What a great day it is today.

It is not just because it is the Lord’s Day. It is not just because we are here for worship. No, today is a great day because of what is happening in our midst.

Following the service, we are going to go outside and dedicate the new sign, one of the projects recommended by our church growth consultant earlier this year.

And that is just this morning.

Today is a day filled with activities for children and their parents, activities where families explore and express their faith together. And it all fits rather nicely into the vision of which we have spoken, the vision of a church specializing in ministry to and with families.

There is only one problem. It is our scripture reading for the day. Our assigned reading, the Gospel reading from the cycle of passages we use in worship, calls for us to hear from the fourteenth chapter of Luke. It reads:

Do you see what I mean? Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem and a huge crowd is with him. They are probably pilgrims—men, women and children—all heading to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. Along the way, they have glimpsed Jesus, maybe heard some of his teachings, maybe witnessed a miracle or two, and have become followers. They want to walk with Jesus.

What preacher wouldn’t be thrilled? Here is an opportunity to reach more people, make more disciples, change more lives. And yet what does Jesus do? He tells them if they come to him and don’t hate mom and dad, the wife and kids, their brothers and sisters, even life itself, they can’t be his disciples.

I couldn’t have found a more inappropriate verse to preach if I had tried. Even if we recognize that the Semitic expression "hate" here does not have the emotional content of "loathing" but means instead "to detach from" or "to turn away," it still seems to undermine all we are about today. Does Jesus really insist that parents become detached from the children in Godly Play? Does Jesus really want the teen-agers in Bible Alive, Chi Rho or CYF to turn away from their parents? If it is, then his teachings fly in the face of everything we know about rearing good kids. The relationship between parent and child is essential to the health, well being, even the faith of the child. So what in the name of Dr. Spock is Jesus doing?

Jesus is not telling us that families are to be estranged, anymore than he is telling us in the next verse that we are to walk around with crosses on our shoulders or in verse 33 that we must call Salvation Army and give away all we own.

Jesus is saying that following him redefines every relationship and every loyalty. To be his disciple means he comes first, he takes precedence—over family, over self, over wealth. Following him means acknowledging that truth and, when necessary, paying the price of it.

That’s the point of the parables. Jesus wants those in the crowd to decide whether or not they want to be fans or followers, whether they are ready to put Jesus first.

Clearly that was not a word that many in the large crowd around Jesus wanted to hear. By the time he reached Jerusalem, the crowd had thinned a bit. On Palm Sunday some of the people threw coats on the ground over which he could ride, but most of those raising their voices in praise of God were his disciples. And by the time he was crucified, even they had denied him and fled.

Yet after his resurrection, after their empowerment by the Holy Spirit, the disciples of Jesus not only acknowledged him Lord, but also made him the priority of their life. They sacrificed everything for him—even family commitment to follow him.

And they were not alone.

One of the earliest Christian writings said to be by a woman is the diary of Perpetua, a citizen of Carthage. In the early third century, she was, along with others, imprisoned for refusing to worship the Roman emperor. Her father came to see her, begged her to compromise her faith, and save her life. But she refused. She gave to her father her newborn son, whom she had been nursing in prison, and stood before the Roman governor Hilarion. Even he begged her to heed her father’s pleas, to think of her young son. But she would not, could not, deny Christ.

Of course, such persecutions ended long ago. But putting Christ first still reorders relationships, even with our family.

Off to college she went, but not just any college. She went to one of the elite schools, one that just this week made U.S. News and World Report’s Top 10. What was all the more impressive was that she was the first in her family to even go beyond high school. Never before had it happened, and her family was rightly proud. They looked forward to her future. They just knew that someday they would introduce her as "Our daughter the doctor" or "Our daughter the lawyer." And it was possible. She had that kind of mind and drive.

But something happened there at college. Something got into her—and it was God. She became a disciple of Jesus Christ. And that changed everything—even her relationship to her parents. No longer was their dream her dream. No longer was what they wanted for her what she wanted. She had different priorities, priorities that turned her away from them. And so today, when her parents are asked about her, they have had to learn to say, "Our daughter? Oh, she’s a Peace Corp volunteer digging ditches in Ethiopia."

Her allegiance was to Christ, even at the cost of her family’s dream.

So what does all this mean for us? What does it mean for the parents down the way at Godly Play or those who will come tonight for Chi Rho and CYF?

Maybe it means we are in the right place. Maybe it means that we are saying that as important as the other things we could do one Sunday morning—the time we have together, the football pregame on TV, the lawn that desperately needs mowed—our allegiance is to Christ. Maybe it means that are children are important enough to us to bring them here to worship God, to grow in faith, to serve Jesus as Lord. Maybe it means we want them to love Jesus more and us a little less. Amen.