I did preach on this and tried not to water it down. I talked about Kenda Creasy Dean's book Almost Christian and her contention that many youth are being taught a watered-down faith, attending a "Church of Benign Whatever-ism," as she puts it. The thing this text said to me is that Jesus isn't suggesting Benign Whatever-ism, but a faith in which actual risks and costs will be involved.

Laura Toepfer

Contrasting Jeremiah and Luke it struck me that the prophets (3rd Isaiah being somewhat of an exception) were trying to reform a society built on the structure of family, tribe, and clan. Jesus, however posits faith independent of blood ties as the basis for the kingdom he proclaims, thereby, in essence, destroying all the old boundaries defining who can be a member of a God's community. Paul understood what Jesus was doing; neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female can separate us from God's love.

It is not that Jesus says we must hate our relatives in order to be his disciples, but that Christians who accept discipleship over the claims of family and clan will find themselves hated for threatening the old order.

Both Judaism and Rome, built on the model of family, saw the threat in Jesus new order and Christians were indeeed hated and persecuted by both.

I did preach on it, connecting the hate (as in "the opposite of love") with rejecting the system of allegiance imposed by the Roman Family System. Then I imagined with the congregation how the disciples heard this, and their reactions to a *new* kind of family in Christ, with more sisters and brothers than number the stars in the clear desert sky promised to Abraham.

This wove into the Philemon letter-Pauls appeal to treat Onesimus as a brother, freeing both Philemon and Onesimus, with a request to treat all workers who we meet on Labor Day with the same respect, dignity and honor.

I challenged the congregation to imagine what it would mean to be this kind of family - not being a member in an institution.

That freedom is what we have in this new family imagined by Christ - joyful, eternal, loving and free.

We discussed this in our adult Formations Class, and I compared it to the story in Luke 8 when Jesus says his mother and brothers are "those who hear the word of God and do what it says."

Its easy to make idols out of family, spending inordinate amounts of time and energy maintaining something that is contrary to the things God values. Many folks I know have essentially created "alternate families" that are based more on authentic relationship and purposeful mission than the families of origin in which they were born. That's not to say we neglect our families of origin, just that we spend our best energies where it seems to be congruent with the Kingdom of God.

My wife and I have an eight year old son. One night at dinner, we were working through the difficulty of his baseball practice being scheduled during Wednesday night family activities at the parish. I told him he'd probably have to miss practice. He asked me, "Dad, do you love God more than me?"

My wife laughed and said, "Let's see you get out of this one!" After a few moments of reflection, my wife rescued me by saying, "God thinks the best way for your Dad to love God is to love you."

He still didn't get to miss church.

This is how I started:

"When Jesus drops an “H-bomb”, a preacher is compelled to respond..."

See, I wanted to preach on Philemon. So at 8AM, I said a few things to suggest that Jesus didn't mean hate like we think of it. Then I switched to Paul.

After my sermon, I sat down, not completely satisfied. I was exchanging the peace with people, and suddenly it hit me. I shared my revelation with the 8AM congregation, and then changed my sermon for 10AM:

"The key for me, is the word “possessions”, at the end of the passage.

Look closely again at the list: parents, wife, children, siblings, and life. What’s missing? The husband, the father. Technically in the first century, the head of the household possesses the rest.

What I think Jesus is saying that even while our society values certain possessions as signs of blessings, the pursuit of them is morally bankrupt. It’s bound to fail, and it’s not the road of discipleship."

At both services, I also quoted Emille Towns:

“In the process of becoming living disciples, we must, as Jesus states, also learn to give up all of our possessions---our need to acquire, our yearning for success, our petty jealousies, our denigrating stereotypes of others, our prejudices and hatreds, and more---and follow the way of Jesus, as we place ourselves on an ever-treading potter’s wheel to examine our thoughts, words and actions. These possessions keep us further and further from the Christlike walk to which Jesus invites us in discipleship.” (Feasting on the Word, Year C, Vol. 4, David Bartlettand Barbara Brown Taylor, editors, 2010, p. 46)

Yes, I preached on it. Dove right in. The audio can be downloaded here: http://www.box.net/shared/0va60cctm1

We want to shy away from the tough texts; but sometimes we need to hear the more challenging word.

When in doubt, check the little Kittel. The Greek for hate also means to be indifferent to. The Greek we translate as possessions actually is a participle ...possessings. So I talked about how we possess and are possessed by the people we love. Our parents. Our siblings. Our children. And how we have to learn to relinquish our possessings of them in order to be free to follow Jesus. And how hard that is. How we try to be God in other people's lives. But it doesn't work till we let God be God to those people.

My sermon was called "Hate Your Family," and I said that Jesus' words shouldn't be tamed-- they were meant to be shocking and offensive. They were meant to break everything that gets between us and God: in this case, the family. "This is how the cross works. It breaks things. And it makes new life."

I preached about Manche Masemola, killed by her parents when she was eighteen for following Jesus, and her mother, who was baptized herself, forty years after murdering her daughter.

Sermon here: http://www.saintgregorys.org/worship/sermons

I did preach on it, and no I didn't skirt around it. Briefly, I pointed out that Jesus was close to his mother and one of his disciples was his brother. "Hate" in Greek is "Miseo", which is no better than in English, so I think Jesus was going for shock value on this one. Basically, I said we need to focus first on Christ, even over our selves and families. Like others have done, here's the recording:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/528lgtddg56yb44/September%205%2C%202010.mp3

I didn't preach on it--being but a lowly layman--but I note that most preachers (including mine) run to the sayings and miss the vignettes. The parabolic vignettes are the key here, I believe. Jesus is using hyperbolic language, but we miss the direction and thrust of it if we don't first consider where he's headed.

The point of both the man building the tower and the king going to war is that neither of these are endeavors to be taken lightly. They require planning. They require calculating the costs and the risks. Once we realize that this is where Luke is coming from in communicating Jesus we see that he's not laying out basic conditions for membership but is laying out the potential costs.

Using "hatred of the family" as a lead-off is hyperbolic and is designed to shock the listener/hearer (and clearly it still works!), to focus attention on what follows. Unfortunately, we tend to get hung up on this part and miss what comes next... The point, though, is not how to go about hating your family but to communicate that true discipleship is a serious business with potentially deadly consequences.

Too, reading through the accounts of the martyrs--particularly in the first few centuries of the church but in recent years as well--we can see that the truth of this cost of discipleship has been graphically illustrated time and again. In particular, families turning over their Christian children to the authorities for persecution/execution is a common topos in the third and fourth century narratives.

Yes I preached on it. We had a couple moving away from the parish after 35 years, two 50th wedding anniversaries and a 40th anniversary. I suggested that in preparing for a move or a wedding that you had to look at the cost, the arrangements, what you would give up. I talked about what had to be given up to make the relationship work, that sometimes you had to turn your back on a neighsaying parent or sibling, that you had to be willing to stand up for the relationship you believed in. After all, the Canadian Anglican Wedding service compares marriage to the relationship Christ has with the church. With that as a basis, I marched head first into the fact that Christian faith is not cheap or easy, that you can't just sit on the sidelines, you need to get in and get to it. The words weren't easy when Jesus spoke them and they aren't easy to hear now, but they are true. I also clearly added the human element, that we wouldn't (I wouldn't) always measure up, and God will accept us as we are. But we are always called to try

I chose to relate the giving up of possessions to the appeal to Philemon -- it is about giving up control and accepting cooperation, "love of" in exchange for "power over"; and "give up" as surrender.