by The Very Rev. Jered Weber-Johnson, Rector
In 2016, as protests erupted around the country following the shooting, by police, of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, and Philando Castille here in our own Twin Cities, you might remember one particular iconic photo that captured Ieshia Evans at a protest in Baton Rouge. That image shows Evans, clad only in the light and breezy fabric of a summer dress, head up, chest out, and arms crossed, as police in full riot armor swarm toward her to arrest her. In that moment, she is the epitome of poise and courage, a black woman standing between her fellow protesters and the armed officers who have come to quash that protest.
The image became emblematic of the Black Lives Movement of what it means, particularly for black women, to stand as they have over the generations in our country, in dignity and power, between their young men – their brothers, uncles, husbands, and sons – and a system that seems hellbent on killing them.
Such a legacy echoes in the words of activist, novelist, gardener, and professor of African American Studies at Harvard University, Jamaica Kincaide, who writes about her mother:
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamp-light. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.
Like Kincaid’s description, the image of Ieshia Evans captured the imagination of so many, because of the way it juxtaposed a courageous vulnerability with a world bound in systems of death and destruction. Evans’s protest modeled a fearless sense of sacrificial service, over and against violent power and the fearful urge to squash dissent. What’s more, Evans’s galvanizing witness in that moment, showed us a more human way to be in the face of great suffering and evil.
We have long been taught in our culture that in times of danger and violence, when we are threatened, that there are two basic choices all animals have, including we humans, for our own survival — fight or flight. This limited range of options has meant that in the case of conflict, when trying to solve the world’s most pressing problems, when one nation or community or group feels threatened existentially or literally by another, when we fall into personal disagreements and fights with another individual, we tend to default to one of these two responses. Why else would we have the war on drugs or poverty or wokeness? Our culture is riddled with the language of fighting, battling, conquering and winning. And, when the fighting seems impossible, or the odds are against us and our cause, when we have no mental fortitude to stay in the battle emotionally, we run away. We need only look at our political leaders for good examples of both of these responses. A meeting in the Oval Office that becomes a verbal beatdown on one of our allies. The cowardice of others who back away from the existential threats we face in the politics of this present moment. Fight or flight. Are these our only options?
The model of Evans seems to indicate otherwise. In fact, scientists discovered in the past several years that the research which brought us this conclusion about the fight or flight response was flawed. It turns out that only male rats were included in the study that brought us this now decades old theory of animal survival. When female rats were later included and the study repeated, scientists established a third and equally significant response to threats – tend and befriend. It turns out that often when threatened, or when a group of rats were in danger, female rats turned to their community of other creatures, for support and survival, and often resorted to acts of care for the vulnerable over and against aggression and fighting.
The image of courageous vulnerability that defines a posture of care and compassion over and against fighting and aggression, of gathering in instead of scattering and fleeing, is the model presented to us in the gospel lesson today. With his face firmly set toward Jerusalem, a city that he and so many prophets like him have loved, a face set toward a power structure that often seemed complicit or even in cahoots with the aggressive and violent structures of empire, in the full and certain knowledge that he would die there if he chose not to run away, Jesus laments a reality that he is physically powerless to change, and then expresses even still his desire to gather the vulnerable to him, as a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wings.
In a piece for the Christian Century decades ago, the great preacher Barbara Brown Taylor wrote:
If you have ever loved someone you could not protect, then you understand the depth of Jesus’ lament. All you can do is open your arms. You cannot make anyone walk into them. Meanwhile, this is the most vulnerable posture in the world –wings spread, breast exposed –but if you mean what you say, then this is how you stand. …
… Jesus won’t be king of the jungle in this or any other story. What he will be is a mother hen, who stands between the chicks and those who mean to do them harm. She has no fangs, no claws, no rippling muscles. All she has is her willingness to shield her babies with her own body. If the fox wants them, he will have to kill her first.
This is how you stand, she says, “wings spread, breast exposed”. We are in a moment in the world right now where everything and everywhere seems like Jerusalem, a city and a place that we love, that is yet caught in the thrall of a system of oppression and violence, where the least among us are treated as disposable and dispensable. My conditioned response in this moment is to want to fight, to rage and swear, to mock and belittle those I deem to be the enemy. And when my energy wanes, when I see the fight as lost and the outcome hopeless, I know that other urge, to retreat, to turn off the news, bury my head, back away, slink back into whatever comfort I have accumulated and acquired, to numb myself there for as long as I am able.
But, these are not the only responses we have as people of faith. Into our fears and our anger, our hiding and our fighting, Jesus models a different way. How I desire to gather you together, he says, like a hen gathers her brood. In our Lenten read at St. John’s, Viktor Frankl’s classic reflection on the horrors of the Holocaust, Man’s Search for Meaning, he writes of the ways that the brutalities of that time seemed predisposed to either turn humans ruthlessly against one another or demoralize them into a state of victimhood. But, for a select few, those possessing of a moral and spiritual fortitude, he describes a response of vulnerability and care that echoes with the example of Jesus. He writes,
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
There is a choice, in this and every season, to be so formed and compelled by the model of courageous vulnerability, to stand in our power to care and tend, to be radically for the vulnerable that we would place ourselves between violence and those we have been called to love, and it is the model of Jesus Christ, the Mother Hen.
As Barbara Brown Taylor concludes with a sobering but powerful reminder of the death Jesus suffered, at the hands of Herod the fox:
He slides up on her one night in the yard while all the babies are asleep. When her cry wakens them, they scatter.
She dies the next day where both foxes and chickens can see her — wings spread, breast exposed — without a single chick beneath her feathers. It breaks her heart . . . but if you mean what you say, then this is how you stand.
There is a question before us in this and every moment, of how we will respond, who we will be in light of a culture of might makes right, in the face of the seemingly hopeless odds. As the great poet and teacher of Celtic wisdom John O’Donohue prays in his blessing for leaders:
May you know …the decorum of held dignity,
the springtime edge of the bleak question.
How will you stand?
We always have a choice in times of great suffering and in the face of oppression and violence. We have a choice to stand in vulnerability, in grace and humility, in courage and dignity, in care for those on the margins, between those who would be discarded and disposed and the violent who deal in oppression and death, between the chicks and the fox. As the apostle says to the church at Phillipi, “stand firm in the Lord, in this way, beloved!”
