Well, how’s your Lent going?  Better, I hope, than this woman described by her pastor:

I wouldn’t say she’s not religious,
(for fear of prosecution)
But all she gave up for Lent
Was her New Year’s resolution.

Lent is our time to focus on Jesus and our relationship to him and to the God he called Father.  In the Gospel we heard read a few minutes ago we are reminded strongly of where this Lenten journey is going for Jesus and for us.  It is going to Jerusalem and to death for Jesus and to Holy Week for us, where we accompany him, day by day, for his last week of life.

Jesus tells the Pharisees that he can’t or won’t be killed outside Jerusalem —that’s where Israel always put its prophets to death.  And then he laments about Jerusalem with a powerful image:  that of a mother hen, gathering her chicks.  This is a wonderfully feminine image, showing Jesus’ ability to connect with that nurturing part of himself.  Yet it is not a soft image.  Mother hens who gather their chicks under them do so in the face of danger.  It is not infrequent that after a bad storm the hen will be found dead, while all her chicks will still be alive.  That is the point of this metaphor that Jesus used.

The two words that leap out at me from this Gospel are courage and compassion.  Jesus showed both of these qualities simultaneously and in abundance.  He knew he would be going to Jerusalem and that what would await him there would be his death.  He would do this because of his love for his people, who continued to resist the love of God despite  everything that God had done for them.

Courage and compassion.  These are two qualities that are hard to hold simultaneously, I think.  March 7 is the Feast Day of St. Perpetua and her companions, martyred at Carthage in 203.  They were among the earliest Christian martyrs, and we have the story of their imprisonment recorded first hand by Perpetua in her journal, and then the story of their death by one of their close associates who was a witness.  This account was read in churches almost like scripture for many years.  It was a powerful witness to the courage and love of two women and their four male companions, all sentenced to death because they were Christians and refused to sacrifice to the Emperor. 

Perpetua resisted her pagan father’s attempts to dissuade her from her course.  She even gave up her infant child that she was still breast feeding.  Felicity, the other woman in this group, gave birth in prison and turned her infant over to another family.  Perpetua was only 22.  It is hard to judge the actions of another, but it feels to me, in my gut that she was long on courage and short on compassion.  She had courage to give up her life for her faith, and this became more important than her compassion for her family and her child.  But God save us all from ever having to make such a choice!

I thought back to myself when I was Perpetua’s age.  What courageous or impetuous things was I doing in my young adulthood?  The one that stood out was in my senior year of college, I deactivated from my sorority.  Big deal, huh?  To me , it was.  I did not do it alone.  About six of us who had been active on the Greek Panhellenic Council did it together.  We did it in protest of the racial exclusion policies of our Greek organizations.  My sorority sisters and our advisors, one of whom I deeply loved and respected and who later went on to become ordained herself, tried to talk me out of it. “ Stay in and work for change from the inside,” she said.  A big part of me wanted to do that.  I felt scared.  I knew I would miss the friendship of my sisters for the rest of my senior year.  But I went ahead and did it.  And I hope it helped contribute to the change that eventually happened on that college’s campus.

Would I do the same thing now?  Probably not.  I have learned that for me, at least, it is important to stay in conversation with people who disagree with me, to find common ground, to work together to make change happen.  It is important not to cut-off relationships. 

Jesus’ ability to stay in conversation was ended on the cross.  Far too often death to those who differ has been society and the church’s way of dealing with that difference.  We crucify, we burn, we stone, we denigrate, we disassociate, we walk out, rather than stay and listen and share as a way of dealing with conflict.

I am wondering these days if part of the mission of the church is to show first that violence is never the answer to conflict, and secondly, that we can continue to have both compassion and courage by staying in dialogue with those with whom we differ.  In all major denominations there is a split between progressives and traditionalists.  Some denominations are severely threatened by schism and division.  We Episcopalians might be considered one of them.

But what an opportunity for us to stay together and keep talking and keep loving.  This is where courage and compassion can come together for us.  It is where the church can be a model for all of society.  We can continue to share, to listen, to love, to break bread together even when we strongly differ on issues of great importance.  This is perhaps our chance to truly witness to the world the power of our faith and love.  This is perhaps our chance to offer to a divided and polarized world another way of living rather than creating more laws,  more fear, and more division. 

The second courageous or impetuous thing I did at Perpetua’s age was actually more embarrassing than courageous.  It took more moxie than courage, I suspect.  I had read all of Reinhold Neihbur’s books the first semester of my senior year of college.  This activist theologian at Union Seminary was the single most important reason I was going to go to seminary.  And I knew his health was not good and that he was not teaching any more.  How much longer would he be around?  So in my senior year of college, even though I was heading to Union that fall, I called up Niebuhr’s tutor and made arrangements to fly to New York by myself and have a visit with him in his home.  This was like requesting to join the Queen for tea!  For an hour I sat in the presence of one of the greats of all times.  He was very kind to me.  His blue eyes were brilliant like his mind, and he spoke openly to me, an almost tongue tied young woman, just a little younger than his own daughter.  He told me among other things that he thought that the world in which we lived would never again have true peace,  that true peace would  be possible only in individual relationships and in families.  How prophetic his words in the spring of 1963 have turned out to be. 

The reason I am thinking about him right now is because I am reading his daughter’s memoirs of her father.  She entitled her book The Serenity Prayer, because it is leading up to how he happened to write this prayer that has become one of the most popular prayers of all time.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.  He wrote it on the back of an envelope to use in a church service and tossed it into a wastebasket after the service where it was later retrieved by someone who had been in church that day to hear it.  We know it now as the foundation prayer for 12 step programs and all serene living.  I am glad the paper shredder hadn’t been invented yet!

He wrote it between the two world wars.He and his Christian friends were trying to figure out how to be a  Christian witness to peace, justice and  international understanding.  Where would their Christian compassion and courage lead them?    Where was wisdom in the discerning of how to address the issues of those times?  And could there be serenity in realizing that some things are just not possible to change and even if one were to get on a cross like Jesus or die in the coliseum like Perpetua, it would not make a difference.

 Every generation deals with these matters of discernment.  How do we make a difference in the world because we are Christians?  How do we decide what action to take? At least we have a place to start and that is by talking with each other about what is important to us, about where our hearts and minds, enlightened and informed by our faith, are leading us.

Perhaps the people of this country at least are a little more interested in what the Christian faith has to offer because of the incredible interest that has been stirred up by Mel Gibson’s movie on the passion, Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code, a book on the feminine of God, and the General Convention’s decision to consent to Gene Robinson’s consecration. 

I imagine that even among ourselves we would have lively discussions about all three of these things, and I know that Jesus himself would be present in our honest and caring conversation.  We know he is with us in all his courage and compassion, both in our individual lives and wherever two or three are gathered in his name.

The gathering of women held here today/yesterday reflected on Perpetua. We asked God to help us become women of courage.  To do this we need encouragement, and there are encouraging words in our scripture this morning:  from the Psalm:

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom then shall I fear?  The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom then shall I be afraid?    O tarry and await the Lord’s pleasure; be strong, and he shall comfort your heart, wait patiently for the Lord.

And from the Epistle—Therefore, my brothers and sisters., whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.

And finally the example from Abraham, who trusted that God was in charge and his promises were true.

So we take these all to heart for courage and we take Jesus to our minds and our hearts and reach out in compassion to one another and to a world that desperately needs our compassion and courage.