ALL IN

Sermon Summary (11/10/19) “All In” (Lk 14:25-33)

Rosemary and I used to drive by an unfinished house everytime we went back home.  Mark, the son of a high school classmate, never finished the house.   He never understood either the cost of finishing the house or the price of life. 

My primary source for this sermon is The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  “Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without Christ, living and incarnate.” I would like to say that I’m a student of the book but it is too challenging for me.  Maybe the classic line from the book is “When Christ calls a person, he bids him come and die.” 

Bonhoeffer entered adulthood with the rise of Hitler. In 1930, he spent a year at Union Seminary in NYC.  A fellow negro student introduced him to Harlem, Abyssinian Baptist Church, the Rev. Clayton Powell, and the plight of black people.  In Harlem, he learned of oppression from the bottom.  He returned to the land of Beethoven and Bach with records of Negro spirituals, I’m sure something never before heard there.

When Hitler consolidated power in 1934, he instituted fraudulent elections in the church placing supporters throughout the state church.  Bonhoeffer became part of the “Confessing Church,” a resistance movement to reclaim the theology of the church.  Even as a pacifist, he became part of the conspiracy to remove Hitler saying, “When seeing a madman starting to drive a car into a crowd, one does not wait for it to be over to then minister to the dead in dying, one tried to wrest the steering wheel from the hands of the madman.”  He was imprisoned in 1943, then alleged to be part of the July 20, 1944, attempt on Hitler’s life, and was hung on April 9, 1945, two weeks before his prison was liberated. 

Bonhoeffer walked the walk.  We can’t all be martyrs; we can’t all go to the cross; we can’t all die.  But we can all be “All in.”  For Bonhoeffer, grace which God offers through the cross was infinitely costly and should not be accepted cheaply.  Cheap grace was first and foremost grace without discipleship. 

Our Scripture passage ends with “So therefore, none of you can be my disciples if you do not give up all your possessions.”  This had nothing to do with possessions, it is about ordering our loves:  Jesus first, then family, then life itself.  We need to be “all in.” 

Recall Jesus’ parables and the treasure found in the field, and the pearl of great worth where in their joy the finders sold all their had and bought the whole field bought the pearl. 

When Jesus says we must hate father and mother, and even life itself, he is using Mid-eastern hyperbole, extreme exaggeration to make a point.  But what he does mean is that we have to choose, we have to order our loves, there is no other way but to go “all in.”

We start or restart from where we are.  We choose to be disciples and we immerse ourselves in grace that will lead us to where God wants us to be.  So may it be with all of us.