September 15, 2019 - Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost - Cost, Choice, and Grace

Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them, “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.

Luke 14:25-27

This begs the question. Do these crowds want to be his disciples? On first blush he certainly is not trying to attract followers with this talk. Who wants to choose to give up all their possessions? Who wants to carry the cross and hate life itself?


Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about the cost of discipleship and about both cheap and costly grace. In this passage Jesus talks about the estimating the cost of building a tower before the foundation is laid. The doctrine of “cheap grace,” a derisive term coined by Bonhoeffer to mean the inclination of some religious adherents to believe that once they had been “saved,” not only would all past sins be wiped away, but future ones, too—so one could pretty much behave as before.

According to Bonhoeffer, costly grace confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: "My yoke is easy and my burden is light."

Yet Bonhoeffer also wrote "When Christ calls us he bids us to come and die". These statements would appear to be irreconcilable but only when we live our lives acting as if we can live forever and that the main purpose our life is to avoid death. 

The cost of discipleship is not transactional. It does not come from a deliberate, rational choice that someone makes alone without God's help . Yes, it does come as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and contrite heart. What Jesus is doing here is giving the crowd who would follow a signpost. To be followers of Jesus we are bid to come and die. When we act as if we could live forever we are will stray from the teachings we know so well.

Jesus speaks to this throughout the Gospels. Matthew 6:24 "No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money." And, for many of us, we think of money as life.

The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard one wrote "In times of great suffering, there can be no rational source of hope or comfort.". Yet Kierkegaard also writes "Faith cannot be fully understood in times of happiness. One can only experience true faith when life is bleak. One sees a kind of goodness coming out of this darkness but it’s by virtue of a leap. It’s a leap in rationality. One can’t argue one’s way, in a straightforward fashion, to a position of faith, When there’s no hope or future, and no logical reason to keep going at all… It’s precisely then that you experience faith.”

Kierkegaard’s argument can be understood against the backdrop of Christian theology, The idea of God dying on the cross is “scandalous” from a Biblical perspective and is “as dark a moment as one could really believe.” Yet it’s also fully attests to God loving humanity.

Before the service today the SE Youth Collective, some of whom are Creator high school students, presented the today's Rally Day Adult Forum. Among the activities they have been engaged in has been their continued processing of their summer New Mexico experiences and stories.

Just after they returned many from the group shared their experiences with Creator at our June 23rd Worship Service. Among other stories, Isabella was struck by how these Native Americans stuck with prayer in dealing with the myriad problems they were encountering. For Victoria, she was moved by how the making of tamales for a particular family became an act of persistence as women sold them to help others through the injustice and discrimination. 

Their presentation in an Adult Forum on Rally Day was moving and a piece was shared written by Majax that spoke to what Victoria detailed about what they had experienced.

i have been taking communion my whole life
but i have felt christ deeply only once
it was nothing fancy, just a tiny house
that had alot of patching up, like the souls that call it home
it felt like home the way i was welcomed in
to a meal of tamales
but what i didn't know was that these were no ordinary tamales
they were hope
she fed me the very thing she used to tie her family together like rope
she fed me what she had bled her soul into, and broke her body preparing
she fed a youth collective not tamales but hope
after she told us that she sold countless tamales to save her husband
i saw christ in each corner of the room
and i couldn't unsee him
because in the moment hope became permanent

-majax