What a set of lessons we have today – all kinds of stories about parents and their children.  In the Old Testament lesson from the Book of Genesis, Sarah demands that Abraham toss out his mistress and their son into the desert.  Abraham gives them a loaf of bread and a bottle of water and sends them out to fend for themselves.  Although he is distressed, he salves his guilty conscience by remembering God’s implied assurance that somehow they will survive.  A similar version of this story appears in the sixteenth chapter of Genesis, and in that version of the story Sarah wants to get rid of the mistress because the two women can’t get along.  Hagar, the slave and mistress, has been mocking Sarah because she is fertile and Sarah is not.  But in the version we heard this morning the motivation is different.  Sarah sees her son Isaac, playing with Hagar’s son, Ishmael, and can’t stand the idea that they’ll share the inheritance.  She demands that Abraham put them out, and, in a supreme example of spinelessness, he complies with her wishes.

Parents and children also feature prominently in today’s Gospel lesson.  Jesus says that he has come to turn our household upside down by setting parents against their children and children against their parents.  He finishes up with this paean to family values, which you won’t find on any schoolhouse wall, by saying, “’Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.’”  My only regret is that we did not read both of these lessons last week for Father’s Day.

The Old Testament lesson is an example of parental love run amuck.  Sarah thinks that she is doing the best thing for her son by kicking Ishmael out.  Abraham thinks he is doing the best thing by obeying his wife’s demand.  But they both have a tragically narrow view of family.  Their narrow view of family results in Hagar and Ishmael’s near death.  Even if they didn’t physically die, don’t you think something must have died in Hagar’s soul when she tucked her son under a bush and then walked away so that she wouldn’t see him die.  Surely, even from a distance, she could still heard his cries which reached all the way up to heaven.  Hagar and Ishmael wind up in this horrible situation because of parental love run amuck.

Parental love run amuck isn’t just some problem that’s confined to the Bible; I’ll bet we all can think of examples.  I’m thinking of the parents who yell and scream from the sidelines of a softball game because their kid isn’t getting enough playing time – who cares about the other kids.  I’m thinking of I’m thinking of all of us who use more than our fair share of the world’s resources – food, energy, water – who a cares about kids in other parts of the world.  Parental love run amuck cares only for one’s own children to the detriment of everyone else.

Jesus’ harsh words are meant as a corrective to parental love run amuck.  He uses extreme language to teach us that we have a loyalty to God that supercedes our loyalty to family.  We demonstrate that loyalty to God by the way we act.  It’s hard to believe but sometimes people really are willing to put their families at risk in order to follow Christ.  Examples abound, of course, from every age and culture, but the best example I can think of is those Christians in Europe who put themselves and their families in great danger during World War II by hiding Jews from the Nazis.  Like those courageous people, we have a loyalty to God, which in some circumstances may call us to put our families at risk.

Last week with the help of Bill Sherman and Toga Porte, I had the opportunity to meet the new Bishop of Liberia.  It was quite an honor to spend time with him and to hear about his ministry and his diocese.  The Diocese of Liberia is a diocese of the Episcopal Church, which has over 100,000 members and 119 congregations.  The diocese has just 37 active priests and 22 active deacons, and each priest serves four or five congregations and walks from church to church.  A congregation is lucky if they see their priest once a month.  The bishop and his staff have use of a jeep and two pickup trucks, but the priests travel on foot, as I have said, and the lucky ones might have a motor scooter.  Thanks to the work of the alumni association of the Episcopal Schools in Capemount, we in this parish are particularly aware of the physical destruction due to twenty-plus years of civil war.  Churches and schools need to be rebuilt and arable land owned by the diocese needs to be farmed.  After reviewing these and other serious needs the bishop said – this is his message to you and to me – he said, “Don’t forget about us.”

That’s what Jesus is talking about: Don’t forget about each other is his message, too.  We are all bound together one to another.  We hear a lot about family values, but sometimes that seems to mean nothing more than watching out for me and my own  - my own family, my own race, my own church, my own country.  Jesus wants us to expand our idea of family.  Your family is my family and my family is your family.  St. Paul says we have been buried with Christ in his death, and so we will be raised with him in his Resurrection.  This means that we are all one family in Christ, now and for eternity. Amen