Disappointment & Heartbreak
March 17, 2025
Disappointment & Heartbreak
Luke 13:31-35
by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones
First Central Congregational Church
16 March 2024
One of the great challenges now facing the Mainline church is the rise of the new Christian Nationalism. Who Jesus is, what it means to be a Christian, and how we are supposed to care for the vulnerable are now issues being contested in the public square.
We’ve seen this in the responses to Bishop Marian Budde after her sermon on mercy, the defunding of Lutheran Family Services, and the attacks to Catholic refugee ministries by the Catholic Vice President. Which generated a strong rebuke from the Pope.
Of course I grew up a Southern Baptist and was well acquainted with the Jerry Falwell-era Religious Right. And as a gay rights activist who is also a pastor, I have spent much of my adult career contesting the dominance of the Religious Right in the public imagination and discourse.
But what we are seeing now is something new, this new Christian Nationalism. And to better understand it, I recently read the book Money, Lies, and God by the journalist Katherine Stewart, who has spent decades exploring and writing about the Religious Right.
She concludes that:
Christian nationalism is not a religion. It is not Christianity. It is a political identity with a corresponding political ideology, and the ideology in question doesn’t have a lot to do with the way many if not most Americans understand Christianity. You don’t have to be a Christian to be a Christian nationalist, and plenty of patriotic Christians want nothing to do with Christian nationalism.
What alarms Stewart the most is that this movement, as she writes, “isn’t looking for a seat at the noisy table of American democracy.” Instead, “it wants to burn down the house.” She reveals the various ways in which it is an antidemocratic movement “grounded in resentment and unreason” with authoritarian and fascistic tendencies.
Her analysis is that the movement is based upon fear. Fears of the ever-changing world and the ways the culture has shifted over time. Also fears based upon economic inequality. It’s a complex brew of resentments and grievances, with little to do with actual theology.
Stewart writes, “The bulk of this movement is best understood in terms of what it wishes to destroy rather than what it proposes to create. Fear and grievance, not hope, are the moving parts of its story.”
She has her own label for the movement, instead of Christian nationalism, she calls it “reactionary nihilism.”
And so a Gospel lesson like today’s is helpful to us in our current challenge. Jesus is told of a threat to his life by Herod, who has already jailed and executed John the Baptist. But, Jesus is not to be deterred. No threat to his life will stop him from carrying out God’s mission of mercy and liberation.
But notice Jesus’ attitude here. Brendan Byrne points out what he calls a “tragic tone” in Jesus’ response. And Michael Curry, the Episcopal bishop, describes Jesus’ mood further. He writes, “Jesus speaks in tones of abject disappointment and utter heartbreak at the refusal of his own people to hear and heed the summons of God to draw near, to gather, and to come home.”
Jesus doesn’t respond to the threat with fear or anger. He responds with sadness and with pity. Grieving that Herod and the people have chosen a path contrary to the goodness and blessing that God wants for them.
Let Jesus’ response be a model for you as you experience disappointment and heartbreak that the world is not turning out as you had expected and hoped that it would.
Jesus doesn’t only grieve, however. He responds and continues to take action. He tells them to take word to Herod that he will not be stopped. I’ve always loved that phrase, “Go and tell that fox for me.” I’ve imagined using it myself a few times.
Commentator Rodney Clapp sees even more in Jesus’ response to Herod and the threat. Clapp writes that Herod and the other power players “want to see themselves as masters of the universe, invulnerable and imperial behind their relentless, foxy maneuvering.”
But Jesus directly challenges the notion that Herod or Rome or the religious establishment is really in charge. God alone is sovereign over creation.
Clapp writes, “Jesus calls their death-dealing by name, yet he also sees them as barnyard chicks lost in a storm, too afraid and too stubborn to find shelter under the shadow of mother hen’s wings.”
Let’s unpack this for a moment. First is Jesus calling out their death-dealing. Way back in Deuteronomy, when God’s covenant with Israel was first being implemented, we read about God telling the people that you can choose life or you can choose death. And then detailing all the ethical choices that lead down either path.
Jesus calls out the authorities for having chosen the way of death. Their actions and decisions are harming people and destroying the goodness and abundance of God’s creation.
They could have followed the covenant, the way of steadfast love, of righteousness and justice, of care for the widow, the orphan, the stranger. God has consistently offered the path to something good and better, a path to life in all of its fullness and abundance.
So, you might expect God’s wrath and judgement then upon the death-dealing forces. But in this particular lesson of Jesus, that’s not what we hear. We hear instead God’s pity and compassion, that disappointment and heartbreak.
These death-dealers, these powerful people who think they are in control, the masters of the universe, are really just frightened and lost chicks, not seeing and refusing to enjoy the protection and salvation on offer to them.
As Katherine Stewart points out the fear and grievance that animates the new Christian nationalism, we see a parallel with what Jesus says here in Luke. When we are motivated by fear and let our fears overcome our compassion, we are lost. Instead of being powerful and in control, we become like little, helpless chickens, scurrying about.
But God offers mercy. God offers protection and salvation. Like a good mother hen, God will take care of her children. We need only see and respond.
You’ve heard by baptismal liturgy a lot recently. Enough times that hopefully some parts of it resonate with you.
One particular paragraph I want to call your attention to today:
Little siblings, by this act of baptism, we welcome you to a journey that will take your whole life. This isn’t the end. It’s the beginning of God’s adventure with your life. What God will make of you, we know not. Where God will take you, surprise you, we cannot say. This we do know and this we say. God is with you.
Those words are from Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon’s classic book of Christian ethics, Resident Aliens. I first read that book in the nineties and marked that paragraph then as one I knew I’d use in baptism. And now those words have been said over so many babies and children and even adults in my fifteen years at First Central.
In that book, Hauerwas and Willimon laid down a challenge for the church. Christendom, they said, had come to an end. The long era in which politics and culture and the Mainline church were all on the same page. And rather than bemoaning that loss, they celebrated it as a chance for the church to finally be the church. To model an alternative way of being human and being community.
They declared that “Christians are intentionally made by an adventuresome church.” An idea that has always deeply influenced my approach to ministry.
For them, Christianity is a movement that we join. Here’s one of their best statements of the matter:
Christianity is an invitation to be part of an alien people who make a difference because they see something that cannot otherwise be seen without Christ. Right living is more the challenge than right thinking. The challenge is not the intellectual one but the political one—the creation of a new people who have aligned themselves with the seismic shift that has occurred in the world since Christ.
For them, “Christianity is mostly a matter of politics,” because it is about the formation of a new people, who live counter to much of the way society normally functions.
In a much later book Stanley Hauerwas explained that he does see himself as a theocrat. But very different from the way the new Christian nationalism would see itself. Here’s Hauerwas’ explanation:
I am of course a theocrat. “Jesus is Lord” is not my personal opinion; I take it to be a determinative political claim. So I am ready to rule. The difficulty is that following a crucified Lord entails embodying a politics that cannot resort to coercion and violence; it is a politics of persuasion all the way down. It is a tiring business that is slow and time-consuming, but then we, that is Christians, believe that by redeeming time Christ has given us all the time we need to pursue peace. Christ, though the Holy Spirit, bestows upon his disciples the long-suffering patience necessary to resist any politics whose impatience makes coercion and violence the only and inevitable response to conflict.
So, it’s impossible to be an authoritarian or fascist if one is a genuine follower of Jesus. Because we genuine followers of Jesus must be patient and persuasive pacifists. God rules, but God rules through a cross.
That’s the politics of the gospel, as we see here in Jesus’ response to the threat from Herod.
In the face of foxy Herods and the death-dealing forces that want to be in control and exert power over others, we should be disappointed and heartbroken, like Jesus was. And like Jesus we should respond and keep taking action. We will not be deterred from our acts of mercy, compassion, and liberation. And while we continue these God-given ministries, we must also practice patience, which can be so difficult.
And so I conclude with one more bit of advice from Stanley Hauerwas:
The church must learn time and time again that its task is not to make the world [into] the kingdom [of God], but to be faithful to the kingdom by showing to the world what it means to be a community of peace. Thus we are required to be patient and never lose hope.