“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”
That was the criticism of American Christianity by a theologian named Richard Niebuhr.
Let’s hear that again.
“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”
A Christianity that doesn’t believe in much and that ultimately finds itself powerless and incapable of caring for and serving a broken world.
It is a Christianity caught up in what Dietrich Bonheoffer called “cheap Grace” rather than costly grace. Cheap grace is a life without discipleship, without change, without taking up the cross and forsaking ourselves. It is a grace of comfort alone without challenge.
Costly grace, now that is a grace that costs us our lives, giving up on the old life and taking up the new life of discipleship, of being freed from all the false idols that enslave and twist us, of daring to become free.
If God is real, if God is incarnate in Jesus Christ, if Jesus was crucified to set us free from the powers of sin and death, if God’s judgment is redeeming and restoring a desperately broken creation, if that Grace is real and true and is at work in the world….then what are we going to do about it?
That response is the life of faith, the life of discipleship, that response is Church, that response is stewardship. This is about much more than paying dues, this is about much more than using resources carefully, this is about living a life and being the Church that makes this costly grace present in the world, a world in desperate need.
How thankful are we for this costly grace? Will I be a minister of this grace that sets us free?
It is grace because it is freely given, all are invited to the banquet. It is costly because it changes who we are, we have to put on wedding garments, clothe ourselves in Christ.
Today is the beginning of our annual pledge campaign. Grace has become a fully activated and enlivened Church. We are being the body Christ on every level. We are growing and changing. It is the consequence of being faithful, as opposed to just maintaining what used to be.
We have reached a transition in our life as a community where we are now too big for one priest, but we are nowhere near financially able to call a second priest. It is an awkward size. How will we maneuver through this? With costly grace.
It is time to start planning seriously for a second priest, and part of that is this pledge campaign for 2015.
It would take an almost 20% increase in giving to call a full time priest, realistically I don’t see that happening, but it is time to start talking about to make this happen, sooner rather than later and that this pledge campaign is the beginning of that to see just what we can do.
This is a good problem. I am more than a little proud to serve a congregation that has this challenge to face.
I don’t think it comes down to doing more and doing better. I think the motivation comes from someplace deeper, from believing that God is real, that God’s grace really has embraced the world in Jesus Christ, that our response to this grace is costly because it changes us, and that the world desperately needs us to make that Grace present and real in the world.
I think this comes down to simply being Church.