Saint Luke 13:31-35
Something like this has probably happened to the best of us.
Last fall we were sitting enjoying pizza around a friend's pool. Some people there we had known for a long time while others we had just met at the resort at which we were staying.
Things were going swimmingly {Pun intended!} when the conversation turned to “In-N-Out” burgers. Since these delicacies are only available in limited locations in California and the west but no further east than Colorado they have become a required stop for many of us on any California vacation.
The hamburger patties are made in their own processing plants, never frozen, and delivered by their own trucks. One can watch the French fries being cut in-house and, while I have never had one, it is my understanding that the shakes are second to none.
Almost everybody gathered around the pool that night seemed to be in agreement that an “In-N-Out” burger was one of life’s true pleasures.
Everybody, that is, except one guy who said: “I would never eat at ‘In-N-Out.’ They put bible verses on their packaging.”
They do but only in very tiny print in hard-to-find places like the inner bottom rim of their cups and near the seams of the paper pouches the burgers are placed in and it is never the whole text it is only the biblical reference. You have to look hard and risk spilling your drink on yourself or your friend or finish all of your fries in order to find them. As was noted by Snopes.com: “No overt explanation is given for the presence of the odd phrases or their meaning: they just quietly sit there, awaiting decipherment by those moved to do so.”1
On the soda cup is John 3:16. The milkshake cup has Proverbs 3:5, "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding." Hamburger and cheeseburger wrappers have Revelation 3:20, “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.”2
I like that last one the best. The idea of sitting down with the Lord for a burger, a shake, and an order of fries is very appealing to me. Apparently, it was not appealing to the guy at the party who was vowing he would never eat there because of the hard to find fine print.
It was at that point, out of the corner of my ear, I heard a voice, a sarcastic voice, bellow: “Not Scripture! Oh no, not Scripture! Anything but Scripture!”
As I looked around the room the faces had silent stares with blank expressions that resembled the statues on Easter Island. Some mouths were, as the Irish would say, a’gob.
Then I looked over at Lowell whose head was in his hands and, because I watch a lot of British mysteries, deduced that the person who had bellowed, “Not Scripture! Oh no, not Scripture! Anything but Scripture!” was me.
The party concluded and although I don’t remember the guy ever speaking to me again I thought the expressions on the faces had to be the same as the ones on the faces of those in the crowd when Jesus said, loud enough for everyone to hear: “You go tell that fox!”
“Not a fox!” they must have thought or even whispered to one another. “Oh no, not a fox. Anything, rather than to be so foolish, than to call Herod ‘a fox.’”
This whole kerfuffle began with a warning from some of the Pharisees. “Get away from here,” they tell him, “for Herod wants to kill you.”3 This is not an “above the fold headline” for Jesus.
When you are under three years old and your earthly father whisks you off to Egypt because your life has been threatened it is not something you easily forget. That threat came from the murderous and paranoid Herod the Great who, by this time, is long dead. Jesus had to remember running for his life into Egypt after the “Three Wise Men” spilled the beans that there might another king loose in the land.
It is the son of that Herod whom Jesus now has to fear, Herod Antipas, who is a chip off the old block. This Herod just had Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist, beheaded because, as they say in the south, “he had stopped preaching and got to meddling.” This threat to Jesus’ safety and security is very real and coming dangerously close to home.
We might have run and hid but Jesus is not done. He has healing and teaching to do and a death threat is not going to stop him. So he replies: “Go tell that fox, ‘I will keep on driving out demons and healing people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal.’”4
It is not long before this spirit of defiance turns into a lament. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killer of prophets, abuser of the messengers of God! How often I’ve longed to gather your children, gather your children like a hen, Her brood safe under her wings— but you refused and turned away!5
At the First United Methodist church in Chicago there are two altars. The first is in the sanctuary on the main floor and features a carving called “If thou hadst known,” based on the quotation in Luke 19:42 when from the western slope of the Mount of Olives, Christ beheld the city of Jerusalem and wept over it, saying, “If you had known even you, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.”6
Since the church is located in a skyscraper completed by the Methodists in 1924 some 400 feet above the city streets is what they affectionately refer to as “The Chapel in the Sky.” In order to reach this intimate little space you have to use two elevators and a set of stairs. Once there you would see the “companion piece to the altar in the sanctuary but in the carving on this altar Jesus is shown weeping over the city of Chicago because people still do not know “the things that make for peace.”7
Paddy Bauler, saloon keeper and Alderman, after the 1955 election of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley may have summed up what Jesus was looking at best when uttered the now infamous line "Chicago ain't ready for reform yet!" Nor does it appear is world and even our nation.
Jesus still laments. Jesus still weeps. He weeps at the images of war that we have witnessed these past two weeks. He knows what is like to be a child ripped from home by a despotic ruler. He knows what it is like to live in an occupied land surrounded by people who face the daily choice of either battling the occupier or capitulating to the occupation. He weeps when politicians try to use any reference to a particular word as a wedge issue between teachers and students, students and their parents. He weeps at racial divisions in our land and he weeps over lands that have been labeled ungovernable. He weeps because he knows that we do not know the “things that makes for peace” and that this world “ain’t ready for reform, yet.”
In her book, Bread of Angels, Barbara Brown Taylor invites us to think of Jesus’ image of himself not as a powerful bird of prey but as a hen, a mother hen. She writes:
Jesus likened himself to a brooding hen whose chief purpose in life is to protect her young. . . . She doesn’t have talons or much of a beak. All she can do is fluff herself up and sit on her chicks. She can also put herself between them and the fox, as ill equipped as she is. At the very least, she can hope that she satisfies his appetite so that he leaves her babies alone. . . . How do you like that image of God?8
I’m not sure you that I will or even can understand that image of God but it is one that Jesus gave us. It is certainly not one that can be summed up in a scripture verse printed on a fast food container. It is God’s love in Jesus, giving life away until he reaches his goal and gives his life away for us on the cross.
I’m not sure I understand this. I’m not sure I comprehend this reforming love that keeps at work even when we might not be willing, yet.
But I do know that apart from that sacrificial love, Christian faith is just another religion, another slogan among many slogans.
I do know and believe that this one man going humbly to his cross is important to know. I know and believe that this man who could have, but did not, claim the kind of power and privilege that the “foxes” of the world tell us we must have at any cost.
I do know that this man is “the truest human being who ever lived and that insofar as you and I live like that, even occasionally, we approach something of the meaning and purpose and glory for which we were created.
I know I believe that the love, for which gave his life away, is the best thing anyone ever did for me and for you—and that it is our final safety, our security, our salvation, and our freedom.”9
How do we know this? How did we find all of this out?
Because of Scripture. Yes! Really! Scripture! We know it! We believe it, all because of Scripture!
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