Image and Word: Reflections on the Stained Glass in the Paul W. Powell Chapel

5. A Sermon on the Counseling Stained Glass Window

43 5 A Sermon on the Counseling Stained Glass Window # The Best Counsel Luke 22:24-38 Joel Gregory Most of you have a prejudice. It is not a prejudice often noted in public. We could just as well confront that intolerant narrow-mindedness today. In a place such as this it should be exposed for what it is. You have a prejudice against chickens. It is not a prejudice against everything in the world of hens, pullets, roosters, capons, and chicks. It is a more discreet prejudice. You have a prejudice against chickens’ intelligence. You may even have used those unmentionable, politically incorrect words about chickens: bird brains. I am here to set the record straight. Chickens are more like people than you think. To be more blunt, chickens may think more like you than you think. A Norwegian named Schjelderup-Ebbe demonstrated that chickens behave more like us than we would wish to Image and word 44 admit. He put a different colored leg band on each one of a flock of chickens and watched their social behavior for sixty days. He discovered the interaction among chickens at the level of position and power. The social order of chickens is determined by the giving and receiving of pecks or by the reaction to the threat of receiving a peck. When two chickens meet for the first time, either there is a fight or one chicken runs away without fighting . This is the lexicographical etymology of the idiomatic aviamorphic expression, “You are a chicken.” (I completed this pioneering lexical research in the fourth grade on the playground of Arlington Heights Elementary school in Fort Worth, Texas.) When those same two chickens instanced above meet for a second time, the one who has earned the pecking right pecks the other chicken without being pecked in turn. The only exception is a successful revolt—which with chickens rarely occurs. The organization of one group of brown leghorn pullets observed over sixty days demonstrated a rigid social order. The leading chicken among the twelve, the Alpha chicken, pecked every chicken beneath her. The second chicken pecked ten chickens, the third pecked nine chickens, and so forth. The chicken at the bottom, the Omega chicken, was pecked by all eleven chickens above her, but could not peck any other chicken. You might say that is an impeccable chicken. Schjelderup-Ebbe went on to repeat this experiment with other birds: sparrows, ducks, geese, pheasants, cockatoos , parrots, and even the common caged canary. He found the same despotic result in all of them. He became a cynic about all existence, stating, “Despotism is the basic 45 Counseling idea of the world, indissolubly bound up with all life and existence.”1 What a foul fowl conclusion. While reflecting on this barnyard despotism, we might also notice that disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ can and do act in the same way as these tyrannical birds. Disciples, too, argue about pecking order. A motif that runs through the last six months of Jesus’ ministry is a recurring argument among the Twelve: who is the greatest? The genesis of this argument seems to be those days immediately after the transfiguration, recorded in Matthew 17, Mark 9, and Luke 9. There may be a clue to the obsession with rank that simmered just under the lid of discipleship. Consider this: Jesus had taken the inner circle to the top of the mountain to witness his metamorphosis. The beginning of the problem may be just there. When Peter, James, and John came back down the mountain, the other nine surely wanted to know what happened. Imagine the following dialogue: Andrew to Peter: Rocky, what happened up there? Peter to Andrew: It was great, a spiritual high. But he told us not to tell anybody. You’re just not ready. That is not the kind of observation that builds koinonia in your small-group experience. Then added to that was the reported failure of the disciples to exorcise the demon-possessed boy at the bottom 1 For a summary of Schjeldorup-Ebbe’s experiments, see http:// elibrary.unm.edu/sora/Wilson/v048n03/p0145-p0151.html. Image and word 46 of that mountain. The boy’s father reported their powerless attempt to Jesus. Could I venture another dialogue? Andrew to Jesus: Matthew does not have a clue how to use the exorcism liturgy. MAtthew to Andrew: It’s Nathaniel’s...