Scripture: Luke 14:25-33; Matthew 5 Series: 2022
Concluding the ‘In the World’ series, this sermon preaches Luke 14:25-33 on the cost of discipleship: Jesus calls would-be followers to count the cost, carry their cross, and let go of all they cling to. Using the life and writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it contrasts cheap grace (forgiveness without repentance or the cross) with costly grace, which costs everything precisely because it cost God the life of his Son. The things we cannot let go of are lies; releasing them is the death of the old self that begins true communion with Christ. The hearer is assured they are worth that cost to God, a child of God called into new life.
Illustrations: pros-and-cons-list, dietrich-bonhoeffer, niemoller-first-they-came, barmen-declaration, bonhoeffer-letter-to-niebuhr
September 4
The Cost
“Large crowds were traveling with Jesus. Turning to them, he said, “Whoever comes to me and doesn’t hate father and mother, spouse and children, and brothers and sisters—yes, even one’s own life—cannot be my disciple. Whoever doesn’t carry their own cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. “If one of you wanted to build a tower, wouldn’t you first sit down and calculate the cost, to determine whether you have enough money to complete it? Otherwise, when you have laid the foundation but couldn’t finish the tower, all who see it will begin to belittle you. They will say, ‘Here’s the person who began construction and couldn’t complete it!’ Or what king would go to war against another king without first sitting down to consider whether his ten thousand soldiers could go up against the twenty thousand coming against him? And if he didn’t think he could win, he would send a representative to discuss terms of peace while his enemy was still a long way off. In the same way, none of you who are unwilling to give up all of your possessions can be my disciple.” Luke 14:25-33 CEB
I don’t know many people who really enjoy a pros and cons list. I know a lot of people who do them, and they may enjoy helping other people list pros and cons for their own life. I mean, it is a lot easier to give advice than it is to take advice. But pros and cons are not the most enjoyable things in the world. The easiest decisions to make are the obvious ones or the unanimous ones. Listing out pros and cons sometimes seems cheap or redundant, speaking for myself, but it’s important in times we are stuck: what are the arguments for something? What are the arguments against something? Do they match up? Is one stronger? Cost is an aspect of any pros and cons list for almost any decision you’re going to make. What is it going to cost? And is this worth the cost? Is it worth the cost of doing this thing? Or is it worth the opportunity cost of not doing it? This was not a foreign concept and the time of Jesus. What is the cost of following Jesus? And what is the cost of not? Friends, we are finishing our series on In the World, looking at how to live in the world but not of the world. We began by looking at the privileges of being a follower of Jesus and how that differs from how the world sees privilege. Then we looked at the responsibilities of being a Christ follower and the responsibility of how wide our circle should be. But today we’re really talking about the cost. What is the cost of being in the world? In this chapter in Luke, Jesus lays it out plainly.
“If one of you wanted to build a tower, wouldn’t you first sit down and calculate the cost, to determine whether you have enough money to complete it? Otherwise, when you have laid the foundation but couldn’t finish the tower, all who see it will begin to belittle you. They will say, ‘Here’s the person who began construction and couldn’t complete it!’
What is the cost? The words of Jesus here are strong and easier to skip over.
Whoever comes to me and doesn’t hate father and mother, spouse and children, and brothers and sisters—yes, even one’s own life—cannot be my disciple. Whoever doesn’t carry their own cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.
These are the words of Jesus in the Bible for us this day. These are not easy words,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor in Germany in the first part of the 20th century. His father was a famous psychiatrist in Berlin, a contemporary of Freud’s. Bonhoeffer grew up with a comfortable background and lifestyle. His family was not very religious, but he connected with the church, decided to go to seminary and then to graduate school. He finished his doctorate in theology writing a dissertation on the Holy Community, where he wrote that “a Christian who stays away from worship is a contradiction in terms.”1 Bonhoeffer moved to Spain and was a youth director for a few years to the German church in Spain, this is in the early 1930s. Around the time of the rise of the Nazis, he was connected to other pastors around Germany in what would become known as the confessing movement. Soon after Paul Hindenburg made Hitler Chancellor of Germany, Bonhoeffer took a job at German speaking church in London. But again, he never forgot his people or his connections. A major current of thought that Bonhoeffer and colleagues like Karl Barth and Martin Niemöller, Who wrote this famous poem,
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
These thinkers had been termed neo-orthodoxy. It came out of a response to the humanistic understandings of faith, focusing on anthropology, sociology, historical critical enquiry, that had been propounded in German universities for the last 50 years. They also came out of a response to World War I and the reality of the trench warfare in which many of them fought. After the Nazis took power, Hitler saw the German church as an important supporter of Naziism. They were for the most part anti-communist and anti-semitic, which were Hitlers two most important beliefs. He wanted that support to continue and he did not want to allow any dissent within the country. So the Nazis pushed through his own Bishop of the Lutheran church and then changed the constitution of the German church with an Aryan Clause that said that all preachers had to be of Aryan descent. Anyone with Jewish blood was immediately kicked out of the church. They tried to go further by removing any pastors who were sympathetic with socialism. They tried to remove the Old Testament from the Bible. They tried to add more heroic or positive views of Jesus, less meek and mild views of Jesus. So in 1934, Karl Barth wrote and others signed the Barmen Declaration. It included six theses.
- The source of revelation is only the Word of God — Jesus Christ. Any other possible sources (earthly powers, for example) will not be accepted.
- Jesus Christ is the only Lord of all aspects of personal life. There should be no other authority.
- The message and order of the church should not be influenced by the current political convictions.
- The church should not be ruled by a leader (“Führer”). There is no hierarchy in the church (Mt 20, 25f).
- The state should not fulfill the task of the church and vice versa. State and church are both limited to their own business.
- Therefore, the Barmen Declaration rejects (i) the subordination of the Church to the state (8.22–3) and (ii) the subordination of the Word and Spirit to the Church.
Bonhoeffer was in England during the writing of the barmen declaration, but he supported it. And when he came back in 1935, he started an underground seminary in Eastern Prussia in a town that was then called Finkenwalde, but which is now a part of Poland called Zdroje. They broke the law by studying God and training for ministry. In 1937, the seminary was shut down. But before that, Bonhoeffer wrote his greatest work, translated into English as The Cost of Discipleship.
The book is in a sense, a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew 5 focussing on this dichotomy between what Bonhoeffer terms cheap grace and costly grace. He wrote in hiding with people who were willing to give up their life to preach the word of God in the face of evil. We truly see the difference between costly grace and cheap grace. Here is how he describes it.
Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace as bargain-basement goods, cut-rate forgiveness, cut-rate sacrament; grace as the church’s inexhaustible pantry, from which it is doled out by careless hands without hesitation or limit. It is grace without a price, without costs…Cheap grace means justification of sin but not of the sinner. Because grace alone does everything, everything can stay in its old ways. The world remains the world and we remain sinners…Thus the Christian should live the same way the world does…Cheap grace is preaching forgiveness without repentance; it is baptism without the discipline of community; it is the Lord’s Supper without confession of sin; it is absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without the living, incarnate Jesus Christ.
Costly grace is the hidden treasure in the field, for the sake of which people go and sell with joy everything they have…It is the call of Jesus Christ which causes a disciple to leave his nets and follow him. Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which has to be asked for, the door at which one has to knock…It is costly, because it calls to discipleship; it is grace, because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly, because it costs people their lives; it is grace, because it thereby makes them live. It is costly, because it condemns sin; it is grace, because it justifies the sinner. Above all, grace is costly, because it was costly to God, because it cost God the life of God’s Son…and because nothing can be cheap to us which is costly to God. Above all, it is grace because the life of God’s Son was not too costly for God to give in order to make us live.
Soon after the seminary closed, Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, told him about a plan within the Abwehr, the german intelligence organization, to take down Hitler. It was at this time that Bonhoeffer traveled to the United States one last time. He came to New York City in 1939 to give a series of lectures at Union Theological seminary. He had lived in New York in 1930 and had friends there. Many of them already aware of the horror going on in Germany, the friends tried to convince Bonhoeffer to stay in the United States. He wrote to his friend, Reinhold Niehbuhr, that he could not.
I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period in our national history with the people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people … Christians in Germany will have to face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose but I cannot make that choice from security2
Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of the church. Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of Jesus. There is no discipleship with cheap grace. There is no conversion or new life. Jesus said, “Whoever doesn’t carry their own cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”
This is how Bonhoeffer explains that passage.
The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ. As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with His death—we give over our lives to death. Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise god-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ.
When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow Him, or it may be a death like Luther’s, who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world. But it is the same death every time—death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at his call.
We cannot follow if we cannot let go. That is the cost of being in the world. You have to let go of the world.
The reality is that the things we must let go of are the lies we tell ourselves. The things we can’t let go of are lies, themselves, as well.
Bonhoeffer’s story ends in the Flossenburg concentration camp. He was arrested in April of 1943 and then eventually transferred to Flossenburg.
He died April 9, 1945, two weeks before Flossenbürg was liberated.
You are a child of God. You are called to new life. You are called with a costly grace, because it was costly to God, because it cost God the life of God’s Son…and because nothing can be cheap to us which is costly to God.
You are worth it to God. You are not your mistakes. You are not the lies of the world. You are a child of God worthy of love and capable of loving, giving, serving, worshipping, praying. You are capable of transformation. Your new life can start this day.
Let us pray, Heavenly father, thank you for paying the cost for us and for our salvation. Help us not to see away from your call. Help us not to seek comfort in lies but only in your truth and hope and love. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.