There are some passages in scripture that break my heart:

• Abraham with a knife in his hand and a lump in his throat as he looks on the face of his son, Isaac . . . his shining star.

• David, weeping over the death of his son, Absalom, even though Absalom had betrayed him and sought his death.

 “Absalom, O my Son, Absalom . . .”  and

•  this text, where Jesus weeps over Jerusalem.

Jesus is able to see where things are headed. It’s not so much predicting the future as being able to put two and two together.

What do you do when people won’t listen?

Greek mythology explains that sense of utter powerlessness in the character of Cassandra.

Cassandra had done something for which she was both rewarded and punished at the same time. Her reward was that she could see what was going to happen, and even how to prevent the worst from coming to pass. The punishment was that no one would believe her.

Jesus stood overlooking Jerusalem and he wept. God had sent prophets to warn, to guide, to speak the truth to the people, but they didn’t want to hear. They were determined to go their own way and do their own thing.

And Jesus was right. History proved it. The temple fell and the people scattered  . .  .  Jerusalem, as they knew it, would be never be the same.

You can hear his heartbreak in this passage. (Only hearts full of love are susceptible to breaking.)  You can sense his own feeling of powerlessness.

He speaks of himself as a mother hen longing to shelter the brood under her wings.

That is such a tender image.

It can’t get much further from a majestic eagle soaring over head.

Chickens are humble birds, and easy prey.

Jesus knows the danger of which he speaks. He calls Herod a fox. Followers of the way are vulnerable to the powers of the world. Compassion makes us so.

This is the essence of the Lenten journey. Things are stark in the wilderness. It is a place of danger and struggle.

Jesus wept over Jerusalem and longed to gather the people under his wing and protect them from what is to come, because he is powerless over what is coming.

I am never comfortable putting myself in Jesus’ shoes. It’s dangerous for any of us. If I had any sense at all, I would spend my time focusing on how I was more like Herod than Jesus.

But, I can’t help identifying with the mother hen this morning.

Since I am a mother, with a brood of three daughters, I hope it isn’t too much of a stretch.

I know well that maternal instinct of which Jesus speaks.

I have been pondering this week my role as mother and some of the wilderness wanderings  I have been led into with my daughters.

Especially, I have been thinking about times when I felt like I was able to see a train wreck coming and knew I was powerless to do anything about it. Those dreadful times of impending doom, when all one can do is ache and weep and long as Jesus did.

One of those times occurred when my eldest daughter, D’Arcy, was a junior in high school. D’Arcy is a bright, sensitive, gifted young woman. But, because of all the changes in our lives, which included a divorce and a couple of moves and seminary, there was a great deal of stress on her. After seminary, when I was ordained and installed at a church in Houston, it meant she would be attending the third high school in three years.

I was excited about the church and it demanded a lot of my time. I was stretched pretty thin.

The girl’s father lived about 600 miles away and was not a real presence in their lives.

D’Arcy didn’t fit in at her new school. All the kids had known one another since kindergarten, so it was hard to make friends.  She began hanging out with a group of kids whose only common thread was that they didn’t fit in either.

After a while, she changed. She was morose. She was angry. She was belligerent. She was mean to her sisters, and defiant with me. Her grades dropped.

I was busy. Torn. Worried.

I thought she was just going through teenage angst.

Nope.

It was crack cocaine.

When I received a letter from the school telling me of her many absences --  I realized that she was actually ‘going through high school.’

That is to say; I was dropping her off at the front door and she was walking in that door, then right out the side door -- and over to an apartment near the campus where she and her new friends were doing drugs.

She was expelled from school.

I was mortified. I was terrified. I was angry. I was embarrassed.

After all, how would it look for the new minister to have kid who was out of control?

(At the time I still believed that I could somehow control what people thought of me. It had not yet dawned on me that if I did have that amazing super power -- mind control --one would hope I would use it for something a little more noble than what people thought of me. Something like world peace, or an end to bigotry.)

Though clearly we both needed it, I took D’Arcy to a counselor; but it wasn’t D’Arcy who showed up.

It was the crack that was holding her hostage. She seemed possessed. I wanted to shake her and scream: “Where is my daughter? What have you done with her??”

I was frantic and tried to control her. That didn’t work. “When we don’t know what to do,” a friend says, ‘We do what we know.’ I did more of what hadn’t been working.

My therapist suggested I attend some Al-anon meetings, so I did.

I am grateful for that. I needed it. I explored the tough love concept.

I began seeing what was happening to the whole family.

I was faced with one of the hardest decisions in my life.

I needed, for the sake of my other two daughters, to lay down the law to D’Arcy.

I had to tell her she was either going to have to go into treatment or leave the house.

I didn’t want to do it. I wanted her to get help.

I couldn’t really imagine kicking my own child out on the streets.

One wonderful wise crone in Al-Anon pushed me on the issue. Week after week, when I would say I needed to give her an ultimatum, but hadn’t done it yet, this wise old bird finally challenged me.

“What’s keeping you from doing what you know you need to do?” she asked.

“I’m afraid.” I replied.

“Of what?” she asked.

My head swam as the images washed over me like a slide show of every mother’s worst possible nightmares. I blurted them out . . . and they all ended up with my beautiful daughter dead in a ditch. I didn’t want to sacrifice my daughter to the streets.

And the wise woman told me, “So – you think you control whether she lives or dies?  You do know, she could die of an overdose at home while you are at work or sleeping.” 

I was stunned, but I knew she was right.

This crusty old broad looked at me and took me under her wing as she said, “Your daughter is in God’s hands. Not your hands. She always has been and she always will be. You do not have the power of life and death. You cannot control that. And, by the way, you, too, are in God’s hands.”

I did what I thought I could never do, would never do, certainly never wanted to do. It nearly killed me.

I told D’Arcy that she had to go to a treatment center or she could no longer live with me. I put the choice in her hands.

And as my daughter walked out the door . . .  my heart broke. And hope would have left with her, except for those words: “Your daughter is in God’s hands.”

I wept like David over Absalom and Jesus over Jerusalem.

I thought I would have given anything for it to be different. But I couldn’t sacrifice the other two girls, and I wouldn’t sacrifice my own tenuous sanity.  It was what it was.

The really hard choices are never between something good and something bad.  They are always between two difficult and painful things.

That was, without a doubt, one of the worst wilderness periods of my life.

I blamed everyone. I blamed her father. I blamed the school. I blamed the friends.

But most of all, I blamed myself.

I agonized over things I could have done differently or failed to do. I kept thinking “If I had done this or that  . . . Perhaps if I had . .. “

I had a hard time letting go of the hope that the past could be different.

I was wracked with guilt. Even though I had done what seemed the right thing to do at the time.

My friend says that it is easier to feel guilty than to feel powerless.

One of the terrible things that happens in a situation like that, one so  complicated by many things, and many people, and such confusing dynamics, is that sometimes, we are forced to do something that doesn’t fit with how we see ourselves. Doesn’t gel with who we really are.

I had always imagined myself to be a loving, compassionate, and generous mother. That’s at least the kind of mother I want to be and what I would hope my children would tell you about me.

I never saw myself as the kind of mother that could toss her kid out on the street. Or the kind of mother that would pay so little attention that her child would end up on crack, for that matter.

I never thought that I would have to do what I did.

Nor did I think I would ever see that as the only choice.

But I believed that was what I had to do. I hated it. I ached. I cried.  I second-guessed myself for years.  I was angry about it. I was ashamed. I was defensive. I received criticism from those who didn’t understand.

I was terribly depressed. I had a hard time letting go.

I felt betrayed by my daughter and by life, and by myself.

And I hated being in that circumstance. I felt cut in half and raw and bleeding.

I spiraled down.

Finally, I hit bottom.

And I found the bottom solid.

For in that wilderness, at the bottom of that pit, there was God.

It was God who gave me the strength to get through that ordeal.

My faith in God grew. It had to. It wasn’t easy letting God be God at first. But it grew on me. I came to take much comfort in God being God and me being just me. I came to realize how crazy I had been for even thinking otherwise. It was not control I let go of, it was the illusion of control.

I have heard it said that life begins with betrayal.

While many of these tales end in tragedy, there is a happy ending to this one.

D’Arcy was out of the house for a few months, and then she came home, ready for change.

She “cleaned up”, as they say. And she went back to school, graduating with her class. She even received a scholarship to college and graduated. She teaches, is married to a wonderful young man, and they have two beautiful daughters.

She is an elder in the church and involved in politics and charity organizations.

Even more miraculous: her mother also survived.

Thanks be to God.

There was a long period when we didn’t talk about that dark episode in our lives.

We would have all said we had put it behind us.

But that wasn’t true. There was work to be done.

Eventually, the lingering emotional damage emerged when we realized it had not been resolved. It was always just under the surface.

Just wanting it and willing it to go away because it had been so unpleasant didn’t work.

We had to talk about it.

We did not need an autopsy— we didn’t need to dig up the corpse and poke around to find out what happened—and assign more blame.

We needed the meal after the funeral; some ham, a little green bean casserole and a slice of Aunt Minnie’s banana cream pie and talk about feelings and rebuilding the relationships between the survivors, and seeing how God was there all along.

We forgave one another and ourselves.

We gave up the hope that the past could be different.

Not even God can change the past.

When I told D’Arcy that I was sorry I had to turn her out of the house, when I told her how guilty I felt about everything, she surprised me by saying, “Mom, I’m glad you did that. There is no telling what would have happened if you hadn’t. I needed that kick in the pants to grow up and take responsibility for my life. It was one of the most important gifts you gave me.”

Then she told me how guilty she felt for, in her words, “putting me through hell.” When I heard how she blamed herself, and felt like she could never forgive herself or really expect me to forgive her, my heart broke once again. I was able to tell her she was wrong, that I had forgiven her. I was able to tell her how proud I was of her, and how amazed I am at her strength. And I was able to say,  “I, too, needed that kick in the fanny. I needed that corrective. We all made mistakes, and it was a dark night, for sure, but one that led me to seek shelter under the wings of God.”

Then we were able to be ourselves with one another again. To have the ham and pie. To share communion once again.

I think of a hen and her chicks.

Every hen knows there is a time to protect the chicks by sheltering them from danger under her wing.

But no mother hen expects or wants her chicks to stay chicks forever.

Christina Berry, another pastor with whom I exchange emails in an on-line lectionary group, recently commented on this:

“Most of us, if we admit it, have at least a little deep down longing for some person or institution to be the expert fixer upper, the grown-up who will step in, know the right thing to do, and do it, all the while making sure that we are okay. Gather us under their wings, keep us safe, make things okay. Pick us up from the sidewalk, take our skinned knee seriously, kiss away our tears, and punish the big kid who pushed us down in the first place. While we eat a popsicle on mommy's lap and watch.”

God had other things in mind. God had maturity in mind. God had that “You are going to be a light to the nations” thing going on. God wanted this people to be strong for the sake of the world.

D’Arcy (and Becca and Julia) and I went through a horrible wilderness journey. But we survived. And we grew. It made us stronger, and more mature than we were before.

More importantly, we learned to be able to depend on a God who still takes our hand in the darkest of nights and shows us the stars. Stars we would not even be able to see if it weren’t dark.

A God who holds us through those dark times, and promises us better days to come.

And they do.

They always do.

Thanks be to God.