(Preached on Sunday, February 28, 2010)
Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Your people have killed the prophets and have stoned the messengers who were sent to you. I have often wanted to gather your people, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But you wouldn’t let me. -Luke 13:34
In April 1956, C.S. Lewis, a confirmed bachelor, married Joy Davidman, an American poet with two small children. After four brief, intensely happy years, Lewis found himself alone again, as Joy was snatched from him by cancer. Lewis was inconsolable at first. The man who had once seriously questioned the existence of God, and then became one of the greatest intellectual champions of Christianity, found himself facing his greatest crisis of faith. In his journal from that time he records his experience of prayer:
Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be – or so it feels – welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?
Lewis’s experience is actually a very common experience. It comes on all who seek intimacy with God. Times of seeming desertion and absence and abandonment are universal among those who seek to walk the path of faith. The ancient writers spoke of this reality as Deus Absconditus – Latin for “the God who is hidden.” Instinctively, you understand the experience they were describing, don’t you? Have you ever tried to pray and felt nothing, saw nothing, sensed nothing? Has it ever seemed like your prayers did no more than bounce off the ceiling and ricochet about an empty room? Have there been times when you desperately needed some word of assurance, some demonstration of divine presence, and you got … nothing? Sometimes it just seems like God is hidden from us. We do everything we know. We pray. We serve. We worship. We live as faithfully as we can. And still there is nothing … nothing! It feels like we are “beating on Heaven’s door with bruised knuckles in the dark,” to use the words of George Buttrick.
Lent is a good time for us to think about some of the empty places, the barren places, of our lives. It is a time to think about some of our doubts and questions and worries. We certainly have had plenty of such places that raised serious questions for our faith. Places like the HIV/AIDS epidemic or the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda or the earthquake in Haiti. Perhaps it is a more personal place for you, such as the experience of God’s absence in the loss of a loved one, as C.S. Lewis experienced. Or perhaps it was during a time of “mid-life crisis” brought on by the sudden confrontation with your own mortality through the sudden death of a friend your own age, or the loss of a job and the inability to find a new job for months, going on years.
Jesus had those empty and barren places, too. His most powerful was on the cross, but before that was the Garden of Gethsemane, standing in front of Lazarus’ tomb, and weeping over the city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Your people have killed the prophets and have stoned the messengers who were sent to you. I have often wanted to gather your people, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But you wouldn’t let me.
You and I can never appreciate the depth of feeling a Jew like Jesus had for Jerusalem. Idealized as the city of God, Jerusalem was woven into their prayers and conversation, into their hopes and their worst fears. Elie Wiesel explains what this feels like for Jews still today in an interview he gave Krista Tippett on the Speaking of Faith radio show on American Public Radio. He said:
My first prayer was about Jerusalem. The first lullaby my mother used to sing me was about Jerusalem. I knew Jerusalem, the word “Jerusalem,” before I knew the name of my hometown. I knew the streets of Jerusalem, the houses of Jerusalem, before I was there. Because somehow Jerusalem was the center of our dream, the center of our aspirations, the center of our hope. It’s Jerusalem, the city of peace.
In their history the Jewish people have often felt the absence of God and Jesus, in his lament of Jerusalem, expresses both the sense of that and the answer to that longing. A big reason they felt the absence of God, a big reason we at times feel God is absent, is the human tendency to feel everything depends upon us and that we are the ones running the show. Even our spirituality tends to emphasize activity. We depend a great deal on techniques for prayer, expect certain spiritual gains and become disappointed if they do not materialize, return to certain religious activities through which we experienced profound spiritual and psychological affects in the hope they will be repeated, and immerse ourselves in charitable works without knowing whether they truly express our deepest selves. The tendency of a spirituality oriented toward activity, even when the activity is seemingly “good,” is to place the self at the center of the process. It becomes all about “me” and “my” spiritual experience. The more we find our self at the center, the more likely we forget our dependence on God’s love. This leads to spiritual sterility. Spanish mystic, John of the Cross knew this danger intimately: “Although you perform many works, if you do not deny your will and submit yourself, losing all solicitude about yourself and your affairs, you will not make progress.”
Too often today we seek to play the “hero,” where everything depends upon us and we can do it all. Or, we play the victim, and blame all the ills and tough times we face on somebody else or on circumstances beyond “my” control. Jesus understood both approaches are unhealthy, unfulfilling, and non-productive ways to live life. Instead of going it all alone or blaming others, Jesus expressed the desire of God to care for us, protect us, and shelter us under God’s transforming wings, just like a mother hen does for her chicks.
A chicken’s wings are useless for flying. Watching a chicken expend all its energy to fly up to its roost quickly affirms that. But a mother hen’s wings serve a very practical and important function: protection. When danger approaches, either from an overhead hawk or a menacing noise from the brush, the mother hen clucks, spreads her wings and her chicks run under them for cover. They have discovered hens, after farmyard fires, with their wings spread out, the hen charred and dead, but underneath her wings, living chicks which survived the fire in that protected place.
To claim that experience of protection is to acknowledge one’s absolute dependence upon God, just as Jesus did at the moment of his death when he was totally emptied of everything human. Reaching a relationship of deep intimacy with God ultimately depends more upon surrender than upon understanding. It is a process of the heart and the will more than of the intellect. Prayer is the lifelong process by which we are emptied of disordered love of self in order to be filled with God’s uncreated love. Meditation and contemplation are the means that assist this radical self-emptying and complete surrender to God’s Holy Spirit.
But this is not prayer focused on me or my needs or my sense of what the world needs. This is prayer focused on God, on spending time quietly in God’s presence, on “wasting” time in the protective canopy of God’s love. It is not results oriented prayer but love infused prayer where we are taking time to stare lovingly into the eyes of God, just because God loves us and we love God, not because we want anything or hope to achieve anything. It is spending “love time” with God. James Hudson Taylor expresses this approach beautifully when he said: “I used to ask God if He would come and help me, and then I asked God if I might come and help Him, and then I ended by asking God to do His own work through me.”
Tempting as it is, we do not spend this “love time” with God as an escape from the world. Ultimately the mother hen removes her wings and ushers her chicks back into the barnyard. Ultimately these protective wings are the same wings which will nudge the chicks out of the nest when it is time for them to move on. Jesus understood that these wings of God, safe haven though they are, are not a place to escape. They are a safe haven, but a haven where we are transformed to be able to return to the world. They are a place where our hearts are strengthened by the healing balm of God’s love for the living of our lives. We are then able to step out into a future we cannot imagine, a future that we believe belongs to God, not to death, destruction, hatred, terrorism or global warming. We are able to live out this trusting faithfulness which has grown strong in our hearts and souls through our time in the loving embrace of God’s protective wings.