The Hedges and the Walls

 + The Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity +

Isaiah 5.1–7; Psalm 80.9–17; Philippians 3.4b–14; Matthew 21.33–end

 

Today’s reading are strong meat. God’s blessing doesn’t last forever when it’s taken for granted. Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow (Galatians 6:7).

In 1937 a German Pastor called Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a celebrated book called The Cost of Discipleship.

The main thrust of the book was a comparison between what Bonhoeffer called ‘Cheap Grace’ and ‘Costly Grace’.

This is what he meant by the terms, and I quote: Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy for which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble; it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.

His criticism was aimed most particularly at his own Lutheran church of the time. He said that many had misconstrued Martin Luther’s teaching of "justification by faith alone" as a free pass to live without moral courage or effort.

One more thing: the mainstream Protestant church in Germany (predominantly Lutheran) largely supported or acquiesced to Adolf Hitler and in response Bonhoeffer joined an underground church called the ‘Confessing Church’; a movement within German Protestantism (primarily Lutheran and Reformed) that fiercely rejected the Nazi state's attempts to control and subvert Christian doctrine.

The Nazis long term goal was the eradication of Christianity in Germany but their plan was to do that in stages. They came up with a policy they called ‘Positive Christianity’ and that involved the promotion of an Aryan Jesus, who was stripped of all reference to his Jewish roots and recast as an Aryan warrior who fought against the Jewish people. They also de-Judaised the Scriptures by banning the OT and removing Hebrew words like ‘hallelujah’ and ‘hosanna’ from the NT, as well as the Jewish ancestral genealogies.

The Nazis to forced Germany's independent Protestant churches one single, centralized state church: the German Evangelical Church and installed a pro-Nazi Bishop, Ludwig Müller, to oversee things.

They implemented the "Aryan Paragraph" within the church structure. This law stripped any pastors or church officials of Jewish descent (even those who had been baptized Christians for decades) of their ministries.

They waged ideological war on traditional Christian virtues like humility, meekness, and grace, arguing that these virtues repressed the violent instincts required for the Aryan race to conquer its enemies. They shut down all Christian youth organisations and schools and rebranded Christian feasts as pagan festivals; Christmas became a Winter Solstice festival celebrating German nationalism.

Anyone who joined the Confessing Church was sent to one of several concentration camps.

I am going to cut the story short here by telling you Bonhoeffer was involved in a whole series of subversive activities, including smuggling 14 prominent Jews out of Germany and into Switzerland for which he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943.

What the Gestapo didn’t know at that stage was that Bonhoeffer was also involved in the planning of a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler by placing a suitcase bomb at his HQ in July 1944. They discovered documents linking Bonhoeffer to the plot after his arrest.

He was hanged at dawn on 9 April 1945 at Flossenbürg concentration camp 2 days before the Americans liberated the camp.

Before he was taken to the gallows, he whispered a final message to a fellow prisoner to pass along to an English friend. That fellow prisoner was a British military intelligence officer named Captain Sigismund Payne Best and the friend to whom the message was delivered was George Bell, the Anglican Bishop of Chichester.

This is what Bonhoeffer said: "This is the end - for me, the beginning of life."

I’ve taken a detour into what I hope is a story that will inspire you somewhat but I also hope that it will challenge you.

Both our readings give a graphic description of what happens when the people of God take his favour for granted. The OT reading from Isaiah calls the community of God his ‘beloved vineyard’ which he took care to plant in a green and pleasant land (flowing with milk and honey); which he nourished with his Word and trellised with his Commandments; which he trained and pruned by his prophets, only to find that the harvest was nothing like the justice and righteousness he hoped would come from his efforts.

Both our readings are an example of people to have lost the sense of respect (the fear of the Lord) that is so essential to the life of faith. The NT reading from St Matthew takes it even further and gives us a picture of souls so corrupt that when God shows up in person (in his only-begotten Son) it’s not enough that they are unworthy and lazy custodians of their inheritance, they actually go as far as to kill the Son and take possession of what was never theirs in the first place.

This is a graphic prophetic description of what the religious leaders will do to Jesus not long after he spoke these words. It’s a graphic description of what happens when everything, even religion, is employed in the service of personal gain.

Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow (Galatians 6:7). When a society gets to that level of degeneracy I think we might say that the end is in sight.

Later in all 3 of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) Jesus weeps over Jerusalem and predicts the destruction of the city and the Temple and that’s exactly what happened 40 years later (the Bible loves things in 40’s).

Notice though that although the Bible seems to indicate that God is the actor when punishment is due, Galatians and other passages paint times of what it calls ‘punishment’ as the natural consequence of  depravity. We bring these things on ourselves.

I should know. I have tried it. A life lived without due respect for the Commandments goes nowhere fast.

A life lived with no respect for God; for truth and justice; a life lived without personal responsibility and accountability;  without compassion and forgiveness; without self-control; without restraint and a respect for persons and property ends in loneliness, despair and death.

The same is true, I think, on a larger scale: a society with no respect for God; for truth and justice and all the attributes I have just mentioned ends in chaos.

The OT passage says that when the unrighteousness gets to a certain level God removes the hedges and the walls and allows the land to revert to chaos. Well, there’s no real need for God to do that because it sometimes looks as though we have removed our own moral boundaries without any help from anyone else, let alone God.

How far off are we, do you think? The hedges and the walls, the limits across which we didn’t routinely used to trespass have been knocked over by our own hands and trampled down under our own feet.

I’ll let you decide for yourselves which of the Commandments have fallen out of favour in our society in our day and age. For myself I think I can name examples of every single one.

But I am not here to judge, or to condemn anyone in particular. God knows I have my own conscience to deal with and my own transgressions to confess and repent of.

But I am grateful, today, for the reminder that God’s grace is not ‘cheap’. God’s grace is infinitely ‘costly’ because his only Son paid for it with his most precious Blood.

I am grateful for readings that might be termed a wake-up call. I am grateful that the readings prompt me to look for areas in my life where I might be treating God’s grace and favour as ‘cheap’; areas where I need to confess my faults and ask for his forgiveness and repent.

I am also grateful for readings that prompt me to pray for my nation and ask God to have mercy on us and save us, often from our own folly.