Readings for the Second Sunday in Lent: Genesis 15:1-12,17-18, Philippians 3:17-4:1, Luke 13:31-35, Psalm 27
The children’s ministry program at Grace Church in St. Helena, CA, where I served before coming here, is a little like Godly Play, which you all have had here in the past. One of the key elements is a raised map of the city of Jerusalem. Along with other maps and materials, it makes the point that Jesus really came to a real place on the earth. Jesus lived in a land with mountains and rivers and seas and towns and with a great city called Jerusalem, a city whose particular politics and struggles and conflicts mattered to Jesus’s life and death and resurrection.
Through working with the raised map, the kids learn about the gates that Jesus would have used to enter the city, and where the upper room was located, where the last supper happened, and the garden of Gethsemane, and the palaces and homes of the various leaders who put Jesus on trial, and the site of the crucifixion, and the tomb. It’s a prominent, big part of the room, so many of the kids know it quite well, having heard its stories year after year.
Or they did, until COVID, when we had to move online or outside for everything. But last year, we decided to do an outdoor version of the city of Jerusalem. We decided that on the day before Palm Sunday, we’d have the kids draw the city in sidewalk chalk using our whole church campus, and then invite people to come and walk through it as we told the story on Palm Sunday. I had sketched out a plan of which parts of the city would be where, but one of the 10-year-olds showed up that Saturday with a full plan that was way better than mine. So all morning, we drew the places that Jesus encountered during that week in Jerusalem, and the paths between them. We drew the gate to the city where we thought people would gather. The upper room was probably in the lower city, where average people lived, so we drew the big table for the Passover supper in the parking lot, the lowest point on campus. We made the labyrinth the temple, and the high priest’s house on a sidewalk, and Pilate’s palace in the courtyard, and Herod’s on another walkway. There’s a big cross already near the church door, so that was the site of the crucifixion, and the outdoor columbarium was the tomb.
As I was remembering this event this week, I started to wonder if those kids had heard the passage we read today, before we did our drawing. The chalk buildings ended up with a whole little sub-narrative about birds. The kids drew a nest of birds on top each leader’s palace, glaring at the leader. Then Herod’s palace and Pilate’s palace both got successively bigger birds’ nests, and the parent bird on each of those nests was giving an even dirtier look to each of them.
And the glares were well-deserved. In this city, like any city, there were complex layers of leaders and power struggles. The city was occupied by the Romans. Rome, and its emissaries like Pilate, held power over occupied cities, including the power to convict and execute criminals.
But there were also other local leaders, like Herod and Caiaphas, who cooperated with the Romans in varying ways, and, as we will see during Holy Week, sometimes leveraged Rome’s
power to accomplish what they wanted to do, to eliminate threats to their own standing or the status quo.
Jesus mourns all of this, he expresses anger at all this, as he travels toward the city of Jerusalem in the passage we hear today. He describes himself as wanting to be like a mother hen, gathering her chicks. I think the kids had it right: Jesus, in this image as a bird, is wanting to protect those who are being hurt by corrupt and destructive leaders like Herod. He wants to gather them and shield them from the foxes who would destroy them.
And so as we travel this journey with Jesus into Jerusalem, into Holy Week, I think we can hear in this story that Jesus was acting with care, was acting to love and protect the vulnerable people that he loved.
But the way that Jesus does that is not to sweep away the complex political reality of that particular city at that particular time. Which, by the way, is something that we’ve often done as Christians when we read this story- we gloss over the complexity of the situation to blame all Jews, or even all Jewish leaders, for what is hard about this story, instead of using it to understand the empires and powers of our own day that we participate in. Jesus doesn’t try to swoop those complexities right out of the fray. Jesus doesn’t even try to shield the people that he loves from seeing the difficult truths that his journey into Jerusalem unmasks. Instead, he brings the disciples right into the middle of it, he invites the whole city to see what happens.
The day after we drew the city of Jerusalem, we had our service. We gathered, about 30 of us, all ages, and walked back and forth across our campus that had become the city of Jerusalem. At each stop, the kids and I told the story of what happened at that place. We walked into the city with Jesus as he and his humble procession made a satire of the Roman leader’s parade. We traveled with Jesus as he angrily turned over the tables at the temple where people were exploiting those who came to worship. We traveled with him to the upper room, where he shared the last supper with his disciples, where he taught them and prayed with them, and where he washed their feet.
We walked with him out of the city to the garden of Gethsemane, and then we traveled with those who arrested him as they dragged him from house of power to house of power, as they passed Jesus back and forth, various groups trying to increase their power, to get what they wanted, to avoid anything resembling justice, and mostly to get rid of Jesus, who the people were calling a king, who was teaching such dangerous things about justice and love. Finally, we went to the cross, and then to the tomb.
We always say to the kids, when we talk about the cross- is that the end of the story? And they say- no! And then we light a candle to remember that Jesus rose again, that the tomb was empty, that he lives still and is present with us.
You remember last April- it was probably about the same here as it was in California. A few of us had been able to be vaccinated, but not a lot yet. We hadn’t been worshipping in person for most of the prior year. We weren’t expecting 30 people to come- it was the largest gathering we’d had together since everything shut down. And we ended up crowded together in the small columbarium. I hadn’t thought much about what to do after we lit the candle, especially with so many people.
But what we usually do is ask the kids if there is a song that the story has reminded them of, so I asked that. Everyone thought for a while, and then the 10-year-old who had imagined all this said, “Soon and Very Soon.” So we sang there, quietly, because we weren’t any of us really sure if singing was safe, “Soon and very soon, we are going to see the king….No more dying there, we are going to see the king…”
So there it is. We are embarking on that walk toward Jerusalem in this season. The world in many ways seems even heavier than it did last year, and the year before. I don’t think we are called to turn away from all that is complex and political and difficult in this time. But this gentle and fierce leader, this hen who gathers her brood- we know that she is our king. She comes to usher in a new way of justice and love, and that will always be a threat to those who want to wield power by other means. But her life is more powerful than the death dealing ways of empire, and all of us who are entangled in it.
We don’t get to that new life by hiding or avoiding the cross, but we can also trust that, as we encounter the pain of this world, the crosses of this world, we have a guide, we have one who leads us and cares for us and shelters us, who has shown us the way through all that is painful. Soon and very soon, we will see that in a new way, yet again.