September 7, 2025
Philemon 1:1-21
Luke 14:25-33
“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”
Well. Just when we were beginning to like you, Jesus.
“In a church I was previously a part of,” writes E. Trey Clark at Working Preacher, “it was not uncommon for one of the pastors to say to the congregation after mentioning a challenging teaching of Jesus, ‘If you can’t say “Amen,” let me hear you say “Ouch.”’ This is one of those texts that calls for ‘Ouch.’”
Anyone here willing to say, “Ouch”? Well, I am. Ouch.
Commentators have, I must say, gone to some lengths to say that when Jesus said, “hate,” he didn’t mean “hate.” That’s the kind of thing that makes me a little uneasy, but I have to admit that Jesus said a lot of things that contradict this instruction to “hate.” Dr. Clark notes that earlier in Luke’s Gospel Jesus specifically instructed us to follow the Law recorded in Deuteronomy 6 to love your neighbor has yourself. I think we’ve got to include family among the neighbors we’re supposed to love.
If Jesus didn’t mean hate, if he didn’t mean to actively work against the interests of father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even life itself, what did he mean?
I think it means that when we plan, when we consider, and especially when we choose, Jesus comes first. God comes first. The realm of God comes first. As Cheryl Lindsay writes at UCC.org, “Discipleship must center the Holy One not the hopes and plans of the follower.”
Is that what we do? Do we center the Holy One? Or do we plan, do we consider, and do we choose while centering something else?
I’m going to guess we make most of those choices while centering something else.
At the close of this section, Jesus named the most obvious of the things people tend to prioritize over God: possessions. I’m not sure that’s been much better expressed than DuBose Heyward’s lyric in the opera Porgy and Bess, with music and additional lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin:
“De folks wid plenty o’ plenty
Got a lock on de door
‘Fraid somebody’s a-goin’ to rob ’em
While dey’s out a-makin’ more
What for”
Think about it. Do you have things that you will protect before giving them to God?
I’m afraid that I do.
There’s another item on Jesus’ list that’s high up on a lot of people’s priority list. “Life itself,” he said. I’m going to use a more common phrase in contemporary life: safety and security. That’s a phrase that wins elections, isn’t it? The candidate that credibly promises to protect me from crime, from war, from disease: this is the candidate that’s going to succeed, isn’t it?
Mind you, “credibly” just means, “believable.” It doesn’t mean, “accurate,” or “competent,” or “true.” The members of the Caesar family promised security to Rome and embroiled it in decades of assassinations and civil war that ranged from Rome itself to Egypt and Greece. The Nazi party promised security, which was bizarre considering that they’d attempted a violent overthrow of the Bavarian government in 1923. Ten years later Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor despite having been convicted and imprisoned for treason.
It turns out safety and security can come with an unaffordable price. The loss of legal due process. The loss of full participation of all people in society. The loss of public health decisions based on scientific evidence.
Order without law. That’s much too high a price for “safety and security.”
The last category Jesus named – the first one named; I’ve been going backwards – was family. That was a hard one in the first century and it’s a hard one today. We have a lot of formal and informal obligations to our families. We regard their welfare as our welfare, and frequently it is. One of the Ten Commandments requires that children honor their parents, and that doesn’t stop when they become adults.
So no, Jesus couldn’t have literally meant, “hate your father and mother” in violation of the Commandment.
As D. Mark Davis writes at LeftBehindAndLovingIt, “This is real and critical engagement that Jesus is talking about, a stark contrast to the typical depiction of ‘the happy Christian home’ where one’s faith is demonstrated by how committed one is to providing every possible advantage to one’s own.”
“Every possible advantage to one’s own” is not faithful Christian discipleship. When we act primarily in our families’ interests, it’s not much different from acting primarily in our own interests. We see this over and over again in the history of feudal cultures around the world, where a small number of families acting in their own interest exerted extraordinary power against the interests of a very large number of families. The industrial age frequently changed the identity of the families, but it didn’t change the thinking very much, did it? People sought to gain power and influence and wealth to pass along to their children and as they did it other people’s children labored in their factories.
I don’t think any of us are 19th century robber barons, so I think it’s harder to discern whether our acts on behalf of our families are consistent with God’s expectations of love and care for them, or whether they contradict God’s summons to care for our neighbors and our community. So how do we know?
Ask this question: What is the cost to others for this thing that benefits my family? If we’re not imposing burdens, if we’re even relieving burdens to others, then I think discipleship and family run side by side. When others suffer from what benefits my family, though: then, I think, Jesus weeps.
Jesus asked those following him to consider the cost, the cost in wealth, the cost in safety, the cost in family power. It’s something for us to consider not once, but each and every time we need to choose. Consider, consider, consider.
As Karoline Lewis writes at Working Preacher, “To carry your cross is to carry the choices and burdens and realities of a life that has made a certain commitment — a commitment to a way of life that is committed to bringing about the Kingdom of God here and now.”
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while he preaches, occasionally intentionally.
The image is a photo of the fortified Ingush military tower, ‘Hamishki’, circa 16th century, with Erzi towers and Olgetti village in the background. Armkhi Valley, Republic of Ingushetia, Central Caucasus. Photo by © Vyacheslav Argenberg / http://www.vascoplanet.com/, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94858812.