15 September 2013

“Sheep, coins, idols … it’s all about GRACE”
Exodus 32:7-14 / Luke 15:1-10
OT 24 C
15 September 2013


Change is in the air this morning.
Some of it has greeted us already, in the form of the return of our fall / winter / spring schedule. Granted, it’s not a huge change … for those who are part of adult education or choir or Kids’ Church, there are some adjustments to be made and we witness and give thanks for the return of Christian Education and the choir’s musical leadership in worship, that’s for sure.
But the other change is that, after a summer of some Hard Words from Luke’s Gospel, Hard Words about Discipleship, about what it means and what it takes to follow Jesus … today, the words, like the weather, have changed.
Our Gospel text’s focus shifts from God’s Expectations of those who follow Jesus … the cost of discipleship, if you will … now, we hear of the benefits those who follow Jesus receive … actually, the one big benefit … for us … which is GRACE.
Yes, it does seem backwards; logically, we’d think that we should hear about the grace first, and then, the discipleship life / expectations into which we’re being called.
Ah, but given what God knows about us, that would be the wrong choice.
If we had heard about grace first … perhaps, likely, we’d simply shut out the discipleship teaching which we’ve heard, received, or, perhaps in our thinking, that we’ve endured the past few weeks.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who has been our help and guide through these difficult words the past few weeks, Bonhoeffer begins his work entitled simply “Discipleship” with these rather famous words about grace … his definition of grace, and his distinction between grace which is “cheap” and grace which is “costly” …

Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of the church. Our struggle today is for costly grace.
Cheap grace means justification of sin but not of the sinner. Because grace alone does everything, everything can stay in its old ways. So the Christian need not follow Christ, since the Christian is comforted by grace.
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 call of Jesus Christ which causes a disciple to leave his nets and follow him. 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. Above all, grace is costly because it costs God the life of God’s Son … and because nothing can be cheap to us which is costly to God.

And so, being community of the Cross, people of the Cross, people and servant leader who will not be about Cheap Grace … we have been counting the cost of grace … the cost to us … life to be lived in, with, under, through, the discipleship call of Jesus Christ.
We will not be purveyors of cheap grace here, that is for certain.
But that costly grace also comes as gift to us … and today, we get to hear about that gift.
Of course, there are always those who will object, even to a gift.
Enter the Pharisees and Scribes, those religious leaders who protest that Jesus “welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
They have got grace backwards.
To them, there’s an admission charge to grace, before you are eligible to receive the call.
You have to “clean up your life” before God will ever be interested in you, you miserable sinner.
The Pharisees and Scribes are cheapening grace.
They are making it a work from our side.
Once WE clean up our act, once WE exhibit a certain kind of behavior, THEN, only THEN, will God call upon you, to come and follow his Son.
See how this cheapens grace.
The Pharisees and Scribes … not God … decide what’s proper behavior to deserve God’s call.
They obviously have, possess, exhibit that proper behavior. And “sinners” don’t.
Ah … so, then, why did Jesus even need to come?
Since the Pharisees and Scribes set themselves up as judgment-purveyors, deciders of who’s in, who’s out, they are saying that there’s certainly no need to have God come and do that.
Even that word, “sinner,” gives it all away, about them.
It’s a word in their language which means, those who, which, don’t exhibit the right behaviors for life in the community, as I judge you to be in or out of the community.
In other words, cheap grace.
In response, Jesus tells the parables about Costly Grace.
Now, you may be saying to yourselves, “hey, we just heard these stories, not too long ago, why are we hearing them so soon again?”
Well, first, it’s not “that soon,” it was back on the fourth Sunday in Lent, back on the 10th of March, and I took some license then and added this portion of Luke 15 to the assigned text, which is not included in our Gospel reading today but certainly makes it complete … the story of the prodigal or Lost Son.
The lectionary divides this chapter in half, to give us a double-emphasis on Jesus’ Costly Grace, and that’s OK, I think, because of our tendency, our proclivity, to cheapen grace.
Now, today, just because we don’t have that Lost Son story before us doesn’t mean we should forget about it. Actually, it’s the story which completes this set of three stories about the lost.
They are all three stories of repentance … and remember Bonhoeffer’s word about Cheap Grace …

Cheap grace is preaching forgiveness without repentance …

… ah, but here, what repentance actually is, is different, isn’t it? What sheep can repent? What coin? They can’t, and that’s the point.
And that lost son, yes, remember how he comes to his senses and decides to go back home, but before that son can even open his mouth to say anything to his father … dad comes running to him, puts his arms around him and kisses him.
I don’t believe Bonhoeffer … and I know Jesus … never wanted, never wants to make repentance some kind of a conditional … IF we do this in our lost-ness, THEN we get found.
For Bonhoeffer … for Martin Luther … and at their root and cause, in the words and actions of Jesus Christ … repentance is all about the action of God. “God always comes down” is the Word here, and these stories emphasize that. Hey Pharisees, hey Scribes, you don’t get to decide who’s in, who’s out, you don’t even get a voice in the discussion. Cease and desist! Shut up and listen!
Repentance, then, is about response … our response … to what is first offered by God. It’s our being embraced by the outstretched, beckoning arm of God … the God who is so relentless in pursuing us in love, to have us right and whole and one with him, that he will go, he does go searching for us, the one of the hundred, the one of the ten.
It’s not all about us.
And, paradoxically, it is all for us.
So if we don’t like repentance, then, we don’t want Grace. We don’t want the outstretched arm of God.
We want to make what is Costly, Cheap … like those Pharisees and Scribes.
Hmn.
That hurts.
Well, allow me to stick the Word in deeper and twist it around a little. Courtesy of our Old Testament reading.
Now here is a Word, certainly, mostly, speaking of all that stuff in which those Pharisees and Scribes revel … and not just them, but those of every time and every place since, including our own, including, perhaps, even for some of us … it’s all that fire and brimstone, God sitting in judgment stuff that they, perhaps, maybe, WE, know, and love, the God’s gonna get ‘em for their sinning stuff.
As one of my colleagues says, it’s God’s Wizard of Oz moment. The One behind the curtain, pulling the levers and pushing the buttons,

I have seen this people, how stiff- necked they are. Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume
them …

Except …
Except remember what happens to the Wizard. The little dog Toto pulls on the curtain and exposes him for what he really is.
And here Moses pulls on the curtain and exposes the Hidden God … the God of wrath and fire and brimstone, consuming sinners in their sinfulness, the God who damns them … the them with which we disagree or dislike or disdain … this God condemns them to hell forever (and dontcha know that’s the Word which makes the Pharisees and Scribes in us rejoice in glee … oh wait, we’re Lutheran, so we’ll just break the tiniest of
smiles) …
Nope … Moses pulls on the curtain and exposes God for who God really is …

And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.

DAMMIT! How come, God?
Stupid Toto – er, Moses!
Why did you have to go and spoil it for us?
God changes God’s mind and God repents of God’s anger and wrath … so the Israelites are saved … and they don’t have to repent at all. They don’t get a chance to repent first. They don’t even know anything has changed at all.
Hmn.
So isn’t this the ultimate in cheap grace? People saved, the mirror of their sinfulness not even held up to them, but God changes God’s mind?
Well, by our cheap standards, yes, it does.
But then, that puts us into the place of God.
The ultimate cheap grace.
And a lie, THE LIE, THE LIE OF ALL TIME, to top it all.
Certainly God has the option to change his mind if he wants.
But even saying, thinking that way, cheapens the grace.
No, in the end, the only thing we can do, when it comes to grace, is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
It’s God’s arm, God’s arm in Jesus’ arm, stretched out, to us in love. God’s arm, God’s arm in Jesus’ arm, grasping us …
You don’t think that costs God? Putting it all aside to pursue us in love, to come after us in love, to grab hold of us … running away in fear and trembling, in stubbornness and rebellion … this God, our God, comes and grabs hold of us in love?

This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.

The only thing we can “do” from our side, is to walk away. To turn our backs and sneer and point and complain about the unfairness of it all, how they should have gotten theirs, how we look and act and smell so much better than them, surely, surely, Jesus is with us and want to be with us and doggone it, he is with us, and not them, blah blah blah.
Cheap grace. Cheap grace.
Cheap grace which leads to dead people.
Now, I don’t want that.
And I don’t think you want that either.
And you know what? Neither does God.
This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.
THIS FELLOW WELCOMES SINNERS AND EATS WITH THEM.
Welcome, sinners.
Welcome to Jesus, God’s costly gift of grace which comes freely to us.
Come and eat. Come and drink.
Enter into discipleship … the life where all is made new … starting with us … and flowing out into the world God loves.
And go and tell that good news of new life … even new life, here and now … life we live in the shadow, in the shape of Jesus’ cross, always, ALWAYS for others … go and tell, go and bring it to them.
Because That’s. Basically. It.