August 10, 2025 Reflection

This is our final week of our sermon series on birds of the Bible.  I know it could seem like an odd focus for a sermon series, but as I have said several times there is much about bird watching that is similar to the practice of faith. Both require attention; both call for our eyes to be open to the smallest movement, the slightest sound. Both call for lots of waiting, and the engagement of our whole bodies – not only our eyes need to be open but so do our ears and our hearts. And perhaps most importantly both take us out of a constant focus on ourselves. Debbie Blue in her book, Consider the Birds, A Provocative Guide to Birds of the Bible, writes that focusing on birds moves us off our ‘incessant narcissism’ which focuses all our attention if not on own selves, certainly on the human race. Considering the birds helps move us to value something for its own sake, to see all creation as being precious, indeed sacred, for its own self, rather than as a resource to be enjoyed or exploited for our use. Author Graeme Gibson has compiled articles and poetry into a beautiful book called The Bedside Book of Birds, and he offers one more insight into the value of considering the birds. He writes, “One of the rewards of bird watching is the brief escape it affords from our ancient and compelling need to make nature useful.” (The Bedside Book of Birds, p. 4)

I love this because one of my hobby horses is the crushing effect of our society’s desire that everything be useful or pragmatic. Pragmatic utilitarianism, the growing notion that everything has to be practical and useful, is like a smothering drop cloth weighting down creativity, beauty, wonder, and curiosity. I hope zooming in on the birds helps us break from that contemporary challenge that so limits our capacity to appreciate wonder, that is has moved our gaze beyond ourselves and towards the wonder and mystery of God’s creation and the nature of the Creator.

In our reading today we overhear the voice of Jesus from 2000 years ago in a heated argument with his religious colleagues, who are also his detractors. He is calling them out for their hypocrisy for, to put it simply, their failure to walk the talk of their Jewish commitments. Seven times he cries out ‘Woe to you…’ “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. Woe to you blind guides… For you are like white-washed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and all kinds of filth. So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. (Matt 23: 27-28)… Woe to you scribes and Pharisee, hypocrites. For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law; justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!……How can you escape being sentenced to hell?”

Jesus was enraged by frustration, by disappointment, by fear. I think it was with a mix of all those emotions that he insults the religious leaders. If you ever wondered about the humanity of Jesus, if you ever wondered about his ability to stay locked in his persona as a sensitive new age kind of guy, here you have evidence of the level of his very real engagement with the real world. “While insult was a fine and frequent art in antiquity, piling them up as Matthew does here suggests very serious conflict between Jesus and his opponents (or between Jesus’ followers in Matthews’s community and the opponents of that day.” (Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, p. 115)

We need to be very careful that we do not project all these negative slurs of Jesus on to all Jewish leaders at the time of Jesus. We need to remember that in writing this passage the gospel writer Matthew was writing to his own people, to other Jews.  As a Jewish man who believed that Jesus was the Messiah, in his writing Matthew is allowing us to overhear an in-house argument. This is not a rant by one Christian against all Jews, but a fight among siblings. Remember indeed that Jesus was a Jew, and in this story, he is a Jew very angry at other Jews, who are nevertheless his brothers in faith.

In this passage Jesus is accusing the religious leaders of many things that on occasion we could be accused of today: not practicing what they preach; focusing on little bits of the law rather than the intention of the big picture; doing things to draw attention to how righteous they were; not distributing the wealth of the synagogue to those who needed it;

reveling in their status as leaders rather than emptying themselves in service to others. Jesus has been under attack by the religious authorities, under constant attack by Facebook trolls and in this passage it seems like he’s had enough. He logs on and gives as good as he was getting. And then, suddenly he seems to run out of steam and moves instead into a wistful lament, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,…how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings….”

            Notice that rather than responding in kind, with threats of violence against those who were threatening him, rather than cutting himself off from the community that rejects him, Jesus responds with love. With a desire not to exclude, not to form his own little group, not to walk out on those he doesn’t agree with, but to instead gather them in and love them, nurture them, protect them from all harm. Even to give his life to them, to lay his very body down for them.

            When hens are brooding, sitting on their eggs, they become very protective. They will lash out at anyone or anything that draws near, pecking ferociously at any intruder. I wonder if I’m stretching the metaphor to imagine that Jesus is brooding over the birth of God’s kingdom on earth, and on occasion lashing out at those who would endanger it?

A mother hen will also pluck out her feathers and put them around the eggs, laying down a protective layer. In pulling out her feathers the hen exposes parts of her body to bare patches. These patches then also offer more warmth to the eggs. She quite truly gives her body to her new creation.

            Jesus does not turn away his opponents, or run from them, but instead he yearns to offer himself in the most vulnerable way imaginable, to nestle them under his body and try to bring them to life. Even if it means offering his own. 

            Jesus was not only threatened by the people who wanted to maintain comfort in their religious world, he was threatened by the state, by the Roman Empire. He was considered an insurgent, and the authorities wanted to silence him, to kill him. Under that threat too, he stands fast.

In the gospel of Luke Jesus again refers to himself as a hen who desires to gather in and protect her chicks. (Luke 13:31) When he does that, he is quite deliberately drawing a sharp comparison between the kingdom of God and the rule and reign of the Roman Empire. The symbol of imperial Rome was the eagle, a magnificent bird of beauty and strength, and a powerful bird of prey. Jesus casts himself as the opposite – a mother hen, vulnerable, earth bound, dowdy, scratching a living from the dust of the ground.

Jesus did and said all these things two thousand years ago. How do we hear it today? With our history of the physical and cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples, with the current virulent acts of racism on the uptick in our very region, can we hear ever so faintly Christ crying out in frustration, ‘hypocrites’? As our climate crisis seems to deepen every day, I am frustrated that our response is to remove wooden fences and yew trees from around our property. As if that is an adequate response. As if that will save creation rather than our rampaging in the streets calling out the petrochemical industry and our lifestyles that move sustainability ever further into the realm of imagination rather than possibility. ‘You strain out the gnat, or the yew shrub, and swallow the camel,” I hear Jesus say.

We say we follow the one who gave his very life for the liberation of all God’s people, indeed for the flourishing of all creation. I have only once followed him to a protest, and I knew it would be quite safe and polite in a park in Squamish. I have not always followed him to call out racism when it might be awkward at a dinner party. I have not always followed him to call out homophobia. I have followed to call out misogyny but let’s face it – I have skin in that particular game, and I don’t do it always for fear of sounding like a tiresome shrew. I was on the Board of First United Church in the downtown eastside, such a good Christian, but you know what – I hated going to meetings there because I am so uncomfortable parking in the underground garage and walking among the people there. Jesus’ people. Woe to you hypocrite.

I think I went to bed last night with a rereading of the passage troubling my sleep, “Woe to you Christian leaders and disciples…For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, you fill out your PAR and donate when you can, and click ‘like’ on fb and Instagram memes about racism, but you have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith….Woe to you Christian and disciple…you on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness…you say love, love and then gossip and undermine. You write indignant posts about a personal affront and skim past another notice about another missing indigenous woman and children starving in Gaza. It’s easy to grind ourselves down with judgement not only about hypocrisy but about our ineffectiveness, about the enormity of the world’s needs and our perceived inability to make a difference.

But then I remember, as we read in the book of Lamentations, great is God’s faithfulness. “But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: the steadfast love of God never ceases, God’s mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. …therefore I will hope in God.” (Lam 3:21-24) I will hope in God that God’s goodness will not only be offered to me, but be worked through me. That as Jesus envelops me and mine under his wings, so does he envelop all creation, and that in the midst of it all, we are both flawed hypocrites and God’s most beloved children, and in God all things are possible.

 Jesus broods over us, in all vulnerability seeking to bring forth a new creation, and to offer comfort in the midst of the birthing. Encircled in the grace of God’s wings may we be given the courage to make good trouble in seeking out the kingdom of God. May we be righteously indignant and angry and at the same time act in compassionate hope, embracing all creation with God’s renewing brooding love.

Amen