus had no fear of Herod. Herod was a fox, a predator upon the weak and powerless, and Jesus was a chicken, a mother hen protecting her brood, Jesus in the feminine, and he is not afraid. A perfect conversation by which to come to understand this Lenten thing.

A year or so ago I got involved with our children developing a list of Biblical animals. While our list was a good one, including worms and zebras, we naturally missed some. After all, there’s a universe of animals out there and it must have been one huge ark to have contained them with a million nooks and crannies. Lots of room for worms and as our Sunday School students figured logically, there had to be a zebra.

Two we missed are the fox and hen. That sounds like an English pub and sure enough there is one in Warwickshire, a good place for jazz apparently. Practically in one breath Jesus mentions both, a swipe at the conniving fox and a desire to imitate the selfless and courageous hen. I don’t believe Jesus compared himself to any other animal.

Abram definitely does not want to be like the animals in his encounter with God. A heifer, a goat and a ram, a turtledove and a pigeon are to be killed and sacrificed, the bigger animals cut into two. God makes a solemn and eerie covenant with Abram, passing as a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch pass between the animal pieces. Abram will have to abide by his part of the bargain lest he will be divided like one of those pieces. This may be our covenant, but this is not our kind of religious faith.

But this is Lent and the Christian Church has never pretended this season to be a triumphal one. Most of still think on reflex about what one should give up during Lent. It is a period of 40 days of fasting - Sundays, the day of Christ’s resurrection, are excluded. Grim hunger, tortuous temptations, and concluding with the week of Passion that now Mel Gibson has made perfectly clear was not a spiritual cakewalk. Lent deals with the stuff our faith has to confront, but which we normally prefer to avoid - disappointment, betrayal, humiliation, pain, endurance, injustice, the privilege of power.

It was an odd situation, for Jesus had just finished lambasting the integrity and theological understanding of the Pharisees, the intellectual wing of Judaism, when a handful of these same Pharisees sidle up to Jesus and warn him about Herod’s violent intentions for him. Makes you wonder whether some of Jesus’ preaching was getting through, winning believers out of the doctors and professors.

Most are not so convinced. For one, Herod would have barely heard of Jesus by this juncture in the story, and he certainly would not have wasted his time chasing after an over-talkative country preacher. It’s more likely the Pharisees were craftily trying to get Jesus scared and voluntarily slink out of the region. This subtle technique of harassment and minor-league terror is as old as the hills or the prairie.

Jesus is not fooled either by the Pharisees or Herod and his foxy response must have sounded deliciously nasty, a barb against their common enemy. Jesus can’t get away from using word images and pictures that refer to his story’s climax, twice talking about doing his work “today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my course.” The day of Resurrection makes everything take on a different hue. Yet how do you explain the unexplainable, a series of events that will disrupt and turn upside down the assumptions from which the world operates? Only riddles make sense for the time being.

Jerusalem becomes his target, the metropolis where all the prophets and authentic people of faith are destroyed, the infamous den of iniquity where foxes rule with impunity and Jesus chooses to become a hen, protecting her brood under her wings. But the Pharisees don’t want a mother hen, and Jesus ends up declaring that they won’t see him again until they call out to him, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” For those keeping score, those will be the words in Luke that the crowds cried out as Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. It’s all about that last Holy Week.

There isn’t much of a story here, a little trash talking on both sides. But there is the big story: a teacher who names the game of the Holy City - that is, a city that does not make people holy, but discredits and even kills anyone who is genuinely holy. A mother hen willing to die protecting her young defeats any fox bent on devouring the helpless. A person who is executed by the violence of an oppressive state with the assistance of the violent intentions of an entrenched religious gang ends up thwarting violence forever.

You and I live together for 40 days in order to relive a person who did not eat in a world of plenty, who resisted rather than taking advantage of temptations, who wandered rather than stay comfortably put. This is our story as God’s gathered company, not the story of crystal cathedrals and gigantic churches and the blessing of the military and corporations. Our song is not “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but “We Shall Overcome.” We are no longer the dominant culture, we are the counter culture. We are no longer in charge, the native sons and daughters, we are resident aliens, strangers in a strange land. Thank God, we share our lives with a lot of other strange people.

It is during this Lenten time that we come to grips again with who we are after the long six months of Pentecost normality, the anticipation of Advent, the joy and wonder of Christmas and the afterglow of Epiphany. We are to be wise like serpents, but gentle like doves. Actually, we are the brood of the hen, a chicken who is a bird with wings but cannot fly, a bird who then scurries around on its legs but seldom seems to know where it is going. But through her weakness we are saved and in this world in love with power and strength it makes a different world.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan