Sermon Tone Analysis
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Chicken Illustrations
Chickens.
We bake them.
We grill them.
We barbecue them.
We put them on our sandwiches.
We put them in our soup.
We eat their eggs.
But we probably don’t devote a lot of time to thinking about the birds themselves.
Well, a man by the name of Mark Lewis came up with a one hour documentary titled, "The Natural
History of the Chicken."
In that documentary he told stories of individual chickens and the people who appreciated and even treasured them.
One story, for example, tells about a lady who had a pet chicken named Valerie.
One day she noticed Valerie was in trouble, couldn’t breathe.
Thinking quickly, the woman performed mouth-to mouth resuscitation on the chicken, and revived it.
You’ve got to really love a chicken to do a thing like that for it.
And there was the story of amazing headless chicken from Colorado.
There is good reason for the old saying about “running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”
Decapitated chickens have been known to do that.
The nerves continue to fire somehow and the bird just keep on going.
But what made that particular chicken so unusual was that he continued to walk around and flap his wings even weeks after it lost it’s head.
I'd tell you more, but as you might imagine-it gets a little "fowl."
If you’ve already heard more than you really wanted to hear, I hope you will “egg”-scuse me.
In the future, if I should gain some new insights about chickens, I’ll be sure to keep you abreast of it.
I could go on and on.
Some of you will tell me afterwards that this sermon was certainly nothing to crow about.
But enough of that.
From this point on I’ll just try to “wing” it.
Scripture Today
In our Scripture passage today, Jesus talks about a hen; in fact he uses the hen as a symbol for himself.
"Oh Jerusalem!
You are a city that kills the prophets and anybody else that God sends your way.
How I wish that I could gather you together just like a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wing.
But why a hen?
Why not a lion, King of the jungle?
Why not an eagle?
One Christian writer (Barbara Brown Taylor) put it like this, "Jesus won't be king of the jungle in this story.
What he will be is a mother hen, who stands between the chicks and those who mean to do them harm.
There are dangers at every turn.
Vulnerable little chicks are at the mercy of every fox and bird of prey.
What will happen to the poor chicks?
In the gospel today we are not the ones deciding how we want our chicken; we are the chicks, the vulnerable ones.
Jesus wants to take us under his protecting wings.
Verse 34 ends with the message of judgment on Jerusalem,
"Oh Jerusalem!
You are a city that kills the prophets and anybody else that God sends your way.
How I wish that I could gather you together just like a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wing.
But you don't want that, Jerusalem.
You're not willing.”
All Jesus wants to do is love, he says, and in response all the people want to do is destroy him because of it.
Why is it that people are like that?
Could it be, that somewhere deep down inside, we realize that Christ's love is a challenge to us.
If we are the chicks and he is the mother hen willing give his life for us, think how valuable we must be to him.
It’s almost scary to realize how much he values us.
What if our tiny little lives are not so tiny after all?
If Jesus' love for us is so strong that he was willing to face betrayal and arrest and death on a cross because of it, then that means that our lives are not a gift to be squandered, but instead to be lived to the fullest.
That's what makes Jesus' love scary: it forces take another look at these lives of ours.
Because of the love of Christ, our lives become far too valuable to even call them our lives at all.
These lives we call ours belong to another, to the Lord who has made us and claimed us.
These lives are given to us for a few short years to do the work of God somehow, somewhere.
The hen seeks to gather the chicks under her wings but we know what’s supposed to happen to those chicks.
They grow up to be hens as well.
Jesus says in , "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.
For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it."
We are called to that same kind of self-sacrificing life.
Hen protecting her own
blue something amazing happened: the mother hen saw what was about to happen and ran out into the danger of it all.
She gathered the chicks under her wings and just sat there waiting for the hawk to strike.
And sure enough, that's exactly what happened.
The hawk attacked the mother hen, trying to get at the young who were under her wings.
Feathers flew.
There was a cloud of dust, but the hen would not budge.
She just sat there.
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