Listen to the agony in Jesus’ voice as he considers how Israel had treated the prophets of God – Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killer of prophets, abusers of the messengers of God. How long I’ve longed to gather your children, like a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you refused and turned away! (The Message)

Israel’s refusal to listen broke his heart. Soon, they will take his life, killing another prophet. We aren’t surprised because he was the one Isaiah described as a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. In our story, once again God brooded over the state of his people!

Does God still grieve over the sins of his people? If so, what sins?

I suggest that God grieves over the way people treat the earth. We continue to dump incredible amounts of waste into our rivers and lakes. We continue to deposit huge amounts of garbage in our oceans. We continue to pump far too many impurities into the air.

Shouldn’t every Christian, every one who believes that God created the world, be an environmentalist? We may differ as to the strategy, we need not hold the same political solutions, but we ought to all agree that we must love the world that God created. We ought to be willing to pay to ensure that our lakes, rivers and streams are clean. We ought to elect women and men to office who want to clean up our water and our air.

I believe God grieves over our wars. Each war is an admission of our failure to live peaceably in our world, our failure to do everything possible to avoid bloodshed, and a failure to love as he demanded, to love our enemies. It is a failure to tell the truth, because the first casualty in war is truth. If governments only told the truth there would be far less support for their wars.

In the current war there is much to grieve over. We start with the loss of life. The loss of American lives, the loss of Iraqi lives, the loss of our enemies lives. We grieve because neighbors are now killing neighbors, Sunnis are killing Shiites, and Shiites are killing Sunnis. God grieves because nothing is held sacred, not even the holy sites of Islam by adherents of Islam.

I believe that God grieves today—as he did during the time of Amos—over our treatment of the poor. It is not just that we lack solutions, we lack the will to solve a number of crucial issues facing society. We lack the will to end our dependency on illegal drugs. A small percentage of the population see the problem, but the vast majority don’t see recreational drugs as a major issue. If we did we would make it a huge priority and we would spend the money necessary to stop shooting up.

We lack the will to solve the crisis in health care. It isn’t just that we disagree over how to do it, we disagree over whether we ought to provide health care for all Americans.

We lack the will to care for the poorest of our children. We commit the sin of discarding human beings, the sin of pushing another generation toward lives of abuse, dependency and crime. We are wasting a great national resource…minds, hearts, souls.

There are far too many examples I could use, but we dare not miss how our Lord grieves over the failure of his church to be the people he wanted them to be. I believe he even grieves that we no longer are concerned that we are sinners. We are often more concerned about getting caught, than losing God.

I am not addressing all the people who don’t go to church, who don’t claim to be Christians. I am talking to those who think of themselves as the children of God. In the book of Amos it was the religious, not the secular that caused God to vent. God holds believers to a higher standard. He expects more out of us. He wants us to do justice—oceans of justice. He wants us to do fairness— rivers of fairness. He wants his people to lead so that others can know the way.

So what will God do about this? Please note that Jesus compares himself not with a rooster, but with a hen. What he longs to do, is not crow like a rooster or to fight like a rooster with talons, but to mother us, love us and care for us like the hen. This hen knows she has to face the fox. What will happen when the hen goes up against the fox? The smart money would be on the fox. But not God. God, as the preacher Barbara Brown Taylor has written, has bet the house on the hen, even knowing it will cost the hen its life.

Each day I read about tragedies in the newspaper. I read about the death of people in the storms in the south. I read about car accidents-- far too many car accidents in our county. I read about a bus accident that kills too many baseball players in the south. I read, but I don’t grieve. I care, but I don’t grieve. I don’t grieve because I only grieve over those whose lives are a loss to me. I only grieve when there is a deep connection.

God grieves. God grieves because God is deeply connected with each one of us. Jesus longs to gather us together like a hen gathers her chicks. That is why he is headed to Jerusalem where he will face the fox, and mother all of us who he claims as his own. He heads to Jerusalem, to the cross, because he does everything possible to again make us a part of his flock.