Sermon text: Luke 15:1-32
This past week I had a chance to go work on a farm in rural northern Indiana. I received a grant this year to spend one day a month at a farm in North Manchester, Indiana. In the morning, myself and 5 other pastors work on the farm feeding livestock, planting crops and various other farm-related tasks. Then we eat a lunch prepared from ingredients off of the farm. In the afternoon we sit around a table and discuss theology. It has been great.
I went this past week on Thursday and one of the first jobs I had in the morning was pulling fresh eggs from the hen coop. The whole day it was rainy and cold. And as we were feeding the chickens, there was this one chicken sitting outside the coop sop and wet and covered with scratches and just looking awful.
All chicken flocks have a well-defined pecking order. It's their way of preventing mayhem. The lucky chicken at the top of the pecking order basically gets to push everyone around. She gets first access to food, water, prime roosting spots and so on. If she doesn't like what anyone else is doing she has full pecking rights. She gets to tell any other chicken to bug off. The poor chicken at the bottom of the pecking order is in the exact opposite situation: everyone in the flock can peck her, and she has last rights to food and other resources. The other chickens in a flock fall somewhere between these two extremes. The #2 chicken can only be bullied by the #1 chicken and can bully everyone else in turn, and so on and so on. This pecking order is established at a very early age and usually remains unchallenged until death.