First Presbyterian Church
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
WHAT DES IT COST JQ BE A CHRISTIAN?
February 4, 1990
Sunday Morning Worship Service

John M. Buchanan, Pastor
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

scripture
Luké 14:25-33

“For which of you, desiring ta build a tower, does
not first sit down and count the cost..."
-Luke 14:28 (RSV)

There is something almost offensive about the
question. There is something offensive about the
very insinuation that there is a price to pay. We
have ample experience with religion‘’s venerable
tradition of turning God's grace inte a tidy
profit, from the well organized sale of indulgences
in the Middle Ages, the prayer hankies and vials of
water from the River Jordan. In our time we have
witnessed the harnessing of the enormous power of
television and telemarketing te the old penchant

with the result that Jesus Christ is packaged and

marketed, someone quipped, like so much soap
powder.

What does it cost to be a Christian? There
is something offensive about the question! And
yet, even as we are reacting negatively to it,
defensively, maybe even squirming a bit, I think we
Know that it is also an important question because
we know that the cost of being a Christian for some
people has been very, very steep indeed.

It came up, in fact, one time in the middie
of Jesus’ ministry. If was probably the high point
in terms of numbers. My mental picture of a day in
the life of Jesus and his disciples is of a small
group of people, walking from village to viliage,
dealing with smal] gatherings wherever they went:
teaching, heating, discussing. But, in the middte
of the story he was attracting a jot of attention
apparently. “Great multitudes accompanied him,"
Luke telis us. They were there when he taught.
They straggled behind as he traveled. They were

there at meal time and nisht time. They were

following because of the freshness and winsomenéss
of his teaching, and perhaps because they found
hope in his description of God's coming Kingdom and
Perhaps they followed because they were poor and
had nothing better to do, and perhaps —- at least
one New Testament scholar proposes - they followed
because they sensed a disaster about to happen and
they didn't want to miss the excitement. They knew
there was a deepening conflict between Jesus and
their religious leaders and that it was only a
matter of time unt] the Roman authorities got
invelved. And that was always dramatic, and
interesting.

And sa there they were, for whatever reasons,
following him around, hundreds of them, maybe even
several thousand. And one time he turned around
and said to them with no warning, "If anyone comes
to me and does not hate his own father and mother
and wife and children and brothers and sisters.
yes, and even iis own life, he cannot be my

disciple... whoever of you does not renounce ai]

that he has cannot be my discipie."'

And then he told two smal] parables about a
builder whe had not accurately calculated the cost
of the building and was not able to complete it.
And a king who underestimates his opponent and has
to settle for peace on his enemy's terms.

Luke's presentation of the story of Jesus is
the gentiest, the most human. These are unusually
harsh stories and the teaching about hating one's
family and renouncing everything seem impossibly
difficult. Do you suppose he meant it, that
foliowing him means denying what we generally
regard as one of our better characteristics - love
for family? Did he really expect them - us - to
hate our parents, spouses, children, in order ta be
a Christian? Is that the cost?

We know intuitively that it could not he
that. We have experience with cult-type religion
that undercuts and destroys basic human
relationships and we have ample evidence that when

religion does that 7t becomes demonic.

The simple fact is that he didn't hate his
parents. He apparently worked in his father's
shop, supported his mother and brothers and
Sisters. His mother continued to be a part of the
story, accompanying him to weddings, following trim
ali the way to Jerusalem. She is stil] there when
he 1S arrested and as he dies on the cross, she is
still there; and one of the last things he is able
ta say has to do with her care. So of course this
one whe taught the redemptive power of love - love
of brother and sister, love for the poor, love for
the enemy — did not mean that his followers must
hate parents, children and spouses.

Then, why did he put it that way? The
linguistic scholars who know about these things
help us to understand that the Aramaic Janguage
Jesus spoke was extraordinarily vivid, and that it
1s common in Semitic language to make a strong
point by dramatic contrast or hyperbole. So, of
course he did not mean that you have to hate your

parents. But he did mean thet following him was

demanding and costly; that it can mean serious
self-sacrifice and it does mean a serious
reardering of priorities. What he meant to te?
them, and us, was that there is a lot at stake
here: the meaning and significance of our Tives;
that the nature of this enterprise is salvation,
wholeness, self-realization, and not just a very
peripheral pursuit of peace of mind, or, in their
terms, a pleasant two week sojourn in the
countryside waiting for the disaster to happen. He
used the strongest language possible because the
issue is human life.

There is important truth here. There is
truth here about the limits of human love. The
psycholagists know that if the total meaning and
significance of your life is tied up in your
children, for instance, or your spouse, or lover or
parents - if you have no identity apart from them,
if you Tive through them - you are in trouble.
Anne Wilson Schaeff calls that co-dependency and

addictive behavior. Parental love that knows no

limits becomes smothering, oppressive and deadly.
Parents who live through their children - whose
emotional rewards are experienced through the
achievements of their children - are, sadly, not
wholly alive themselves and are certainly not
Joving those chijdren in a way that works for the
child's welfare and health. Part of loving as an
adult is to know the limits of love. And there is
truth here about life. Life begins, the currently
popular adage proposes "when the last child goes
off to college, the mortgage is paid and the dog
dies." Life begins, the slick magazines promise,
when you can afford Gucci, BMW, to ski St. Moritz
and drink Dewars, But what Jesus said is that life
begins when you find something to live for other
than yourself: that full human life is given when
a great cause calls out of you total loyalty,
faithfulness and commitment. It is the singular
Christian proposal that in giving life to Jesus
Christ, true life is discovered. It is there

throughout the story... It is the Christian counter

proposal to the absolute commitment to consumerism
which is characteristic of our time. True life is
a gift you are given when you discover something
important enough te give your Vife to it. That is
to say the answer to the question, “What does it
cost to be a Christian?" is really simpty
everything.

In the meantime the church continues to wring
its hands over the fact that numbers are down:
that we aren't mainstream or mainline anymore:
that we are not Keeping pace with competing groups
or with the secularism of our culture. When the
Bears kick-off at noon, our attendance is down.

Martin Marty, in a whimsical editorial about
church growth statistics notes that the Mormons,
who are growing, are willing to make 1,500 house
calls to produce one “friendly opening” and that
the Episcopalians who are declining, haven't made
1,500 house caljs since the death of Thomas Cranmer
qn the 16th century.

And so cur inclination is to keep away from

these “hard sayings” of Jesus', this unusual
harshness: ta talk about the benefits of religion.
not the costs.

The Wali Street Journal pubTishec a
delightful article by a Kansas City advertising
executive who, with tongue in cheek, has come up
with a “Marketing plan for revitalizing America's
major religious faiths."

“My strategy is to consolidate the various
name brands, even the strong flagship brands like
Southern Baptist ‘inte one identifiable, Exxon-like
entity. The target audience here is Mom, Dad,
Butch and Sis - solid suburban Americans who want a
little God in their life and somewhere to go before
brunch. After test-marketing various
possibilities, I have decided upon the name Middle
American Christian Church, or MacChurch, for ad
purposes. I wil] not be sure of MacChurch's
theology until focus groups are run, but I plan on
following the promotional path blazed so

successfully by Holiday Inn. In other words, this

will be your ‘no surprises’ church. When Dac
brings the family here, he can be sure that they
wil? nat be asked ta speak in tongues, handle
snakes, or dive itoney to the Sandanistas."

Among the ad man's proposals are a new brand
of Judaism for baby boomers and a "market
segmentation” apardach for Roman Catholicism. “RC
Light for post-Vatican IT liberals, RC Classic for
traditionalists and RC Free for those more
interested in liberation theology than Papal
Bulls."

“Protestantism,” he says, "presents marketers
with special problems: the individual churches
will have to understand that there is just so much
theological shelf space, that product
differentiation is not viable for go-as~you-p lease
Protestantism. Thus. the middle American Christian
Church or MacChurch.” [see American Mainline
Religion, Roof and McKinney, p. 229)

Now, no one is quite that bold about it, but

there is among us the sense that if we were a

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little more market conscious, if we stopped asking
People to give and started giving them what they
want, we fright be more successful. And there are
plenty of success models to emulate.

Deeper still there is a century's old
ambivalence within Presbyterianism about anything
resembling a hard-set] approach to faith. Our
commitments have been to a theology of grace, not
works.

The early Calvinists believed that God had
already decided whe to save and so a7] the church
had to do was be ready to welcome the redeemed.
John Calvin, himself, someone said, “probably
believed that most of those who would be converted
had been by his time. So he designated ‘evangelist’
as a temporary office."

The settling of the new world brought the
issue to the surface. The Calvinist Puritans
confronted a whole new continent and indigenous
people who had never heard about Christianity and

began to think about their responsibility to share

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the good news of Jesus Christ with them. But
Presbyterians have always maintained a degree of
discomfort with the hard-sel?l schaol of evangelism.
Good Presbyterians shudder at the word like they
used to shudder at "castor oi1." J grew up ina
Presbyterian Sunday School and never once saw a new
face. The Baptist Vacation Bible School, on the
other hand. was flat-out recruitmental with plenty
of rewards and incentives for the sales force, my
chums, and for potential customers, me.

Our rich history has always kept in tension
ardor and order: heart and mind: evangelism and
education. We are who we are as Presbyterians
precisely because our relationship with non~
believers begins with respect for their integrity,
not pity at the inadequacy of their religion. And
there is an aesthetic aversion as well. "This
business of a ‘decision for Christ,’ is for people
who like their religion hot and heavy, chiefly
those who get overly excited about it al1,’’ wrote

Robert Raines, “but not for me. I Tike my religion

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quiet and always in good taste. {New Life cin the
Church, p. 40]

But how sad, if for intellectual and
aesthetic reasons we miss the real issue.

Because at the heart of the matter is the
issue of our lives: Will we live them fully? Wil]
we experience them as completely as we can? At the
heart of the matter is paradox that in giving our
lives away we receive them; that in picking up a
cross and following we are alive as we never were
before.

Our wholeness as persons - our seTf-
realization if you prefer the language of
psychology ~ or our salvation, depends on our
finding something that claims our passion, devotion
and commitment: something big and royal enough to
demand everything we have and are.

sometimes history and circumstance draw the
issue very Clearly for us. When we visited Dachau
jast summer, the point was made for ali of us

eloquently. One of the remaining barracks is the

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"Priesterbunker,” the barracks for ministers and
priests who saw in Nazism an absolute conflict

with devotion to Jesus Christ, who acted on that
perception and who ended up in a concentration
camp. And there is not a clergyperson - or 2
layperson for that matter, who does not Jook at that
barracks and wonder, could I have done that? Would
I have done that? There are times and
circumstances when the issue is clearty drawn.

That was one of them. And so Dietrick Bonhoeffer,
knowing what was ahead, could write about cheap
grace and costly grace and familiar and stirring
but also distressing lines:

“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come
and die.”

Clearly Ajan Boesak and Bishop Tutu and those
around them, black and white, believe that time and
circumstance are drawing the issue sharply in South
Africa; and that their loyalty to Jesus Christ js
forcing them to say no to their government. I was

reading some of Boesak's sermons recently to try to

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learn a Tittle bit about fris thinking because I do
believe he is on the edge of the basic theological
issue, as Bonhoeffer was fifty years ago. And I
was interested to discover that his introduction to
a collection of highly political sermons contains a
warning about a too eager martyrdom or Christian
masochism, “that dark longing within the hearts of
so many Christians to be flogged into the arms of
Jesus — or into the fires of hell." {Ihe Finger of
God, p. 8] That is, we are not all called to bea
Bonhoeffer or a Boesak, nor does the issue come at
all of us with equal clarity. History and
circumstance differ and reauire different
responses .

William Willimon once wrote to the point:

“To be martyred is one way to pay for the
faith, but I submit it's tough to pay, day to day,
in a lonely, dul], ignored-by-pagans wilting that
comes from waiting."

The cast is not always dramatic, he says.

“the woman who devoted her life to raising

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children in need of a home, the man whose faithful
devotion to a mentally i17 wife is quiet and
steady, the youth whose civil disobedience for
conscience's sake leads to prison or exile, these
are among the countless thousands, who through the
centuries and in many contexts, have interpreted
the text with their lives." CInterpretation, Mark,
p. 156-7]

One who paid with everything she had was Eva
Jane Price, Congregational missionary wife, in
China in the 1890s. Her long correspondence with
her parents in Des Moines has been published
recently under the title China Journal. It is a
fascinating, informative and moving story. She was
33, her husband 41, when they decided to go ta
Oberlin College with their two children to prepare
far Missionary work. She was very human and
winsome: wife, mother of three - two of whom died
in childhood. She loved God, but she alse loved
her own life, children and her mother, and the farm

in Iowa. It took three months to travel to China

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so a Jetter to her mother took six months to be
answered. the letters are full of the stuff of our
own humanity - the daily details of life in an
utterly alien culture — which she did not
understand and which called her "foreign devil.”
And, of course, the Toneliness which caused one of
her friends to 90 mad and another to decide to
commit suicide. In an early letter she writes,
"Mother, what do you think I wanted the ather day?
Well, I'll tell you if you'll] promise never, never
to tell - one of your big aprons so I could put my
head in it and cry and imagine it was in your Jap."
[p. 29]

In 1900, eleven years after they left Iowa
and Oberlin College, the Prices and their remaining
daughter were murdered in the Boxer Rebellion. In
her last letter, as the rebellion closes in on the
smal] missionary compound she wrote... "Our Jives
are worth nothing unless the Lord keeps them. We
are all expecting to die and God is giving us

grace, and we pray that you at home may be

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abundaritly biessed by him. We would not choose to
die now and ‘in any horrible way, but pray without
ceasing that God will choose for us and make us
glad to go the way he says.” [p. 236]

Time and circumstance do not draw the issue
as sharply for everyone. Pray God that we do not
have to face the issue as dramatically as Eva Price
did, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer did, as Alan Boesak is.

But pray God that our good fortune does not
protect us also from the opportunity to decide to
live. Pray God that we are not so anesthetized by
comfort and security and the orderliness of our
lives that we never get around to living them by
giving them away.

“What does it cost to be a Christian?"
Everything. It means deciding to be his man/woman
with everything you are and everything you have.

It means tiving for him. It means deciding to be
his man/woman every day. It means deciding to be
alive.

I invite you to it.

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