“Under God’s Holy Wings”
A Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent (RCL Year C)
March 4, 2007
Genesis 15:1–18, Philippians 3:17-4:1, Luke 13:31–35
Rev. Larry Lange
Grace Evangelical Lutheran Congregation
Green Bay, Wisconsin
At the little Lutheran church in the little town on the high plains of Montana, Christmas was the same every year. Mrs. Verkins and Mrs. Hawkins had written a Christmas program for the Sunday School a hundred years ago and had directed that same program every year since. They painted each letter for the words “Christmas” and “Jesus” on large masonite panels which the students standing in front of church held and turned around to reveal one at a time. For each letter a part of the Christmas story was read out of scriptures by one of the confirmation students or acted out by the younger students.
For many years there were enough students to hold all the letters, though as the rural population dwindled Mrs. Verkins and Mrs. Hawkins began inviting the Presbyterian children to help hold the letters, though they knew they would have to offer parts to their little brothers and sisters and they feared that it was only a matter of time before Mary herself would be a Presbyterian.
Mrs. Verkins and Mrs. Hawkins nobly set these aside fears, because they were pioneers, pioneers in the ecumenical movement, decades ahead of their time.
But it wasn’t enough for one little girl, Kathy Hogsrud. No, as thoroughly modern as Mrs. Verkins and Mrs. Hawkins were, Kathy had the whole Christmas program thing figured out by the time she was the tender age of six. First she was a sheep; then she was an angel; then one year she was Mary and so on until she was old enough to tackle reading the King James Version of the Christmas story. Though she really wanted to, Kathy knew she’d never get to hold a letter, because Mrs. Hawkins and Mrs. Verkins said the letters were too heavy for girls, but the truth is they designed the letters as a physical challenge for the boys who they believed were too fidgety and unruly to do anything else but try to prove to each other that they could hold the letters up for the entire hour and ¾’s long program. It was all the boys could do to make sure they were holding the letter upside right. One year the “M” became a “W” and Mrs. Hawkins lost her place in the script, and you could just hear her offstage tearing through the pages with apocalyptic frustration until Mrs. Verkins saved her.
From these observations of the Christmas program, Kathy believed that her whole life was planned out for her, and well, it made her angry, because besides wanting to hold one the letters in the Christmas program, what Kathy really wanted to do was decorate the Christmas tree, but no, only the Johnson families could do that, because every year they cleaned out their horse trailer and drove all the way down to Missoula to cut down a tree and bring it home and since no one ever knew exactly when that might be, no one else got to decorate the tree.
And the reason Kathy wanted to decorate the tree so badly is that the Johnsons used the same white angel ornaments every year: the ones with the styrofoam balls for heads and wings made out of white garbage bags following a pattern they’d found in the Montana Home Magazine.
Kathy hated those angels. “It just wasn’t right,” she’d say, “to decorate a Christmas tree with garbage bags,” but there was nothing she could do about it; it was like the Christmas program, it was like the fact that her brothers would inherit the whole ranch and not her; it was just the way things were.
When Kathy was about twelve, the Ladies Aide Mission and Quilting Society brought in a very nice looking young man who was a missionary in Tanzania who, because the church had no projector screen, showed a slide show about his mission on quilt batting hung across the front of the church. Kathy saw whole towns full of beautiful brown African children being baptized in a lake and new schoolhouses built with the help of Lutheran World Relief filled with those children. She saw people digging new wells for water and men and women learning about cattle ranching and leading worship under thatch-roofed shelters. Kathy saw a world in which lives were taking new courses and new things were being done and built—all of which were being explained by the dashing, passionate, young missionary with the dreamy brown eyes and the little, round, gold glasses like John Lennon, and right then and there Kathy believed God was calling her out of Montana, to a destiny all her own, to go to a Lutheran college, and to become a missionary and to be a blessing to all nations.
Abram of Old Testament fame must have had one of those moments to have had the courage to leave his predetermined destiny in his homeland to a new destiny of his own that God kept promising him: to become a great nation, to inherit a new homeland, to become a blessing to all nations. But in today’s Old Testament lesson, he hear a bit of Abram’s frustration with this grand calling of God’s. Abram is getting older, yet he’s still without an heir, a son, except for some slave named Eliezer in Damascus, and Abram’s wondering how he’s going to get a legal deed to someone else’s land.
And yes, the Lord repeats the promises, and yes, Abram trembles at the real presence of the Lord passing between the bloody halves of slaughtered animals in that terrifying night time covenant sacrifice. But in the very next chapter of Abram’s story, he takes matters into his own hands bypasses God’s promises, tries to start his family with a slave woman, and in the end, consigns his son born to the slave to die in the desert.
Kathy, however, stayed true to the calling of God she felt listening to that missionary from Africa and she freed herself from what she perceived as a predestined path to become a cattleman’s wife who would never get to decorate the church Christmas tree. She did enroll and excell in a small Lutheran college, but found her math and analytical skills so greatly admired there that she gradually became enamored with promises her professors waved before her like pictures of her that her fans wanted autograph. “Kathy,” they gushed, “with your abilities, the sky’s the limit: New York, Chicago, six-figure salaries; they’ll be stumbling all over each other to get you.”
Upon graduation, Kathy chose an offer in Chicago, because it wasn’t as far from home. Her office gave her a commanding view of the city. The idea of picking up the cross, heading off to become a missionary in Tanzania, living in a concrete block compound with a thatched roof, slogging through mud trying to dodge a hundred diseases, somehow just didn’t thrill Kathy the way it had when she had first seen that slide show on the quilt batting from the pew in the little church in the little town on the high plains of Montana.
Now, I don’t think Kathy became what Paul called “an enemy of the cross of Christ,” but she wasn’t too keen on the idea of her life being defined by the cross either. You can hardly blame her for that choice, can you? Kathy’s mind became set on the earthly things
available behind the plate glass of the stores along the Magnificent Mile—almost all of which she could afford. Gods bought her flowers and wine and feasts in alabaster towers and in a year she was sobbing in the pastor’s office in the basement of her church in Chicago: she was pregnant; she’d been diagnosed by a psychiatrist as addicted to shopping; she had been contemplating killing herself along with the life within her.
I don’t remember how it was that several months later she and the organist decided to play in church together. The organist loved twentieth century music—stuff with no melody or reliable rhythm, stuff he had to move around with his entire body to play so that you thought any minute he’d fall right off the bench. I heard them one afternoon sacrificing several hours to practice. It sounded like the organist was trying to make the organ fly. Higher and higher his fingers scaled up the three keyboards. Kathy played a marvelous flute and the notes she played
somehow reminded me of a tiny bird fleeing for refuge from tree to tree up into the mountains, until there were no more trees, until the bird was nothing but a speck against the heavens which were about to unleash a blizzard.
Not so very long before Kathy had felt that way—like a bird alone about to be bashed against the stone cliffs in a blizzard, her citizenship in the heavens about to be lost. You could hear her reliving her fear and longing in the way she played that strange piece of music. I felt her playing was a prayer to a Savior who, thanks be to God, desires to rescue such lost birds as Kathy, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.
And thanks be to God, Kathy was willing so to be gathered under God’s holy wings, and she was grateful and healed.
Amen.