The Cost of Discipleship
The Cost of Discipleship
Matthew 5:43-48
Last week, we listened as Jesus moved from the social world to our internal lives. Jesus told us who he stands with in this life: the broken-hearted, the sick, the persecuted. He told us how he feels about us: that we are salt and light. God is present within us. God can shine through us. With God’s help, we can make the world better. Then, Jesus talks to us about anger, a feeling which can eat us alive. There is no room for grudges or nasty comments. We have to do the hard work of getting rid of the things inside of us that can block the chance for God’s presence to shine through us.
The old pattern was that the law would show us how to live. The law did so as a set of external constraints. The law wasn’t about how you feel inside. The law was about getting you to do what you should do and getting you to not do what was prohibited. Anyone could look at your life and tell if you were law abiding. If you did things that you weren’t supposed to do or failed to do what was required, you made things right by offering a sacrifice to make amends with God. Then, you got a new shot at following the law.
This is not the “way” that Christ has come to show us how to live. This new way begins with this truth: God loves you. You didn’t earn this. You didn’t find some way to make yourself irresistibly lovable. You didn’t fulfill the law. Rather, God’s love is pure grace. Think again of Jesus’ baptism. Before he has done anything, God declares, “This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.” That’s amazing…but hey, this is Jesus, right? Keep listening, though. The radically good news that Jesus reveals in his life, death and resurrection is that God loves each and every one of us in this same way. God calls us to love…but God goes first. God looks at folks like you and me and declares, “You, too, are my beloved child with whom I am well pleased.”
To really come to grips with this grace is to be permanently and relentlessly humbled. It’s not that we have to walk around thinking how terrible we are. We’re not. There are really good things about each and every one of us. Of course, it is just as true that every one of us is broken, as well. We are not perfect. Rather, God’s love is perfect. We don’t have a leg to stand on. However, the foundation that is there for us to build our lives on is that no matter how broken we may be, we are loved. As I’ve said to you before, this is God as the all loving parent who is just plain going to love their child, no matter what else is going on. Those of us who have had a chance to savor such a love know that being loved unconditionally is the kind of love that sets us free to grow.
Let’s make this concrete. I was listening to someone this week who was talking about the bed time ritual when he was a child. He would snuggle into bed, look up at his dad and his dad would ask, “What did you do to earn your keep today?” This was where the bar was set in his family: every day everyone had to prove their worth. The most immediate impact of this was that everyone in that family became huge overachievers. It turns out that if you have to prove your worth every day, you can get a lot done!
That wasn’t this person’s point, though. This person’s point was about how that message got internalized. He talked about what life as an overachieving, workaholic looked like for him…and for his brother…and for his sister…and for his mother…and for his father. He talked about how such a way of living had been passed from generation to generation in his family. While it was true that they had achieved some great things, he was hard pressed to find anyone in his family who found joy and meaning in the long run in what they had accomplished. Spending your life trying to prove yourself and trying to secure other people’s approval left folks feeling empty. Today’s achievements vanished in the face of the next day’s question: “What have you done today to prove your worth?”
When you take God’s message that you are already loved and that this love is unconditional to heart, life is about something other than proving our worth. It would make sense that having received an unimaginable gift that I didn’t deserve, I might be humble. It would make sense that having been loved, I might want to take every chance I get to love the person in front of me. It would make sense that this love would be unconditional, too,—my own best shot at pure grace, at least the best a broken person like me can do. All of this would make sense when the only thing that I can do when God loves me is to try to live a grateful life. Life isn’t about trying to prove anything about me. Life is about trying my best to create little moments which point to how amazing and transforming God’s love can be. One of my favorite quotes is this: “Sometimes, your life might be the only Gospel someone reads.” If that’s true, please God, let that Gospel be about you, God, and not about me.
This might all sound like God is letting us off the hook. After all, God just loves us—no matter what? Aren’t we supposed to have to work hard to get the best things in this life. Isn’t is true that nothing’s free? If God is just going to love us and the message is, “Oh ya…if you want to do something nice in return, try to be a loving person,” doesn’t that just seem a bit watered down?
This would be true if all God asked us to do was to love the people who love us. We love our friends and family, right? Well, let’s pause for a moment of honesty. Even loving our friends and family is more of a goal than an achievement on a lot of days, right? Some days, even loving the people who love us, whom we are clearly supposed to love back can be a giant challenge. We get on each others nerves and sometimes go out of our way to annoy each other. We withhold the words that the other person is dying to hear. We’re not always all that kind. Still, though, most days it would be hard to look at our lives and think that we’re not at least trying to be loving.
Jesus isn’t satisfied with us just being a loving husband or wife or son or daughter or mother or father or friend. He pushes things and tells us that we should love our neighbors. By this, he means the one with the dog that barks in the middle of the night. He would have meant the neighbor who’s light shines all night into your bedroom if there had been lights that shined back then. He definitely would have meant the neighbor who thought differently than you—even the neighbor who put “the wrong” political sign in their yard or on their Facebook page. “Jesus, can you define the term ‘neighbor’ for us?” the crowds would ask. “Oh, I don’t know…” Jesus would answer, “Let’s start with whoever is standing right in front of you?”
Okay…so we’re supposed to love the people immediately in front of us. I might be able to manipulate this one if I live in the right gated community, right? I might be able to avoid certain types of people and then have an out: “You know, Jesus, it’s super weird but I never actually met someone who was hungry or who needed my care. Everyone I met seemed fine!” Sooner or later, though, we know that we’re going to be the guy walking down the road, minding our own business, when we mess up and see the person lying in the ditch on the side of the road or in some other way, suffering. And, if we’re honest, we know we’ve already been the guy in Jesus’ parable who walked right past someone in need while we rehearsed the excuses that we needed to soothe our consciences.
Okay…alright, Jesus, I will love my family and friends and I’ll extend that to loving my neighbor along the way, too. I can see your point. The world’s a better place when we care, when we look out for one another, even for strangers, and lend a hand. I can do that, after all you’ve done for me! That puts a lot on my plate but I’m ready. Let’s get busy!
Then, Jesus says, one other thing: “You’ve heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” You pause for a moment to let these words sink in because somehow you’ve internalized the old, “count to ten before you act” message from last week. “Eight…nine…nine and a half…nine and three quarters… Jesus…how in the world can you ask me to love my enemies? That’s not fair. That simply doesn’t line up with how human beings work. Get real!”
Truly, this is rarified air. This is where it turns out that God’s love may be freely given but it is not cheap. This is where the rubber hits the road. This is where faith becomes very concrete and real. Here is the equation. It is undeniable. This is the cost of discipleship. If God loves me, when, in fact, God has every reason not to (because God heard how I yelled at the dog or how unfair I was to my spouse or how hard I worked to avoid my neighbor’s needs, just to name a few possibilities), then I really don’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to judging others. God is the judge—not me. And if God prefers mercy and forgiveness and reconciliation to revenge, who am I to complain? I’m not here to judge. I’m here to be a source of grace and to allow God’s love to shine through me. Given God’s propensity to love, it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that we are even supposed to love the most unlovable folks we run into. Period. End of discussion.
Please don’t fly past how excruciatingly difficult this calling might become. I remember when I read about the end of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. Just days before the camp was liberated, the guards hung him. What did Bonhoeffer do in his last moments? Did he scream that God was going to get them, that they were going to burn in hell forever? No…Bonhoeffer prayed for them. And some of those guards never forgot those prayers. Love your enemies. Love the guards—not for what they’ve done but for the love of God which will chip away at them until insight and healing and reconciliation come their way.
Do you remember Dylan Roof? He was the white supremacist who looked exactly like a lost kid who showed up to Bible Study at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. He was welcomed into the group. He sat for ninety minutes with them. Then, when they closed their eyes in prayer, he pulled out a Glock handgun and calmly shot and killed nearly every one of them. What did the people of that church do? They asked all the hard questions. They felt all the loss. Then, astoundingly, they found something, not within their human powers, but in the power of God working through them to forgive him. They did not for one minute sanction what he’d done. However, they refused to be consumed by hatred and vengeance. With God’s help, they did the most amazing thing. They loved their enemy. They left everyone who was listening to them speechless. God was at work through them.
That’s the point. We’re never going to live up to God’s calling on our own. We don’t have the strength or the courage to love like that. What we do have is a God who loves us and who stands ready to work through us—to be better than we ever could be on our own. For most of us, this will not mean praying for our prison guards or forgiving Dylan Roof. Instead, it will mean recognizing the rising tide of righteous hate inside us, whoever might have stirred such feelings, and crying out, “Please God… help me, now!”