May I have the grace to speak to you in the Name of the Father who is beyond all our concepts of Fatherhood – and in the Name of the Christ who, as the poet GM Hopkins says, plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his – and in the Name of the Holy Spirit who calls us to grow beyond our egos to become Christ’s body in this world. Amen.
One of the things I most love about Scripture is that it tells the truth, and in a world and time when truth can feel slippery, this is a gift valuable beyond all telling. Even when the truths it tells are hard – hard to understand, hard to accept, hard to follow – Scripture does not shirk from telling us the truth. Thanks be to God!
This morning’s Gospel is replete with these tough truths. And though perhaps part (or all) of you want to turn away – maybe your heart and your mind can’t or won’t find space for those truths just yet – these truths call out to us for our good, and for the good of the world around us.
The first thing that may be hard to hear – here on Father’s Day – is to hear Jesus say:
Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
For I have come to set a man against his father,
…and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.
Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.
These are tough words to hear, even if some of us grew up in households where our fathers (or mothers) weren’t very loving or nurturing. So let’s do some digging into the background of the words that Jesus uses, and see if that might help us better understand – and then live into – just what Jesus is getting at.
First, a word about Father language in the Gospels. Jesus consistently addresses the God who called and sent him as his Father. You know this, of course, because of the prayer that he taught us which we call the Lord’s Prayer, or the Our Father.
Jesus is up to something in his language about God as Father that is more than cozy, feel-good language about God as “daddy.” What Jesus is up to in calling God “Father” is important, and far more radical than mere fatherly coziness. He is reshaping for us, and inviting us to reshape, our entire understanding of what it means to have been created/fathered by God, and to be part of a community, a family, that is bigger, broader, and more encompassing than blood family.
God is to be our Father, and we are all to be brothers and sisters in this new community, this family of God, that is being called, and shaped, and sent out into the world by God’s number one son, Jesus. This will mean that we may have to turn away from our fathers – and mothers, and in-laws – all our blood relations – in order to become part of this larger and broader family, whose legacy will go beyond earthly inheritance of property, or houses, to join what St. Paul in his letter to the Galatian Christian community calls “the household of faith.”
Later in St. Matthew’s Gospel Jesus sharpens even further this whole new idea of a community beyond blood family by saying: “Call no one your father on earth. For you have one Father – the one in the heavens.” Talk about expanding our focus! It is as if Jesus is saying to us: “Your whole idea and experience of family and fatherhood is too small. Open your eyes and hearts and minds wider. Look out beyond your blood family. Look up. The only one you should call Father is the one who made the whole Creation. The Father in the heavens. The Father bigger than the cosmos.”
Perhaps all of us have had to stretch our hearts, souls, and minds beyond whatever comfortableness we knew from the parents who raised us, and the family household in which we grew up. For some, of course, this stretching has had to be more extreme than for others.
An example: a gay or lesbian or trans child whose coming out resulted in their father and mother disowning them, and then throwing them out of the household in which they had grown up.
But I think all of us, as we came of age, have learned to see that our fathers – and our mothers – no matter how stellar they may have been in certain ways, these parents of ours had clay feet…and so we have had to ask: “Does honoring my father and my mother mean that I have to bow down to and agree with everything they stand for?” When we reach this limit, this sort of line in the sand, it is often because we have found a value – something that matters to us – something or someone that we love – more than we love or honor our parents.
This can come about in simpler, smaller ways – say the dating of and falling in love with someone who doesn’t meet our family’s approval. (I still remember coming home from 1st grade to tell my Baptist grandmother with great excitement that I had fallen in love with Frankie (a girl, not a boy), and wanted to marry her. Only to see the look of horror on grandmother’s face, and hear her say, “Now Bill, you can’t marry Frankie. She’s a Roman Catholic!”) Though that crisis passed quickly, it was my first glimpse of the possibility that I might love and value deeply something or someone more than my blood family.
Of course, stepping outside the values of one’s family can have much more lasting consequences than the passing disapproval of one’s beloved Grandmother over one’s choice of a 1st grade love. The consequences of choosing something or someone other than what “Father Thinks/Knows Best” can literally alter the course of one’s life – and in some cases lead to one’s death. To choose something outside the comfortable familiarity of home, family, and culture means a kind of sword will have to be wielded to separate one from what was comfortable and familiar, so that one can choose what is of a higher value.
I think this is what Jesus means when he says that he comes not to bring peace but a sword. In Greek the verb we translate as bring really has a more active sense to it. In fact it means to throw. Maybe Jesus is saying that he is going to cast a sword into our midst to interrupt our everyday comfort with the ways things are, like a wrench jamming the gears of a smoothly running machine. Maybe Jesus is saying: “Wait a minute! I need to jam the works. Because this isn’t how God intended things to be! We can/we need to do better!”
So God calls all of us out of comfortable peace. Out of the hammock and into the fray. And sometimes these calls from God are terribly costly. I happen to have been on March 7, and in the calendar of saints that is the day the Church marks the martyrdom in the year 203 of St. Perpetua, who chose faith in Christ over the paganism of her father. She was a young North African mother – only 22 – and she had probably already been widowed, because her husband is never mentioned in the reliable accounts written of Perpetua within a year of her death. For her faith in Christ, her ruler and guide, the head of her family, she was imprisoned and sentenced to death. When her pagan father came to visit her in prison, and begged her to recant her following of Christ, Perpetua is recorded as having said: “See that pot lying there? Can you call it by any other name that what it is?” When her father answered, “Of course not,” Perpetua responded, “Neither can I call myself by any other name than what I am – a Christian.” For choosing Christ as head of her family instead of her father or the Emperor, Perpetua died by the sword in gladiatorial games to celebrate the birthday of the son and heir of the Emperor Septimius Severus.
The celebration of birthdays of those in the ruling class have wasted countless lives and countless resources then and since. And so it was forbidden for Christians in the early church to attend the gladiatorial games – because they glorified the exalted (supposedly divine) status of the Emperor and his family, and because innocent blood was shed in those games. Christians had to make a choice: attend or not attend? Attend and glorify the ruler and pump up his status? Or glorify Christ and choose not to attend. Perpetua made her choice on March 7th, 203. She would glorify Christ, with her loyalty and life, not the Emperor and his son.
And so it with us, we must make our choices about who we will glorify with our loyalty and life. And so, week by week, and day by day, we Christians in our time and place must make choices. To whom will we give our loyalty and the gift of our lives? And from whom will we turn away so that we will not perjure our faith in Christ?
Last Sunday, for instance, June 14, 2026, Christian Americans had to make a choice about whom to glorify by the gift of their time, attendance, and treasure. Some chose to give themselves once again to Christ and the weekly celebration of his opening the gates of eternal life to every family, people, tribe, and nation (as the Book of Revelation rejoices). Some last Sunday instead chose to give their time, attendance, and treasure to celebrate the birthday of the President of the United States who has no power to rescue into life all peoples of all backgrounds.
And so, we followers of Christ gathered here on this Sunday, one week later, must make our own choices about where we will place our loyalties; and who we will glorify by our presence.
By your presence here today, you have signaled your choice. You have chosen again – when so many other choices are placed before us all every Sunday – to give your loyalty to Christ and to the values of the One he called his Father in the Heavens. And later today in the Our Father, we will re-assert our choice of ultimate loyalty to God, and to the kingdom of God, and not to any earthly realm or ruler. It is, of course, one thing to do this in church Sunday by Sunday. What is infinitely more difficult – and just as important – is to follow our Sunday words of faith and loyalty to Christ with weekday actions and words that reflect, and indeed embody and show forth to others, that we have chosen Christ and his Father – the ruler of the Cosmos – over every other loyalty.
Just one example: Our ancestors had to make these choices day by day about who is a part of our family, and how widely our family extends. As the Juneteenth celebration of the freeing of enslaved people of African descent reminds us, our ancestors had to choose whether these folks would be our folks, members of our family in Christ.
And we in our own day have to decide: will we regard as beloved members of our family, all people of all colors, and all backgrounds, of all classes – yes, and even those who choose loyalties abhorrent to us, lesser loyalties and lesser values than those of Christ and Christ’s Father.
If I really am to find a way to regard even people whose values I disdain, or utterly abhor, as beloved members of my family in Christ, then those other hard words of Christ in this morning’s Gospel must come true. If I am to love and welcome as fellow members of the family of God: Donald, and Steven, and Ivanka and Jared, and Elon, and so many others that I would otherwise gladly consign to some other place than God’s eternal household of love and joy, then I must indeed take up my cross and follow Christ, losing my life of certainty that I am right and deserving of God’s numbering the hairs on my head, and that they are not deserving. It’s a day-by-day lifelong journey into this truth: namely, that fullest truth and the highest values are not in my keeping, but in the good and loving keeping of the Father of the Cosmos, the Father in the heavens, who regards and treats all of us as precious, beloved valuable sparrows in a world where sparrows’ lives are fragile and short.
This same God asks us to treat each other this way…every each other, not just the others we comfortably agree with. And so God in Christ invites – no commands – us to take up our cross and follow him to that eternal banquet table where we will find ourselves – undoubtedly – surprised to be seated next to ones we thought weren’t deserving of an entry ticket into that banquet, and who the host at the head of the table – Christ Himself – commands us to break a piece of our own bread – His Bread after all – and share it with that unlikely despised one seated next to us, and invites – no commands – us to share the joyful cup of God’s inebriating love with that same one, so that together we may flow into the deepest truth of all: all of this – and all of us – are God’s, and all of it this – all of us – are precious to him, forever and ever. Amen.
The Rev. Dr. William W. Rich
June 20th, 2026, 4th Sunday after Pentecost
Chapel of St. James the Fisherman, Wellfleet