Green Blades Preaching Roundtable

Hymn suggestion: When Twilight Comes ELW 566

When I hear this Lukan text, I always recall the chapel service at seminary when someone preached about Jesus as the mother hen gathering her chicks protecting them from a storm. One of the male professors sitting behind me commented under his breath for the benefit of his male sycophants that he’d rather worship the One who created the storm than a chicken. They all laughed.

I wonder– what offended the professor the most? God compared to a creature, this particular creature or the use of feminine imagery to describe God? I think the joke and the laughter of the group especially during a seminarian’s brave act of preaching before this critical crowd probably helps us enter into the text.

Jesus, afterall, is the one who chose this image for himself while calling Herod a fox. As we know, even if we are not chicken raisers, foxes are predators who kill hens. A thunderstorm is a little closer to a fox than a mother hen. One seems powerful and capable of bringing death; the other seems vulnerable and even depending upon circumstances defenseless.

At the same time, mother hens are fierce protectors of their chicks. They sound alarm calls when danger is near as throughout Scripture God sends out alarm calls to God’s people when they stray away from God and follow or become foxes.

Mother hens do what Jesus says he tried to do with the people of Jerusalem- gather them beneath his wings to provide safety, but they were unwilling. The pathos here is of a parent watching their child choose death over life. Perhaps, this is how many of us feel about our invitations and cries to change our ways in relationship with creation. We are sounding alarms; creation is sounding alarms; we are being invited to gather beneath God’s holy wings and trust that there is more power here than in sly worldly death-dealing ways. The message is to gather as a brood in, with and under God’s word – to stay close to the mother hen and thus, to one another. There is power and protection in this Word and in being part of a brood rather than a lone chick out there for the eating.

The EcoFaith Summit of the Upper Midwest 2025: Earth’s Cries, Earth’s Call: Becoming Midwives of Hope for the Healing of Creation will take place on Saturday, April 5th at First Lutheran Church in Duluth and online. We gather to hear and respond to these alarms; wegather because we recognize our need for one another and the power we have when we do gather and act together empowered by God’s Spirit and Word.

I don’t know if there was knowledge of imprinting in Jesus’ day. However, it’s rather fascinating that chicks will imprint on other creatures including humans if they are not around the mother hen. They then become other than who they were created to be. Isn’t that what Jesus was doing with the disciples? With his plea for the people of the city to gather beneath his wings? Jesus wanted to – wants to imprint his image on us so that we act as we were created and called to be. It’s way too easy for the world to imprint its ways on us and to do so quickly.

Finally, a mother hen will lose her life protecting her chicks as Jesus lost his life staying true to God’s ways not the world’s. God’s way of choosing love and forgiveness over violence had been imprinted on Jesus from the beginning.

When Scripture uses creaturely images to describe divine and human ways, it presupposes that we have cared enough about or are connected enough to them that these images, these metaphors have meaning. It means that we know something about creatures' ways and that we are able to learn from them. Learning from another puts us in a very different relationship to that being than putting ourselves above as the one doing the teaching. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes  about creation and creatures being subjects not objects. This again changes the relationship and moves one, it is hoped, towards care – as the fierce care of a mother hen.

With apologies to foxes.

Pastor Dianne O. Loufman is the Lead (currently only) pastor of

First Lutheran Church faithlovecommunity Duluth, MN