The Manliness of a Loving Lord

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A
Sermon for June 21, 2026

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Good morning, Church of the Epiphany. Happy birthday to my mom, number 73; we’ll sing to you in a bit. And, for all the dads in the room, mine included: Happy Father’s Day. Last year, Father’s Day fell on Trinity Sunday, and I didn’t really preach directly to dads. I talked about relationships, as you might expect, and “the Father and Son” are part of the Trinity, but I avoided the topic of fatherhood. I avoided it, like I avoid mentioning Mother’s Day too much here at Epiphany, because for some, these “Hallmark holidays” are difficult days. It’s possible you didn’t have a great relationship with your mother, or you wanted to be a mother and couldn’t be… the same is true for dads, but it is a little bit different: many people today have (or had) fraught relationships with their fathers, and many men have difficult or distant relationships with their kids. Absentee dads are more common than absentee moms, even though both situations do exist. I’m lucky to have good relationships with both of my parents – I’m hopeful our daughters will say the same about Abbey and me in their adulthood – but I know, not all of us are (or were) as lucky.

I begin the sermon with that preface today because our gospel text is maybe the worst possible text with which to begin a Father’s Day. “Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword,” Jesus says, “for I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother… one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” Come on! “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” Well, sorry dads, sorry moms. The only passage in scripture that might be a worse fit for a Father’s Day is next week’s reading on Abraham and Isaac, where a dad loves God so much that he’s willing to sacrifice his own son on an altar. This might be second worst. Or maybe this is the second best? Maybe there’s something to say here? We’ll see. Regardless, it’s a decent onramp to today’s sermon.

This morning in our gospel reading, we have a vision of Jesus that is a little difficult to analyze; this is not the Sermon on the Mount, or the Beatitudes, this is not “love God and love your neighbor,” this is not Christmas or Easter or Pentecost. This is a difficult text, a passage from Jesus we might want to ignore, though it is full of good lines: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?” (And yet God cares for them.) “Even the hairs of your head are all counted.” (Easier to count for some than others.) “Those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” There are some real gems here, easy to preach on those snippets.

But I don’t think we can ignore the difficult parts of scripture. Some of us want to do that. “I don’t think Jesus really said this,” is an often-heard line around Epiphany for the parts of scripture we don’t find matching up with our own opinions. Blame the gospel writers, blame their lack of dictation devices, “Jesus didn’t say that.” Conservative churches do this too, you realize, just with the words of Jesus that we like here at Epiphany. We do not get to pick and choose, Church, lest we craft our own Jesus, a God in our own image.

And so, this morning, we also read Jesus saying, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” “I have come to divide your families, to set you against each other.” “I have come to set a man against his father, daughter against mother.” What do we do with this? Well, there are contextual ways to read this, as you might expect. Let’s dive in.

For first-century Jews, the family was the most important societal unit. If you had no family, you were lost, hence the repeated insistence in scripture to care for widows and orphans. Family matters. Here, Jesus is telling the people who choose to follow him that, by following him, they become part of a new family, they have a new life. Their priorities are going to shift, and probably dramatically so, when they choose to truly love all their neighbors as themselves, because there is no hierarchy of love in the kingdom of God. It is all love, all the way down, for everyone. It may be tempting to read this passage negatively, as though Jesus is promoting hate, division, and battle, but in the context of the entirety of the gospels, of the Bible, we know that God is love. Jesus is framing how deeply his followers will love him and each other in contrast to their deep love of family.

Now as a quick disclaimer, there may be some division that comes as a result of this kind of abundant love. Some will not quite understand the fullness of this new life, the vastness of this ever-expanding love. Epiphany experienced some of that division a few decades ago, when a tradition that put limits on love because a perceived biblical law got in the way. But even in division, love is still the way. In 2026, in Pride Month, Epiphany is still standing; we are still confidently on the side of abundant, welcoming love for all.

So, with this love over-flowing, so much so that our deeply held familial bonds are made trivial… what do we say to our dads today? What is fatherhood in light of a gospel love that says love for neighbor, love for everyone, is just as important as love for family?

I mentioned earlier that we all like to proof-text, that we find the words of Jesus we like and discredit the words of Jesus that we don’t. In our Gather & Grow group, we’ve been talking about Christian Nationalism, but really, lately, we’ve been talking more about masculinity. We’ve been talking about how a certain, loud, well-known portion of the church in America has crafted a hyper-masculine Jesus, a Jesus who loves UFC and MMA, who wants the woman at home, who wants to impose first-century Jewish values onto twenty-first century American society, American homes.

Many in that movement love reading, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” This verse has broad appeal to those who want to use it with violence and for power, those who want to lead people, especially young men, down a particular combative path: “Our sword-bearing Jesus needs you, men, to fight for Christian values!” If this is not a world of churchiness you’re personally familiar with, thanks be to God, but also: turn on the news. Theirs is a portrayal of masculinity and yes, Christian fatherhood, that urges men to follow a warrior Jesus into a culture war, to follow a Jesus with big, bulging muscles, swords on his back, or even a Jesus with a cowboy hat, six-shooters at his side. That is their “manly” Jesus.

And, sadly, there is a critique, in that particular camp, that we in the mainline Protestant (Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist) churches, that we follow a “sissified” Jesus, a wimpy Christ. Their critique is not just a theological one, that our Jesus is somehow too loving, but a practical one, and that part can appear to be accurate: many of our churches are led by older women who find community and support here, and many of the men, of all ages, are nowhere to be found.

Now, this may not be true at Epiphany, thanks be to God, but “our branch of the Jesus movement” has often struggled speaking to men, allowing the Promise Keepers and the Ultimate Fighting Jesus to fill that void. In the name of equal rights, men lost their traditional high ground and then, sadly, they felt tossed out with the dirty, patriarchal bathwater. Those may be strong statements to make this morning from an Episcopal pulpit, they may not ring true here, and they are certainly not a critique of equal rights! But broadly, they are true: we as a church can struggle speaking to men.

So, let me briefly try this morning, this Father’s Day. I won’t say anything you haven’t heard here before, friends, don’t worry. Men, dads of this church: the Jesus we see in scripture, our Savior, he needs no sword to be manly. The Jesus we see in scripture is love embodied to its fullest. He is strong and courageous, even in the face of his own death. He is faithful and present. He is fully engaged in life. The Jesus we see in scripture is not violent, except that time when he flipped some tables over in God’s Temple, but no, he is not violent. He serves. Jesus mentors even the most frustrating follower, Peter; he is patient. He defends the vulnerable, he welcomes the outcast, he models the way of life and love.

This is what it is to be manly, this Father’s Day: love all the way to death on the cross. This is not wimpy nor sissified. Jesus Christ shows us all, men and women alike, the type of love that we need, that all of us can live. It is an egalitarian message, yes, so it is one for both our women and our men: Lose your life for the sake of love, love so abundant that everything pales in comparison to it, and you will find true life. Amen.