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14 Pentecost, 5 September 2004 |
(25) Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them, (26) "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. (27) Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. (28) For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? (29) Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, (30) saying, 'This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.' (31) Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? (32) If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. (33) So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions. THE COST OF DISCIPLESHIP Lutheran Christians are good at talking about Jesus, but I’m not so sure we’re very good at listening to him. For instance, Lutheran Christians tend to be adept at articulating the Gospel of Jesus Christ as Good News. We love to say that God’s love in Jesus Christ is an absolutely free gift. To emphasize this to our children we use clever acronyms like GRACE – God’s Riches at Christ’s Expense. We insist, officially, that we want to properly distinguish God’s Law from God’s Promise in order to keep the Good News good and trustworthy. And so we are scrupulous about avoiding words like “must” and “have to” and “got to.” The Gospel is about inviting not coercing, we say. We quote Martin Luther’s Small Catechism often, saying that the Holy Spirit does what we cannot naturally do. Working in the Church of Jesus Christ, we say the Holy Spirit creates faith in us through the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We say the Holy Spirit teaches us, through the Gospel, to trust that we are made right with God through no effort or merit of our own. We say that as God baptizes us into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are claimed by grace as God’s beloved daughters and sons. We say, at least officially, that we are reborn again and again as we return to our baptism, confess our brokenness, and approach God’s throne of grace with empty hands. In our liturgy, we say that we are responding to God’s goodness and mercy by offering up our lives as a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. Pressed to give an answer, many Lutheran Christians can give a fairly simple answer to the question, “What is the Good News of Jesus Christ?” (Why grace is a free gift!) But left to our own normal ways of being and doing, most Lutheran Christians can’t seem to grasp what it is that the Gospel does! We can’t seem to get it that Jesus is trying to do something with us sometime before we physically die. Yes, we Lutheran Christians tend to be suspicious about the notion of sanctification. We are officially quick to say that the Holy Spirit does it in and through the Church – working through the Word and Sacraments. But then we point to Luther’s famous dictum that we are simultaneously saints and sinners. Again…it’s almost as if we are afraid that God might actually change us sometime before the old sinner in us is finally drowned once and for all in our physical dying. The German martyr, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, took aim at Lutherans in his famous exposition of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel. Writing in his book The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer castigated Lutheran Christians for living a caricature of the Christian life. He was attacking a crossless Christianity. He was attacking us for singing, “Take My Life and Let Me Be.” He was attacking that old sinner in us that wants to stay old – that old unredeemed part of each of us that wants to stay unredeemed, unclaimed, and unwashed. Bonhoeffer was popular when I was coming of age in the 1960s. I was surprised to hear my mother’s Lutheran pastor and my father’s Baptist pastor sometimes agreeing on the same Sunday morning that cheap grace was a problem for Christians. (For years I went to the Lutheran church and the Baptist church on the same day). After I had been a pastor for awhile, I finally understood that both pastors were wrestling with far too many apathetic church members. They should have been talking with each other. Instead sometimes they had more of a friend in Bonhoeffer than in Jesus. One Sunday my Dad said to me on the way home, “I wish for once I could hear about Jesus instead of Paul Tillich or Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” He almost always loved his pastors, but he loved Jesus more. I can still hear him saying, “Son, I can tell in five minutes whether a preacher is sold on his product.” (Daddy died before many women made it into Lutheran or Baptist pulpits.) My Dad was a good listener. He heard his preacher’s anguished cry behind all the Bonhoeffer and Tillich quotations. The preacher was saying, “Lord, I believe, help Thou mine unbelief” (Mark 9:24). He was saying, “Lord, I want to be a Christian, but I’m not sure I want to be a pastor. I’m not sure that what I’m doing makes any difference.” Daddy’s preacher was undergoing a mid-life crisis if not a crisis of faith. I think he felt that he was serving a congregation that resembled Flannery O’Connor’s famous Church Without Christ. (In her novella Wiseblood that’s the church where the deaf don’t hear, the lame don’t walk, and them that’s dead stays that way.) Like my Daddy’s preacher all of us could listen to Jesus more than we do. He makes absolutely clear today that the old sinner in us cannot remain. I can’t be God’s dear possession when most of me is still hanging on to my possessions for dear life. I can’t love the Lord with all my heart if most of my heart is engaged in making my child a better soccer player. I can’t love the Lord with all my heart if most of my heart is occupied with how to make somebody love me like I want to be loved. I can’t love the Lord with all my heart if most of my heart and most of my wallet is tied up with whatever it is in this world that delights me. I can’t love the Lord with my all if most of my heart, soul, and mind is consumed by ambition or control or the arts or fundraising or church-building or politics or whatever it is to which my heart is clinging. We preachers listen to Jesus selectively. We hear this Gospel lesson, and we say, “Now I can use that text for a good stewardship sermon. Yes, it costs to run a church. Or I can use that text for the next building program. Yes, we are to count the cost of the project before we begin. Or I can use that text to grow the congregation. Yes, we are in a battle out there against the enemies of God.” And so on. All the while the preacher is often baptizing his or her ambitions and longings instead of inviting the congregation to die. Too many of us preachers don’t believe the Gospel actually transforms lives. Change? Most lay people listen to Jesus selectively. Most hear this Gospel lesson and say, “Jesus doesn’t want me to hate my family. He just wants me to put God first. He just wants me to be a little nicer and a little more forgiving and a little more active in my congregation and a little more generous.” All the while the lay person is avoiding the fact that the old sinner in each of us has to be drowned daily. Christians don’t want to admit that following Jesus means the death of everything in us that just wants to be a little different but not too much. Most lay people don’t believe the Gospel actually transforms lives. Change? We Lutherans can laugh at ourselves though, can’t we? We all know the joke. How many Lutherans does it take to change a light bulb? Twelve. One to change it, and the other eleven to say how much they liked the old light bulb better. Yes, we can laugh at ourselves as long as we’re laughing about change instead of actually changing. As long as we’re laughing about being cheap instead of actually writing God’s check first. As long as we’re laughing about our brokenness instead of actually taking those first faltering steps towards actual transformation. For most of us Lutherans transformation simply means moving the proverbial deck chairs around on the Titanic. Yes, change the hymnal. Change who’s in the pulpit. Change who’s in the pews. Change buildings and names. Change social statements. Always…telling ourselves that’s the kind of change Jesus means. If it’s new, it must be the Gospel. That’s what a lot of us Lutherans think. Just don’t ask us to die to ourselves. God’s Son Jesus had to die for us, because we didn’t want to die to ourselves. And we still don’t want to die to ourselves. It cost God everything to save us from ourselves. It cost God everything to free us from the power of sin, death, and evil. God so loved us that He did for us what we can not do for ourselves. It’s not that God somehow changed His mind about sin. Rather God did not give us what we deserve. In Jesus Christ, God gave us what we didn’t deserve. Mercy. Forgiveness. Love. Himself. When we are baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection, we die and rise again. It is the beginning of a pattern that is only completed when our body dies. Finally, at the last, we will be made completely new. In the interim between our first washing and the day we draw our last breath, we die and rise. Die and rise. Die and rise. Die and rise. Die and rise. Die and rise. Die and rise. Die and rise. Perhaps all this dying and rising is the stuff that slogans are made of. Perhaps it is that sanctification is one step forward and six steps backwards. Perhaps it is that we grow from looking down on people to looking down on those that look down on people. Perhaps it is that we fake it until we make it. Perhaps it is that we practice looking better until we are better. All of that God the Holy Spirit’s mighty transforming work fighting against the old sinner’s reptilian survival instincts. The point is that disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ do die and do rise, or we are not his disciples! We follow the Master however halting, or we do not. We loathe our brokenness and do not celebrate it. We mourn our sinfulness and do not offer it up as if it were God’s doing. We carry our fondest dreams like Isaac to the woodpile tearfully willing to give them up if God so terrifyingly demands them of us. And ultimately, we must in truth admit, God will demand everything of us that is of this world. We die. Ah, yes, but we rise! Behold, He makes all things new! My dear sisters and brothers, every lesson that I have learned has been through pain. I have had to suffer the deaths of loved ones, relationships, ambitions, and dreams. I have had to fire people that I liked and even some that I loved. I have had to face God with my own terrible failures and shortcomings. I have had to tell people the truth when I knew that I would be hated and reviled for it. I have had to say goodbye to a congregation where I was mostly loved to serve another congregation where I was often despised. In all of that God’s Holy Spirit has been molding me not as I intended or wanted but as God willed. And God is far from through with me yet. All of the pain, some of it self-inflicted, has been the stuff of death. But each act of dying to self becomes the occasion for becoming more of what God intended in the first place. The Christian life, dear ones, is not merely talking and singing about Jesus. It is not dabbling in God while clinging tenaciously to the things of this world. The cost of discipleship is the death of Jesus. Those of us that follow him will die, too. And in that dying, God gives life as we could never imagine it! The Rev. Dr. Samuel Zumwalt
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