Good morning! I feel very honored to be invited to preach for you this morning.

But I must admit that when this invitation from your worship committee first came to me I also felt a bit intimidated, since I've never preached before, or at least not in the proper sense of the word. Rather lectures are my genre; a sermon is something different, and I have always thought of it as a very special responsibility. In a lecture one explores a problem in a setting of detached reflection, whereas a sermon leaves detachment behind in order to unfold the word of God in a way that will kindle the heart and guide the soul as well as stimulate the mind. Of course I realize that sometimes my lectures can begin to sound a little like sermons, and perhaps that may help me in the present effort, but I also want to apologize in advance if what I have to say may sound a bit intellectual; we all have to work within the frameworks of our own limitations. I must also admit that I felt even more intimidated when, after accepting your gracious invitation and then asking what the lectionary readings would be for this Sunday, I found out what the gospel reading was. This summer in a class at the University of Washington on Septuagint and NT Greek we read a number of stories from the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible and then read the whole of the Gospel according to Luke. It was great fun. But I remember the shock I felt when I came again, this time in Greek, to the passage in which Jesus says, "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." I thought, "Hoo, boy! I wonder how they'd handle that in a sermon. Maybe a good move would be to invite a guest preacher that Sunday." So, lo and behold, here I am, and that particular strategy is precluded, at least for me.

But I do enjoy a challenge, and I think there are some interesting things one can uncover by delving into this passage. It is especially appropriate, I think, that those who composed our lectionary have paired this passage from Luke with the one from Deuteronomy in which God says to Israel-his "son" whom he called out of Egypt to worship Him-that He has set before them the two paths of death and life and urges them to "Choose life."

This offers a first clue to the meaning of the Gospel passage. That says that to follow Jesus requires that one "hate...even life itself," an idea that seems to clash so directly with the injunction in Deuteronomy that it forces us to reflect more carefully on what might be meant here by these words, particularly "hate" and "life." I'll begin with "hate."

Luke and Matthew both cite this saying, but Matthew does not use the word for "hate"; rather he reads (to quote the parallel passage in full): "He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it" (Matt. 10:37-39). "Not loving more" is a very different idea from "hating." Matthew's version looks like a softening of what had been a very "hard" saying in the oral tradition-which is why most Biblical scholars think Luke's version is more likely authentic than Matthew's.

In our class, we found that when we were reading the Septuagint and came across something that sounded odd, it was helpful to look at the Hebrew text behind the Greek translation. An example is the oddness of King David's calling Uriah the Hittite back from the battlefront purportedly to ask him about "the peace of the army" (2 Sam. 11:7). The Hebrew word translated by eiréne, the Greek for "peace," is shalom; and in fact wherever one sees the word "peace" in the Hebrew Bible, you can know that the Hebrew word behind it is shalom. Now the word "peace" in English, like the Greek eiréne, is closely tied to the idea of absence of war or conflict, which makes it sound rather odd with reference to the army Uriah was leading in battle on David's behalf at the time. But shalom in Hebrew also has another important meaning, that of "well-being" or "prosperity," and for David to ask about the well-being of his army in battle does make sense, which is why most English translations, unlike the Greek, have him asking "how the war is going" or "how the army is doing."

But in the case of the Gospels, we aren't able to go to the original to see what other connotations might have been involved, since the only original would be the Aramaic of the oral sayings handed down. The most we can do is ask about possible Hebrew parallels to what the Aramaic might have been. So I asked a friend and colleague, a scholar of ancient Semitics and the chair of our Near East department, about this, and he looked into it and found that the Hebrew word usually translated by the Greek miseo (hate) does normally mean simply "hate," but it also has another slightly different use as an element in the formula for divorce, where a man divorcing his wife tells her three times that he "hates" her. Here it seems to mean something more like "separate from" rather than simply "hate."

That idea of a separating, an inward breaking of the ties that bind us and even maybe limit our love, looks as if it might fit Jesus's meaning here fairly well. Like Elijah telling Elisha (I Kings 19:9) that if he wants to follow him, he must leave everything behind or else he is not suited to do so, or Jesus saying the same thing (in the very same words in the Greek) to a prospective follower in an earlier chapter of Luke (9:61-62), Jesus is calling for the radical transcendence of all finite attachments and identities (such as nation, tribe, or family) for the sake of following him into the true, universal life of sonship to the one Father of all.

Which brings us to the question of what it might mean, then, to "hate" one's own "life." The principal words for "life" in Greek are zoe (as in zoology) or bios (as in biology), and to hate "life" in those senses would be truly nihilistic. But the word in this passage is neither of those, but psyche, which is also commonly translated as "soul," "mind," or "self." Almost every translation of the Gospel passage uses the English word "life" here, but if one bears these other meanings of psyche in mind, this statement too fits perfectly with the idea of radical self-transcendence and the breaking of all finite identifications-even identification with one's "self"-for the sake of a new, universal mode of existence, that which St. Paul refers to again and again in his epistles as "life in Christ." It also fits with the special emphasis of Luke's gospel in particular on the following of Christ as transcending the boundaries of all traditional groupings: Pharisee vs. Sadducee, Jew vs. Samaritan, Jew vs. gentile, and so on.

There is another similarly startling story in the Biblical tradition which this passage and its theme may remind us of-a story that is alluded to in the earlier episode in Luke where the infant Jesus, as first-born son, is taken to the temple to be "redeemed" by the sacrifice of two doves or pigeons. That is the story known in Jewish tradition as "the binding of Isaac." There Abraham was said to be commanded by God to offer in sacrifice his first-born, Isaac. This story must seem as extreme as the one about the command to "hate" one's family. But its point was not that God demanded Isaac's death, but that He did not demand it. Rather, in Abraham's world, in ancient Mesopotamia, it was conventionally believed that a first-born son must be sacrificed to the gods in order that subsequent children might live. The point of the Biblical story is that even though the one true God who first began to reveal Himself to Abraham calls us to relinquish what is dearest to us, He does not demand its destruction; rather it was God Himself who provided the ram as a substitute, as in later tradition the pigeons would be a substitute for the first-born son of Mary and Joseph. The point of the story is that this God is radically different from all the deities imagined before. He does demand an act of radical relinquishing, but He also gives back what was relinquished alive as a pledge of even greater gifts to come-in Abraham's case, the multitude of descendants and nations who will bless themselves by him.

These stories also connect, I think, with our epistle for today, Paul's appeal to Philemon to release his slave, Onesimus, "so that you might have him back forever," as we heard, "no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother...both in the flesh and in the Lord." To hold a slave is also to be bound by that holding, and to let go of those we cling to and try to possess frees us, just as it frees them. All of us have something in common with Abraham and Philemon; all of us are tempted to try to possess other people and also ourselves. Those of us who are parents of grown children all experience the challenge of relinquishing them as children in order to receive them back again as adult friends, and children too have to relinquish the childhood image of their parents as superhuman protectors or thwarters to know them anew as fellow adults under the one God who gives life to all of us and has promised to bless us all, Jew and gentile alike, as the heirs of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

So I hope today's Gospel passage may be a little less perplexing than it might seem without these considerations. But there is no way, I am afraid, to make it less "hard" as an injunction and declaration of the nature of discipleship, nor would I really want to do so. The life of Sonship we are called into by the Father and Spirit through the voice of Jesus, the "firstborn of all creation," will be more glorious, I believe, than we can even begin to imagine now. And our life as believers and followers of Jesus in this "between" time, between the resurrection of our pioneer and lord and our own resurrection that we expect through him, remains a dying to self. But, in the paradoxical manner of everything we encounter in this life since he came to us in human flesh two millennia ago, this dying into life is also a joy beyond the power of words to describe. May we live it together in mutual compassion, joy, and peace.