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     With today's gospel scripture, the "seminary education" of the twelve apostles comes to an end and Jesus sets forth to show them in person just what all he has taught them means when it comes to practicing it!  The last lesson is as demanding as anything that came before.  In the social world of the Middle East, family, clan and tribe were the primary relationships.  Anyone who lost those relationships was truly poor.  This is why "widows and orphans" is an expression that captures the most vulnerable of people in that day.  Jesus seems in today's gospel to demand that one become virtually an orphan and be attached first and foremost to following him!    Not only that, faith in him may indeed result in family rejection!  All of this can be painful and a good part of what it means to "take up the cross!"

     Although religious conflict in a family can be a painful thing to experience, perhaps that may be better than the religious indifference that results from parents failing to practice faith in a healthy and committed fashion at all.  Parents who leave choice of religion to the children are not doing their children a favor.  That choice will indeed be made but not in a vacuum.  Sometimes this is the result of unhealthy religious conflict in a family that "turns off" the children to faith.  Sometimes it is the result of no or lukewarm faith.  The gospel makes much greater demands than that.  The other choice is an empty secular humanism that dissolves as soon as individual interests are challenged by others.  A review of the Sermon on the Mount and the charges to the disciples should give us considerable material to meditate on and see if we come near to a passing grade.  AMEN