Henhouse

Sermon for Year C, The Second Sunday of Lent

By The Rev. Torey Lightcap

February 24, 2013

St. Thomas Episcopal Church

Luke 13:31-35

“Henhouse”

Herod is like a fox – Rome is like a fox –

  The empire and its powers are like foxes – and Jesus is like a mother hen.

Fox and chicken are pitted adversaries,

  Both of whom offer protection for their subjects, in their own way:

  And the question is asked, Whose generous protection would you rather be under –

    The hungry fox’s, or the mama chicken’s?

The fox is the greatest natural predator of the chicken.

A fox knows how to push against every foot of fencing to find any weak spot

  So he can burrow under,

  Just after sundown or just before sunrise,

    And find something to eat.

When the fox does get in the henhouse,

  Baby chicks make easy pickin’s.

If you ever lived on a farm, this is a familiar and disquieting truth:

  That no amount of wire and nails and boards can seem to keep a fox away.

It’s one reason why my grandma kept her old shotgun in the closet by the front door.

A farm is an economy in itself, and foxes that steal chickens

  Greatly disrupt that economy:

  Goodbye meat, goodbye eggs, goodbye money for marketing.

Would you let a thief into your house to rob you blind?

This scene gets even more complicated when you think about it,

  Because Jesus isn’t a shotgun-toting grandma:

    He’s the mother hen in this little scenario.

And what can a mother hen do, really, in the moment,

  Except to shield her younglings

    And confirm their desire to run!, scatter when the fox shows her face;

  But we all know that when it comes down to it,

    It is the mama hen who will place herself between the teeth of the fox and her chicks.

I doubt this is how it happens in the moment in the actual henhouse –

  I imagine quite a cacophanous scene in which the fox is dodging rooster spurs

    And aiming for the biggest catch, the most meat, to feed her own family –

      But the result is the same.

A mother hen is an all too easy victim.

And so we walk the Lenten road with Jesus again this year,

  Knowing where the story of God is eventually meant to take us:

  To a hill of crucifixion, a henhouse called Golgotha.

Yesterday I walked the Seasonals aisle at Bomgaars with my children.

There were a number of high aluminum water troughs

  Brimming with various breeds of baby chicks.

They clustered together under hot lights and cheep-cheep-cheeped.

I looked down into these troughs

  And could not summon up the energy to say how cute I thought the chicks were;

  It was just Jesus’ words from Luke ringing in my ears;

  So I could only remark that there was among them not one mother hen.

In the absence of anyone to protect them,

  They were as good as the chocolates in the bulk candy boxes at Palmer’s,

  And all a fox had to do was scoop them up and pay by the pound.

I collected my brood, and we left.

I recently had the experience of watching chickens in a sustained way, in Africa.

I went to the southwest section of South Sudan, in the east-central part of the continent.

There I found a diocese of Anglicans – a diocese called Nzara,

  And I found their bishop, Samuel Peni, and his wife, Mama Santina.

(We’ll have them here in October and you’ll be able to meet them for yourself.)

Bishop Samuel and Mama Santina know a few things about having baby chicks,

  Having half a dozen of their own, and being partly responsible for several others.

But they also have a modest colony of real live chickens running around.

These chickens – a rooster and a hen – were a gift from some visitors last year,

  And when I visited, there were maybe eight chicks trailing in the mother hen’s wake

  Everywhere she went.

The rooster was given to talking to us all the time (especially around 3:45 a.m.),

  And he spent quite a bit of time gossipping with a neighboring rooster

    Just over the fence, about 50 feet away.

My sleeping space was in between them.

Cock-a-doodle-do! said the one.

RR-rr-RR-r-Rrrr! said the other.

There must have been a lot of good gossip.

They tell us that in the story of humanity,

  Where hominids began their long evolutionary trek to becoming homo sapiens,

  Africa is the place where it really began.

In a fundamental way, it’s the birthplace of human beings.

Yet it receives no pride of place for such a major accomplishment.

Nzara is a little town in a little diocese to whom history generally has not been kind,

  And life in the area of Bishop Samuel’s territory is difficult.

To begin with, Bishop Samuel is 42 years old – a few years older than me.

But this makes him almost an elder.

Average life expectancy, he told me, is mid-forties.

Take that in ...

Reasons why are entirely predictable:

  HIV/AIDS … bad drinking water … little access to women’s health care …

   Little in the way of public health education … sustained war with the north …

    Almost no infrastructure in the way we’ve come to know it (roads, utilities, bridges)

    … It goes on.

In particular, there is something called the Lord’s Resistance Army,

  A band of guerilla militants that emerged to the south, in Uganda,

  That has systematically terrorized the region where Nzara is found.

The LRA conscripts children into its ranks –

  Ten-year-olds, baby chicks, with machine guns and sabers –

  And it forces them to participate in the cruelest and most vile of human rights abuses,

    Including mutilation, abduction, murder, and various sex crimes.

This is an almost cultlike movement that swept across Nzara

  Like an infestation of army ants, leaving fear and terror.

Armies from the US and Uganda and other places came in and pushed the LRA west,

  Deep into the bush, into hiding more or less, into Congo,

  But the damage was done.

As if rank poverty and disease and deprivation weren’t enough already.

If any of this happened in our henhouse there’d be an uproar –

  A rush to provide aid and comfort –

    But there in Africa, it largely goes unnoticed by the rest of the world.

Bishop Samuel will tell you without batting an eye

  That 9/11 happens in his country every day.

With God’s grace there hasn’t been an attack on their soil in almost two years,

  And it’s giving them time to think about things like farming and health care.

The soil is rich; there are oil reserves; possibilities abound.

But it’s a long way up.

In other words, Nzara is one of the worst-fenced henhouses in the world,

  And it’s full of hungry foxes.

The weaker your defenses, the easier the pickin’s.

And this is what I’m left to ponder and pray over in the wake of my return:

  My return to the privileged and may I say chilly USA.

Not, Oh, those poor beautiful simple people –

  There’s nothing romantic about suffering –

  But just the image and the experience of watching a bishop and a mama hen

    Doing their best to try and shelter many thousands of Anglicans,

    And wondering what we might all do together to make life better.

In the end, I guess, in God’s wild farming economy,

  The job of mother hen falls

    To whichever Chrstians have the power and the motivation

    To protect the other chickens.

That may mean money. That may mean expertise. That certainly means prayer.

That may even mean changing planes for 36 hours

  And immersing yourself in it, firsthand –

  Going and seeing something for yourself

  Because some things you just have to see for yourself;

    Some things are simply beyond the capacity to have described,

    And you just have to know on your own.

It is good, sisters and brothers, to witness something completely Other Than.

It’s good for the blood, even if it’s a wreck on your tummy.

It’s good to see a henhouse of eager, prayerful Christians that is unlike any other.

Who pray as though their lives depended on it, because in fact they actually do.

Just like us, if we were bold enough to admit it.

Theirs is a henhouse ravaged by time and circumstance

  Where Jesus Christ himself nevertheless is the great high priest and mother hen

    Just as we say he is here, with us, just as we equally proclaim.

A place where Christ and the Holy Spirit are palably real,

  And where God’s life is lived out by people taking up their crosses each day,

    Just as we say is true here, with us, just as we equally proclaim.

A henhouse like any other. Unlike any other.

A place where God is praised, just as he is here,

  Amidst the muck and the cut-and-thrust of everyday life.

A henhouse, secure in its own way,

  And showing us how to shore up our own and keep our foxes at bay.

In this way we are already one.

Now we begin the long process to simply understand how very true this is.

God be praised. Amen.

Sermon After Sandy Hook

Sermon for Year C, Advent 4

By The Rev. Torey Lightcap

December 16, 2012

St. Thomas Episcopal Church

It is a common hallmark in the life of a preacher that in times of distress, well-chosen words and well-dissected thoughts must be dispensed with. Many a manuscript has been tossed aside at the last minute, and the preacher begun anew, struggling, as always, against time, yet working with time, to try to say something helpful that blesses the name of God and moves the people on ahead.

Sometimes, people need meaning. Sometimes they need comfort. Sometimes, challenge. On a good day, all three. And better than these, they need to know that God is always and everywhere; and deeply loves the creation; and that in Jesus, God comes to us as one well acquainted with suffering.

On Friday something happened that in a sense has already happened before, unfortunately in many times and in many places, on bigger scales and on smaller scales. Simply put, in Connecticut, a man named Adam killed 26 people – 20 children and six adults – before turning his gun on himself.

The priest in me wants to try and make sense of this. The writer in me longs to understand and to help others understand. The counselor in me wants to rush in and somehow fix an unfixable scene. The father of two small children in me can only turn away in disgust and fear. Honestly, right now very little of me is willing to sit with these facts and to let them sink in.

And I know that I am not alone. Denial can be useful, but only for a while. After that, how do we even begin to wrap our minds around such terror against some of the most helpless in our society?

For myself: today I am tired all the way to my bones of taking up the search for meaning within terrible, violent acts. I am as tired of it as I am sure that there will be more occasions to pursue it, and this thought all on its own is beyond exhausting, beyond frightening. For surely such acts are evil, and who wants to stare at evil for very long.

When these things happen, it has become commonplace to ask, Where was God? or, in a more ethical sense, Why would God permit such terrible things to occur? That’s a sensible question, and an honest one, but with respect, I think it may be the wrong one. For God is never not anywhere; God is always and everywhere; God is too big and too far beyond our understanding to be chased out of a school or any other place; and as a sign of God’s graciousness toward the whole of creation, we human beings are given free choice as to how we will behave. Quite a lot of the time we don’t pay much attention to that sense of free choice, and then something like this happens, and we have to face facts. People do murder; people do choose to do evil; clearly, they should be stopped.

So, setting aside for a moment the matter of why, what else might be the question we could be asking? It may just be this: Now that this has happened, what is God asking to us to do about it? Specifically, how are we supposed to be making ourselves useful for God’s purposes even in the midst of terrible tragedy? How can we create genuine community and stand with those who are hurting at this time?

How is God asking us to respond? A few thoughts.

1. Pray. Pray for the victims and their families and the people and places affected. Pray for anyone you talk to, that they would know peace. Pray for yourself, for from where else would you gather strength to face your own day?

2. Count your blessings. Love the people in your life. Tell them how much you love them. Don’t just assume they know. Find them and tell them.

3. Learn and repeat this small prayer from Psalm 90: “Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.”

4. If you have children or grandchildren, be honest with them. Give them the amount of information that seems appropriate. If you’re asked a question for which you don’t have an answer, don’t make one up. When a child asks to change the subject or to go off and play, recognize that that’s not an insult; honor it as best you can.

5. Recognize that compassion begins within. You can’t be compassionate with others unless you love yourself. Know when it’s time to pull back and gather strength. Ask for help when you need it.

6. Work to put a stop to violence wherever you see it, recognizing, as Jesus himself knew, that telling the truth comes with a cost.

In that spirit, I prayerfully offer this thought. The land where I was born and reared was, and is, gun country. A gun was a standard part of farming equipment and for many it  provided an essential source of food. I grew up with guns and hunters and marksmen in my family. I was first handed a gun and taught to respect it starting when I was eight – the age my son is now – and I still do the same. When one holds a gun, one is often made aware of the enormous responsibility to protect life and safety. This has been readily apparent to many over the years.

In the hands of those whose will is not aligned with God’s, that fact is overlooked. In the hands of those who are ill or who have a need to express power and control over others, a gun is an instrument of destruction or even death. In this age of ultraviolent culture, it becomes far too easy to violate the sixth commandment.

Christians stand against violence. Christians stand up against murder. Christians work for justice. This is plain and simple.

And so I say seventh and finally, that it’s time to have a forthright conversation about all this. If a moment like this won’t bring all parties to the table for real talk, I’m afraid nothing will, and therefore nothing will change, and the whole thing will have to somehow be turned over in our quest to protect life. The last thought anyone wants to have is that further carnage is inevitable because we were unable to prevent it because we were so intractable in our positions.

Even so – even though we are fearful and exhausted and sad for the present and sad for the future – we are still at the Third Sunday of Advent. We remain a people of hope who believe in our hearts that it’s better to live in hope than in despair. And we look to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, to come among us and to lift our faces and to show us how.

And so we say, Come, Lord Jesus. Come among us, and restore us.

Amen.

Heart

Sermon for Year B, Proper 22

By The Rev. Torey Lightcap

October 7, 2012

St. Thomas Episcopal Church

Mark 10:2-16

“Heart”

The very first thing I want to tell you this morning
 Is of a general nature about preaching - sort of an announcement.
It’s something I have meant to say for a long time now.

I see the act of preparing and giving a sermon as the beginning of a conversation.
That hearty “Ah-men” at the end of the sermon does not signify the end of the discussion.
It means you have just been handed an imperfect set of ideas
 To chew on and think about on build upon.
It would be the height of folly for me to imagine I’m offering the last word on any subject.
I want you to engage me in what you’re hearing.
I want you to engage one another in what you’re hearing.
I long and pray for you all to have a much bigger and wider conversation
 Than anything this pulpit can provide in fifteen minutes.
However, whenever, wherever you choose to do that is up to you.
And when dealing with me about the sermon, remember that I am not fragile;
 I have written on deadline and accepted much criticism for my ideas over the years;
 And I just want you to feel free to disagree if it helps make something richer and deeper
   That happens in the name of Christ, and with the charity of Christ.

Now, since I’m getting the conversation kicked off this morning,
 I guess I need to begin with a set of claims about myself.
Notice I didn’t say “disclaimers.”
In my experience, when preachers begin sermons by disclaiming or apologizing,
 They distance themselves from the text at hand,
   And today’s text is most definitely something we don’t want to distance ourselves from.

I am the child of divorced parents.
It seems odd to say it that way since it happened when I was four,
 But nothing can change that fact.
Even if my parents got back together -
 Which would be a colossal mistake,
   Seeing as how, for one thing, they’re both married to other people now -
 They would still be two people who had previously divorced.
Now, that divorce: it was a big blessing in a terrible disguise:
 It colors me and how I see my world,
 And I thank God that it has given me strength to live my life in the way that I have.

Because in the end, it was the right thing to do,
 And though it was hard,
   And though in some ways it was fought against every step of the way,
     Still, there was nothing else to be done.
The marriage could not be retrieved; it was broken.
Its demise was inevitable, and no amount of tears or fights were ever going to save it.
It was dead on the table; nothing would resuscitate it.

Some marriages can be pulled back into vitality;
 Some just need a tweak here or there;
   Some, with a lot of work, can be realigned;
     As a person of faith, I think divorce is indeed a card that sometimes is played
     With too much ease, too much nonchalance, for the convenience of a few.

But this particular marriage: Well, now.
It began in shady half-truths that grew more and more problematic, year by year,
 And in the end, when my mother and father finally admitted defeat,
 Only then, gradually and painfully, was there any liberation from the problem.
God be praised.

That’s the claim I need to make about myself;
 As I say, it impacts upon my thought process and what I say today.
So … if I had to ask myself whether I agree automatically and always
 With the logic of Jesus in Mark’s gospel
 That a woman or a man who remarries instantly commits adultery,
 I would say that particular question is really not the question I should be spending time with.
It’s a blind alley as far as I can tell;
 And many have gotten stuck in it.

Here are the real theological questions of marriage, at least from where I stand:
 … Is this relationship a blessing to one another and to the world?
 … Does it show the handiwork and creativity of God?
 … Do we love each other and work at it?
 … Do we try to understand each other even and especially when times get tough?
 … Do we feel better and safer and saner when we’re with each other?
 … Are we doing everything we can to avoid hardness of heart,
       Which, as Jesus notes, is the central problem?

If you can generally affirm this as true, then you’re making the Kingdom of God on earth.

What’s so strange about this is that through our cultural conditioning,
 We have come to create all sorts of exceptions around this that we really have to address.
So, at the risk of beating the proverbial dead horse to make it deader,
 Let me bring this into as clear a focus as I possibly can
 By speaking into the range of us in our many sorts and conditions of relationship.

One.
In a previous parish I served,
 I was approached by someone who’d been married to a scoundrel a few years
 And whose marriage hit the rocks before the ink dried on their license.
He was a casual womanizer with no interest in monogamy;
 She worked to put bread on the table and took care of their baby;
 They had no business being together.
Their divorce couldn’t come fast enough,
 And yet years later, she was frightened of remarriage
 Because, she said, of this very passage in Mark.
She looked deeply into my eyes and she asked me,
 “Father Torey, why does my ex get to go and live his life, and I don’t?”
I told her she did get to, if she was ready,
 And that she didn’t have to ask for forgiveness or seek confession
 Just for marrying someone she loved;
   How could that be a sin? I said.
God wanted her to live a rich, joyous, full existence, I said.
Over the course of my time in that parish, I think I told her all this three or four times.
In the end, it wasn’t anything I could change.

Two.
If you are a human being at all, your job is
 To give thanks and do all you can to prevent hardness of heart.
If you’re single, and you want to be, and you feel it’s where you need to be,
 Give thanks and do all you can to prevent hardness of heart.
If you’re single and you wouldn’t mind marrying or remarrying some day,
 Give thanks and do all you can to prevent hardness of heart.
If you are single and you haven’t found a mate,
 Give thanks and do all you can to prevent hardness of heart.
If you are married now,
 Give thanks and do all you can to prevent hardness of heart.

Three.
All people deserve the blessing of the church in the sanctity of marriage.
All people need to know that they are made in the image of God and blessed by Christ.
To my gay, lesbian, transgendered, bisexual, and questioning brothers and sisters,
 I hope you will let me speak to you right now.
I am asking your forgiveness for the many years that I just didn’t try to understand
 Who you are and what you are asking for.
I ask your forgiveness for the many times I have failed to speak up or speak out
 When I witnessed you being relegated to second-class status.
I ask your forgiveness for not pushing hard enough for a simple policy of marriage equality
 When I first arrived at St. Thomas three-and-a-half years ago.
I pray that wherever I have been in error, God will forgive me and teach me,
 And train from me the impulse toward hardness of heart.

By doing the very bold thing of asking the church to recognize and uphold your marriage,
 You are actually asking for something so simple,
 And that is to also be officially submitted to the common standards of Christian marriage:
   Fidelity, mutuality, genuine partnership, and growth together in the life of Christ
   And in the loving, uncompromising, communal embrace of the church
     That you and we all so badly deserve and need.
If there is one place in this world outside of our homes where we can experience
 The radical and all embracing love and acceptance of God in this way,
 It should be within the church.
So thank you for asking for that;
 Thank you for standing up even when it has been dangerous to do so,
   And demanding and asking and begging consistently
     For a life of complete and whole inclusion in the church.

Four.
To those who have suffered or are suffering any form of abuse in marriage,
 Be it verbal, physical, sexual, psychological, economic, or isolation,
   Be it you or your children, be you a woman or a man:
 The point of Christian marriage, as I say,
 Is fidelity, mutuality, genuine partnership and genuine growth together in Christ.
These cannot be accomplished when the stumbling block of abuse is present.
What is abuse if not hardness of heart expressing itself in a dark way,
 Just raw power being exercised for its own sake?
Please know that help is possible;
 Ask;
   If you are alive and listening, the point is not lost and it’s not too late.
We have a safety net built into our society for people who are hurting,
 Although letting go of whatever situation you’re in may feel like a freefall.

Five.
Our parish, like many, has had its share of elder male deaths in recent years,
 Leaving widows.
Our parish, too, has widowers.
There should be no stigma for you if this is your place in life right now.
Again, of all places where you can seek and find refuge from the way society wants to paint you,
 The church should be the one place where you are accepted, period, for who you are.
If your prayer directs you to seek a mate and it seems sensible, fine.
If your prayer directs you to hold your present course, fine.
But either way, know that as long as you and I are here, we are brother and sister.

Finally.
To those who are married, no matter how you managed to get here:
 Whether you’ve been to a judge or stood in this church before a member of the clergy,
   Whether you just walked right up and asked for the privilege to be extended to you
     Or had to fight to get it recognized in court over a period of years:
 
Let’s recognize that a marriage is not something we enter into once and then are finished,
 But in fact is something we must commit to anew each and every day,
   If God has anything to do with it.

Let’s recognize that even in the best of times we are never done evolving,
 That it’s a special and strange calling to be a partner for life
   With someone who wasn’t the same yesterday and will be a little different tomorrow;
 And that when times get tough,
   Sometimes the best response, the only acceptable response to the pain of the other,
     Is to simply be present to it, hard as that is.
That when we are divided by argument and enslaved by the need to be right,
 Nothing is as important as the other person.

Because what does Jesus say?
He says God made you, made us all, made us for each other,
 And that if we do all we can not to fall victim to hardness of heart,
   We’re going to be fine.

Not only fine, but amazing.
Growing. Evolving. Changing. Getting better.
Deepening in trust and mutuality and fidelity and deep union and friendship with each other.
And I truly believe this:
 That when all that’s happening and deepening,
 So, in some crazy and inexplicable way, is our relationship with God.

The call, sisters and brothers, from the beginning of time,
 Is to “be fruitful and multiply.”
That isn’t just about having kids: It’s a whole way of being in the world.

May God richly and beautifully bless every love-relationship in this room,
 Keeping our hearts softened and receptive,
 To see the hand of the divine at work in the world around us.
In Christ’s name.
Amen.