Sunday Sermon - 7 September
Did you hear what I just read? Jesus, our Lord of Love, is telling us to hate our mothers and our fathers, our wives and our children, our brothers and our sisters, and even our own very lives. If we don’t, we cannot be his disciple.
Hate is a really strong word. In our house, it is a curse word. In fact, when my children were young I would much prefer (though I still didn’t like it) to hear them use other cuss words than the word ‘hate.’ So today, when we hear Jesus use this word, it hurts my ears and my heart. It feels like such a contradiction coming from our Lord who calls us to love unconditionally, issuing to us our Great Commandment - To Love God with all of our heart, all of our mind, all of our soul and all of our strength, and to love our neighbours as ourselves.
So, I had a thought. I wondered how many times the Gospels report that Jesus called us to love versus how many times Jesus called us to hate. I turned to AI for the answers on this one.
As an aside, I use an AI platform called Berean AI. It’s an AI product that is specific to religious and biblical questions and can be really helpful with biblical study and exegesis. Here is what I discovered:
There are eight accounts, eight passages, that are the clearest explicit imperatives where Jesus directly uses the verb “love” (The Greek - ἀγαπᾶτε - agapáte - “you love”) in addressing His disciples. While the theme of love is pervasive throughout the Gospels, these texts form the explicit commands to love by Jesus.
They can be found in:
• Matthew 5:44 – “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
• Matthew 22:37–39 – “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart… You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
• Mark 12:30–31 – Parallel to Matthew 22, Jesus repeats the twofold command as the essence of true religion.
• Luke 6:27–35 – It’s an extended discourse: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you… and you will be sons of the Most High.”
• Luke 10:27–28 – Jesus affirms the lawyer’s summary and adds, “Do this, (love) and you will live.”
• John 13:34–35 – “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.”
• John 15:12–13 – “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.”
• John 15:17 – “These things I command you, so that you will love one another.”
On the other hand, our reading today is the only place in all of the Gospels where the word “hate” is used by Jesus. In fact, even in the parallel to this passage in Matthew, Matthew 10:37, the word Jesus used is not translated as hate but as “love less than.” It reads: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me…”
The word that was in the original Biblical Greek text that was translated in our Luke reading for today, was the word "miseo" (μῖσος). It’s the root of our words like misogyny, for example.
According to Berean, “the word Miseo is used to convey the idea of a lesser love or strong disfavor, rather than literal hatred. This Greek word is the one translated as "hate" in our Gospel passage and is understood in context to mean holding God in higher priority than family or self, even to the extent of "loving (them) less" than your love for Jesus.
The point is, the strong connotations that we associate with the word “hate” as we read it today is not what Jesus is saying and does not contradict the other eight times we are commanded to love. Rather, Jesus is calling us to prioritize our devotion to God and to understand the implications of following in Christ’s footsteps. Jesus is saying, you have to put me and your love for me above all else, including yourselves. You have to sacrifice in ultimate humility, in order to fully know God. Being a Christian is not easy and not to be taken lightly.
We see and hear too much hatred today. It is everywhere - in the news, on our social media, everywhere - and it is incredibly disturbing. Today I want to walk us through the readings to discover a message of hope and love—showing how Jesus calls us, not to hate but to place our love for Him above all else, and how that love can transform our lives and our world.
First, Jeremiah’s vision sees God at the potter’s wheel, continuing to rework the clay that keeps malforming in his hands. God, the potter, is working us, His clay, and by our deeds and actions we continue to malform, but God never stops the wheel. He never takes His hands off of us and if we open ourselves to being malleable, if we stop resisting the potter’s touch, God will form us into the people we are called to be.
Today, one of the hardest shapes that appear to be challenging God’s ability to form us, is our partisan identities and especially as it relates to politics. People’s politics are increasingly becoming their defining loyalty, prioritizing their identity and shaping how we see others. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always flown a Canadian flag at our cottage and now, apparently, because I fly a Canadian flag some people have a preconceived perception about who I am and what I stand for politically, for example.
Our Psalmist for today celebrates the fact that God knows him better than anyone. God knows him more deeply than anyone because God has created him, formed him “knit him together in his mother’s womb”. The Psalmist rejoices in the fact that God formed his truest identity and as a result, if our primary identity is in God then all other relationships have to come second to the relationship with our creator.
Paul’s letter to Philemon is the passage that ultimately set me on this theme and message for our sermon today. Paul is in prison with Timothy and he writes this letter to Philemon and all those who gather as Christians under his leadership. Paul is pleading to Philemon to change his perspective on a person that Paul has come to know and love, Onesimus. Onesimus was a former slave and even though he has been freed, he is still often perceived as lowly, unworthy, even hated as less than. Paul calls for Philemon and his Christian family to change and accept and welcome Onesimus as an equal - a fellow human being who deserves to be loved as a follower of Christ. It is a letter pleading for reconciliation, calling Philemon to forgive Onesimus’ debts and allow him to be free in Christ.
Today, when we read Paul’s letter, we, like the house of Philemon, are called to transform, to forgive, to reshape our social dictates no matter how costly or counterculture. We are called to see each other not as left/right, conservative or liberal, not as “other” but as equals, brothers and sisters - all one family in Christ.
You may be saying to yourself, “Oh ya, right, that’s easy for us to do in our little parish family of St. Johns and in our little village of Lakefield here in rural Ontario but what difference does that really make? Look at the world - it’s going to hell in a handbasket” (as the saying goes). But I urge you to look closer. There are signs of hope, even in American politics.
Have you ever heard of the “For Country Caucus”? It is a group of Congresspeople in the House of Representatives.
They are a bipartisan group, made up of current and former military veterans, that seeks to bridge America’s deeply polarized political landscape. The For Country Caucus is co-chaired by Democrat Don Davis (North Carolina) and Republican Jake Ellzey (Texas), this Caucus prioritizes shared national commitments—such as veterans’ issues, national security, and community service—over partisan allegiances. They put love and equality first and they’ve had success - influencing the passage of many pieces of bipartisan legislation over the years. It is their goal to bridge the political divide that threatens the democratic stability in America.
This caucus embodies Jesus' call to prioritize our love for God and others over all other allegiances. Their political identity, whether they are Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative is less important than their ultimate purpose of doing good and serving their people. We don’t hear of them much in the media, rather our news and social media likes to focus on the train wrecks of conflict, the hatred and bipartisanship. So I mention the For Country Caucus only because there are signs of hope, signs of love even in the noise and haze of the pervasive hatred that blinds us. We just need to look more closely, to find the love and focus on that and those whose voices may be harder to hear but are so much more important to listen to.
Jesus doesn’t call us to hate, as can be misinterpreted in today’s Gospel, Jesus calls us to prioritize our love and be prepared to sacrifice for HIM who we love the most - our God, our creator, our potter who forms us. Jesus calls us to set aside our human inclinations to be judgemental and divisive - and to place nothing above our mandate to love.
Today we are reminded that even when we lose perspective and misplace our priorities, God does not abandon us. Like a potter at the wheel, He forgives us, reworks us, and reshapes us into what we are called to be—loving followers of Christ.
We just sang these words, and I’d like to end with repeating them one more time, as we surrender to Christ:
“Have Thine own way, Lord, have Thine own way.
Thou art the potter, I am the clay.
Mold me and make me after Thy will,
While I am waiting, yielded and still.”
Today I pray we surrender to God by ‘loving less’ every other claim on our lives, laying aside division so that Christ may be our first love. Then, through us, God’s reconciling love can flow into our divided world, and we can become beacons of love and hope for others.
Amen.