The Easy Way (Not)

Today’s readings take us back to the issue of sin. I know some of you don’t want to talk about it and frankly I think sin gets far too much attention in some versions of Christianity, but it is so fundamental to Christian thinking that we can’t just ignore it. We need to take sin seriously in all its forms.

The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called Christian narratives which don’t acknowledge the importance of sin “cheap grace”. Cheap grace preaches forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without formation, and communion without confession. Bonhoeffer himself described this as "grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ". One of its characteristics he said is treating God's love as a superficial cover-up for sins, allowing people to continue living as they wish.

In contrast, Bonhoeffer called the obedience of following Jesus, the discipleship of ‘costly grace’. Costly grace acknowledges the need to take up our cross and follow Jesus the non-violent Savior into the desert, into his confrontation with the ease of compromise with empire, into his life-giving ministry and ultimately his death. Costly grace is not about coming to church to feel good, to enjoy the music and the liturgy and each other’s company. Costly grace is about the transformation of our lives, it is about resistance to all that masquerades as life-giving but which sucks the very life away from us.

Bonhoeffer was extremely critical of the German church of his time which he saw compromising its values. Instead of standing up to the Nazi authorities, church leaders tried to maintain a "viable" position: one that would conform to Christian doctrine, prevent the Church from dividing into opposing factions, and avoid antagonizing the Nazi authorities. Their public statements seem to have been a painstaking attempt to say neither too much nor too little about what is happening around them. Needless to say, this ruled out any real opposition to the Nazi persecution of Jews and others.[1]

For Bonhoeffer this lack of courage was “cheap grace” – preaching and receiving the love of God without the consequent responsibility of taking up the cross – which in his time meant standing up for those being killed and persecuted.

There are of course, many parallels to our own time. We have a federal administration which is centralizing power into its own hands, and seems willing to ignore systems of honor, ethics and even legality. We are seeing people rounded up in their places of works and in the streets because they look like they might be illegal immigrants. And in the process legal, passport holding Americans are shot and killed and then labelled domestic terrorists.

And it is tempting to do nothing. It is tempting to believe the propaganda that these people are all violent criminals. It is tempting to turn away from the injustices and ill-treatment being carried out in detention centers. It is tempting for us to sing and talk about the love of God without confronting the realities of sin.

But that’s not what Jesus did.

Those forty days in the wilderness Jesus confronted cheap grace. He was tempted to do it the easy way. Don’t worry about fasting – you’re hungry just order take out – a nice loaf of bread? or how about pizza? Want people to notice you? Take the easy way and jump off the top of the temple – you know the angels will catch you. Nah it’s really all about power isn’t it – take the easy way and let the empire handle all the details – don’t worry about ethics or honor or other people – don’t worry about the rich getting richer or the poor getting trampled on, join in with the rich and famous and everything will be yours.

Yet we know that Jesus said no. He didn’t take the easy way. He carried his cross to Calvary.
Y’all have been listening to me on or off for a year now and you know that I fully believe that God’s love is unconditional and embraces all of us. That’s grace. Grace is that we are totally accepted by God with all our warts and all our imperfections. We don’t have to be someone else in order to deserve God’s love.

Sometimes I worry that I am preaching cheap grace. So I hope I also talk enough about how our response to God’s love is to be transformed into the image of God, or perhaps back into the image of God as we were before we started to take the easy way. Before our ancestors took the easy way and ate the nice-looking fruit even though they knew it wasn’t right. No I don’t believe literally in the story of the fall but it is a myth that speaks to us again and again of how we are almost programmed to take the easy way, the way that brings us the greatest gain with the least effort, at least in the short term.

As our second reading this morning emphasizes, grace is free. Our reconciliation with God is not through anything we do or anything we earn, like points on a cosmic scoreboard - but it is the free gift of God, given to us through Jesus. Death is walking apart from God; life is walking with God.
This is the good news. We are given life. We are given the opportunity to walk with God. A little further on in the ancient story we hear, “Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”” The Lord God called, “Where are you?” God is calling for us in the cool of the day, ready to relax and hang out with us. Will we say ‘here I am Lord” or will we hide with shame because we took the easy way and never turned back?

Costly grace is not an easy path – we only have to look at Jesus’ life to see that. But it is the path of life. It is the path that brings life and hope not only to ourselves but to the stranger in our midst and to the whole of Creation.

Sin is much more than telling a few white lies or envying our neighbor their new car or their expensive landscaping. Sin is writ large in our faces every day. It is the way society rolls. Tax breaks for the wealthy and reductions in food stamps for the poor. The unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for true Americans who are not black, brown, Muslim or Hindu. We are enmeshed in a system which is sinful, I call it the sin matrix, that privileges some people and not others. And you and I my friends are among the privileged. You and I are offered the easy path.

But Jesus calls us to the path of the wilderness. The path of the cross. The path of pouring ourselves out for the good of the world. The path of costly grace. The path of Lent.

the Rev. Dr. Caroline Hall
 


[1] https://www.adl.org/resources/news/role-churches-nazi-germany