Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

Divine Vulnerability

Homily for St. John’s Episcopal Church

by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn given March 16, 2025

The Second Sunday in Lent: Genesis 15:1-6; Luke 13:31-35

 

 

 

Today’s story of God coming in a vision to Abram is a foundational story for both Jews and Christians. God had called Abram to leave everything he knew and travel west to a land God would show him, which Abram did. After many years, however, Abram and his wife Sarai still had no children. And in today’s story from Genesis, God comes in a vision to Abram, and Abram has the courage to voice his despair and bitterness to God. Without a child, he effectively says, there is nothing you could give me that I would really want.

 

And then God takes him outside and shows him the stars. I know in today’s urban landscape we don’t see stars as brilliantly as I imagine Abram saw them, without night lights, without any smog, but I know from time in what they now call “International Dark Sky Places” like the Boundary Waters how impossibly beautiful they are. And God tells Abram that Abram will not only have a child, but that Abram’s descendants will be like the stars—impossible to count. God makes a promise to Abram that is beyond what Abram is capable of achieving. Being barren by definition means that you do not have the capacity to generate life by yourself. There are lots of ways of being barren – there is the literal sense, but we have all experienced lots of ways in our personal lives and in the broader life of our communities and our country and our world in which we have lost our way and are not pursuing that which is life-giving, and we get stuck.

 

 

So in the midst of Abram’s total incapacity to achieve that which he most wants, a child, God promises countless descendants to him. God’s promise and God’s will are for generativity and blessing–for Abram personally and for the whole world through him. And something moves Abram from the experience of despair to the experience of hope and trust. Here is where I want to stress what really happens. God did not immediately give Abram a child. Abram had to continue to live with his old age and with his barrenness for years after that. God didn’t take those facts away. God didn’t promise Abram an end to suffering or even simple safety. You notice also that God did not make Abram assent to seven points of doctrine, like signing on the dotted line under the Nicene Creed. God made a specific promise to Abram in face of Abram’s yearning, and Abram found he could trust it.

 

So, this coming to trust in God’s promises is not an immediate cure to all suffering. What is it, then? Is it just becoming an optimist or even just forcing ourselves into blind faith?

 

What God gives Abram is the capacity to trust that God wills life in a cosmos full of death and barrenness. We can trust that even though our individual lives will end—God grants Abram a child, not immortality—that God will continue to work life and healing and Shalom, the restoration of all things, through us.

 

There was a time in life I was in a relationship with someone who had a wee problem with drinking too much. One thing led to another, the relationship ended and I found myself going to Al-Anon, which is for loved ones of addicts and alcoholics. Part of Al-Anon is the opportunity to work the twelve steps yourself. Step two says, “Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” At the time I didn’t consider myself a Christian, having left the church of my childhood years ago, and I was agnostic at best. So what kind of power greater than myself could I trust? It was really a conundrum. Eventually I decided I could trust the seasons. I could trust that no matter what anyone says or does, the earth’s rhythm of spring, summer, fall, winter would repeat like a heartbeat. Now, of course I knew that the seasons themselves cannot transform a person. But faith that there was a power beyond me that created the seasons was just the opening I needed to begin to trust the promises and goodness of God. And that helped me.

 

And we need help like this. We have all faced situations in our personal lives and in the greater society that are not life-giving, that we fear we are unable to fix. We reach dead ends in our work, or in our marriages, or in society as a whole. The polarization in our nation right now reveals a fault line none of us has the power to heal, and the consequences are playing out in the news every day.

 

The central key of Judeo-Christian faith is trusting in the promise of God for blessing and generativity in the world as it actually is, and being empowered by that trust to be an instrument of God’s blessing for others. For Christians, this is most clearly seen in Jesus—the one who did not come to end the Roman Empire, but who conquered the oppression of the Roman Empire nonetheless through non-violent love, even at the cost of his life. He was and is God-with-us—a God who does not take away suffering but who promises life and blessing in spite of it, and who is willing to go to any lengths to suffer alongside us in the person of Christ. Followers of Jesus’ Way of Love know that even torture and murder and oppression and death cannot conquer the power and love of God to bring about resurrection and life.

 

There is a living God, the Source of all life beyond naming, a spiritual reality at the heart of all things, that is worth everything we are and have. It is this kind of vision and trust in God’s power for life that motivated people like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, who said that the arc of history was long, but it bent toward justice. This vision of a future bending toward justice was not a generic humanist vision of social justice. Dr. King was a Christian pastor steeped in the story of our tradition, and in the spiritual reality at the heart of those stories. This vision, the vision of God’s unconquerable will for generativity and blessing, is the thing that can shift us to throwing all our weight behind what God wants to do in and through us.

 

This is what moved Jesus in today’s gospel story. When Pharisees come to him to tell him to leave because he is in danger from Herod, he just says he must be about his work—to heal and to liberate—and that he is headed toward Jerusalem come what may, even though it is the city that kills the prophets. He can’t un-see what he deeply knows, which is that God’s will is for healing and that he is an instrument for that healing. Come what may. And he compares his love for the people of Jerusalem to the love of a mother hen gathering her chicks under her wings. You notice he doesn’t choose a powerful animal, like a lion or a bear—he chooses a chicken, of all things, which is just like the God we know in Jesus, isn’t it? God chooses vulnerability, the small things of the world, the things that have no power, to nevertheless convey God’s love to us. Perhaps we’re tempted to see Jesus’ words as scolding or as an indignant, “you’ll see.” But if you’ve ever loved someone you could not protect, you understand the depth of Jesus’ grief.[1] All he can do is open his arms to them: he can’t make them walk into his embrace. This is our God, in a posture of divine vulnerability.

 

Coming to believe in this kind of God is not a one-time moment in life or a single decision. It is a slow process of having eyes to see and recognize what is already in front of us, like God showing Abram the stars and promising life as beautiful as they are, in some future we can’t imagine. In today’s context, we need the transformation that empowers us to work toward life and healing and blessing for all, come what may. There is a certain freedom in knowing that no matter how desperate things become, no matter how insane the world feels and is, our mission stays the same: to join God’s mission to heal the world through love. To learn to embody Jesus’ Way of Love.

 

What do you trust? What about God, the source of all being, the nature of the universe, do you know in your bones? May we, like Abram, speak about our pain and barrenness and yearnings to God. May we come to trust the promise of God—above  all, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. Amen.

[1] See Barbara Brown Taylor, “As a Hen Gathers Her Brood,” in Religion Online, accessed March 16, 2025 at https://www.religion-online.org/article/as-a-hen-gathers-her-brood/

10am Service