How Wide Are You Willing To Love?

The Rev. Sara Warfield

Scripture Luke 14:25-33

Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.

How could Jesus possibly ask such a thing? Isn’t that the opposite of his message of healing, liberation, and love?

Well, let me ask you this: Do you think there are no rich people in the kingdom of God, since it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for them to get in? What percentage of Christians in these two millennia since Jesus walked this earth do you think have gouged out their right eye because they had lustful thoughts after seeing someone they found attractive?

Jesus isn’t speaking literally, not about rich people, not about gouging eyes out, and not about hating our families. As we can see throughout all the gospels, Jesus very often exaggerates to make his point. It was a common rhetorical device among teachers, politicians, and speakers at that time. Those there listening to Jesus would have never presumed to take him literally, to take what he says as facts rather than a way of description that points to a greater truth.

And that greater truth is indeed healing, liberation, and love. But the exaggeration takes all of this a step further. When Jesus is saying that we must hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, he’s saying, if you want to be my disciple, you need to look beyond your family, beyond those who are easy to love, when it comes to offering healing, liberation, and love.

And let’s be real: for many of us, some of our family members are not easy to love. To you Jesus might say that you must hate your closest friend, a beloved mentor, or your sweet dog.

He says this same thing a little differently in the sermon on the plain earlier in the gospel of Luke:

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.

What Jesus is actually saying in both of these passages is: How far are you willing to go in order to offer healing? What are you willing to risk to set people free from oppression? How wide are you willing to love?

Because if that love extends only to people who are easy for you to love, who will easily love you back, then your discipleship is falling short. If you’re not willing to get uncomfortable, or as Jesus exaggerates, to hate even life itself, for the sake of healing, liberation, and love, then you aren’t being his disciple.

And I want to remind us that Jesus gave us many different examples of what healing, liberation, and love look like. When a naked man who called himself Legion and who lived in a tomb away from polite society approached Jesus, Jesus didn’t recoil. He didn’t refuse to make eye contact and then walk past him like he didn’t exist. No, Jesus stopped, asked him his name, saw that he was suffering, and offered him healing.

When Jesus saw that there were sellers in the temple, in a sacred place of worship, who were exploiting people’s beliefs and spiritual practices for the sake of their own profit, he turned over their tables and drove them out. In calling out their bad behavior, he liberated those worshipers they were exploiting.

When Jesus passed by a tax collector named Levi, a man who would have been considered a traitor to Jesus and his Jewish brethren, a man who took too much from people who had too little for his own benefit, a man Jesus was supposed to revile, Jesus invited him into his circle and accepted an invitation to eat dinner at Levi’s house with other tax collectors and sinners, offering them love and understanding rather than judgment and condemnation.

Who are the Legions of our time in our world? Who are the sellers in the temple and who are they exploiting? Who are the Levis of our time in our world? I know this much: they’re usually the people that most of us would rather walk in a wide circle around to avoid rather than risk engagement or, God forbid, confrontation.

But, Jesus is telling us in all his hyperbole, that’s the opposite of what discipleship looks like. We are called beyond the safety of loving those who are easy to love and who easily love us back and into the challenge of getting uncomfortable, risking reputation and rejection and ridicule, so that we may bring healing, liberation, and love to those who need it most.

And that’s why we’re here at church. Every Sunday. And sometimes other days. With all these people who are not our blood relatives, for the most part. We’re here to practice. To bump up against one another. To annoy each other. Yes, some aspects of who I am are annoying to someone in this room, and some aspects of who you are are annoying to someone in this room. Sometimes I’m hard to love, and so are you. So are all of us sometimes. But we are all, every one of us, deserving of healing, liberation, and love.

So we gather here to practice figuring out how to provide those things. We do it here because we know we can screw it up sometimes and know that this will still be a safe place. We know that we can be honest with one another with a level of grace and mercy that we don’t always see outside these doors. We know we can hold one another accountable, say hard things to one another, and know that both the speaker and the receiver will be held with love.

Or at least that is my hope. If that’s not your experience of this St. Luke’s community, I invite you to tell me. Or if you’re not comfortable coming to me, that’s okay, you can talk to one of our Vestry members who you feel comfortable with. Because the whole point of Jesus’ teachings and example is to grow our healing wider, to find ways to love one another more authentically, to set one another free in ways that we didn’t even know we needed.

We practice that here so that we can bring that kind of courageous, sometimes challenging way of being out into our homes, our workplaces, our communities. If you come a little early to worship every Sunday, that’s what you hear me pray for with the musicians: that through our gifts we nurture Jesus’ healing, liberation, and love here in this sacred and safe place so that all who worship here may have the strength to bring it into the world. May it be so.