Luke 14.25-33

COSTLY DISCIPLESHIP

(Luke 14.25-33)

I could hardly believe my ears when I heard the other day of a certain parish priest who had never prepared the parents for the baptism of their children!

Similarly, I could hardly believe my ears when I heard of another parish priest who only gave one preparation class for his confirmation candidates!

Little wonder that Christianity is not taken seriously when its faith and practice is treated in such a casual way.

It is simply not fair, either to the candidates who are encouraged to think that being a Christian is easy, or to those members of the Christian Church, who throughout the centuries have kept the torch of faith burning, and who, in some cases, have paid the ultimate price, namely, martyrdom.

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Alas, this danger of selling Christianity on the cheap is nothing new. It was an ever-present danger in the life of the early church when being a Christian was not popular and sometimes led to organised persecution.

St Luke was aware of this growing danger in his day. Hence, when he came to compose his gospel narrative towards the latter half of the first century, he included the passage in chapter 14.25-33. In it, Jesus warns his would be followers of the costliness of discipleship.

For instance, Jesus says, before a builder begins to build a tower, he should first sit down and work out how much it is going to cost financially, to ensure he can afford to finish it.

In the same way, before a king goes to war against another king, he too should sit down and work out what it is going to cost in terms of manpower, to see if he can afford to win the war.

Likewise, before a person decides to become a follower of Jesus Christ, he or she should first sit down and see if they can afford the personal cost which could be involved.

By cost, I do not just mean financial cost, though the last part of the person to be converted is often his or her pocket! By cost, I mean that in terms of personal relationships which could be put under a strain, [maybe even fractured], particularly with those who are members of our family.

Hence Jesus says: 'Whoever comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife, children, brothers and sisters, yes even life itself, cannot be my disciple’.

Now Jesus did not mean that we should go out of our way to 'hate' those nearest and dearest. He is using the Semitic way of speaking which uses extremes such as light and darkness, truth and falsehood, love and hate. You see, in the Semitic way of speaking, to say 'l prefer this to that' one would say, 'l like this and hate that'. In other words, in Semitic speech there are only primary colours with no half shades of compromise in between.

Perhaps St .Matthew is nearer to the meaning of the words of Jesus when he says: 'Whoever loves father or mother more than me... and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.'

Above all, Jesus is seeking to say that there may come a time in the Christian life when one is faced with the choice of preferring to be a follower of Him, rather than a follower of those nearest and dearest.

Such a choice may well be costly. Are you prepared to pay such a price for being a disciple, asks Jesus?

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We do well to recall those words of that First World War Army chaplain, Studdart Kennedy, commonly known as 'Woodbine Willy' because of his liberal distribution of cigarettes to the troops, when he said, that Jesus offers us a cross and not a cushion.

Yet all too often, you and I go for the 'cushion'. We go for the easy option when the going gets tough. We go for 'cheap grace' to use the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

ln his book, 'The Cost of Discipleship', published in 1937 as the storm clouds of war were beginning to gather over Europe, he wrote: 'Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession'

And he concludes: ‘Cheap glace is grace without discipleship, Grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate’.

And he is so right, isn't he? Let me just spell that out a little bit.

Cheap grace is ‘the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance'.

We all like to know that our sins are forgiven, but are we prepared to turn our back upon the attractiveness of sin and thereby never sin again? Alas, all too often, we are happy to be assured of the forgiveness of our sins, but have no real intention of turning our back upon the causes of sin. So tomorrow, we find ourselves in the same embarrassing situation as we are in today.

Cheap grace is 'baptism without church discipline'.

Yes, people want to have their children baptised, but seldom, if ever, do they consider the implications of Baptism. For many it is merely a rite of passage that must be gone through, because it is the done thing, or because there is the need to keep the peace with the child's grandparents. Few, if any, ever consider it as a rite of initiation whereby the newly baptised becomes a member of the Christian Church, and, like joining any other organisation, involves the acceptance of certain rules and regulations designed to enable one to fulfil the aims and objects of that organisation.

Cheap grace is 'communion without confession’.

Again, Sunday by Sunday we come to church to receive Holy Communion, but how many of us bother to prepare ourselves to receive Jesus Christ, in the form of bread and wine. After all, if we were going to Buckingham Palace to receive a decoration or an award, we would certainly spend time preparing for such an important occasion! Yet, all too often, we are sloppy about our preparation in meeting Jesus. We dash in at the last minute, and we dash out afterwards giving little or no thought about who we are about to meet, or have just met in our worship.

Cheap grace is 'absolution without personal confession'.

Again, Sunday by Sunday, we rattle off the words of the confession during the service, eager to hear the priest pronounce the words of God's absolution, with little or no thought about what we have said or done or thought over the past week, for which we are truly sorry.

Cheap grace is 'grace without discipleship'.

The Greek word for 'discipleship' means 'learner'. And to be a learner, involves a certain degree of humility whereby we place ourselves in the position of a student before God. Alas, all too often, we speak, we behave and we think as if we have all the answers. In fact, we are often all too ready to tell God what he should do, rather than listen attentively to that 'still small voice of calm'. We are so busy with our own importance that we leave little room for God.

Cheap grace is 'grace without a cross'.

Again, I never cease to be amazed how few people there are in our churches on Good Friday, compared with the vast numbers there are on Easter Sunday. Yes, we want the new life of which the resurrection speaks, but fail to realise that we cannot experience that new life unless we first put to death the old life, of which Good Friday speaks. New life must be preceded by crucifixion. You cannot have one without the other,

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Yes, Bonhoeffer is so right. Unlike the first generation of converts to Christianity, we are seldom prepared to pay the price for being a real Christian. We want our version of Christianity but not Christ's version because we want Christianity on the cheap, at a knock-down bargain price!

We want to avoid anything which might embarrass us and separate us from our work colleagues, our friends and our families.

We want to avoid anything which might challenge us to make a decision because we want to be popular and well liked. Alas, this is true for clergy and laity alike.

It is this absence of the cutting edge of the Christian Gospel which confuses those outside the life of the church and encourages them not to take its message seriously. We seem to have lost that distinctive character which marked out the early Christians from their pagan environment.

But the prospect of personal suffering has always been a hallmark of the Christian life, from the first days until now.

I do not believe that it was a sheer coincidence that Jesus should have warned his early would-be followers about the need to bear one's own cross of suffering, as he himself went up to Jerusalem to embrace his own cross of suffering.

Nor was it a coincidence that, having warned about the danger of 'cheap grace' Bonhoeffer should have returned to Germany from the safety and security of America at the outbreak of the Second World War, so that he could identify with his nation's suffering. Suffering which would ultimately lead to his own death at the hands of the hangman at Flossenburg on the 9th April 1945.

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My friends, beware of 'cheap grace' which avoids the cost of discipleship. Forget the 'cushion' and embrace the cross. For as Jesus warns us in Luke’s Gospel, "whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple”.