Month: March 2025

Lent 2: The Chicken & The Fox

Beth Bathe ‘Mamma Hen’

16/3/25
Lent 2

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
Philippians 3:17-4:1
Luke 13:31-35

As it is Lent, I need to start with a confession. Sermon writing this week was a challenge! I have never preached on this short passage of Luke so it was daunting and refreshing to start with a blank page. There are threads from last week: God’s response to the vulnerability of Jesus and us and faithfulness to his promises which he fulfills.

The First Sunday of Lent always has the set Gospel of the temptation of Jesus. The first temptation was to turn a stone into bread. Jesus had been fasting for forty days and could have easily satisfied his own hunger. The cost of this temptation was denying his own humanity. When hungry we are too lean into God for our lasting fulfilment.

The second temptation was for Jesus to bow down to the devil and all the kingdoms of the earth would be His. This was to tempt the ego into believing that we can have all the power and be worshipped.

The third temptation to throw himself off the top of the temple speaks to vulnerability. To be vulnerable is to be easily physically or mentally hurt, influenced, or attacked. This is the language used around safeguarding vulnerable adults and children. The suggestion of this temptation is that God’s beloved will be kept safe from every harm, frailty, disease and ultimately death.
In his temptations we see something of Jesus’ character; he will not take the easy choices and opportunities for glory nor will he test God for His own gain. Jesus chooses to believe that God will be faithful and is worthy of worship regardless of circumstances. Jesus is living within the boundaries of his humanity by showing his strength of knowledge and character. I like this vision of a strong Jesus.

This week’s Gospel reading has been more of a challenge. If you were to draw a picture of Jesus, what would you draw? A lion? A lamb? A door? Bread and a cup?
Would you draw a chicken? I know that a few of you have or have had chickens. Think of that noble bird for a moment; the beady eyes, easily flappable, not able to soar like the eagles, or run like the ostrich. Sure they have beaks that can be fierce but even those are a little pathetic. They are still pretty defenceless.

Yet it is the chicken that Jesus uses as a self-description. Can you picture Jesus as the mother hen? This is not the maternal metaphor I would have gone for. Luke invites us to consider Jesus as the mother hen whose chicks do not want her. To hold the definition of being vulnerable as to be easily physically or mentally hurt, influenced, or attacked, chickens would come out as a safeguarding risk. Especially against a fox but hold that thought.

This Jesus-chicken has been rejected by their own children; her arms are open and empty. You do not need to be a parent to experience rejection. We have all likely experienced rejection in some form during our lifetimes. It is one of the worst feelings. Jesus understands rejection; he received it from his followers who turned away, the disciples who could not cope with the cross and even felt rejected by God on the cross.

In the first verses, a group of Pharisees warn Jesus to leave as Herod wants to kill him. When it came to Jesus, the Pharisees were looking for reasons to hand him over to the authorities, to Herod. This is the Herod who had John the Baptist killed, everyone knows that he is dangerous. In previous encounters, Jesus rebukes or challenges the Pharisees but not this time. He must have believed the sincerity of their warning.

Jesus tells the Pharisees to tell that fox Herod that he still has work to do. The chicken is not done yet! Referring to Herod as a fox almost raises some questions. Why a fox? We would think of them as cunning or prowling around, waiting for an opportunity to take out a chicken or other unsuspecting victim. Urban foxes are a problem in many cities, they kill pets and eat garbage.
Being an opportunist is not always a bad thing but can become negative when taking advantage of others.

There is no Old Testament evidence of foxes being symbols of willingness or cunning, strength. Apart from this passage, references to foxes imply weakness, feebleness and skulking which are morally different. Jesus’ reference to Herod as a fox indicates that he is a light-weight, powerless. Herod was seen as a puppet-king with no real authority and he is still dangerous.

Jesus has set his sights on Jerusalem, the city that rejects God’s messengers and kills its prophets. Jesus knows what is coming, his death, and He will not change his course. A course that will lead him into Jerusalem and Herod’s court where the chicken and the fox will meet.

Luke ends this passage with lament. How often I have desired to gather you. Jesus longs and grieves for his lost and wandering children. For the little ones who will not come home. For the city that will not welcome its saviour. For the endangered multitudes of people who refuse to recognise the danger that awaits them.

How might you be called to lamentation during this holy season? What do you yearn for that eludes you? What missed chances, failed efforts, or broken dreams tug at your heart and call you into mourning? How might we, the Church, lament with Jesus over our homes, our cities, our countries, our planet? How might we stand with him in the Jerusalems of our lives, and weep our sorrow into new hope?

We are called to return. Return to the wings of the mother hen, to find strength and comfort, relief and consolation. Paul reminds the Philippians that citizenship is in heaven, it is there we will wait for our transformation into his likeness. We need to stand firm and hold fast to the promises of faithfulness as Abraham did while waiting for his offspring as numerous as the stars.
Jesus is both loving and lamenting. In this Lent may we know his love for us and take our lamenting to him. He is the way home.

Lent 1: Beloved and Bedevilled

Paolo Veronese – Baptism & Temptation of Christ (Milan)

Lent 1
9/3/25
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Romans 10:8-13
Luke 4:1-13

Welcome to Lent. I wish you all a holy one. As a reminder of what this season should and could look like, I start with the words from the Introduction to the Ash Wednesday service and invite you to observe it faithfully.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, since early days Christians have observed with great devotion the time of our Lord’s passion and resurrection and prepared for this by a season of penitence and fasting.

By carefully keeping these days, Christians take to heart the call to repentance and the assurance of forgiveness proclaimed in the gospel, and so grow in faith and in devotion to our Lord.

I invite you, therefore, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word.

Lent is not about being miserable or forsaking the delicacies of life in and of themselves. It is meant to bring us closer to God, to build up our relationships with Jesus and to deepen our understanding of our Christian faith. Take the opportunity; we all need to.

The Gospel reading on the first Sunday of Lent is always the temptation of Jesus. This event happened immediately after Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist. The focus is often on the temptation by the devil, however in our study group on Wednesday, it was pointed out that Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. God the Spirit was with Jesus in his temptation.

God was also with Moses and the Israelites as they stood on the cusp of the land that was being given as their inheritance to possess. It was not going to be easy, the travelling had been long; punishment for disobedience had made the journey even longer. Temptation to go their own way had plagued the travellers; Moses kept them going and was the bridge between the people and God. The land would flow with milk and honey because God had promised and is faithful.

In Paul’s letter to the Romans, we are told with great passion that all who call on the name of the Lord will be saved. God is generous to those who confess with their lips and believe with the heart. We will be saved for all eternity to be with God. God is faithful. This is what we need to hang on to every moment of every day; Lent is an opportunity to deepen our understanding of God’s faithfulness.

This is how Jesus was able to resist temptation and Moses got those rebellious Israelites into the promised land. It is how we will be saved and spared from an eternity apart from God (also known as hell).

Whatever our attitude towards Lent might be, I strongly encourage all of us to invest, pay attention, do some work, and do things differently over these next few weeks. I suspect you will surprise yourselves. We are to set our minds on things above. The idea behind fasting for Lent is rooted in this Gospel story; Jesus was able to resist temptation at his weakest points. We give up things in Lent to remind ourselves of the sacrifices that Jesus made

At his baptism, the bottom-line truth of Jesus is revealed: He is God’s son, precious and beloved. When Jesus is led into the wilderness, he is faced with various assaults on this truth. Jesus has to work out God’s presence in a harsh and lonely world. The lesson is that he and we have to learn that we can be beloved and go without, precious and vulnerable.

I want to briefly look at the temptations that Jesus faced and what they might say to us today.

Tell This Stone to Become Bread

This temptation suggests that God’s beloved should not hunger. There should not be any doubt that Jesus could not have done that. He was, after all, hungry. He had been fasting for forty days! Taking a stone and turning it into something it was not meant to be would be cheating, denying the reality of Jesus’ humanity. By paying attention to hunger, we are to lean into God for our lasting fulfilment. The devil wanted Jesus and us to disrespect and manipulate creation for our own satisfaction.

Many of us have the power to look after ourselves, provide for ourselves to a standard that we see fit. I can do it myself, thank you very much!

By doing things for ourselves all the time, we too can stop exercising trust in God to provide for us. His provision is always better, remember we too are his beloved and precious children. Lent should teach us that we can be loved and hungry at the same time.

If You Worship Me, It Will All Be Yours

The second temptation targets the ego. Power is the root of many evils. People crave power and Satan knows this. We want to be in control of our own lives, destinies, plans. It started with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; they were tempted by the prospect of power. They believed, with no proof at all, that eating the apple would make them like God.

The temptation suggests God’s beloved do not need to labour in obscurity; we can do it all on stage with the applause and admiration we desire. Surely God does not want us to live in modesty and insignificance by the world’s standards or Charlwoods/Sidlow Bridge standards?!

Do we trust God sees us when those with power do not? Are we able to live as God’s beloved in quiet places in humble service?

Throw Yourself Down From Here

The third temptation targets Jesus’ vulnerability. To be vulnerable is to be easily physically or mentally hurt, influenced, or attacked. This is the language used around safeguarding vulnerable adults and children. The suggestion of this temptation is that God’s beloved will be kept safe by God. Safe from all physical and emotional harm, frailty and disease, accidents and ultimately death.

This is an attractive lie as it targets our deepest fears about what it is to be human in a dangerous world. We can get God to guarantee a perfect rescue if we believe hard enough.

Jesus’ reply is that we are not to put God to the test. The cross teaches us that God’s beloved ones still bleed and ache and die. We are loved in our vulnerable states, not out of them. God accompanies us, as he did Moses and the Israelites, in our suffering.

This is good news because we are the beloved of a God who resurrects. There is no suffering that God will not redeem. Our story is not one that ends in despair; it ends with an empty tomb, in a kingdom of hope and love, consolation and joy.

Jesus does not choose to enter the wilderness; the Spirit led him there. The time of temptation was to establish that Jesus had choices and desires of his own, like all humans do. We do not voluntarily choose to enter the wilderness but it still happens; maybe in a hospital waiting room, a difficult relationship, a troubled child or sudden death. Does this mean that God wants us to suffer? I do not believe that.

It does mean that by following the example of Jesus, we must choose to make God’s will our own will. We choose through our temptations and wilderness times what kind of Christian, what kind of person we will be. The wilderness can be redeemed and become holy if we stay and pay attention.

There is hope in the wilderness; God does not abandon Jesus there. Jesus was ministered to by the angels. When we find ourselves in the wilderness we are not abandoned as it is Jesus who tends to us.

Lent can be a wilderness season of sorts as we make time (or should make time) to examine where we are at with God. Jesus was able to answer Satan at each turn with scripture from Deuteronomy. Maybe we need to brush up on what the bible says (or doesn’t)!

A wilderness season, however challenging, will never be wasted if we believe and know that God is with us. Those who call on the name of the Lord will be saved. Our identity lies in being His beloved son or daughter. If we can hang on to that, then whatever the wilderness throws at us, we can make it through.

Ash Wednesday: Conditions of the Heart

Ash Wednesday
3/5/25

Psalm 51
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Ash Wednesday can and should be a point of reflection; a time to step aside and ask ourselves deeper questions about life and faith. Where might we want to start? The entire season of Lent could be a time set aside for examination (if we never have) or the re-examination (if we already do regularly) of our hearts. Our hearts need to be guarded for they are the well-spring of life, everything you do flows from it (Proverbs 4:23).

You might already be asking yourself: how does the heart have anything to do with Ash Wednesday? If you noticed in the special liturgy this morning – there is a lot of mention of the heart. We are to take heart, we have already asked for new and contrite hearts, we will soon confess for not loving God with our whole heart and we are to avoid hardness of heart.

The Heart, biblically speaking, is a metaphor for the inner life; it is the seat of our physical, spiritual and mental life. It is the place where we store wisdom.

Jesus tells us in Matthew 15 that what comes out of the heart makes us unclean – evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. He is very concerned with the condition of our hearts. They need to be clean and free of the rubbish that builds up because everything we do flows out of it.

This is why I brought my stethoscope this morning/evening. This was the first big purchase I made when I started my nurses’ training. We all had to have one. I worked on a ward that required us to use them daily; they weren’t just accessories. A stethoscope is used to check the heart sounds and blood pressure along with other bodily noises.

One of the difficulties with the heart is that it is (or should be) always moving. I am going to relate the physical heart to the spiritual heart. Your heart beats constantly; has been beating since before you were born. For some of you that is a very long time! The heart needs to be beat within certain parameters to ensure that it is working correctly: a certain number of beats/minute and in a particular rhythm.

Sometimes the heart moves too quickly: this is tachycardia. The heart muscles work too fast and blood is not circulated in an efficient way. People with tachycardia feel terrible; they get anxious as they don’t get enough oxygen. They can also have a feeling of impending doom – again from not getting enough oxygen to their lungs and brain. The heart can’t maintain a fast pace indefinitely.

Sometimes the heart beats too slowly: this is bradycardia. The heart becomes sluggish, blood backs up into the rest of the body. People become puffy, they feel sleepy and exhausted. They don’t get enough oxygen and it makes them lethargic as the heart is not working efficiently.

The ideal state of the heart is to function normally; this is called sinus rhythm. This is regular, even beats of 60-100 per minute. The heart muscles work at their most efficient in this range neither too fast nor too slow.

Ash Wednesday and Lent can be used as a time to find our sinus rhythm again if our hearts have been too fast or too slow. Our lives, like our hearts, don’t stop. We need them to force ourselves to step aside, have a look and listen to what is going on. In the slings and arrows of everyday living and in the dust and ashes of Lent; there are our hearts.

This is what Matthew means about practising your piety before others in order to be seen by them. To rend our hearts is to tear up the interior, identify those things that need to be removed.

Return to God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing – we are told again to return to God, take the pieces of our hearts to him. He is the only one that can put our hearts back together. God is the ultimate jigsaw expert! He can put it back together however many pieces there are. He will do it graciously, mercifully and with abounding love.
Why do we need to do all this?

Because there is the final heart condition – this is called asystole. The absence of a heartbeat. On all the medical TV shows it is known as a ‘flat line’.

With no beating heart there is no way for blood to deliver glucose and oxygen to your brain and organs. Life stops at this point. This will happen to all of us one day physically – our final physical state will be asystole. This stethoscope has been used many times to confirm asystole.

We can also have spiritual asystole. That is when we don’t return to God, we choose to walk our own ways, do things that cause ourselves and others weeping and mourning. This is the result of keeping our hearts to ourselves.

We are to quite rightly guard our hearts. This does not mean that we stop anything and everything for entering your heart. A heart that doesn’t move – has no life in it! Asystole!

We are to watch and monitor what goes into our hearts – stop the things that will damage the condition of our hearts or interrupt its beats. This can be all manner of things – what we eat or drink, watch or listen to (this can be people around us, tv, internet). At times we need to take a break to see what the effect on us is. That is what the fasting of Lent is for. In their absence we are to turn to God in prayer. Especially when the absence is noticeable! We are not to wrestle in misery or denial. Instead turn or return to God.

If you decide to come forward for ashes this morning, you are in good company. We all fall short of the glory of God – but this isn’t a fatal condition unless we choose to ignore what has been picked up here, in our hearts and decide not to return them to God.

The sign of the ashes is admitting that we have work to do, we have a heart that needs some repair. By admitting this corporately we know that: 1) We are not alone 2) As brothers and sisters in Christ we can support each other in prayer through Lent knowing that we are all working through our heart conditions and 3) We are in good company – none of us are perfect!

This isn’t false piety if we come to rail ready to receive and then go ‘to our rooms’ to meet with God. It is in these places where we can begin to store up our treasure in heaven – the place where it will be safe. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Amen.