What Cost?

[UPDATE: Welcome, Pajama Pundits readers!  Thanks for stopping by, and feel free to click around.  Many thanks to Pajama Pundits for the linkage.]

Hey, maybe I can ease myself back into blogging by stealing cartoons from Hugh! 

I love this cartoon.  It's so funny because it's so true.  One of my favorite Lutherans, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, would certainly agree. 

Belief costs.  Faith exacts a price.  Whatever you fear, love, or trust, it costs you something.  Maybe you aren't aware of what you're paying.  Maybe you don't mind.  Maybe the price is something you're glad to be without.

But in this aspect, despite whatever one may protest, there are no atheists.  We all have costly beliefs.  We all have gods that take their price from us, whether we will it or no.

Belief in Jesus is costly.  That whole cross thing.  That call to live in community.  Loving your neighbor!  (Jesus, have you met some of my neighbors?)  Owning up to your own sinfulness.  Heck, admitting that there even is such a thing as sinfulness is a price many won't willingly pay!  Discipleship can feel like it is tearing the believer apart at times (Matt 5:29-30).  The cost is, indeed, losing your life (Matt 10:38-39).

Of course, let's not be foolish.  Jesus isn't the only Lord and Master whose call to "follow" is costly.  What are the costs of our cultures various obsessions?  To ourselves (I speak as a westerner), and to those who do not share the general privilege of the west?  Spiritually, morally, physically, psychologically, environmentally?  And of course, those are all temporal expressions of the ultimate price, the eternal one (Matt 16:25-26).  We can at least say this for Jesus: he was fairly up front about his costs!  Our idols give us no such consideration.

Perhaps one way of looking at the conversations now around "emerging" forms of the Church is around the question of "price" or "cost."  I see many "emergent" folks as having had their eyes opened, by the Spirit, to the tremendous price that modernity is exacting upon the Church and world, and responding to that work of the Spirit by exploring new, or perhaps better, older, ways of living the Christian faith.  A danger, of course, is that the post-modern world has just as many idols as the modern one.  What prices are we unwittingly paying to them?  And when Jesus calls us away from post-modern paths of death (just as he calls us from modern ones), will we pay the price?

Belief, whether true or false, conscious or unconscious, is costly.  What prices are you paying in your life?  What costs are you not counting?  What prices are coming due, and which ones will come around later?  There are so many that you can stop paying now.  But that's the cost of following Jesus - stopping the paying off of all those little idols.  That's what Jesus offers.  It's a cost, yes, but it is also infinite gift.

Comments

[LF]

I never thought of it in those terms. Good food (a whole meal!) for the ole brain.