Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA
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Wow... Quite the gospel passage, huh?
Harsh words, Jesus.
“I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
“I’ve come to set a man against his father.”
“Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.”
So yeah, uh... Happy Father’s Day?
This isn’t Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild on the felt church banner holding a little lamb. This is a much moodier Jesus we’re getting today.
So let’s not pretend this is a comfortable text. Let’s sit in the discomfort for a minute, because I think we might find a doorway here.
I was in Minden, NV a couple weeks ago visiting family. Alex, Rory, and I used to live there, and it was nostalgic walking around our old neighborhood.
When we reached a certain block, I stopped dead in my tracks and took note. We were in front of the courthouse. And I realized, that’s where I voted, for the first time in my life, opposite my dad.
Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a homily about partisan politics and who’s right and wrong. It’s about something deeper than that.
Like many of us, I voted exactly the way my most dominant parent did; same party, every time. Not because I’d sat down and balanced the issues and landed there on my own terms, but because my dad was, let’s just say, a man of strong opinions. He was the kind of guy who didn’t just have a favorite side…
He had a favorite side… and several specific and detailed grievances against every other side… and their adherents… (and possibly their families) going back generations.
And when you’re the only child of someone like that, you learn early which way the wind blows. You don’t go against the grain. You just absorb it, the way kids in two different families instinctively know which jokes are okay at their dinner table and which ones get you, ya know, The Look.
My dad died a few years before that particular election.
But when I stood on that sidewalk in front of that courthouse the other day, I remembered the feeling I had when I ticked that box on my ballot...
He’d been dead for years. And I still felt the butterflies in my stomach.
Some old internal alarm going off. As if he were standing right behind me in line, staring right through the back of my neck, seething.
Turns out... Even years after he was gone, I was still performing for that most influential audience of one.
I think this is exactly what verse 36 is talking about when it says “one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”
It’s the team we root for, the jokes we laugh at, the opinions we keep to ourselves, the version of “normal” we never question.All of it is absorbed so early we don’t even experience it as a choice. We just think it’s... us.
And I don’t think this is only a political thing (even though, let’s be honest, partisan politics might be the closest thing our country has to a national religious war these days).
What we’re talking about here is something more basic to how we’re built.
We’re creatures with mirror neurons wired into our brains. We’re designed to copy each other.
It’s how toddlers learn to talk, how teenagers learn to dress, how all of us learn what’s normal and acceptable and safe. We find ourselves in a group, and without ever deciding to, we start wanting what they want. But there’s an underbelly to this: We also start fearing what they fear and hating who they hate.
Once we’ve latched onto a group, the easiest way to know we belong is to find someone outside the group to define ourselves against.
Houses get divided. Knives come out. And most of the time we don’t even notice it happening, because it feels less like a conscious decision and more like just being our authentic selves.
Jeremiah knew something about this too. He didn’t just disappoint his parent. His whole hometown turned on him. People he’d grown up with were actively plotting against him.
He says, in this brutal, almost embarrassing prayer we read today, “everyone mocks me.”
His own community decided he was the problem, and (as you may know from experience) once a group decides you’re the problem, it’s not easy to convince them otherwise.
He’s not just sad, he’s furious. He wants vengeance on the people who turned on him. The words of Jesus haunt us here...
“...and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”
I get it. If my hometown decided I was a traitor for telling the truth, I’d probably want some payback too. I can’t fault Jeremiah for this very normal response, and I’m glad the many editors of the Bible throughout the centuries haven’t smoothed it over.
But here’s where we need to keep it in perspective. To look at this from the other side of the cross. What Jeremiah didn’t have... was Jesus. He lived six hundred years too early. That pivotal verse 39 says,
“Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”
So is Jesus saying to just give up?
I think it’s important to remember that he came to GIVE life and life abundant. What he’s talking about here, I’d say, is existential. Ontological, even (at the basis of our being).
The part of yourself that identifies with a tribe, a family, or an authority figure out of safety and fear instead of orienting itself in relation to an eternally loving God... must die. In order for you to truly live.
Jesus isn’t threatening or justifying physical violence. He’s making a diagnosis. He’s saying: the life you’re protecting right now — the one built on keeping the peace, staying in everyone’s good graces, never being a disappointment to those around you or to your own ego — that life is not actually your life. It’s a costume. And it’s exhausting to wear a costume your whole life.
The sword isn’t Jesus attacking your family or handing you a green light for any aggression you may want to mete out.
The sword is what it feels like when you finally stop performing for an audience that’s been running your choices since you were an infant.
A lot of us carry this to our graves, and it’s really a bummer.
This word from Jesus feels like a rupture because, well, it is one. But on the other side of that rupture is something I pray Jeremiah got to experience: actual freedom.
Not just freedom from your dad, your hometown, or former versions of your “#bestself”.
Freedom in Christ is a sturdier kind of freedom, because it doesn’t depend on anyone else changing, dying, or finally approving of you.
In this love, you’re living FROM approval, not FOR approval.
And you don’t have to wait for the funeral. I didn’t need my father to die to be free of the script. But nobody told me there was another way. Baptism already cut that cord. I wish the priest who baptized me had told me that. (Godparents and sponsors, this is your one job!)
Christ already absorbed the rivalry, already took the sword meant to divide us and let it land on him instead. He already opened up a way of being a son, a daughter, a person, that doesn’t run on anyone’s approval but God’s.
You can lose the costume today.
No, you likely won’t shed it entirely. The old loyalty and guilt will probably keep elbowing its way back in — mine still does.
But you can look at the people you’ve been performing for, even the ones who are gone, even the ones still very much alive and still very opinionated,
and feeling, maybe just for a second, something other than fear.
That’s not Jesus bringing a sword to your family. Or handing you a sword and telling you to go, get ‘em. That’s Jesus taking a sword to the chains that bind you and cutting you loose.
Yes, it’s Father’s Day. All the complications and celebrations this day holds are in this room.
My dad was imperfect. Like I am, as a father. And this goes for just about every human dad who’s ever lived.
Families are where the mimicry and rivalry run deepest and cut closest.
But the Father we actually belong to at the very basis of our being doesn’t need your loyalty to know who he is.
He’s not waiting to see which way you vote or which FIFA team you root for, before deciding whether you’re his. He already took that sword and let it land on himself, so you wouldn’t have to keep handing it to the people you love.
With this Father, there’s no audience to perform for, no “us” that requires a “them” just the refreshingly sturdy freedom of being his. Which is to say, beloved, before you’ve proven anything at all.
So today, in a season when it’s tempting to let our loudest tribal voices tell us who ‘our people’ are and who they’re not (yes, gird your loins for more drum-beating from both sides about the 250th birthday of the US of A), maybe the gift is this:
You get to set the sword down too. Because the Father who made you isn’t keeping score the way the world taught you to.
Happy Father’s Day. You’re free.
Oh...
Go, USA! Amen.
Such an extraordinary message … the contention we live with … is all ours. We can put the sword down…. Now, all that is required … is to think, before you ever pick it up again! Work in progress!