Matthew 10:24-39
“I Don’t Like It”
Preached Sunday, June 21, 2026
This is a terrible text for today. It is the assigned lectionary text from the Revised Common Lectionary which has been around for about thirty years - a collection of four texts a week (Old Testament, Psalm, Gospel, New Testament) that repeats on a three year rotation. Trust me, I did not seek out or purposefully choose a text for Father’s Day that says, “For I have come to set a man against his father…”
And I’ll be honest with you. I don’t like this text. Yes - a pastor can say that. A Christian can say that. This text comes to us from our Holy Scriptures, the Gospels no less, red letters from Jesus and - I don’t like it.
And I’ll be honest with you. I don’t like this text. Yes - a pastor can say that. A Christian can say that. This text comes to us from our Holy Scriptures, the Gospels no less, red letters from Jesus and - I don’t like it.
It doesn’t sound like the Jesus I know, love, and preach about.
It doesn’t sound like the same Jesus, the same God, who said “Love one another” or “God is Love.”
And so this makes me stop, pause and ask: What do we do with Scripture that we don’t like? How do we engage with texts that make us uncomfortable?
I am often tempted to ignore them. I will admit that I have chosen, in the past, to choose different Scriptures to focus on in preaching because the assigned text for the day was a doozy.
And this one is a doozy. At times, this choice may be a selfish one from me - that I don’t have the energy or the time to engage with the text in a way that is constructive. And still, not every text from the Bible works well in a sermon. Other texts can be parsed out better in Bible study or conversation. Regardless - my inert inclination is to ignore the texts I don’t like.
Others may take texts like this purely at face value. They may say something like, “The Bible says it. I believe. Period.” And it ends there. But - I also don’t think this is a healthy way to engage with Scripture. Because the Bible does contradict itself. Genesis 1 and 2 have different orders of creation. The history between Judges and Joshua are the same time period but have different versions of events. Some of the commands that the writers claim came from God in the Old Testament, directly contradict not only Jesus’s commands to love one another but the law passed on by God in the Old Testament. If we simply say, “The Bible says it. I believe it. Period.” We will actually end up doing our faith, our relationship with God, and the extremely complex book that is the Bible a disservice. We will tie ourselves in knots trying to erase contradictions. We will even find ourselves excusing behavior that is an affront to God simply because it is “Biblical.” Remember - not everything that is Biblical is Christ-like.
So if we don’t ignore the text. If we don’t just give it a blanket statement of uncritical acceptance - what do we do with it?
We wrestle with the text.
And so today, I was tempted to ignore this text, to pick something else to preach on - and instead, I have chosen for us to wrestle with it together.
First, let’s start with the foundation for wrestling with the Biblical text. The Biblical text welcomes wrestling, it welcomes questions, it welcomes us diving deep - Jacob wrestled with God and was rewarded for it, given the name of Israel. Thomas doubted and was able to touch Jesus. We too can come to know God better, to more closely encounter God, when we wrestle with Scripture.
This is evidenced in Scripture and it is a part of our tradition as United Methodists. United Methodists do not believe that Scripture is innerent - meaning that it is without error. We do, however, believe that as it says in our articles of faith, that the Bible holds everything necessary for salvation. And - The Bible was written by people interpreting God’s actions in the world. There are a myriad of genres in the Bible, vastly different culture concepts, and thousands of years of changing perspectives in the Bible, not to mention it was originally written in three different languages, none of which are Latin or Greek which is where a lot of modern English Bible translations come from. All of this is to say - we are called to wrestle with Scripture. And United Methodists have coined a term for the tools that we use to wrestle with and better understand Scripture and that is called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.
The Wesleyan Quadrilateral is often presented as a trapezoid where Scripture is the longest, bottom line and then the other lines are Reason, Tradition and Experience. It’s also often presented as a three-legged stool with Scripture being the seat and the legs that hold it up are reason, tradition, and experience. I prefer the example of colored lenses. We read Scripture through the colored lenses of reason, tradition, and experience - those lenses color how we understand and interpret Scripture which is not a bad thing. Because those lenses are always there for every single person whether we realize it or not. There is no such thing as an unbiased reading of Scripture. Instead we need to be aware of the factors that God is using to help God speak to us through Scripture and help make it relevant and applicable to our lives today.
Tradition is the long history of people of faith - from teachings, sermons, creeds, and hymns that have shaped, interpreted, and put our faith into practice. Experience is each and every one of our lived experiences as unique individuals in this world. Our genders, our ethnicities, our family structures, everything that’s ever happened to us - this is our experience of who we are and we cannot read Scripture without it influencing us. We can also learn from those who read Scripture and have different experiences than us. And then there is reason. Reason is our brain’s ability to think, question, and understand. To take into account science, logic, and the growing understanding of human knowledge and how God can use that to speak to us in new ways.
So yes - we wrestle with Scripture, aided by tradition, experience, and reason - so that - so that - we can better know God and be better followers of Jesus.
So whenever I approach the Biblical text - I use Jesus as the anchor of my faith and understanding. Jesus is God revealed to us. God sent Jesus so that we would better know and understand God - so that God would be revealed to us. And so whenever we engage Scripture we should always start with the embodiment of Jesus. And Jesus says that the core of the Gospel, the core of the Good News of God, is the two greatest commandments - to love God, and to love neighbor as self. All other Scripture should radiate out from that center.
Using Jesus and the two greatest commandments of the Gospel. Let's take God’s commandments in Joshua to kill every man, woman and child into account. How do we deal with texts like this that are so deeply contradictory to the life and Good News of Jesus? Many will say “well, that was the Old Testament God, not the New Testament God.” But the tradition of the church has long been considered it a heresy to divide our God into two different gods. We can use reason to see that although the text in Joshua says they killed every man, woman, and child…in Judges and Kings, we see people of the tribes they presumably killed still living in the land. So we can use reason to say there is something amiss in the text here. It doesn’t add up. And then we can use our experiences of the long scope of human history to know that there is nothing new under the sun and since the beginning of time, people have been claiming that God has sanctioned our tribalistic and violent endeavours - even though that is not the person of God. Most people today realize that the Crusades were not blessed by God. They were not a “holy” effort - they were politically motivated wars over resources and borders. Violence that was abhorrent to God was committed. And yet, if they took place during the time of Scripture, and the people leading these wars had written them into the text, they would have been written as ordained by God. People are always looking for God to bless their violence and nationalistic wars - but saying or writing it, even in a book that thousands of years later would be canonized, does not make it so. Taken together, we can say with confidence that the violence in the book of Joshua was not ordained by God and is not congruent with the person of Jesus that we follow.
Okay - I have been talking a lot about things other than our assigned text this morning in order to help us wrestle with the difficult words of Jesus we read this morning. So now let’s do a little bit of wrestling with that text.
This morning’s Gospel text is about being a disciple and Jesus is warning his disciples about what it will be like to follow him - it will not be all sunshine and roses. Jesus is not being prescriptive (that is say that being a follower of Jesus means that there SHOULD be familial strife) but he is being descriptive - saying that, at that moment in time, and throughout times in history, being a follower of Jesus will put you at odds with other allegiances - including familial ones.
This particular teaching to his disciples starts with an admonition that is repeated over and over in Scripture: Do not be afraid. “You will face hardship and be judged…don’t be afraid when this happens!” Don’t be afraid said over and over throughout Scripture, God is comforting and assuring us that no matter what we go through in this life, God will be there.
Jesus says, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, fear the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” - I could give a whole sermon just on the Greek words used for "destroy" and “hell” here which are not direct Greek-English translations, I think this is important to understand when wrestling with the text, we are dealing with different languages, translations, etc - and even scholars don’t always agree on the best English word to use in translation…but this sermon is long enough as it is. But the text always has more that we can explore and wrestle with.
And, basically, what Jesus is telling the disciples is again, “do not fear” - no matter what other people can do to you, no matter how being a follower of Jesus affects your other relationships, God holds your soul in the palm of God’s hands.
Jesus stresses this point again in the next couple of verses: “are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.”
And now we come to: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword.” Yikes.
Many have taken this verse as an excuse for Christian violence which is a complete misunderstanding or even an abuse of Jesus’s words - Jesus, who we call the Prince of Peace, who told us to turn the other cheek, who told us to love our enemies and bless those who persecute us, who told Peter to put away the sword and said that those who live by the sword die by the sword… No, those who want to use the name of our God to commit violence against fellow human beings created by God will always find justification - even if it means misunderstanding and misrepresenting who Jesus is. So using the other red letters of Jesus and our reasoning here, we can know that Jesus means a metaphorical sword, not a physical one.
Jesus is not telling us to commit violence, instead Jesus is saying that choosing to follow Jesus can cause strife in our world and relationships - in fact following Jesus may be the sword that cuts relational ties for us.
Which brings us to the next verses which are just perfect for Father’s Day:
“For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, 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, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”
Jesus is not encouraging familial strife. He was talking to his disciples who were experiencing familial strife because of their decision to follow Jesus.
It doesn’t sound like the same Jesus, the same God, who said “Love one another” or “God is Love.”
And so this makes me stop, pause and ask: What do we do with Scripture that we don’t like? How do we engage with texts that make us uncomfortable?
I am often tempted to ignore them. I will admit that I have chosen, in the past, to choose different Scriptures to focus on in preaching because the assigned text for the day was a doozy.
And this one is a doozy. At times, this choice may be a selfish one from me - that I don’t have the energy or the time to engage with the text in a way that is constructive. And still, not every text from the Bible works well in a sermon. Other texts can be parsed out better in Bible study or conversation. Regardless - my inert inclination is to ignore the texts I don’t like.
Others may take texts like this purely at face value. They may say something like, “The Bible says it. I believe. Period.” And it ends there. But - I also don’t think this is a healthy way to engage with Scripture. Because the Bible does contradict itself. Genesis 1 and 2 have different orders of creation. The history between Judges and Joshua are the same time period but have different versions of events. Some of the commands that the writers claim came from God in the Old Testament, directly contradict not only Jesus’s commands to love one another but the law passed on by God in the Old Testament. If we simply say, “The Bible says it. I believe it. Period.” We will actually end up doing our faith, our relationship with God, and the extremely complex book that is the Bible a disservice. We will tie ourselves in knots trying to erase contradictions. We will even find ourselves excusing behavior that is an affront to God simply because it is “Biblical.” Remember - not everything that is Biblical is Christ-like.
So if we don’t ignore the text. If we don’t just give it a blanket statement of uncritical acceptance - what do we do with it?
We wrestle with the text.
And so today, I was tempted to ignore this text, to pick something else to preach on - and instead, I have chosen for us to wrestle with it together.
First, let’s start with the foundation for wrestling with the Biblical text. The Biblical text welcomes wrestling, it welcomes questions, it welcomes us diving deep - Jacob wrestled with God and was rewarded for it, given the name of Israel. Thomas doubted and was able to touch Jesus. We too can come to know God better, to more closely encounter God, when we wrestle with Scripture.
This is evidenced in Scripture and it is a part of our tradition as United Methodists. United Methodists do not believe that Scripture is innerent - meaning that it is without error. We do, however, believe that as it says in our articles of faith, that the Bible holds everything necessary for salvation. And - The Bible was written by people interpreting God’s actions in the world. There are a myriad of genres in the Bible, vastly different culture concepts, and thousands of years of changing perspectives in the Bible, not to mention it was originally written in three different languages, none of which are Latin or Greek which is where a lot of modern English Bible translations come from. All of this is to say - we are called to wrestle with Scripture. And United Methodists have coined a term for the tools that we use to wrestle with and better understand Scripture and that is called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.
The Wesleyan Quadrilateral is often presented as a trapezoid where Scripture is the longest, bottom line and then the other lines are Reason, Tradition and Experience. It’s also often presented as a three-legged stool with Scripture being the seat and the legs that hold it up are reason, tradition, and experience. I prefer the example of colored lenses. We read Scripture through the colored lenses of reason, tradition, and experience - those lenses color how we understand and interpret Scripture which is not a bad thing. Because those lenses are always there for every single person whether we realize it or not. There is no such thing as an unbiased reading of Scripture. Instead we need to be aware of the factors that God is using to help God speak to us through Scripture and help make it relevant and applicable to our lives today.
Tradition is the long history of people of faith - from teachings, sermons, creeds, and hymns that have shaped, interpreted, and put our faith into practice. Experience is each and every one of our lived experiences as unique individuals in this world. Our genders, our ethnicities, our family structures, everything that’s ever happened to us - this is our experience of who we are and we cannot read Scripture without it influencing us. We can also learn from those who read Scripture and have different experiences than us. And then there is reason. Reason is our brain’s ability to think, question, and understand. To take into account science, logic, and the growing understanding of human knowledge and how God can use that to speak to us in new ways.
So yes - we wrestle with Scripture, aided by tradition, experience, and reason - so that - so that - we can better know God and be better followers of Jesus.
So whenever I approach the Biblical text - I use Jesus as the anchor of my faith and understanding. Jesus is God revealed to us. God sent Jesus so that we would better know and understand God - so that God would be revealed to us. And so whenever we engage Scripture we should always start with the embodiment of Jesus. And Jesus says that the core of the Gospel, the core of the Good News of God, is the two greatest commandments - to love God, and to love neighbor as self. All other Scripture should radiate out from that center.
Using Jesus and the two greatest commandments of the Gospel. Let's take God’s commandments in Joshua to kill every man, woman and child into account. How do we deal with texts like this that are so deeply contradictory to the life and Good News of Jesus? Many will say “well, that was the Old Testament God, not the New Testament God.” But the tradition of the church has long been considered it a heresy to divide our God into two different gods. We can use reason to see that although the text in Joshua says they killed every man, woman, and child…in Judges and Kings, we see people of the tribes they presumably killed still living in the land. So we can use reason to say there is something amiss in the text here. It doesn’t add up. And then we can use our experiences of the long scope of human history to know that there is nothing new under the sun and since the beginning of time, people have been claiming that God has sanctioned our tribalistic and violent endeavours - even though that is not the person of God. Most people today realize that the Crusades were not blessed by God. They were not a “holy” effort - they were politically motivated wars over resources and borders. Violence that was abhorrent to God was committed. And yet, if they took place during the time of Scripture, and the people leading these wars had written them into the text, they would have been written as ordained by God. People are always looking for God to bless their violence and nationalistic wars - but saying or writing it, even in a book that thousands of years later would be canonized, does not make it so. Taken together, we can say with confidence that the violence in the book of Joshua was not ordained by God and is not congruent with the person of Jesus that we follow.
Okay - I have been talking a lot about things other than our assigned text this morning in order to help us wrestle with the difficult words of Jesus we read this morning. So now let’s do a little bit of wrestling with that text.
This morning’s Gospel text is about being a disciple and Jesus is warning his disciples about what it will be like to follow him - it will not be all sunshine and roses. Jesus is not being prescriptive (that is say that being a follower of Jesus means that there SHOULD be familial strife) but he is being descriptive - saying that, at that moment in time, and throughout times in history, being a follower of Jesus will put you at odds with other allegiances - including familial ones.
This particular teaching to his disciples starts with an admonition that is repeated over and over in Scripture: Do not be afraid. “You will face hardship and be judged…don’t be afraid when this happens!” Don’t be afraid said over and over throughout Scripture, God is comforting and assuring us that no matter what we go through in this life, God will be there.
Jesus says, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, fear the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” - I could give a whole sermon just on the Greek words used for "destroy" and “hell” here which are not direct Greek-English translations, I think this is important to understand when wrestling with the text, we are dealing with different languages, translations, etc - and even scholars don’t always agree on the best English word to use in translation…but this sermon is long enough as it is. But the text always has more that we can explore and wrestle with.
And, basically, what Jesus is telling the disciples is again, “do not fear” - no matter what other people can do to you, no matter how being a follower of Jesus affects your other relationships, God holds your soul in the palm of God’s hands.
Jesus stresses this point again in the next couple of verses: “are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.”
And now we come to: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword.” Yikes.
Many have taken this verse as an excuse for Christian violence which is a complete misunderstanding or even an abuse of Jesus’s words - Jesus, who we call the Prince of Peace, who told us to turn the other cheek, who told us to love our enemies and bless those who persecute us, who told Peter to put away the sword and said that those who live by the sword die by the sword… No, those who want to use the name of our God to commit violence against fellow human beings created by God will always find justification - even if it means misunderstanding and misrepresenting who Jesus is. So using the other red letters of Jesus and our reasoning here, we can know that Jesus means a metaphorical sword, not a physical one.
Jesus is not telling us to commit violence, instead Jesus is saying that choosing to follow Jesus can cause strife in our world and relationships - in fact following Jesus may be the sword that cuts relational ties for us.
Which brings us to the next verses which are just perfect for Father’s Day:
“For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, 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, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”
Jesus is not encouraging familial strife. He was talking to his disciples who were experiencing familial strife because of their decision to follow Jesus.
People who are using this scripture to justify disowning LGBTQ children are again, misunderstanding or even abusing Jesus’s words. We must understand these words alongside Jesus’s commandments to love one another.
If your relationship with Jesus puts you at odds with those in your family or inner circle - you are not alone. Jesus’s disciples from the very beginning have experienced this. Don’t seek it out or be purposefully antagonist. Keep on offering love. Because even if your relationship with Jesus puts you at odds with another, Jesus tells us to love our enemies and above all, to choose love.
After all, in another controversial Scripture, Jesus says “who is my mother?” when his mother is right in front of him. But his mother was still at the foot of the cross and he asked John, the disciple whom he loved, to care for her.
Danny Zacharias is a New Testament professor and an Indigenous Christian. He said this when reflecting on these verses of familial strife and his own relationships with being both Indigenous and a Christian:
“Reading this as an Indigenous man, I cannot help but also think of Indigenous communities throughout much of the world, but especially here on Turtle Island (North America). The church has perpetuated much harm among my people, the First Nations of Canada. Christian theology demonized our culture. Christian teachings like the Doctrine of Discovery bolstered colonial conquest and dehumanization. Christian churches helped to run Indian Residential and Boarding schools, which sought to kill the Indian in the child. It should not be hard for people to understand why there is sometimes such outright hatred toward the Christian church within Indigenous communities.
And yet, the reality is that many Indigenous people are followers of the Jesus Way. And for us, the painful division is sometimes twofold: We are sometimes at odds with our Indigenous communities because of our devotion to Jesus, while simultaneously being at odds with the church because we are proud of who we are as Indigenous people and seek to follow God the way he has made us—something that is often deeply resisted within the wider church that desires more cultural hegemony.”
End quote.
This is a faithful and real life example of what Jesus meant when he said he comes to bring the sword -- being a Christian will put us at odds with those who don’t understand the teachings of Jesus and even those who say they preach Christ but don’t live out his love.
Jesus ends this teaching with these lines: “and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”
In essence - anyone who wants to follow Jesus and also wants power, wealth, or an easy way - they have to make a choice. To follow Jesus means to be crucified with Jesus, to follow Jesus means to lose one’s life, it means choosing love.
Choosing love -
even when relationships are fractured,
even when we’re navigating messy relationships,
even when you’re at odds with other people,
even when you lose power in this world.
Following Jesus is not the easy path, Jesus is letting his disciples know - “at times, it will be hard - do not be afraid, I am with you.”
So yeah, I don’t really like this text because of the way an uncritical reading of it lends itself to abuse and mis-use. I don't even really like it once I dive deep and wrestle with it because it's not an easy message! I wish Jesus could be less esoteric. I wish Jesus could speak more plainly. I wish Jesus always agreed with me… but if that was the case, God wouldn’t be God.
So when there is something we don’t like in the Bible, we don’t have to like it, and we are invited to wrestle with it, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll come to know God a little more for the wrestling.
Amen.
If your relationship with Jesus puts you at odds with those in your family or inner circle - you are not alone. Jesus’s disciples from the very beginning have experienced this. Don’t seek it out or be purposefully antagonist. Keep on offering love. Because even if your relationship with Jesus puts you at odds with another, Jesus tells us to love our enemies and above all, to choose love.
After all, in another controversial Scripture, Jesus says “who is my mother?” when his mother is right in front of him. But his mother was still at the foot of the cross and he asked John, the disciple whom he loved, to care for her.
Danny Zacharias is a New Testament professor and an Indigenous Christian. He said this when reflecting on these verses of familial strife and his own relationships with being both Indigenous and a Christian:
“Reading this as an Indigenous man, I cannot help but also think of Indigenous communities throughout much of the world, but especially here on Turtle Island (North America). The church has perpetuated much harm among my people, the First Nations of Canada. Christian theology demonized our culture. Christian teachings like the Doctrine of Discovery bolstered colonial conquest and dehumanization. Christian churches helped to run Indian Residential and Boarding schools, which sought to kill the Indian in the child. It should not be hard for people to understand why there is sometimes such outright hatred toward the Christian church within Indigenous communities.
And yet, the reality is that many Indigenous people are followers of the Jesus Way. And for us, the painful division is sometimes twofold: We are sometimes at odds with our Indigenous communities because of our devotion to Jesus, while simultaneously being at odds with the church because we are proud of who we are as Indigenous people and seek to follow God the way he has made us—something that is often deeply resisted within the wider church that desires more cultural hegemony.”
End quote.
This is a faithful and real life example of what Jesus meant when he said he comes to bring the sword -- being a Christian will put us at odds with those who don’t understand the teachings of Jesus and even those who say they preach Christ but don’t live out his love.
Jesus ends this teaching with these lines: “and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”
In essence - anyone who wants to follow Jesus and also wants power, wealth, or an easy way - they have to make a choice. To follow Jesus means to be crucified with Jesus, to follow Jesus means to lose one’s life, it means choosing love.
Choosing love -
even when relationships are fractured,
even when we’re navigating messy relationships,
even when you’re at odds with other people,
even when you lose power in this world.
Following Jesus is not the easy path, Jesus is letting his disciples know - “at times, it will be hard - do not be afraid, I am with you.”
So yeah, I don’t really like this text because of the way an uncritical reading of it lends itself to abuse and mis-use. I don't even really like it once I dive deep and wrestle with it because it's not an easy message! I wish Jesus could be less esoteric. I wish Jesus could speak more plainly. I wish Jesus always agreed with me… but if that was the case, God wouldn’t be God.
So when there is something we don’t like in the Bible, we don’t have to like it, and we are invited to wrestle with it, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll come to know God a little more for the wrestling.
Amen.
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