Sermon — March 16, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
The word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision,
“Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield;
your reward shall be very great.” (Gen. 15:1)
If I had to identify the most pervasive scams of 2025, I’d pick two. The Scammy Award for Most Pervasive Con would be split between the “‘I’m Your Pastor’ Gift Card Email” and the “‘Notice of Toll Evasion’ Text.” You may have encountered one of these. I actually received them both this week. Both of them are designed, like all scams are, to exploit human emotions.
The pastor scam preys on our goodness and our relationships. It’s been around for a few years now. You get an email from an account with a name claiming to be your pastor, who says they can’t talk by phone right now but they really need you to do them a favor to help someone out. They need you to buy a few hundred dollars in gift cards and send them the numbers by email, so they can give them to a person in need. If you buy the gift cards and sending the numbers, there’s no way to get the money back. You were just trying to help your pastor out, and you were robbed.
The more recent toll evasion scam preys on our fear of judgment. “You have an unpaid toll bill on your account,” one text message I got this week reads. “To avoid late fees, pay within 12 hours or the late fees will be increased and”—here’s the worst part—“reported to the DMV.” At this point, I get 3-4 of these a week. But you can understand how it would work. I might have missed a toll, you might think. Maybe my EzPass was on the fritz? I really don’t want to have to deal with the DMV, so okay, sure, I can pay ten bucks. (PSA, if you ever see one: these are both always scams. And anyway, in Massachusetts we call it the RMV, right?)
These cons have none of the charm of The Music Man. They’re a numbers game, spamming the world with so many emails and so many texts that surely someone will pay. But they prey on the same deep-seated human traits that were so well known to the con artists of old: the desire to be helpful to a person you love; the embarrassment of questioning a confident authority figure; the fear of being seen as the kind of person who doesn’t pay a toll, and the desire to avoid the DMV.
Many religions built on these same traits. But I want to suggest to you today that the good news that Jesus came to share is that we have things exactly the wrong way around. People often act as though God were an eternal con man in the sky. We often act out of the desire to please God by being helpful, or out of the fear of divine judgment. But in fact, in a world of wily foxes, the only thing God wants is the chance to protect you like a hen, sheltering her chicks under her wings.
It’s Jesus who gives us this image of the fox and the hen, of course. And there’s some irony in it. The Pharisees come to warn Jesus to leave Galilee, because Herod Antipas, who rules Galilee, wants to kill him. The warning is superfluous. Jesus is already on his way out of Galilee, toward Jerusalem. But he won’t find safety there. He’s already predicted that’s where he’ll meet his fate. The danger is real: Pontius Pilate and Herod Antipas really do think that Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem to seize the throne, and they see him as a threat.
But Jesus isn’t there to launch a coup. He’s not there to outfox Herod. He says that he’s the other half of a pair familiar from folk tales around the world: If Herod is the fox in this story, then Jesus is the hen. Even in the city, we know who wins that fight. But Jesus isn’t worried about Herod’s threat to himself. He’s talking about his chicks: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem!” he laments. “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.” Herod isn’t only a “fox” because he wants Jesus dead. He’s a fox because he’s preying on the people, exploiting and oppressing the beloved chicks of God. And Jesus the hen isn’t only the victim of this predator; he’s the one who’s going to protect his people from the threat.
This is the pattern all throughout our readings today. Again and again, you see the enemies who attack and exploit the people of God and the God who tries to defend and protect them.
So our Psalm today repeatedly invokes the “evildoers” who “came upon me to eat up my flesh,” the “army” that is “encamp[ed] against me,” the “war” that “rise[s] up against me.” (Psalm 27:2-4) And the Psalmist turns again and again to God for safety: “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?” (Ps. 27:1) The two sides don’t act in the same way. God is not an avenging warrior, but a shelter and protector.
Paul makes the same kind of rhetorical move. There are those who are the “enemies of the cross of Christ,” whose whole purpose is shaped by “destruction,” whose minds are set on “earthly things.” They seek satisfaction and chase after glory. But “our citizenship is in heaven,” Paul writes; our highest allegiance is not to any ruler or nation on earth, but to God, and it is from there, from heaven, that we await a “Savior.” Not someone to destroy our enemies but, again, someone to save us from them. Someone who can say to us, as God says to Abram, “Do not be afraid…I am your shield.” (Genesis 15:1)
These are not symmetric pairs: fox and fox, army and army, enemy and ally. We get the fox and the hen, the army and the refuge, the enemy and the Savior. There are the all the forces of evil and death that do their best to destroy humankind—and there is a God who wants to shield us from them.
And this is what Jesus is going to do. He has a little time, for now, for small miracles: he can cast our demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, but then he’s got to go on to finish his work. The fox is near, and he needs to go gather his chicks, to protect them not only from Herod, or from Pilate, but from the greater power of Death itself. He will shelter the chicks from that fox. His disciples and the people will be safe. But he himself will die, just as the Pharisees tried to warn him that he could. On Good Friday, he’ll die; and on Holy Saturday he’ll rest in the grave; and then on Easter Sunday, on the third day, he’ll finish his work. And in some mysterious way, just as the hen’s self-sacrifice might protect her chicks from the fox, Jesus’ death and resurrection work to overcome the power of death. Jesus goes, of his own free will, to die, and he rises again, and opens the way for us to rise. This is how he resists evil; how we wins the ultimate victory at the very moment that he seems to fail.
Technology has changed. New forms of government have come and gone. But Jesus lived in a world made of human beings just like us. He lived in a world of people who saw raw power as the measure of a leader’s strength. He lived in a world whose rulers tried to dominate the people of neighboring lands. He rejected those rulers, those foxes who used their cunning for their own gain. But he also rejected their way. He didn’t respond to violence with violence, or to power with power. He stretched out wings of love, not to push against his foes, but to protect his people from harm. When given the choice, Jesus chose the side of the weak and the powerless, not the mighty and great.
And this is true for you. God is not an eternal Santa Claus, making a list and checking it twice. God is not working on the same emotions as a scammer does, not trying to manipulate you into doing good deeds, or to scare you away from bad ones. God is trying to protect you, to give you some shelter and some strength. And there’s only one thing that God needs us to do: not to run away.
“How often I’ve desired to gather you together,” Jesus says, “and you were not willing!” And that’s the work we have to do. Not to scatter through the world like chicks. But to accept the hen’s embrace, to shelter under her wings. To accept protection, and to try to live with the courage that it brings: to know that even though the world is full of foxes, full of struggles and pain, there is another and a better way than the way of cunning domination. There is a way of love that leads through the cross all the way to the empty tomb, because on the third day—at the end of the long journey of Lent, at the end of the long journey of this life—Jesus will finish his work.