The Word of the Lord...

I'm on vacation this Sunday, so I don't have to preach for the first time in a good while.  But you kind of get in the habit of working through Gospel texts, and this week Jesus says some stuff that is fairly likely to tick a lot of people off, at least if they're paying attention.
Matthew 10: 24-39 is a sort of random collection of prophetic sayings.  They're prophetic, not because they predict the future, but because they call people to a different mode of thinking.  In fact, some of these sayings are so very difficult that you will often witness some of the more peculiar hermeneutic gymnastics, in order to explain exactly how these things can have meaning.  People who are otherwise firmly in the literal camp when it comes to understanding scripture, get a little nervous when Jesus starts talking about persecution and the sword that will separate us from the people who are dearest to us.
The phrase "family values," is often held as sacred in the political and religious life of this nation, however, Jesus says here that the cross is going to stand in direct conflict with that.  We make idols of our family.  We sacrifice ourselves and our children on that altar.  How often does family trump God?  I know it has for me, I take my duty as a father every bit as seriously as I do my duty as a Pastor, and I have promised myself that if the latter and the former are in conflict, then my kids come first.
Guilty as charged.
I rationalize this by convincing myself that God has given me this family and that I am called to be part of it.  I try to avoid those contrived hypothetical situations where the two things would be at odds, and I simply thank God for the grace that allows me to be both an idolater of my family and a disciple of Jesus Christ.
I hope that I never have to make a choice of one over the other.
I do know that my desire for my children is to raise them up to know and follow Jesus, and maybe this is the way through the dilemma.  I want to make disciples in my own family, I want them to see how my own discipleship makes a difference, and that, I suspect, means that I need to love them with all my heart, and demonstrate how that works, so that they can understand, "through a glass darkly" how God loves them as well.
There is danger for us, in understanding Jesus' teachings as being a refutation of the good and healthy aspects of our humanity.  This path leads us to gnosticism.  To understand our relationship with God as the primary source of all other relationships, is exactly the opposite of that.  Our relationship with God establishes a pattern for our other relationships.  At least, it should work that way.
In the discussion of the language we use for God, whether we stick to the traditional masculine forms or whether we try learn to include references to God that are either feminine, or gender-neutral, the issue of calling God, "Father," is often at issue.  Some people have good, or at least generally positive experiences with their actual fathers, but some people have been abandoned, abused or otherwise damaged by their actual fathers.  Thus the word, "Father," carries unfortunate baggage that then gets transferred to God.
This is a prime example of getting it backwards, our notion of God as a loving, merciful, just and holy, ought to inform our worldly vision of what a true father can and should be.  To allow our broken experience of men who may or may not deserve the title of father to shape our idea of what God is, is the very essence of idolatry, it is making an image of a god who is not God.
What Jesus is challenging here, and pretty much everywhere, is precisely that sort of spiritual backwardness and the quagmires of sin they lead us into.
It is indeed dangerous to deny sin, because in denying you compound its power.  But it is also dangerous to give it too much control, to use the brokenness of a fallen world as your framework for your relationships and your understanding.  The solution to the problem is suggested by Jesus here: flip the situation, act like there is nothing that will separate you from God, do not hold anything more dearly than your relationship with God, and then your other relationships will most likely follow that pattern.
Honestly, without being absurd or insane, name a situation where God would call you to actually harm your children.  Bringing them to church, even if they don't want to go, making sure that worship is part of the pattern of your life, even if it means giving up some worldly pursuits, these are not destructive things, they are things that form lives in the proper balance.
God loves children, and you can be pretty sure that if you feel that it is the will of the Creator to neglect or do harm to a little one, you are probably way off base.  Families are our best and most intimate opportunity to love one another as God loves us.  They are the places where we understand agape, the self sacrificing type of love that seeks the good of the beloved above the needs of the self.
Because they have this connection with that sacred sort of love, they can become powerful idols, but it doesn't have to work that way.  We find by losing and in losing we find, it doesn't make intuitive sense but it is the way God actually works most of the time.