6 Epiphany, 2022
Friends, I’d like to begin with a word of thanks and a word of introduction.
I am grateful to Ken for this partnership this Sunday morning in these strange COVID times and I am grateful to our rector for his welcome and for the sometime opportunity to read or to preach.
My name is André Lavergne. I grew up in Montreal and on the shore of the Bay of Fundy. I was ordained 43 years ago as a Lutheran pastor. I served in nearby parishes including 30 years at Trinity Church in New Hamburg. Somewhere in all of that, I was twice seconded to the national church, first, as our staff-person for worship, and, for the last decade before retirement, as our ecumenical and interfaith officer. I also staffed our theological commission.
When Preston had lunch with Barbara and me some time ago, he said he wished to involve me however he might. I replied that in my latter years I had come to think of myself more as a deacon than as a priest. My work with the national church had been principally diaconal: bridge-building, facilitating, witnessing and teaching. Not so much sacramental. Recently, I spent a couple of years in a project to refine the theology and practice of diaconal ministry and to do the constitutional work to enable the full recovery of the permanent diaconate in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada.
That was my last “hurrah”. I cheer from the bleachers, now. I retired from my parish in 2014 and we moved to K-W. I retired from my work for the national church, and we planted a garden and eventually we found this community just in time for COVID. I used the on-line vestry meetings, this year and last, to try to put faces and names together but masks make recognition so difficult.
In 1943, and a couple of years before he was hanged by the Nazis, at about the time he was arrested by the Gestapo, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was asked how it was even remotely conceivable that the church should sit back and allow Adolf Hitler to seize absolute power. “By teaching cheap grace,” was his reply, “grace without discipleship”.
Some years before, in 1937, Bonhoeffer had published a small book wherein he’d set forth his ideas as a Christian theologian. He called it “Nachfolge” which is German for “discipleship” or “act of discipleship”. In English, the title became The Cost of Discipleship. In his work, Bonhoeffer elaborates his principal theology around the beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount, from Matthew, the twin gospel text to this morning’s Sermon on the Plain from Luke.
The Sermon on the Mount: 8 blessings; no woes. The Sermon on the Plain, as today: 4 blessings; 4 woes. I’ve heard the two gospel texts compared to the content of a stump speech: similar ideas formulated differently for different crowds but with a common core and common set of ideas.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is seen above the people providing them, in the manner of Moses, with a new law. Ten commandments. Eight blessings. And, of course, there is no narrative. It’s a list. And they are third person. They. Them. Those. A list of eight blessings. “Blessed are they.” “Blessed are those.” And Jesus is seated, as was the custom, as one who taught with authority.
In the Sermon on the Plain, in today’s reading, Jesus is seen among the people, one, with the people, standing, making himself understood by contrasting the poor with the rich; the hungry with the well-fed; the weeping with the joyous; the dis-regarded with the well-regarded. And these are not notional third parties. This is second person. You and you. There is an intimacy, a sense of human contact present on the Plain that is lacking from the Mount.
Now, when Bonhoeffer claims that cheap grace is grace devoid of discipleship, he is teasing out a thread, a concern from Paul’s Letter to the Church at Corinth read by Andrea this morning. Paul sets forth his view of those who “misrepresent God”. For Bonhoeffer, grace without discipleship is precisely the misrepresentation of what God’s business is about; of what Jesus’ business was about. In Bonhoeffer’s understanding, those who “misrepresent God” are precisely the purveyors of cheap grace alien to full-fledged discipleship and the fully realized work of discipleship.
And make no mistake about it: whether in Luke’s Sermon on the Plain or Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, the central concern of God is for the poor, the hungry, the distressed and the disregarded. God exercises a “preferential option for the poor” as a Jesuit student of the Bible once put it. The Beatitudes are about the poor and those of related affliction; afflictions which brought personal and/or social injury and separation.
In our time Godly misrepresentation is alive and well. I can think of two forms of cheap grace quintessentially lacking in a sense of costly discipleship.
The first is what one of my mentors and friends calls God as Cosmic Santa Claus. This is the God who’s “makin’ a list and checkin’ it twice; gonna find out who’s naughty and nice.” It’s a painful, silly view of God but not entirely unfamiliar. Fortunately, God has better things to do with God’s time. It’s not like God needs lists in case God forgets.
Then there’s that other lamentable misrepresentation of God and of God’s concern: the modern but oh-so-ancient prosperity gospel God. In that construct, success, especially financial success, is seen as a measure of one’s nearness to God. I’m sure we could all name names.
Jesus’ world, as a foot-to-the-path, “Come, follow me!” preacher, was a world of enormous poverty and of great gulfs between the rich and the poor; of short lifespans except for the wealthy and well-fed; of terrible child-mortality and women’s distress; of people who lived separated lives whether by caste, religion, wealth, affliction or walls—real walls—then as now.
In Jesus’ time, there were people named for their disease, and they didn’t get to live in town. They lived between the great wall and the garbage dump next to where they crucified people. In fact, Jesus’ world was a world of great vulnerability to disease—and suffering—wherein what distinguished the wealthy was, among other things, the lengths of their lives. Jesus’ world of backwater Galilee, around-the-lake fisher-folk and down-the-road Jerusalem was a mess. Never mind having the Romans camped in your front yard.
What Bonhoeffer was reminding us of was the lengths to which Jesus went to practice the arts of discipleship: of being among rather than being apart; of sharing rather than hoarding; of seeking company after a common good rather than going it alone; of greeting as friends rather than eschewing as strangers; of a willingness to venture out to welcome in; and so on.
Our world today is not the same place, of course. But then again, we do well to wonder whether there are not some lengths to which we must go to be about the real work of discipleship. Discipleship is not something affected by being the church in the church. As our rector likes to remind us, it’s about worship and work as he signals from the world in here to the out there. He talks about being the church in here for the world out there. That’s a familiar diaconal figure.
I conjure, in my mind’s eye, the work of reconciliation that has real people at its core and that will take seven generations, or more, such is the task.
Or the work of advocacy and real-worldly change for a planet we have done an astonishing job of neglecting. Worse, abusing. I find myself genuinely overcome and seized with sadness when I think of the world my grandkids are inheriting.
So there’s lots of work to do and much of it, we can all intuit, touches at the heart of a costly discipleship. This community does some lovely things. One of my favourites is the picnic table outside where people who live rough and never sleep well can simply be in the lee of the safe injection site across the way. That is our work and everything that is kindred to it. I wonder whether we’ll ever see the people from the table out there gathered around the table in here. That would be a vision of the Kingdom.
A last word about the “woes”. Woe is a word we almost never encounter except when we read the Bible or a bit of Shakespeare: “…O, woe is me, T’have seen what I have seen, see what I see!” You can hear those very words in Stratford’s Hamlet this summer. Both the blessings and the woes have an inherent sense of connection to God, and to God’s judgement, which, for the latter, for the word “woe” is lost in translation.
If the concerns of the beatitudes were Jesus’ concerns, then real grace and costly discipleship make them our concerns. We misrepresent God if we fail to grasp and contend with the costly realization of the blessings and the woes. Not as an intellectual exercise on a Sunday morning but in our shared work and our common cause as Anglican (and Lutheran) Christians in downtown Kitchener, Ontario.
Silence.
May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in God’s sight. And let the church say “Amen.” R/ Amen.
André Lavergne, CWA (The Rev.)
Church of St. John the Evangelist, Kitchener
Angus Sinclair was appointed Director of Music of St. John the Evangelist on February 1, 2023. Having graduated in 1981 (Honours B.Mus.) in organ performance from Wilfrid Laurier University, he went on to distinguish himself as a church musician, recitalist and accompanist touring in both Canada and the UK. For over 40 years Angus has served parishes and congregations throughout Southwestern Ontario as director of music. He experiences his present appointment to St. John’s as a welcome homecoming, both spiritually and musically.
As our parish musician, he provides both support and leadership so that a variety of parish programs can find musical expression and attract participation. When our handbell choir is in season, he is one of our ringers. At parish dinners, he provides popular piano music for the guests to dine by. For both worship services and concerts, he will rehearse and accompany vocal and instrumental soloists from our congregation on piano, organ, or even accordion.
Angus Sinclair was appointed Director of Music of St. John the Evangelist on February 1, 2023. Having graduated in 1981 (Honours B.Mus.) in organ performance from Wilfrid Laurier University, he went on to distinguish himself as a church musician, recitalist and accompanist touring in both Canada and the UK. For over 40 years Angus has served parishes and congregations throughout Southwestern Ontario as director of music. He experiences his present appointment to St. John’s as a welcome homecoming, both spiritually and musically.