“Again & Again, We Are Reformed”
Rev’d. Tanya Stormo Rasmussen
The Congregational Church of Hollis, U.C.C.
Lent 5B
Jeremiah 31:31-34
John 12:20-33
Who are your faith heroes, and why? Who are the figures you look up to for the example they set—whose life made a lasting difference in the world, who somehow refashioned or re-formed how you and others recognize God’s work, and our work and purpose in this world?
I have several, but one of them is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor, theologian, and anti-Nazi dissident. The son of a doctor and a teacher, grandson of a clergyman, he grew up in a family that enjoyed a fair amount of esteem and privilege in Breslau (now Poland, then Germany), which allowed him to pursue higher education and overseas travel, including here in the U.S. His international ecumenical connections eventually led him to accept a position with the Abwehr—a German military intelligence organization—where he served as a double agent. He details his personal crisis and the prayerful discernment that led him to make the choices he did, as well as the inevitable ambivalence those choices entailed, in his Letters and Papers from Prison.
Most of us hold our convictions as mere thoughts—thoughts we often keep to ourselves, especially when acting on them might get us into hot water. The courage Bonhoeffer demonstrated as he heeded his conscience and acted on his Christian convictions is humbling, Christlike. That courage of conscience and conviction resulted in his execution by the Nazis on the 9th of April, 1945, just weeks before the total collapse of the Nazi regime. According to Eberhard Bethge, his former student and biographer, Bonhoeffer – having led a final worship service before he was led to the gallows – said to a fellow inmate, “This is the end—for me the beginning of life.”[1]
He wrote quite a bit, including a powerful little book entitled The Cost of Discipleship. In it, he distinguishes between ‘cheap grace’ and ‘costly grace’. Cheap grace is a feel-good sort of grace, a version of acceptance that requires nothing of us, and therefore doesn’t really change us. Cheap grace is what we accept when we think that, because God’s love will never stop pursuing us, and because God forgives us again and again, we can just persist in our self-centered, hurtful ways. It doesn’t require vulnerability or humility. Cheap grace doesn’t open us to the reality that God wants more for us, which can only happen when a more engaged response comes from us.
But because we’re not changed by it, cheap grace is not truly of God, because God is constantly about the work of transformational change. The sort of change the prophet Jeremiah preached about, where God’s ways are not merely a set of rules etched into easily-ignored tablets of stone, but instead are life-giving ways of being inscribed on our hearts, at the very core of our being.
Costly grace, Bonhoeffer writes, “… is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves [their] nets and follows him. Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which [an individual] must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a [person their] life, and it is grace because it gives a [person] the only true life.”
In other words, costly grace entails surrendering the life we know—our coveted control, our perceived security, and any habits that find us following the guidance of anyone other than God in Christ Jesus. It’s costly not only because of the price Jesus paid with his life, but also because it asks something of us: it means we need to be willing to change. And it is grace, because accepting it will provide the real life our souls yearn for. Bonhoeffer, with his life and with his words, confronts us with the false dichotomy between preserving our lives and responding to the world’s ailments—as if we can’t have our lives and do the often-contentious work the gospel calls us to do. The only way we’re going to find and save our true life, is by willingly surrendering ourself to God.
“Listen carefully,” Jesus said (I’m reading from The Message translation): “Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.”[2]
Jesus was responding to Philip and Andrew (two of his disciples), who had come to tell him that Greek pilgrims were looking for him. Faithful Jews from faraway places were gathering in Jerusalem to observe the Passover celebration. Given the Passover themes of liberation, justice and dignity for the oppressed, their own historic deliverance, as well as their anticipation of renewed salvation, the people’s thoughts were naturally bent toward God’s desires and intentions for the world. As John’s gospel tells the story, this scene took place within hours of Jesus’ protest march into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey (we’ll hear more about that next week), and several days after Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead.
Word about Jesus’ deeds of power had begun to spread rapidly and broadly—deeds that made people re-think, weigh up, and re-form their ideas about the systems of this world. Folks were starting to interrogate and challenge the status quo. Questions about power, and justice, and the kind of life God intended and what the people wanted were bubbling; civil unrest was brewing. In John 12:19, preceding our reading which started at verse 20, John says, “The Pharisees then said to one another, ‘You see, you can do nothing. Look, the world has gone after him!’”[3] The powers-that-be were feeling threatened. And when that happens, the easiest way to smother growing dissent is to drive fear into the hearts of the protesters and would-be dissidents.
Jesus understood this, which is why he said, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” As did Bonhoeffer after him, Jesus knew that his death was only a matter of time; his determination to remain true to God’s Law of Love would inevitably lead to a confrontation with those whose agenda was corrupt. And corrupt powers will always use every tool of force available to them. He also recognized that divine love for humankind is so powerful, it will withstand our rejection, even to death, and then transform that rejection into new life and flourishing for the sake of all people.
Still, Jesus was not immune to the anxiety or fear that any healthy human being would feel in such a moment. He was human. He was also divine, and this is the tell: he refused to let fear dictate his course of action. “Right now I am shaken,” he acknowledges in verse 27 (again reading from The Message), “And what am I going to say? ‘Father get me out of this’? No, this is why I came in the first place.”
Jesus recognized that the extinguishing of his breath would not be the end of him, but a new beginning. While self-interested worldly powers intended to put him in a grave to silence and put an end to him, he knew their actions would effectively plant the seed of the Word and allow his life to grow and continue bearing more and more fruit. You see, Jesus’ life was never just about him. It was never just about his life alone – any more than your life is just about you, or Bonhoeffer’s about him alone, or mine merely about me. That’s the point.
The Rev’d. Emily Heath, in her book Courageous Faith, writes:
In treacherous times, when powerful people and systems threaten us or others, we have to ask what God wants us to do—and we have to accept that doing it will cost us something. While there is a chance that the choices faith asks us to make will result in physical death, as it did for Bonhoeffer, the cost is likely to stop short of that. Choosing to do the right thing probably won’t make our hearts stop beating.
But what if it did? What would be worth that risk? If you are like most people, your list of people and ideals you’d be willing to die for is a very short one. Yet there’s something else we seem to be willing to risk our lives for: our fears. We allow fear to deprive us not of heartbeats and breaths, but of something even more precious: the fullness and beauty of a life lived well.
For those of us who believe that we rest in the hands of an eternal and ever-loving God, living a life full of fear is worse than dying. The great threat to Christian faith is not that we will not be safe from the world’s dangers but that we will be held captive by our fear of them—that we will have more faith in our fear than we have in Christ. This can be hard for North American Christians to understand, since we have rarely faced persecution. But the mission of the church is not to avoid causing a stir, nor to hold on to things that cannot save us. As Jesus says, to save your life you have to lose it.
Christians are not called to recklessness [unless, I’d add, it’s recklessness or lack of caution in spreading love, as was suggested in our reading from the Message], but we are called to action. In Christ we are given a new freedom to respond to a world in need. So each time the news informs us of something that’s happening that we know is not right or just, the question to ask is what response does God want from us in this moment? When we learn to ask ourselves this, and to truly discern God’s will for us, we begin to find that the greatest risk we can take, the one thing that will make us lose the life we have been given, is to choose not to risk anything at all.
On a warm Sunday morning in June 2001, I processed into the sanctuary of the East Natick United Methodist Church for the last time. As I processed out, the people followed with communion vessels and a cross and other sacred objects that had belonged to that church for many decades. Our procession continued from our parking lot to the parking lot of the Community United Methodist Church in Wayland, and into that sanctuary, where we continued our worship with an official act of merging our congregations, culminating in a celebration of Holy Communion using the familiar vessels, plate and chalice, that would become commonly used where most of the members of the East Natick congregation would continue to worship as they journeyed forward in faith. It was the fruit of a years-long process awakening members to the reality that change would happen either with us, or to us. We could willingly die to some things in order to live to others. Or, we could cling to what was, and die with it. Only one of the options represented a faithful way forward.
It was a costly grace, but the congregation had discovered that the cheap, comfortable grace of continuing what they’d done for so long simply wasn’t working anymore; they were dying. Spiritually and emotionally, as well as physically, several dozen remaining members felt the dullness of death as week after week, year after year, they lamented bygone days when the pews were full and their younger bodies could keep up with the demands of a building and activities that had become largely self-serving.
By dying to themselves, by giving up what they thought they wanted most (to continue life and worship in that sanctuary and space), the church folk who had a lifetime of memories there opened themselves as surely as grains of wheat do when planted in fresh soil, and they began to grow and flourish in new ways. They were born again, re-formed more closely to Christ’s likeness.
Again and again, the lesson Christ teaches is that it is only by losing the life we cling to that we find our real life; only by letting go of control and allowing ourselves to be guided by God’s spirit that we experience the security and freedom we’re craving. What is it that you need to die to, in order to finally start experiencing the life God has in mind for you? What might our congregation helpfully lay to rest in order to lay claim to the eternal life we’re collectively invited to?
As we journey forward through these final two weeks of Lent, may we renew our resolve to die to self, again and again, so that the fear-defying power and Spirit of Christ in us might find deep roots and radiate through us, reforming us and our world in the ways of divine love. Amen.
[1] Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 927. As quoted in Wikipedia entry “Dietrich Bonhoeffer”.
[2] John 12:24-25, The Message translation.
[3] John 12:19.