Sermon, March 11, Trinity United Methodist Church, Wichita Falls, Texas

"If you really loved me you’d prove your love by . . ."

Yes, you’d prove your love by . . . What?

From a lust-ridded person to his or her potential partner, it means "prove your love by sacrificing an important and holy part of yourself so my lust can be satisfied."

From a angry and lonely wife to her emotionally remote husband, it means, "Make me feel OK, no matter how unwilling I am to take responsibility for my own emotional life."

From the person in the throes of some kind of addictive behavior, it means, "Lie, cheat, make excuses for me, but don’t make me change this behavior pattern that is destroying all our lives."

From a defiant child to her parents, it means, "Let me do whatever I want and make sure I face no consequences of doing that."

From most who call themselves Christian, it means, "Give me what I want, God, but don’t ask me to give that to someone else. Oh, and by the way, make it easy for me and make sure I don’t have to do anything uncomfortable along the way."

This week, I heard a series of lectures by Barbara Brown Taylor. I went because I wanted to hear and learn techniques from a woman proclaimed one of the most effective preachers in the English speaking language. I went away very uncomfortable with the state of my own soul.

In one of the first lectures, she reminded us that while we Christians use the Genesis 3 passage as the template of sinful patterns, Jews use the story in Exodus 32 of the Israelites on Mount Sinai as they wait for Moses’ return from his forty days and forty nights in the presence of the Lord.

They have just experienced great deliverance—they were free from slavery.

None of them had ever lived one minute in freedom before.

Suddenly, no one was telling them what to do, where to go, how to use their time.

They were alone in the wilderness, in the dry place, with an unseen and mighty God over whom they had no power and no influence and everything was strange and different and their leader had disappeared.

So what did they do? They turned to a second fiddle man, elevated him to leadership unaccountable to that mighty unseen God, and prepared to do unthinkingly whatever he asked. And Aaron, the second fiddle man, told them to strip their wives and children of their gold earrings and give them to him. So they did, he melted them down, and, Voila!, this golden calf comes out and everyone proclaims that the god that brought them out of Israel.

As Rev. Taylor pegged it, "A shiny little metal god that will give us what we want."

To expand: "If You really loved me, You would prove your love by becoming a shiny little metal God whom I could control and who would give me whatever I want, especially comfort and no need to change and look carefully at myself and what I am doing."

That is what I’ve finally decided I really, really want of God. I want God to make my life comfortable and not to ask hard things of me.

I have made comfort and control my idols. I want to control how God is going to act, what is going to happen to me, and what is going to happen in my church life.

Idolatry is such an old fashioned word. None of us think we worship idols, of course. That’s for a primitive society.

But we do. How? Any time we work to reduce God to some sort of controllable idea or act or phenomena, we’ve worshipped an idol.

The Scripture passage we read today is Luke 13:34. "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!"

Nice passage. We get this lovely picture of Jesus being a mother hen and gathering her chicks around. In deference to women’s history month, this is one of the passages theologians use when speaking of the feminine imagery of God as they set forth the scriptural proof that God is not male, but encompasses both male and female, and is beyond gender classification.

If we were just to look only at this passage we could be justified in saying, "God, if you really loved me, you’d gather me under your wings and keep me safe there." And we might have little hens sitting all over the sanctuary. We could have a hen hanging here on the back wall.

We could wear golden hens around our necks. Roofs for churches could be fashioned in the shape of outspread wings inviting all to come and take shelter there.

Those who are accustomed to making the sign of the cross when they pray could instead cluck at the end of their prayers. "In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, ‘cluck’ ‘cluck.’"

Artists would compete to see who could best represent the biblical chicken.

And any time anything uncomfortable happened to us, we could look at God and say, "Hey, what’s the problem here? You’re not holding up your end of the bargain." We would have indeed formed our shiny little metal God who we can control.

And that’s one small step to creating a shiny little metal God we can cage and make sure doesn’t get out of control or do things we might become uncomfortable with.

Yes, there is always a danger is just pulling a passage out of the air and building a whole theology out of it. We just might be missing a piece or two.

The verse (Luke 13:31) that starts this particular paragraph in your Bibles reads, "At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, "'Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.'"

And why would Herod, the King of Judea, himself a Jew, want to kill Jesus?

It very well might have been the things that Jesus had been saying and doing just before. Herod was a man of great immorality, and Jesus had called him on his behavior. Herod, you may remember, was married to Herodias, who was both his niece and his sister-in-law, as she had been married to his brother, Philip. She had a daughter who danced before her mother’s new husband and this immoral man was so full of passion for his step-daughter that he promised her anything. So she requested, and got, the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Nice family.

But let’s just look at the context of our passage.

Just before this, in verses 22-30, we read about some of the things that Jesus was doing as he made his way to Jerusalem. Remember, we are in the Season of Lent, the time when we seek to enter into the experience of Jesus as he "set his face toward Jerusalem." So he’s going there, knowing that death awaits him.

Let’s think together. What do you do when you know you are getting ready to head into difficult circumstances? I don’t know about you, but I know what I tend to do. I start bargaining with my shiny little caged metal God saying, "OK, God. Get me out of this one." I do everything I can to make the situation easier—maybe a little fudging here, a little sucking up there, tossing a few extra compliments around, behaving myself just a little better, trying, for a change, NOT to be controversial and difficult. In other words, I’m really trying to get everyone on my side so that things will go easier for me.

But what did Jesus do? Well, he starts telling people that a whole bunch of them who think they’ve got it made in heaven are probably going to be left out in the cold.

He says things like, "The owner of the house is going to shut the door and lock you out and won’t have a clue who you are when you try to gain entrance."

He keeps persisting on elevating the dregs of society, saying that those we disdain as being least are going to end up being first. That one just might have been enough right there to set King Herod off, hearing that this upstart, poor, itinerant Jewish carpenter told him, the great and untouchable King, that he just might not really have a kingdom after all.