Kingdom Above All

The Radical Allegiance of Citizens of Heaven

Matthew 10:24–39  ·  Jeremiah 20:7–13  ·  Romans 6:1b–11

 Father’s Day  ·  June 21, 2026  ·  Condensed Edition (8–10 minutes)

Series 1: The Kingdom Announced  ·  Week 4 of 5

INTRODUCTION

It’s Father’s Day, which means I have a sacred obligation to begin the way my father always began a conversation with his dry humor that caused everyone to groan.

[Lean into it.]

Something like:

•   I’m reading a book about anti-gravity. It’s impossible to put down.

•   I don’t trust stairs. They’re always up to something.

•   And one to file away for later: I’m worried about my calendar. Its days are numbered.

[Endure the groans. Bask in them.]

Now — the dad joke is one of the great unsung dialects of love. It’s corny on purpose. It asks for nothing but a groan. And it shows up again and again, year after year, whether or not anyone laughs. Which is not a bad description of what the best fathers actually do. They show up. Persistently. Often unglamorously. In ways that make us roll our eyes as teenagers and then catch us in the throat years later.

So to the fathers here — the granddads, the spiritual fathers, the men who stepped up to father children who weren’t biologically theirs — we honor you today, and we thank God for you.

[Let that land warmly before the turn.]

And now I have to be honest, because you can read. Whoever assigned our Gospel for this morning was clearly not consulting the greeting-card calendar. Because on Father’s Day, Jesus says this:

Matthew 10:34–37  —  “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword… Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.”

Happy Father’s Day, everyone.

[Wait for the laugh.]

But here’s what I want to show you: this hard, sword-edged text is not the enemy of Father’s Day. It is the very thing that teaches us how to love our fathers — and everyone else — rightly.

Now let us turn to our Scripture for today:

Children of God listen to the Lord’s Holy and sacred Word:

Matthew 10:24–39 “24 “A disciple is not above the teacher nor a slave above the master; 25 it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher and the slave like the master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household! 26 “So have no fear of them, for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered and nothing secret that will not become known. 27 What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light, and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. 28 Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, fear the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell. 29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. 30 And even the hairs of your head are all counted. 31 So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows. 32 “Everyone, therefore, who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven, 33 but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven. 34 “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword. 35 For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, 36 and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. 37 “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, 38 and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

Let us pray.

PART ONE: “Do Not Be Afraid”

Before Jesus says anything hard, he says something tender — and we have to hear it first, or the hard part will crush us. Three times in this passage he says: do not be afraid.And listen to how he does it:

Matthew 10:29–31  —  “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father… even the hairs of your head are all counted.”

Remember my dad joke — the calendar’s days are numbered? Jesus says something far more astonishing: the hairs of your head are numbered. Counted. Known.

[Let the callback land.]

This is not a distant CEO of the universe. This is a Father — Jesus uses that exact word — whose care is so intimate he attends to the falling of a single sparrow you could buy two of for a penny. And here’s why it comes first: you cannot give your highest allegiance to someone you’re afraid of. The radical loyalty Jesus is about to ask for is only possible because it’s loyalty to a Father who loves you down to the last hair. The Kingdom’s demand and the Kingdom’s tenderness are not in tension — the tenderness is what makes the demand bearable.

PART TWO: “Not Peace but a Sword”

Now we can face the hard saying:

34 “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword.

And let’s clear something up immediately: Jesus is not endorsing violence. He blessed the peacemakers. He told Peter to put his sword away. So what does he mean?

The great Matthew scholar Ulrich Luz explains that the “sword” here is not something Jesus wants; it’s something he foresees. It’s the unavoidable consequence of the Kingdom arriving in a world of competing loyalties. When the rightful King shows up and asks for first peace, it creates division between those who say yes and those who say no — and sometimes that line runs right through the middle of a family.

Most of you know this from experience. When one person comes alive to Jesus and the others don’t understand it — there’s a sword in that. Jesus isn’t creating the division out of malice. He’s being honest that his call is so total it will sometimes cost us even our most precious relationships. And that honesty is itself a form of love. He won’t let anyone sign up under false pretenses.

PART THREE: The Ordering of Loves — How We Honor Fathers

Now the verse that seems hardest on Father’s Day — which is actually the key to honoring our fathers well:

Matthew 10:37  —  “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.”

Sounds harsh, but hear it carefully. Jesus does not say don’t love your father and mother. The command to honor them still stands. He says don’t love them more than me — don’t put them in the place that belongs to God alone.

This is what the ancient church called the ordering of loves. Saint Augustine taught that our deepest problem isn’t that we love wrong things — it’s that we love good things in the wrong order. We take good loves — family, work, country — and put them in the spot reserved for God. And when we do, we crush the very things we’ve over-loved, because no human relationship was built to carry the weight of being someone’s god.

Think about that, fathers. When a father makes his family his god, he slowly suffocates the very people he loves most. But when Christ is genuinely first — when a father loves God above even his own children — his love is set free. It’s no longer desperate or possessive. It becomes generous, patient, secure. Because he’s no longer asking his children to be his salvation. He already has a Savior.

[Slow down. This is the heart of the Father’s Day honoring.]

So here’s how we honor fathers this morning. The greatest gift a father can give is not a perfect childhood or financial security or a flawless example. It is to point beyond himself — to say, by the way he lives, “I am not the ultimate thing. There is a Father in heaven who loves you even more than I do, and I will spend my life pointing you toward him.”

The best fathers I’ve known weren’t the ones who tried to be everything to their children. They were the ones who loved God so deeply that their children grew up knowing where to look for the love that never fails. That is what this verse is protecting: not the diminishment of fatherhood — the perfection of it.

CONCLUSION: Losing Your Life to Find It

Jesus brings it home with the great paradox of the Kingdom:

Matthew 10:39  —  “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

Clutch your life with white knuckles and it slips through your fingers. Hand it over to Jesus and you discover you’ve been given it back, fuller and freer. Dietrich Bonhoeffer — who lost his own life under the Nazis for following Jesus — wrote: when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. But that dying is the doorway to the only life worth having.3

We started with dad jokes — the corny, persistent, showing-up love so many of us received. And we’ve traveled through one of the hardest texts in the Gospel, only to find it was never against that love at all. It was protecting it. Ordering it. Setting it free.

To the fathers here: the call of Jesus does not compete with your fatherhood. It completes it. Love God most, and you will love your children best.

And gently, to those for whom this day is hard — missing a father, or never having had the one you needed, or longing to be a father and carrying that ache quietly — hear this: you have a Father in heaven who knows your name, who counts the very hairs of your head, who watches over you more tenderly than the most devoted earthly father ever could. That place is filled — gloriously, permanently filled — by the God who will never fail you and never leave.

So love him first. And watch every other love come alive.

Happy Father’s Day. And thanks be to God — our truest Father, and the King who calls us his own.

Amen.

SOURCES CITED

1.  Ulrich Luz, Matthew 8–20: A Commentary, Hermeneia series, trans. James E. Crouch (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), pp. 111–120. Luz argues that the “sword” of Matthew 10:34 describes the inevitable consequence of the Kingdom’s arrival in a world of divided loyalties — a division Jesus foresees and names honestly, not one he desires or commands.

2.  Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book I, chapters 22–28, and Confessions, Book IV. Augustine’s concept of the ordo amoris — the rightly ordered love that loves each thing in proportion to its worth and loves God above all — holds that disordered love is the root of human misery, placing created goods in the place reserved for the Creator and thereby distorting the very goods we over-love.

3.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R.H. Fuller, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1959), p. 89 (“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die”). Bonhoeffer’s exposition of costly grace — grace that costs a person their life even as it gives them true life — is the definitive modern treatment of Jesus’ call to take up the cross. Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazi regime in 1945 for his faithfulness.

All scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA.