Counting
the Cost
September 9, 2007
by Dr. Charles Parker
Jeremiah 18:1-11; Luke 14:25-33
I. Introduction
I’ve been looking forward to this Sunday for a while: folks are back from vacation, we go back to two services, our wonderful choirs are back singing, we have the excitement of Open House today, the instillation of the Sunday school and Adult Ed teachers, the Unity walk this afternoon. I’ve been looking forward to this morning, but I had a really hard time getting focused on the sermon (as my staff colleagues can tell you). There was a lot of meat in the lectionary readings, but nothing that jumped out as the Word that I wanted to preach from.
And I finally realized that my problem was that I was reluctant to dig into these readings because they’re hard for me, and I suspect hard for a lot of us. And I didn’t want “hard” for this Sunday. I wanted “upbeat” and “positive” and “energizing,” and these passages aren’t that. These passages are about the work -- the discipline -- that is involved in discipleship (those two words, obviously, having the same root). They’re about radically reorienting our priorities; they’re about sacrifice. They’re about picking up our cross – always a popular topic! And then I realized that my reluctance to engage these Scriptures is exactly what these Scriptures are about, the struggle that our church faces all the time: the temptation – almost the compulsion – to preach what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls “cheap grace.”
II. Cheap Grace
As many of
you know, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian who
entered the ministry and his teaching career during the Nazi’s rise to
power. When the Nazi political machine
effectively took over the churches in
I review this history to let you know that Bonhoeffer knew something about the cost of discipleship; which is, of course, the name of his most famous book, taking its title from our Gospel lesson this morning.
Grace is the unmerited gift of God by which we are reconciled with God and enabled to enter into relationship with Him, free from the ramifications of our sinfulness. The wall that we put up between ourselves and God has been broken down by God through the sacrifice Jesus Christ on the cross. This is perhaps the most fundamental theological concept in our faith and was at the heart of the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther’s conflict with the Roman Catholic Church, of which he was a part – the thing that gave birth to the Reformation -- was the doctrine of salvation by works: the idea that we earned our way into heaven on the basis of our good work.
Martin Luther strongly rejected that idea, proclaiming that salvation is a pure gift, given by God as an unmerited act of grace. It is by grace alone that we are saved, through faith. Our Church is built on that doctrine. But something happened along the way, Bonhoeffer tells us. Luther’s disciples used the right language – that we are saved through grace alone – but separated from it the reality that to participate in this grace involves living a life of discipleship, following Jesus in the way of the cross. So that we have become great at talking about God’s unmerited gift, and pretty poor at talking about leading the kind of life that that grace demands.
“Cheap grace,” says Bonhoeffer, “is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church, communion without confession…Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner…The world goes on in the same old way and we are still sinners.” “Cheap grace,” Bonhoeffer says, “is the deadly enemy of our Church.” And it’s so deadly, so insidious, because it let’s us feel like we’re the church, without being the church in any meaningful way. So that when people on the outside look at us, they don’t see that we’re particularly different from anyone else.
III. Costly Grace
We all have experienced the draw of cheap grace. It’s our desire to feel the consolation of our religion without it really having to change the way we live. It’s Norman Vincent Peale’s “power of positive thinking.” Picking up on this idea, Robert Schuler has advised pastors to avoid preaching about the cross because it discourages people. And on some level, he must know what he’s talking about. He has got more people worshipping at the Crystal Cathedral than we have ever had here (actually, his son has them there now).
Luke starts
off this morning’s gospel lesson noting that Jesus also had a lot of crowds
following him. He’s moving towards
“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple… none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”
Here’s yet another example of what a lousy politician Jesus would have made! When you’re just getting the crowds warmed up, you don’t kill the mood with a set of sayings like this. Cheap grace.
As a sidebar, I want to explain that in this first verse, Jesus is obviously not telling us to hate our families (no matter how crazy they get!). This is a Semitic expression that simply means that in the light of our relationship with Jesus Christ, all of our other relationships are reoriented and subordinated to the one relationship that makes all of the others possible.
Jesus is saying that, “if you decide to enter into relationship with me, your relationship with everyone and everything else is going to change dramatically – your relationship with the people around you, your relationships with your life goals, your relationship with your stuff.” So if you’re not prepared for that, then don’t engage this process of being a disciple, because it’s not going to do you or anybody else any good.
Discipleship – the process of following the Lord of Life – is the ongoing discipline of constantly reorienting, putting Jesus first. And we need to bring the same discipline to it that we do to any area of our life in which we want to excel. To help us understand this, the writers of Scripture, Paul in particular, use the analogy of athletics over and over again. We all know that if I decide that I want to run a marathon – something, by the way that will never, never happen – I’m not going to be able to do that unless I’m out there every day disciplining my body. If I don’t -- if I just wake up one morning and decide that it would be a nice day to run a marathon -- I’m going to fail.
And yet, that really is the mindset that many people bring to their faith journey. “I’m spiritual,” people will say, “but I don’t feel that going to church is really important.” Or, “I know that know that the Scriptures are the word of God, but I don’t really have the time to do too much study.” “I’ve prayed for forgiveness for that thing I did to my brother/sister/husband/wife/ mother/father, I don’t really need to apologize to them directly.” Cheap grace.
When Jesus tells us that we need to carry our cross, the verb “carry” is in the present tense, which in Greek denotes ongoing action. In other words, it’s not something that we do once and it’s done. It’s a daily process of setting aside ego and self-interest and picking up selfless love for the people around us. And in doing so, we find our lives given meaning and purpose and joy.
Friends, as we enter a new academic year and reengage after summer vacations, we have a wonderful opportunity to recommit ourselves to the disciplines of discipleship. We have new classes in which to study, we have new opportunities for ministry, and we have new opportunities to grow together as a community. Take advantage of this time to reflect on what parts of your faith journey you may have been neglecting, the areas to which you can start to bring the discipline that has been lacking.
IV. Conclusion
I had a call from a clergy colleague of mine this week. His church is planning on engaging in a capital campaign, and it’s an intimidating process for him, because to build the new structure to allow the church to grow, they’re going to have to tear down part of the old structure to clear the land. So he can’t do it halfway, and he not sure that they can actually raise the amount of money that they need to do the whole project.
Jesus uses exactly this analogy to talk about what it means to be a disciple. He says, “If you were going to build a tower, you wouldn’t get started before you had figured out whether you had the resources to build the whole thing. Otherwise, you might start building and be unable to finish, and then you’d look pretty foolish. Bring that same level of intentionality,” he says, “to the process of being a disciple of mine. If you can’t put me first, don’t try to fit me in around the edges. You can’t fit me into your life. I can come in and transform the whole thing and give you life that you never dreamed of, but you can’t do it casually.”
God’s grace seeks to transform every aspect of our lives. In the image from Jeremiah this morning, God’s grace seeks to collapse the pot that has been malformed by our sinfulness and recreate it into a new and beautiful vessel. That grace is a gift. But if we can’t accept that gift in its entirety, if we can’t live fully out of that reality, all we have is cheap grace. And as we know whenever we do something on the cheap, we get what we pay for.
Amen.