We're Supposed to Hate Whom?

The Rev. Brad Sullivan
Lord of the Streets, Houston
September 7, 2025
Proper 18, C
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Psalm 1
Luke 14:25-33

What are the two greatest commandments? Love God. Love your neighbor as yourself. That’s what Jesus taught. Any other rule we have in our way of life as disciples of Jesus depends upon love God and love your neighbor. In our way of life as the church, everything we do is to be tested, evaluated by, love God and love your neighbor. 

If something we start to believe or something we start to do fails the love God and love your neighbor test, then it’s probably not something we should believe or do.

Then we get today’s lesson from Luke 14, where Jesus said that we are supposed to “hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself.” We’re supposed to hate all of those people and even life itself, Jesus said, or else we can’t be his disciple. 

That sounds unfortunate. Somehow, we need to figure out how Jesus’ teaching to hate our family and even life itself can possibly pass the love God and love your neighbor test. 

So first, let’s try the hyper-literal method. Jesus said to love God, love your neighbor, and even love your enemies. Well, our families aren’t God, aren’t our neighbors, and mostly aren’t our enemies, so I suppose we do get to hate our families, right? Yea, Jesus! Even better, Jesus told his disciples to bless those who hate them, so if we hate our families, they will bless us? Doubtful. Besides, Jesus also said to give up all your possessions. So, going hyper-literal, if we want to be Jesus’ disciples, we all have to live naked without a penny to our names, despised by everyone who once loved us because we decided we had to hate them in order to be Jesus’ disciple. I’m guessing at that point, we might very well hate our own lives.

Obviously, that’s not what Jesus meant. So much for the hyper-literal method of biblical interpretation. (No one tell the your hyper-literal friends that doesn’t work.)

What if we actually look a little more deeply into Jesus’ words? Whoever comes to Jesus and does not hate their loved ones, he said, cannot be his disciple. At least that’s what it says in English, in this particular translation. The word was translated as “hate,” however, can also mean “disregard.” Whoever comes to me and does not disregard their loved ones and even life itself cannot be my disciple. In other words, be able to let your loved ones go, if need be, to follow Jesus’ ways. Be able to let your life go, if need be, to follow Jesus’ ways. That makes a lot more sense with what Jesus taught than, hate your family. 

As a side note, in about 10 different translations I read for this passage, all but one used the word hate, rather than disregard. I think that says more about us than it does about Jesus, the fact that we seem to want to translate the word as hate, despite how that goes against Jesus’ teachings.

Let’s look at what Jesus meant by disregard your family and even life itself. In Luke 8, we hear about Jesus teaching a large crowd of people. His mother and brothers came to see him, and when folks suggested he stop teaching so he could meet with his family, he said that his family are all those who hear the word of God and do it. Jesus did not show any hatred toward his mother and his brothers. He did show some indifference to them. He disregarded them in order to show his love for those he was teaching. They too were his family.

Jesus didn’t hate his family, but he disregarded them, he set them aside, when he needed to in order to live God’s kingdom in that moment. He was not forever saying goodbye to them, and he was not disowning them. He was just acknowledging that right then, other people needed him more than his family did, and if his family got upset about that, he was willing to let them. No anger. No hatred. Just setting them aside for a little while, rather than letting them be an excuse to stop his ministry. So no, Jesus didn’t hate his family.

Jesus didn’t hate his life either. Shortly before being crucified, just before being arrested, Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane begging God not to have to be crucified. He was really hoping to skip that part, his painful and premature death by the state, because he really liked his life. 

Nevertheless, he was willing to disregard his life if it meant following God’s will and God’s ways. 

Jesus had been led to preach, and teach, and heal people, and in all of that, his preaching, teaching, and healing, he angered the religious and political leaders of the day. Remember all that stuff God said about not exploiting the poor? Yeah, God meant that. Remember all that stuff God said about religious practices not really have a heart of love for the people society disregards? Yeah, God meant that too.

Jesus had run afoul of the religious and political elite, and at the same time, many of the people who followed him wanted him to be a great military ruler. They misunderstood and thought Jesus was going to lead an armed revolt against Rome, killing and driving them all out. 

So, at the time of Jesus’ arrest, it was either take up the mantle of military ruler and lead a rebellion to kill to all the Romans, or let himself be killed. Jesus chose to let himself be killed. Peter tried to stop it, grabbing a sword to try to kill Jesus’ accusers, and Jesus said, nope, thanks so much, Pete, but we’re gonna let this death thing happen. I’m going to disregard my life rather than kill and lead a rebellion, disregarding tens of thousands of lives in order to save mine.

Jesus loved his life, and he disregarded it in order to save others. Jesus loved his family, and disregarded them when he needed to in order to live God’s will and God’s ways. 

So, Jesus tells us, if we want to be his disciples, we need to be willing to disregard our loved ones and even our lives for the sake of following God’s will and God’s ways. If someone harms a member of my family, my gut instinct is to find that person and get terrible revenge against that person, beating them senseless, but that’s not the teaching of Jesus.

I’d definitely try to hold that person accountable for what they did. If I needed to get the authorities involved. That could be about keeping others safe too, but going out and seeking revenge, blood for blood, eye for eye, that is not following the teaching of Jesus. So, if I’m going to live as his disciple, I wouldn’t go seek revenge on my own against that person, and my family might just feel like I was disregarding them, letting them down. Why do you hate us so much that you won’t get revenge? 

Because I believe in the ways of Jesus. I believe that seeking revenge only brings about more revenge from the others person. Fighting and killing as revenge for fighting and killing never ends. If we need to disregard our family’s desires for revenge in order to break a cycle of violence and follow Jesus’ teaching, then so be it.  

Being Jesus’ disciple has a cost to it. Sometimes it’s disregarding the desires of those we love. Sometimes it’s disregarding our own desires, because trusting in Jesus’ teaching and Jesus’ ways, we come to believe that there will be greater healing and greater love in the world if we sometimes disregard our own desires. We come to believe that there will be greater healing and greater love in the world if we sometimes disregard our loved ones’ desires. 

That’s a cost. What we get for that cost is greater peace, with work, over time. Disregarding our own desires and our loved one’s desire in order to follow Jesus’ teaching is a cost, and what we get for that cost is to be servants of peace, offering peace and healing to those around us. 

Living as Jesus’ disciples comes at a cost. Not always getting what we want, not always giving our loved ones what they want to. Consider, however, that we’re not always going to get what we want anyway, and we’re definitely going to let our loved ones down anyway. The cost of living as Jesus’ disciple can be high, but you know what? We’re usually going to end up paying some kind of cost in this life anyway. Paying the cost as Jesus’ disciples, we get peace. We get love. We get healing, and we get to share that peace, love, and healing with the world. 

K-Pop Jesus - Driving Out Hate with Love (& Fantastic Singing, Dancing, and Outfits)

The Rev. Brad Sullivan
Lord of the Streets, Houston
August 24, 2025
Proper 16, C
Isaiah 58:9b-14
Psalm 103:1-8
Luke 13:10-17

So, being the father of an 11-year-old daughter, I sometimes end up reading books and watching shows that I wouldn’t necessarily watch on my own. The latest example of this was on Friday night, watching the Netflix animated movie, K-Pop Demon Hunters. The story is about a 3-member, girl K-Pop group who, as the title suggests, also hunts demons. When they’re not killing demons, they are using their music to fight against the darkness of demonic influence. 

The songs are really catchy and fun, and I really enjoyed watching K-Pop Demon Hunters with my daughter. Welcome to your glimpse into the Sullivan household. As interesting as that may be, however, I bring it up because of how they work to overcome the demonic influence in the world. 

Of course, they use magical swords and things like that to attack the demons, but they also use their music to stop the influence of the demons over everyone else. At one point, however, they are also coming under the demonic influence. They’ve let their hatred of demons eclipse their desire to help others, and they begin fighting with each other. They’d been trying to hide all their faults from one another, so when their struggles come to the fore, they turn against each other, and the darkness spreads even further.

Then, after coming together again, they sing a new song, admitting their pain and brokenness, admitting everything the demons had been using to drive them apart. They sing:

We’re shattering the silence, rising, defiant

Shouting in the quiet, “You’re not alone”
We listened to the demons, we let them get between us

But none of us are out here on our own 

 

So we were cowards, so we were liars
So we’re not heroes, we’re still survivors
The dreamers, the fighters, no lying, I’m tired

But dive in the fire, and I’ll be right here by your side

 

I broke into a million pieces, and I can’t go back
But now I’m seeing all the beauty in the broken glass
The scars are part of me, darkness and harmony

My voice without the lies, this is what it sounds like

As they sing their new song, the light spreads and the demonic influence is driven out. Their light spreads, not because of how much they hate the demons. Their light spreads because of how they love each other and connect to all the people around them through that love. 

Now, I’m pretty sure none of us have superpowers to hunt and kill demons, none of us have visible light that emanates from us as we sings, I’m guessing most of us aren’t K-Pop stars, or animated. 

Even without magic, glowing swords; energetic dancing; and aggressively cheerful music, however, we do have a way, to overcome the demonic forces in our lives that keep us separated, that keep us down. We have a way to be freed from the demonic influences that bind us and keep us alone and angry, fearful and contemptuous of others. That way is Jesus. 

While the K-Pop Demon Hunters didn’t exactly ask Jesus for help (it wasn’t that kind of film), they still found the truth Jesus taught, that Satan cannot drive out Satan. As Dr. Martin Luther King said, “Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.”

We heard in our story today from Luke 13:10-17, that Jesus freed a woman who had been bound by Satan for 18 years. We don’t know what had happened to her, only that a spirit had crippled her and she couldn’t stand up straight. Whatever it was, we know from Jesus’ previous teaching that she hadn’t been crippled by the spirit because of being particularly awful. 

Despite a lot of the beliefs of people at the time that any tragedy in your life was because you had angered God, Jesus had made clear in the first part of Luke 13 that this woman wasn’t a worse person than anyone else. So, when he saw her in need of healing, he healed her. He freed her from her bondage to Satan. Now, we’re not talking eternal damnation here. We’re talking about a woman who had been crippled by the devil. 

Most of the people, when the saw her healed and heard Jesus proclaim that she had been set free from the Adversary’s bondage, most of the people began rejoicing. Her being set free set them free as well. The influence Satan had on all of their lives was lessened when Jesus freed this one woman. 

That was true for most people, but it wasn’t true for the leader of the Synagogue. The leader didn’t like seeing this woman freed, and he immediately began telling the people Jesus was wrong for healing her because he did so on the Sabbath, the day of rest. He saw a miracle. He saw a woman healed after 18 years of suffering, freed after 18 years of bondage, and all he could say was, you should have waited till tomorrow. 

There was no love there, only fear. There was no freedom there, only continued bondage. The leader of the Synagogue was so caught up in doing things in just the right way and believing things in just the right way, that when God performed a miracle right in front of him, he didn’t even recognize it. He was also trying to free people from bondage, but he was so bound up in being right, that he turned against God, thinking that he was speaking for God. 

‘Behave, y’all. Don’t you dare mess up with any bit of the laws of Israel, or you’re gonna be in a world of trouble,’ or maybe he was more forgiving towards others, and he just really had a problem with Jesus. It’s hard to say exactly, but any way you slice it, the leader of the Synagogue was very upset when Jesus freed this woman from bondage, and it’s hard to see how he could have been walking in the love of God with a heart so bound against a woman being made well.

So, what about us? How are we bound, and what might freedom from that bondage look like? Thinking eternally, we are freed from Satan’s bondage, Jesus has freed us, and nothing can separate us from God. Still, in this life, there are many ways we end up bound or influenced by dark forces. As Paul writes about in Ephesians 6:12, we can end up bound by “the cosmic powers of this present darkness…the spiritual forces of evil...” 

What is it like to be bound by these forces? We have an idea from Jeremiah what it is like to be bound by spiritual forces of darkness and evil. It looks like pointing the finger and speaking evil, being constantly at odds with others. Being bound by forces of darkness looks like being so full of fear and anger that we don’t care about others. 

Being bound by spiritual forces of darkness looks like a nation, and state, and city that criminalizes being homeless, without putting up the money needed actually to house people. Look at what Jeremiah said.

If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.

As individuals, we can be bound. As a nation, we can be bound. As individuals, we can’t force a nation to unbind itself to injustice and oppression of the poor, but we can show others what freedom looks like. Being freed, ourselves, from the darkness of constantly being at odds with those around us, we can let the light and love of God shine from within us and into the lives of those around us. We can call on the Holy Spirit to grant us peace and patience, gentleness and self-control, peace and joy, faith and love. We can offer a little dose of kindness and let that light shine, freeing others from little bits of bondage, just as we are freed from the little bits of bondage in our lives. 

Most of us probably aren’t K-Pop Demon Hunters, but we do get to be freed from the forces of darkness, we get to be freed by Jesus, and as we are freed, the light of that freedom shines into the lives of others, as love spreads, as kindness spreads, as faithfulness spreads, calling on Jesus to set us free.

Setting the Bar Kinda Low

Brad Sullivan

6 Epiphany, Year A

February 12, 2017

Emmanuel, Houston

Sirach 15:15-20

Matthew 5:21-37

Setting the Bar Kinda Low

“Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”  That’s where we left off last week in Jesus’ sermon in Matthew chapter 5.  At a first hearing, it sounds like Jesus is giving a major, “you’ve got to be good enough for God” kind of statement.  “You’ve got to be righteous enough in God’s eyes in order to be good enough for God.”  That’s certainly where my teenage brain took this passage when I read it back in high school.  “Man, I’ve got to be even better that the religious leaders in order to be good enough for God?”  Yikes!

Well, I’ve got a few critiques to that particular understanding of Jesus and the Gospel.  The first is, let’s face it, if Jesus wants us to be better people than the scribes and the Pharisees, he’s setting the bar kinda low.  Just about any time Jesus mentions the scribes and the Pharisees, he’s saying not to be like them, calling them hypocrites.  So, not too much of a high standard of perfection there.  The second critique of the “You’ve got to be good enough for God” understanding of Jesus’ sermon is this:  “You don’t have to be good enough for God.”  Striving to be good enough for God, striving to be righteous for one’s own sake is missing the point of Jesus entirely.  Jesus is much more concerned with people’s well being than he is with people’s righteousness.  That’s the lesson I get from our story in Matthew’s Gospel today, not reward and punishment, but Jesus’ genuine concern and care for the well-being of people. 

Several years ago, I was gently pushing our then three year old son, Rhys, on a tire swing in the front yard of our house.  We were having a lovely time, and then our neighbor’s granddaughter came over.  She was about six, and she asked if she could push Rhys.  To be honest, I had some trepidation about the prudence of allowing such a young girl to push my son, but not wanting to be an overly protective helicopter parent, I decided to just let them play.  That worked really well for a about 20 seconds, after which time, she spun the tire swing too hard, and Rhys fell off the swing, breaking his collar bone.  Way to go, Dad.

Amidst Rhys’ crying and my checking to see if he was as hurt as I feared, the little girl began apologizing profusely, the fear in her voice and face communicating two things:  “I’m sad I hurt Rhys,” eclipsed almost totally by “It was an accident; I’m so afraid that I’m in serious trouble.”  For my part, I had almost forgotten that our neighbor’s granddaughter was still even there, focused exclusively on Rhys and what appeared even by looking at it to be a broken collar bone.  I was certainly not interested at all in my neighbor’s granddaughter being in trouble.  I knew it was an accident, and my only concern was for my son’s well being, not the girl’s being in trouble or not.  Assuring her that it was ok, I quickly scooped Rhys up and took him to the hospital. 

What strikes me about that story is or neighbor’s granddaughter’s concern about being in trouble eclipsing her concern for Rhys’ well-being.  Now, to be fair, she was a little kid.  Of course that’s how she felt.  She didn’t know what else to do or how else to deal with the situation, so no chastisement of her intended in any way.

But, now imagine that the little girl was an adult who had just accidentally hurt someone, and imagine this adult is more concerned with being in trouble or even worse, being righteous in God’s eyes, than this person is concerned with the well-being of the other person.  That is the situation I find when we hear Jesus critiquing the religion and way of life of the scribes, Pharisees, and other religious leaders of his day.  Be it the parable of the Good Samaritan, where the religious leaders pass by on the other side of the road when they see someone hurt, or be it the actual practices of the religious leaders in which they are shown to take money from poor widows in order to pay a temple tax, or pray about how wonderful they are compared to those around them, we see a group of religious leaders concerned with their own righteousness before God, worrying about being in trouble, while having almost no concern for the well-being of the people around them.

Jesus, in his constant healing of people; in his care for the orphan, the widow, the downtrodden, and the outcast; and in his preaching, including the sermon of his that we hear today, Jesus showed how much he cared for people’s well being, and how interested he wasn’t in people being righteous before God for their own sake.  Our being righteous before God, being good enough to please God, Jesus took care of that on the cross.  Jesus’ desire for us was then not that we would continue to be worried about being righteous or good enough before God, but rather that we would love God and love people.  From a place of fear about our own righteousness before God, Jesus sent us on a quest to love God and love people without fear.  That quest of love is what we hear Jesus teaching about in his words that we heard today, a far more complicated, rewarding, and beautiful understanding of life than simple reward and punishment.

In the teaching that we heard today, Jesus was basically going through the 10 Commandments, saying that on the quest of love, a basic rule based keeping of the 10 Commandments is not sufficient.  Some probably hear his words and are rather disheartened.  “Not only can we not kill people, we’re not even supposed to hate them?  No fair, that’s way too hard!  Not only can we not cheat on our wives and our husbands, we’re not even supposed to fantasize about it?”  From a trying to be good enough standpoint, no we can’t live up to that.  We’re not perfect.  We’re not going to be.  Jesus is teaching that the point of the commandments is not to be perfect, not to be righteous before God for one’s own sake.  Rather, the point of the 10 Commandments is to live in such a way that your life is a quest of love, a quest of loving God and loving people without fear. 

See, the 10 Commandments are a pretty good start to things, but you can keep all 10 of them and still be a pretty terrible person.  Imagine talking to someone who makes sure to keep the Commandments.  This person worships God, has no idols, goes to church on Sunday and does no other work, has never committed perjury or lied about someone to get them in trouble; he doesn’t talk back to his parents; and he’s basically content with what he’s got and doesn’t steal from others.  He sounds like a pretty good guy.  Now let’s say he then starts talking about how righteous he is, and you call him on it because you’ve noticed some rather less than wonderful habits of this person. 

“So, I hear you saying how righteous you are, but you’re also kind of a bully.  You routinely beat people up when they anger you, and are constantly insulting and verbally abusing others.”

“Well, yeah, that’s true, but hey, at least I haven’t killed anybody!”  Check, commandment kept. 

“Uh huh.  Ok, well how can you be so righteous, considering how terribly you treat your wife?”

“Hey, I don’t have to treat her well, I just have to not commit adultery.  I haven’t.”  Check, commandment kept.

See, there are all kinds of ways we can be really terrible to each other and still keep the Commandments.  Even in following Jesus’ more stringent code, we can find ways to hurt each other.  “Ok, Jesus, I got it.  No adultery, no ogling other women, and no divorce.  Beyond that, I can be as big of a prat to my wife as I want.”  Far from giving us a more stringent set of rules for us to follow in order to be righteous before God for our own sake, Jesus is showing us that the whole point of the commandments, is to care about the well being of others as God does. 

Now, there’s still this part where Jesus says that if we treat people terribly, we should be thrown into the hell of fire.  He’s saying we should be thrown into Gehenna, the burning garbage dump outside of Jerusalem.  Have you ever known someone who was such a horrible louse that they seemed like human garbage?  That’s what Jesus is talking about.  People matter so much to Jesus, and so he taught that if you treat people terribly, you’ve turned yourself into human garbage, good for nothing but the burning garbage dump, metaphorically speaking.  Far from actually wanting us to cut off our hands and pluck out our eyes, Jesus is teaching that even small practices of treating others terribly can lead to an entire life of treating others terribly, so stop with the seemingly insignificant practices in which you treat others without love so that you don’t end up living your entire life treating others without love.

Jesus is showing us the heart of God, a heart not interested in keeping rules for one’s own sake, a heart not interested in fear and  punishment, but a heart interested in using the rules to show us how better to love people and to care for their well being.  Jesus really is far more concerned with people’s well being, fare more concerned with love than he is with people’s self-serving righteousness. 

Jesus is inviting us to follow him in a life that is a quest of love, a quest to give and receive love.  In this quest, we have our eyes and our hearts open to check in with ourselves and ask, “am I really living as a loving person?  Am I full of anger and resentment?  Maybe I’m generally ok, but need some help with loving right now.  Maybe I should seek that help.”  In this quest of love that Jesus has given us, we don’t go it alone.  Love cannot be a solitary venture. 

We’re on this quest with each other, we have our eyes and our hearts open to the people around us.  Are they doing ok?  Do they have enough?  Do I have enough?  Do I have more than I need?  Is the path that my life is on serving only myself, or is the path that my life is on also being a light of love for others?  Is the path that our lives are on serving as a light of love for others.  That is the path of the quest Jesus has set us on, a quest in which we care not about our own righteousness before God for our own sake, a quest not of reward and punishment.  Jesus has set us on the quest of genuine concern for the care and well-being of others, the quest in which we love God and love and serve people without fear, the quest of love. 

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.