All Saints’, Dorval
Lent II, Year C
March 16, 2025
My sister Marion holding a chick, spring 2012, with Peter (age 4) looking on
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!
How many of you have had chickens, or at least have had the opportunity to observe and interact with chickens on more than an incidental basis?
I had backyard chickens from the spring of 2012 until the winter of 2016, and they consumed an enormous amount of my time and brainpower. Some of this was my fault. I wasn’t satisfied with having a handful of hens laying eggs; I wanted them to breed and raise their own chicks. So in April of 2014, I got a rooster off craigslist. His name was Arthur, but for some reason Peter, who was six at the time, decided that his name was Edward, so Edward he became.
Edward the rooster (a Rhode Island Red)
Now the first thing to understand about chickens, if you’re not familiar with them, is that while hens are not necessarily as cuddly as they look – they are, after all, still tiny feathered dinosaurs – roosters are scary. Their job is to keep the flock together and protect it from predators, they take that job very seriously, and they have wicked hooks on their feet. They’re also twice the size of the hens. By the second or third time I had to deal with Edward, I had begun preparing for the interaction by putting on knee-high rubber boots and carrying a snow shovel with which to whack him when he started attacking my shins.
It took Edward and his harem a few weeks to get down to business, and at one point I was so pessimistic that any of the hens would ever actually go broody that I bought an incubator. But eventually I had two mama hens sitting on two nests full of eggs.
Early one morning at the beginning of June, just a day or two before we could expect the eggs to start hatching, Peter had come into my bedroom and was looking out the window when he asked, “mommy, why is there a chicken on the lawn?” (The chickens should have been safely locked inside their coop until we got up and let them out.)
I catapulted out of bed, went downstairs, and discovered that a black bear had torn the door off the coop, either driving off the two setting hens or eating them. The eggs were sitting there uncovered. The rest of the chickens were all over the yard.
I grabbed the eggs – there were fifteen of them, total – and moved them into the incubator (thank goodness I had bought the incubator!) as quickly as I could. The bear came back that evening and I called the police, and I got to have the delightful experience of standing on the back step at 3 AM while a cop shone a giant flashlight in the eyes of a bear that was literally sitting on top of my compost pile devouring one of my chickens.
After that, a friend (God bless you, Becca!) came to my house and wrapped a bunch of live wire around the coop, and that kept the bears away.
(The fact that the bears were in my backyard in the first place was the fault of two things, only one of which I was aware of at the time: the very cold and snowy winter that had just ended, making a mother bear with triplet cubs extra hungry and inclined to take risks to find food; and a bizarre political experiment in the nearby town of Grafton. I am not making this up. You can ask me about the second one at coffee hour.)
All of which is a very long-winded, if hopefully entertaining, way of saying that I never got to have loving mother hens gathering their chicks under their wings in my yard and my coop, because the babies hatched in my kitchen and grew up in my mudroom as orphans. (Edward the Rooster, having fulfilled his reproductive duty, had, uh, been eaten by the time the eggs hatched.) The picture on the slide is of the babies, inside my extremely ramshackle homemade chicken tractor, out on the lawn in late June while a couple of the older hens who had survived the bear look in at them from outside.
Because the thing about mother hens gathering their chicks under their wings is, it’s not just about protecting them from predators, cold, and rain, or teaching the babies how to be a chicken.
It is absolutely about all those things. But tiny chicks that don’t have a mother are also in significant danger from the other adult chickens.
And in fact, when I first tried introducing the younger generation to the older ones – even after extensive acclimation – they turned on them and savaged them so hard that they had multiple open head wounds. I had to isolate them for another several weeks before they could coexist at all, and even then, the new hens were very clearly at the bottom of the literal, life-or-death pecking order.
So, with all this background, what do I see when I hear Jesus call Herod “that fox” and then picture himself as a hen? (Besides trying not to get too caught up in clichés about foxes guarding henhouses.)
First of all, foxes aren’t all that scary (especially compared to a hungry New Hampshire black bear). Edward the Rooster could probably have taken on a fox successfully. So when Jesus calls Herod a fox, he’s acknowledging that he’s malicious, but also kind of telegraphing that he’s not actually that scared of him and that he’s definitely not the one in control of the situation.
But Jesus wants to gather the people of Jerusalem under his wings like a mother hen, and they are not willing (and some translations go further, and render this phrase as “you were having none of it”). Apparently, even if someone wants to protect them from foxes or weather, they’d rather take their chances on their own.
And if you’re going to reject the hen who would gather you under your wings, you’re going to be in danger not just from a predator or a hailstorm, but from the other chickens.
We are all sadly inclined, as a species, to turn on each other and peck each other’s heads until they bleed. Jesus, the mother hen, would like us to stop that. We just need to be willing to accept his protection, and acknowledge that mama probably knows better than we do.
My backyard chicks never got that chance. We are blessed, to have a God who wants to gather us, protect us, and teach us how to be both strong and gentle, how to practice both justice and mercy, and how to love each other. Let us leave our pride, and be willing to seek refuge under Jesus’ wings.
Amen.
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