Did you hear that Gospel? We have to hate our mother, hate our father, hate our brother, hate our sister..... My goodness, you know last weekend, Father Dibble preached on another passage, about taking the lower seat, and inviting the lame, the crippled and blind into the house, and being humble. And he said, "This is the most difficult passage in the Bible to preach on." It was so difficult that Father Dibble was ready to climb on his Harley-Davidson and ride off into the sunset with Lulu or Lola, whatever her name was. I don't think there is any comparison.... Where is my Harley-Davidson? Hate your mother. Hate your father. Hate your children. Hate your brothers and sisters. Hate yourself!

Well, I want to share with you two footnotes on this Gospel passage and two lessons it has for our daily lives. The first footnote is that this is not so much a goal or a recommendation or an ideal as it is an historical report. Luke wrote this passage and this Gospel about forty years after the death of Jesus. And, by then, the temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed, and the Jewish people were struggling to survive, and the Jesus Movement was a cause of great controversy and great division. And being a disciple of Jesus at that time DID mean dividing families, leaving families, breaking up households, testing your Jewish roots and challenging your Roman citizenship. That's what it meant to be a disciple. So, what we get here is not a teaching from Jesus on how it's supposed to be, but a rather accurate historical report on how exactly it was to be a disciple in those days.

Second footnote: We are called to hate in this passage. Scholars tell us that this word "hate" really means to love less. It doesn't mean to detest, despise, or have hostility, but rather to love less. Disciples of Jesus were called to love their families, to love mother and father and brother and sister, to hold them as very important, but when compared to the teachings of Jesus and the Person of Jesus, families should come in second.... a close second, which isn't bad, to come in a close second to Jesus. Those are the two footnotes.

The two lessons for our daily lives, from this passage: I would call the first lesson as telling us that, as disciples, we have to be in this for the long haul. We live in a society and in a culture of rapid change, of shifting values and of broken promises. I think, more than any generation we can remember (Go back to your parents and grandparents or certainly go back to the generation before the Second World War.) We move from house to house much more than they ever did. We change neighborhoods much more than they ever did. We move across the nation more than they ever did. You know, you can look back to people coming to California in covered wagons, but they came and stayed. We get transferred back and forth by corporations around the country. It's a time when we always want instantaneous solutions. We want a quick fix. We are comfortable with microwave meals, and frequent change. And we change jobs; we change careers; we change friendships; we change partners. And, in the middle of this, this Gospel passage says to us "When it comes to being a disciple of Jesus you have to be in it for the long haul." Or else, Jesus says, you end up like an unfinished building, in ruins, or like a king who is overpowered and demolished and defeated in war, or later on, He will say, you will end up like salt that is without any flavor and which is spoiled.

When it comes to making a committment, especially in church-ey business, you know, going to church regularly, or getting involved in ministry, when it comes to being committed to being church-ey, I think there are always three stages or three steps. The first stage I call the "fun stage." We end up getting involved and we say, "I love doing this. Why didn't I get more involved sooner?" And that's great, but it's deceptive, because very soon we are going to move to some other stages. And, the second stage that we have to be careful about, because it is mistaken and we can get stuck there, I would call the "intolerant stage," where we say anyone who doesn't get involved like me and see things as we do is a bad person. Now that's mistaken and hopefully we don't get stuck there but some people do. Some people do, and it's common, I think, to right-wing fundamentalists and to over-zealous liberals and, unfortunately to rigid Catholics. And we have to move on to the third stage, which I call the "reality stage," which means "I know these are values that are important. I know this is important in my life, and I know I can make a small change, not a big change, a small change, but it's real." And I think it's at that stage that disciples and saints are found. Someone has said, "The worst mistake in the world is to do nothing because we think we can do only a little." We have to do what we can, and over the long haul.

The second lesson for our daily life really raises the question for us, "What do we love less? What should come in second in our lives?" I mean, for those early Christians it was their Jewish traditions and roots. It was their Roman citizenship. But that's not what it is for us. I think there is a whole range of things. Let me suggest a few. One is, we belong to a larger family if we are trying to follow Jesus and the God that Jesus talks about. And it means what comes in maybe a close second, but second, has got to be our family, or our nation, or even our church. We cannot put our family first before everyone else, our nation, America, first before everyone else (Jesus says, "Wrong!") or our church, the Roman Catholic Church, first before everyone else. Jesus calls us to a broader vision of that, to all of humanity. And the second thing that we're called to is integrity in the face of moral dilemmas. We live in a world filled with moral dilemmas that we have to struggle with, bio-ethical issues, for example (stem-cell research, the beginning-of-life issues and end-of-life issues,) but business ethics too and politics too and the call to be a people for justice, which means trying to set things right with love. If we have integrity we are going to end up putting a lot of things we really cherish second so we can really put those other values first.

And the third and last area I'd mention, (This may sound a little complicated but it's a tension between believing in our faith and being fresh about it. How can I explain that?) Not all of us, but most of us, grew up with a gift of faith from our parents, from our teachers. By the second grade, we knew about Jesus. We knew about God. We knew about the Church. We knew about the Sacraments. Those are wonderful things, a faith that we want to treasure and not lose. But we have to move it to a different level because we live in a different age, a different world, a different universe. For example, the stories that we learned about Genesis.... How have you put them together with what you know about science and evolution and all the galaxies of the world? Have you put those together? Belief in Jesus as the Savior of all mankind.... Have you put that together with the fact that most of mankind will never hear of Jesus? Not to mention the universes beyond this planet! Have you put that together? Now, what we have to love less is our comfort level, because it's very comfortable not to think about those things and just to stay with the Jesus and faith we learned from our parents and from our second grade teacher. And that is absolutely fine, as long as you're a second-grader. Now, I'm not going to ask for a show of hands of how many second-graders we have. But I can look around. I know a lot of us are not, and we have to move beyond that even if it means letting go and loving less the comfort that we once had with a child's faith. We have to allow ourselves to raise questions, to search our faith, and to grow.

I have one last footnote, and that's about the final line of Jesus where He says, "Renounce everything.... Renounce everything. Renounce all your possessions." I don't think He means clearing out your bank account this weekend, getting rid of your house and everything. I think what Jesus is telling us is we have to allow Jesus and His values to possess us. And then if we do, then we will be blessed with wisdom. We will be blessed with good judgment about things, and we will have a light grip on our possessions, rather than our possessions having a tight grip on us. And Jesus says that's the way to go. Amen.