Proper 18
Psalm 1; Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Philemon 1-21; Luke 14:25-33
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I.
What are we to make of Jesus’ words in today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke 14:26? “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”
The text poses a number of problems.
First, it is unnatural. Conservative Christians have been at the forefront of the pro-life movement for over 50 years, and here Jesus is saying that mothers must hate their children if they want to follow Him. Every other natural and familial relationship—father, mother, husband, wife—is included.
Second, it is impossible.
Yes, some of these relationships go so bad that we end up hating our parents, our children, and our spouses, but most do not, and I think it’s fair to say that even for the hardest of hard-luck examples we can think of, hate is too strong a word.
Sometimes, yes, hate is the right word, but rarely, and, more often than not, no.
Certainly, as a basic test of, say, church membership, this is an impossible standard. I think that if I were to begin a church membership class by asking for a demonstration of our prospective new members’ hatred of their closest relations, then we will not have any more new members’ classes.
Third, it is deeply unattractive. Churches, especially preachers, spend a great deal of time trying to think of ways to make their message attractive or, at least, to offer a word of comfort and a respite from the world’s conflict.
If you came here this morning seeking comfort and respite, I suppose these words sound like anything but that. “Hate has no home here” is not the message the Bible seems to have in store for us today.
So, the challenge put before us this morning is to answer each of these objections. Being a Christian, that is, being a disciple, must be presented as natural, possible, and attractive.
II.
You should want to be a Christian. You should want your family and friends to be Christians. Why? Because it is the most natural, possible, and attractive thing in the world to be. That is what I will endeavor to show you in today’s sermon.
Luke has moved on from last week’s setting at a dinner party hosted by a ruler and Pharisee. Jesus is again on the move, and now “great multitudes accompanied him.”
The point Jesus makes to them is that earthly pursuits, like building a tower or going to war, are costly and difficult.
The crowds press in on Jesus in verse 25. In verse 26, He turns to them and says, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple,” and, “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple.”
It seems that Jesus is going to great lengths to make following Him distasteful and difficult. He is putting them off. He could have good reasons for doing so.
The Gospels tell us that Jesus often knew the hearts of the men in the crowds.
Speaking to another group of Pharisees, Matthew 22:18 tells us, “But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, ‘Why put me to the test, you hypocrites?’”
It could be that Jesus is doing that here. He perceives that the multitudes are indifferent to His message, that they are coming to Him out of idle curiosity or because they expect Him to cause a scene.
Luke 14:25-33 is often used as a “count the costs” passage. “Christian,” it seems to say, “Are you taking your faith seriously?” The implied answer is, “No.” Preachers then give themselves license to heap guilt on their congregations. “Don’t miss church!” “Read your Bible more!” “Don’t call yourself a Christian unless you’ve counted the costs and are prepared to pay them.”
Does that sound like good news to you? Does that sound like the free gift of grace? No, it sounds like “works righteousness.”
It sounds like Jesus is saying that you have to save yourself and that you’d better be prepared to purchase up front your ticket to salvation.
Nothing could be further from the gospel truth. There is actually no cost to discipleship, or very little, at least to us, but I am getting ahead of myself.
III.
If I said to you, “I am going to put you in jail; however, I am going to give you a choice. You can either go to Alcatraz or Sing-Sing. Now, don’t say I’m not a nice guy. Don’t say I’m not giving you a choice. Don’t say I don’t respect your free will. Now, please, make your choice.” You would probably tell me that’s not a real choice. To choose between two equally unattractive and distasteful choices is no choice at all.
I suspect the multitudes accompanying Jesus in today’s gospel lesson were coming from that same place—a place of having no choice. This was a crowd of hardened hearts, of salt that had lost its salty taste. How do you restore that? When the very thing that makes something what it is is lost, how do you get it back? The answer is: You don’t.
To put it in theological terms, those now accompanying Jesus were the reprobate—sinners already dead in their trespasses. Let me emphasize that: they were already dead. How do you restore them to life? You don’t. They were under judgment, and Jesus’ words are words of judgment.
“Salvation is impossible for you,” He is saying. “It is both distasteful and inaccessible. You will never count the cost. You will never do what it takes. You are salt that has lost its saltiness, and that kind of salt is good for nothing except to be thrown away.”
Zombie and vampire stories are very popular. Do you want to know why I think they are so popular? Because we see them and recognize ourselves. “That’s us!” we say. We are the walking dead. At least, that’s what we are before Christ restores us.
To me, the word “multitudes” is the giveaway. In the Old Testament, the “mixed multitudes” are the rabble—the foreigners—that accompany the Israelites out of Egypt during the Exodus.
These were the ones who grumbled, pining for their lives back in Egypt as slaves. Numbers 11:4 tells us, “Now the rabble that was among them had a strong craving; and the people of Israel also wept again, and said, ‘O that we had meat to eat!’”
Imagine, before your very eyes, God has opened up the Red Sea, led you through it on dry land, closed the sea, drowning the pursuing army, and all you can do is grumble, “What have you done for me lately, God?”
We laugh at the Israelites for their folly, but we are not too different, are we? Jesus asks us if we’ve counted the costs of discipleship, but how can we count the cost when we forget to count our blessings?
Our little church has been blessed by new members and new sources of income in the past year, but are we paying too much attention to what the multitudes think of us?
Who cares if their towers fall because they built them on shifting sand and not the word of God?
Who cares if they wage a war against nature and nature’s God, calling things and people by their wrong names, doing things they should not do?
They will not win their war against God, and God has so blinded them that they will never send an emissary and ask for terms of peace.
So much for the reprobate, those who reject God. I can’t help them. Jesus might be able to do something for them, but I can’t.
It’s your hearts for which I now contend. It’s your souls for which I must give an account on Judgment Day.
When the Lamb of God opens the Book of Life, if your names are not in that book, then I will be held accountable.
What an awful burden!
This is why James says, “Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, for you know that we who teach shall be judged with greater strictness” (James 3:1).
I worry you could lose your saltiness. I pray that you won’t. The Gospel is a preservative. I labor to apply it every Sunday from this pulpit.
Do not pine for your lives back in Egypt! Do not forget how bitter the bit of slavery tasted in your mouths!
IV.
The mixed multitude that pined for Egypt, the multitudes that accompanied Jesus in today’s Gospel reading, and even many of our family members, friends, and neighbors—yes, the fathers, mothers, wives, and children that Jesus tells us we must hate—none of them have a real choice. But we do.
The choice between one sin and another is not a free choice. It is not the free exercise of our rights.
The choice to fornicate or to adulterate, to sodomize or to transition, as we saw in last week’s sermon, is not a real choice at all. If that is your definition of freedom, then you have not counted the cost. You do not know what it takes to win your freedom.
Jesus took all this into account when He willingly accepted His death on the cross for our salvation. What He faced on the cross is the same unattractive and impossible choice all of us sinners face. The difference is who He chose to obey.
You see, all of us end up obeying our conscience, but a guilty conscience is a cruel master and impossible to satisfy.
The more we try to dress it up, the less attractive it becomes. Soon, all of our choices are dictated by it. This is the idol we must learn to hate. This is the false god we must turn our backs on, even when that false god is called “mother,” “father,” “wife,” or “child.”
If this seems like an unattractive, difficult, and impossible thing to do, that’s only because we have let ourselves become so difficult, unattractive, and impossible in the first place.
The ugliness of what sin does to a man is there for all to see, hanging there disfigured, before our very eyes, on the cross. The thing is, it wasn’t His sins, but ours, that put Him there.
The words we read today from Deuteronomy 30:19, “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live,” had a hollow ring to them when Moses first spoke them. It wasn’t a real choice. Already the die was cast.
God knew His people would turn away from Him and obey everyone and everything but Him and His law. That is why Moses entered the eyewitness account of heaven and earth into the record as a testimony against Israel.
We do have a choice, a real choice, one in which it makes sense to hate father and mother, wife and child, and yes, even our own lives now, because when father, mother, wife, child, and even our own lives are restored to us in the resurrection, we will come to see that what we really hated were the most unattractive, inaccessible, and impossible things about them — and ourselves.
V.
I set out to grapple with three problems in this sermon, problems that seem to make following Jesus and being a Christian difficult and distasteful.
First, that it is unnatural for Jesus to force us to choose between Him and our loved ones, to hate one’s family and friends and even our own lives. Instead, we saw that it is wrong to try to love what cannot be loved and to condone what cannot be condoned.
To love what is passing away is no love at all. Paul tells us that love lasts forever (1 Corinthians 13:13), and so the objects of our love must therefore last forever. But this cannot be said of father, mother, wife, child, and even our own lives.
To condone the living death called sin is not to shout our freedom, but to embrace our shackles.
The second problem we faced was the impossibility of this choice. Is the criterion for being a faithful church member really to give convincing evidence that we hate those closest to us? But if we are not actively pointing our friends and family to Christ, then we produce all the evidence we need to convict ourselves. If we are to love our family and friends, then we must point them to Christ.
Before you knew Christ, what was there to point them to? Or, if you do not yet know Christ, what can you possibly give them that they don’t already have? An interest in the kingdom of death? Your inheritance of the grave? Indeed, what better way to show your contempt for your family and friends than to give them your share of death and to withhold from them the words of eternal life (John 6:68)?
Indeed, without Christ, this choice was impossible, but with Christ, now all things are possible (Matthew 19:26), and the restoration of all things is underway (Acts 3:21).
The third problem is that, given Jesus’ criteria, being a Christian seems deeply unattractive. Rather than know us by our love, this hate will repel—not attract—new members and converts.
Instead, we saw that the most unattractive thing about a Christian is his lingering attachment to sin. How hard is it, really, to hate the things that are most unattractive about ourselves and that make our churches inaccessible to others? Not very hard at all. All it takes is a little repentance.
It’s not the handicap ramps, the contemporary songs, the soothing preaching, or the rainbow flags (or the lack thereof) that make a church open and affirming.
What makes a church open and affirming—truly welcoming to all—is the truth. Jesus says, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32). Isn’t that what we want for ourselves, our families, and our friends?
Christ was able to accept the unattractive and impossible choice of the cross because He was the living truth, and, because He is the truth Himself, we, as His followers, must commit ourselves to telling that truth no matter how painful or difficult it might be sometimes to hear it or speak it.
Will we be accused of being judgmental? Yes, but only by those upon whom the truth is working, working to loosen Satan’s grip on their hearts and expel his lies.
“Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil,” Jesus says in Matthew 5:37. Jesus’ words were nothing if not direct, even harsh.
Today’s gospel reading, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife…” is just one of many examples of Him speaking directly.
If we are His, then we are to be like Him. If we are Christian, then that should mean that we are Christlike. But we have to make sure we are initiating the Jesus of the Bible, and not some softened caricature of Him.
Let our speech be just as direct as His, just as clear. So that when Judgement Day comes, no one can say we didn’t warn them.
This line from the Bob Dylan song, “All Along the Watchtower,” made famous by Jimi Hendrix, makes my point. Dylan wrote: “Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.”
Not talking falsely means realizing that the hour is getting late for our mothers, fathers, wives, and children — yes, even for ourselves because we talk falsely to ourselves every day.
By telling them the truth, it may sound like we’re being judgmental. The attorney general may call it hate speech, he may have a detective call us to investigate why we say what we say, but it is just this kind of “hatred” that will save those whom we love the most!
We must learn to hate the lie buried deep within each one of us, in the hearts of our mothers, fathers, wives, and children—the lie that proves that they—and we—were born children of the Devil and not of God (John 8:44). They are zombies. They are the walking dead.
“And such were some of you,” Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:11, “But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.”
That is why we can never go back to Egypt. That is why we can never call a thing something it is not, or a person something he or she is not. We cannot call the lie truth or call “living in sin” anything like actual living or what it means to be free.
We must, in fact, learn to hate what is already dead, the dead works of sin, because death is the last enemy the Bible promises us that God will destroy.
Even now, death is losing its grip over us. It will pass empty-handed into eternity while the Church grows full with Him who fills all (Ephesians 1:23).
Preached on September 7, 2025, at the First Congregational Church, Woodbury, Connecticut.
