Appreciate value of salvation

This sermon was preached yesterday by the Rev. Terry Specht at St. Leo the Great Catholic Church.

I always smile when I hear someone call Christianity boring. I smile because I know that anyone who says such a thing has never read the pages of the Gospels.

Some of the most shocking words I ever read came from the Gospel.

Take, for example, this statement: “If anyone comes to me without turning his back on his father and mother, his wife and his children, his brothers and sisters, indeed his very self, he cannot be my follower” (Luke 14:26).

Across America, many pastorally sensitive priests would stand up and attempt to take the shock out of Christ’s words. They would soften the tone, place in context, backpedal, make light of and dissect into meaninglessness His stark words. G.K. Chesterton best said that the modern fad is not to explain the Gospel, but rather to explain it away.

But these words cannot simply be rewritten or redefined for two very serious reasons: first, because they are meant to be shocking; second, because they are true.

Sometime in the 1950s, Christians in America lost their nerve. Gradually a consensus developed that we needed a softer, gentler Christianity. Somehow, we needed to take the edge off the words of this man, Jesus. We thought that if we just repackaged Him without the demands of the Gospel; if we stripped the cross from Christianity, then maybe more people would join the church.

While keeping the ancient truth that God’s grace was free, we decided God’s grace was also cheap. But Christ without the cross, and discipleship without cost was so obviously false that the message lost the power of conviction and certainty. The mission became boring.

But Christ’s demands on the true cost of discipleship are the very lifeblood and passion of the church itself. The love He showed us by dying on the cross was not cheap. He paid for our sins with His life, the most precious gift a person has. The question for us today is whether we realize and honor that sacrifice. Do we know that our salvation is the most prized and selfless gift from God? Do we appreciate its worth?

The pagans loved their families and feared their gods. But we have an entirely different divine relationship. We understand that there are two different and unequal kinds of love: love of God and love of neighbor. Jesus clearly stated which love was superior and all-demanding, “Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God is one God, and you must love the Lord your God with all your strength, with all your heart, with all your soul (Mark 12:29).”

This is more than a demand for perfect love; it is a demand for exclusive love. The man, Jesus, orders our unreserved and undivided love for God. There will be no rivals for the lordship of our hearts and lives.

Jesus asks that we devote our lives to Him, as He devoted His life to us. We must be willing to pay the price, to go where God leads us to go and, more importantly, to become what He wants us to be. There are no half-measures here. There is only the simple answer that lies in our own hearts: Yes or no.

God’s grace is free, but it is not cheap. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theologian and writer, described cheap grace as “preaching forgiveness without requiring repentance. … It is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross. Cheap grace is grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

But today, God summons us back to costly grace, a blessing freely given by our redeemer that asks only for our acceptance.