In this tribulation, at this Great Turning, the world doesn’t need more religious consumers who are only interested in the greatest spiritual benefit for the least possible cost; right now our world needs more disciples who realize they need the spiritual practices, the relationships, the rituals and stories of communities like ours—not just to live a better life themselves, but to make a better life possible for the part of the world they inhabit. Right now our world needs disciples who can draw on the grace and benefits they’ve received from their spiritual experience, and then find themselves summoned from within—from the deep, soulful places within them and in their own unique way—to take risks, break with convention, envision a different future, and suffer when suffering is forced upon them because they know that this is the way real love works, this is the way love changes the world. Love will cost us everything. But love alone will set us free. A sermon based on Amos 7:7-15 and Mark 6.3.
1.
Most people pursue a spiritual life in order to make life better for themselves as well as for others. “If I can just get my spiritual life in order”—many of us have said—“if I can reconnect with God, if I can find my soul, if I can transform my pain, if I heal the trouble inside me . . . then I’ll not only feel better, but I just might be better and make a little less trouble in the world around me.”
Most of us awaken to God out of some need to create a better life.
A conscious relationship with God ought to do that—make things better, not worse. Jesus said, “I came to bring you life, life in abundance.” There’s no question that intentional spiritual practices increase our awareness not only of God, but of the sacred in ourselves, the sacred in others, the sacred in nature. There’s plenty of evidence that a greater awareness of God and experience of God—above us, beside us, and within us—can improve our lives and make us capable of improving life on the planet.
Christian discipleship, patterning our lives after the model of Jesus, imitating his way of life, has benefits.
After Joy Dorf’s memorial service yesterday, I spoke with an older woman who decades ago had been very active here at DCC. Over the years, for one reason or another, her spiritual practices waned and she just slipped away. She wasn’t angry. She didn’t blame anyone. That intrigued me.
Why? Well, when a person’s been gone awhile and then meets me at a memorial service or wedding, I often brace myself for a complaint. When a person has my ear over the refreshment table, it’s often their chance to gripe about what the church did or didn’t do that drove them away—this church or some other church.
The church does mess things up plenty. I’ve been a pastor for many years and I’ve been a part of plenty of mistakes, failures, or what some people perceive to be mess-ups. But most of the time, the church and Christianity and religion take the blame for what is almost always a two way street across a bridge—the church fails and so does the person. There are a lot of things the church needs to improve on. It just takes one of us to scowl at someone for sitting in the seat we think is our assigned seat; or it just takes one more hurtful statement from the pastor or another painful decision by the board or another failure of a volunteer or staff member to follow through. These are the kinds of things that can drive people away. But it’s almost always a two-way street. The church may mess-up, but that mess up is complicated by the mess inside a person’s own life. Most of the time problems don’t drive people away when a person’s own spiritual life is vibrant, if they’re connected to authentic spiritual community, and if and they know they will be heard if they have a concern. Mess-ups are inevitable. We need some kind of strength on at least one side of the bridge in order to endure them.
The woman yesterday said nothing about the church and its mess-ups. She just said, “I’ve been away too long. Today I realized there’s something in me calling me to return. I need this.”
We need this. I wonder if you realize how important all this church stuff is, regardless of whether we’ve failed to meet your needs or desires from time to time. Sometimes we grow cold to this truth, we take the grace and benefits of religious experience for granted. But there’s no question that discipleship, intentionally practicing the spirituality of our shared religious experience, is beneficial in so many ways.
There are a number of studies that show the personal benefits of spiritual practices like meditation, singing together, and serving others. And there are studies that show that people who intentionally affiliate with congregations are healthier in their bodies and minds because of the relationships around shared values and visions for what life can be. In our rootless, disconnected, and often suspicious and hostile cultures, people need what religion has always delivered to people—a sense of grounding in a reality that runs deeper than the vicissitudes of daily life.
I don’t know where I’d be today or who I’d be, and I don’t know how I’ll handle tomorrow without my religious experience, without the ability to practice the presence of God, without the spiritual practices I engage in my private life and those I engage publicly with you. My private discipleship needs my public experience with you. I must practice it myself, but it’s awfully hard when I’m all alone.
What would your life be like today without a place like this, a people like this, this shared experience of discipleship that’s carried you? What might tomorrow be like without all this?
2.
It’s important from time to time to stop and acknowledge the great benefits of our religious experience, the blessings of discipleship.
But, as important as the benefits are, as wonderful as the blessings of discipleship are, our religious experience isn’t only about the benefits and blessings.
As people shaped by the consumerist agenda of capitalism, we’re more accustomed to thinking about benefits than we are about the costs of discipleship.
It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who coined the phrase, “The Cost of Discipleship,” for the modern world. He also knew the immense benefits. The grace and benefits of discipleship sustained him in his great struggle as a Christian pastor and teacher against the Nazism of Hitler’s Third Reich. Bonhoeffer was a young pastor in the 1930s and 40s who helped lead the Lutheran church’s resistance to the way Hitler and Nazism co-opted Christian faith, baptized it, bastardized it, corrupted it, and sold it to the adoring masses who were all too ready to see Hitler as a religio-political savior, and his version of white nationalism and Arian supremacy as the answer to Germany’s ills following the devastating economic sanctions placed on Germany after World War One.
Published in 1937, Bonhoeffer’s book, The Cost of Discipleship, was an exposition of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Trained by his spiritual practices, honed by his discipleship, Bonhoeffer foresaw that the way of Jesus Christ was endangered by Hitler and Nazism. On April 9, 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer—pastor, teacher, writer, and activist who helped plot the attempted assassination of Hitler—was hanged for treason at the concentration camp of Flossenburg. He was only thirty-nine. When the German officers came for him in the barracks, Bonhoeffer was leading a prayer service for other political prisoners. As he was taken away, he turned to his friends and said, “Friends, this is the end; but for me it is the beginning of life.”
Bonhoeffer knew the grace and benefits of discipleship—grace and benefits that made it possible for him to face the costs of discipleship and endure whatever suffering he had to face in order to be true to God’s dream for the world.
Often he’s viewed as some great martyr or hero. He wasn’t great; he was ordinary. Like you and me.
We don’t often think about the costs of discipleship. We’re trained by consumer capitalism to ask, “What’s the greatest possible benefit I can get for the least possible cost?” We want God; we want spiritual goods; and we want religion to make sense, fit into our well-ordered, conventional lives. We want a church that meets our needs. And we don’t want it to rock the boat; we don’t want be to be offensive ourselves, to be countercultural, and we certainly don’t want to take a stand and stand alone when we do so.
How unlike the biblical prophets we are.
Amos was just a farmer from the south when he was summoned by God to tell the king of the north that he was an abject failure at being a king, morally corrupt, and that what he was doing was contrary to God’s dream. Amos told the king he was doomed to die. Not a tidy message that was going to win him friends and get him dinner invitations at the palace. No, the temple priest told Amos to go back home, south of the border, and stop pretending to be a prophet.
Jesus was just a carpenter from Nazareth when he began to teach about the kin-dom of God in such unconventional ways. What he did and taught threatened the status quo, challenged those in power, and umasked the privileges of the elite. Not a conventional, predictable message that would get him a lucrative book contract or a seat beside the king in his box-seats at the colosseum for the next games. No, our reading today tells us they questioned his credentials and “took offense at him.”
3.
There are certainly benefits to discipleship, but there are costs too.
Amos, Jesus, Bonhoeffer, and Sojourner Truth (whose story as an early abolitionist I told you a few weeks ago) all are witnesses that if you and I have received the grace and benefits of the spiritual life, we will be called at some point to decide if we’re going to uphold the status quo or unsettle it, if we’re going to be someone or do something that challenges people, awakens them, forces new questions upon them, or requires them to do their own inner work to try to make sense of God. Something sacred will stir in us and we’ll have to decide what we’re going to do with it.
To imitate Jesus Christ—which is what discipleship is all about—will certainly put something worthwhile in you. But it will also want to do something through you that will cost you something.
We are living at a time of great importance for the future of the human race. The older biblical language might call it a “great tribulation.” I think of it as a Great Turning.
And in this tribulation, at this Great Turning, the world doesn’t need more religious consumers who are only interested in the greatest spiritual benefit for the least possible cost; right now our world needs more disciples who realize they need the spiritual practices, the relationships, the rituals and stories of communities like ours—not just to live a better life themselves, but to make a better life possible for the part of the world they inhabit. Right now our world needs disciples who can draw on the grace and benefits they’ve received from their spiritual experience, and then find themselves summoned from within—from the deep, soulful places within them and in their own unique way—to take risks, break with convention, envision a different future, and suffer when suffering is forced upon them because they know that this is the way real love works, this is the way love changes the world. Love will cost us everything. But love alone will set us free.
“We unaccustomed to courage,” writes Maya Angelou (who understood the gospel).
We unaccustomed to courage,
exiles from delight,
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.
Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.
We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love's light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet [love alone
will set us free.]
[Silence . . . ]