27 August 2018

"Should Following Jesus Always be Easy?" (sermon)


Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
August 26, 2018
Scriptures:  Joshua 24:14-17 and John 6:60-69



I have a question that I want to invite you to consider:
Should following Jesus always be easy?

I have a story to share with you.

You can probably imagine that Germany in the 1930s was not an easy place to be.  The Nazi party came to power in January of 1933 and gradually began changing how things were done.  These changes included the church in Germany – both the Protestant church and the Roman Catholic Church.  Just as all other institutions in the country fell under the power of Hitler and the Nazi party, those in charge thought that the church should also come under the authority of the government.

I do have to say that the Roman Catholic Church generally did better at resisting these changes – after all, they considered the Pope to be the head of the church, so how could Chancellor Hitler be the head of the church.  But generally the Protestant churches tended to accept the imposed changes.  On the surface, it seemed to be a win-win situation.  From the churches’ perspective, they would still be allowed to gather to worship – as long as they preached only what the government told them that they could preach.  And from the government perspective, they now had a mouthpiece in the church to hold up their propaganda.

But as the months passed, a group of theologians and pastors came to the realization that this was not a good situation.  In May of 1934, from across denominations – Lutheran, Reformed, and United – they gathered in the town of Barmen, in western Germany near Dusseldorf and Köln.  After a very intensive couple of days of meeting including some all-nighters, they signed the Barmen Declaration.

This isn’t a very long document.  Two sides of a single page.  But it contains some very powerful and dangerous words.  It proclaimed that the church existed only for God.  It proclaimed that there is no part of our individual lives or our communal life as the church that doesn’t belong to God.  It proclaimed that the church could not be manipulated for any purpose other than God’s mission.  It proclaimed that Jesus Christ is the one true head of the church and that no other person or group could be the head of the church.

These were dangerous words in 1930s Germany.  Without naming names or specifics, those who signed the Barmen Declaration were declaring that they were going to stand firm against Hitler and the entire Nazi party.

They broke away from their established denominations who were compromising in order to survive, and formed the Confessing Church in Germany.  They founded a Pastor’s Emergency Fund to support pastors who lost their positions either due to Jewish ancestry or because they had opposed the government.  And as you might imagine, most of the people who signed the Barmen Declaration did not survive the war.

They had been faced with a difficult decision – to compromise their beliefs, or to stay true to what they believed, despite the risk.

Should following Jesus always be easy?

One theologian in a similar situation to those who signed the Barmen Declaration was Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  He was just a little bit too young to have been involved in the meeting in Barmen, but he was also a pastor and theologian in 1930s Germany who resisted what Hitler was trying to do to the church.

One of Bonhoeffer's better-known books is The Cost of Discipleship, and in this book he argues that being a disciple of Jesus isn’t supposed to be easy.  We have to be willing to go where Christ calls us; and do what Christ calls us to do.  God’s grace is freely given, but it comes at a great cost – the death of God-in-Jesus on a cross.  If we accept this grace without being willing to be transformed into disciples, then we turn this costly grace into cheap grace.[1]

And Bonhoeffer wasn’t just writing empty words.  The Cost of Discipleship was published in 1937.  In April 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested, and in April 1945 he was executed in Flossenbürg concentration camp, just 2 weeks before that camp was liberated and a month before Nazi Germany surrendered.  The cost of Bonhoeffer's discipleship was his life.

Should following Jesus always be easy?

We’ve been reading through Chapter 6 of John’s gospel over the past 5 weeks, and Jesus’ teachings have been getting more and more difficult as we have continued.  Remember that the chapter started with the miracle of feeding 5000 hungry people with 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish.  This was the easy part of the message.  The people liked this miracle.  They liked it so much that the followed Jesus across the Sea of Galilee.  When they caught up with Jesus, he accused them of being more interested in bread for their bellies than in following Jesus who is the Bread of Life.  It didn’t take long for the teaching to get difficult.

From there, Jesus gets more and more difficult to listen to.  He claimed that he didn’t just want to feed people’s bodies, that he wanted to feed all of them and in exchange they were to follow him with body, mind, and spirit.

And then we got to last week’s reading where Jesus uses dramatic language of cannibalism to tell people that you are what you eat.  “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them” (John 6:56).

And in today’s reading, we get the response of the crowd.  “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” (John 6:60), and many of his followers turned back and no longer went about with him (John 6:66).

Should following Jesus always be easy?

I think that the answer to this question has to be no.  Each one of us, individually and collectively as the church, is going to face at some point in our lives a moment when it isn’t going to be easy to be a follower of Jesus.  Hopefully our moment of decision won’t be as dramatic as it was for Bonhoeffer or for those who gathered in Barmen in 1934.  I don’t know what big moments of decision we are going to face in our lifetimes.  Some of my thoughts are that one these decision points might be around climate change, and the things that all of us do every day that contribute to the climate changes that are affecting so many people around the world.  Or maybe another decision point might revolve around reconciliation with our Indigenous siblings here in Canada.  I don’t know – I can’t predict the future.

But I do know that we will face moments when choosing to do the right thing – choosing to be a disciple or follower of Jesus is going to be difficult.

But the good news is that it isn’t a once-and-forever decision.  We are always being given a chance to choose, and if we choose wrongly today, we will have another opportunity to choose tomorrow.  Remember those well-known words from Joshua that we heard this morning – when Joshua addresses the people who have just crossed the Jordan River into the land that God had promised to them and to their ancestors after 40 years of wandering in the desert.  Joshua demands of them – “Choose this day whom you will serve.”  And tomorrow, choose this day whom you will serve.  And the next day, choose this day whom you will serve.

And may we, like Peter, answer this call.  “Lord, to whom else can we go?  You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).  And Jesus will feed us again and again with the Bread of Life, until we become what we eat.

Should following Jesus always be easy?

No; but the good news is that the God who calls us also feeds us with the Bread of Life to sustain us for the journey; and God working in us transforms us more and more into the Body of Christ so that we are able to do far more than we ever could do on our own.

Thanks be to God for the Bread of Life!


[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R. H. Fuller, with the assistance of Irmgard Booth (London: SCM Press, 1959), 41-53.


 The beginning of the Barmen Declaration (in translation)

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