You have heard me preach about love before, well I think I mention love in almost every sermon I preach.  I do this because love is central to the Gospel message.  When asked what the two greatest commandants are Jesus response by saying love God and love your neighbor.  He goes on to say that on these two hang all the law and the prophets.  So everything then hangs on our love of God, and our love of neighbor and one feeds the other.  If we love God, we have no other option but to love our neighbor.  If we truly love God with our whole heart and our whole soul and our whole mind, then we have no other choice.

The chapter we heard read today from the 1st Letter of Paul to the Corinthians a letter written by Paul to the church he founded in the City of Corinth.  Paul’s letters are personal and pastoral and written to real people dealing with real issues.  This chapter, or parts of it anyway, are used during wedding ceremonies and thus has been reduced to love between spouses, but by doing this, we lose the intended meaning of what Paul was writing.  Sure there is much in this that we can use concerning the relationship between two people but let’s take this a little deeper.

We need to set the stage here, and I would like, to begin with, verse 11:

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.”

I am sure we can agree that we do not talk to children the same way we talk to adults.  As we get old, our capacity for learning changes and we move from the concrete to the abstract.  As children our brains have not been formed enough to understand ideas from a theoretical point of view but as our minds mature our ability to think in this way changes.

Before my attending seminary, I was a school teacher.  I taught primarily in the middle grades 6th, 7th, and 8th.  I would occasionally teach in the elementary grades to fill in when necessary, and I did teach a year in High School.  All of those grades require different teaching techniques to reach the students in front of me at the time.  I cannot teach a high school student the same way I would teach a 1st-grade student.  Well, I could, but neither one would learn very much.

What Paul is saying is that as children we learn stories to help us understand what we need to learn.  Jesus taught with parables to illustrate his lessons, and he used language and images that they would know and understand.  But as adults we have to take it farther than that past the stories we learned in Sunday school, push past those images and look for the real meaning of the Scriptures.

We do this by understanding the language and the culture of the day.  You have heard me mention before that there are four words in the Greek language that mean love.  In English we have, but one word and the way I like to describe that word is it is the same word for “I love hamburgers” and “I love my spouse.”  Not the same thing.

We begin, and in no particular order, with the phileo, the feeling of companionship, affection, fondness or likening.  This is the love that comes from our heart in response to the pleasure we get from an object or a person.  It is the love that responds to kindness or appreciation.

Agape, the most common form of the word used in the New Testament, is the love that comes from the heart that comes from esteem. It is the noblest word for love in the Greek language.  It is not kindled by the merit or worth of the object or person but originates in its own God-given nature. God is love. This is the love that keeps on giving even when the loved one is unresponsive, unlovable, and unworthy. This is unconditional love. It desires only the good of the one loved and is a consuming passion for the well-being of the other. This form of the word was hardly used outside of biblical writing and is used approximately 320 times in the New Testament.

Storge is the love that has its basis in one’s own nature. It is natural affection or natural obligation it is the natural movement of the soul for husband, wife, child, dog. It is a quiet abiding feeling in the soul of a person that rests on something close to us that we feel good about.

Eros the erotic form of love. A love of passion, and overmastering passion that seizes and absorbs itself into the mind. It is a love that is an emotional involvement based on body chemistry. The idea of this love is self-satisfaction, “I love you because you make me happy.” Eros looks for what it can receive and not for what it can give. It has the philosophy that to be loved one must be attractive in some way to another person.

I am sure by now you have deduced which form of the word love Paul used in this passage.  Agape is the form he used, the noblest and dare I say the purest form of the word.  The King James translation uses the word “charity” here rather than love, and that word works as well, but most other translations use the word love.

This is the love that comes from God and our God-given nature.  In the creation story, we read that when humanity was created God breathed into his nostrils, this is the breath of life, this is our very soul, this is love.  Humanity is the only part of creation that God has this intimate link with, humanity is the only part of creation to receive the breath of God, the soul, the nature of God.  For the ancients, the soul was the very center of our being, our nature.  In philosophical terms, this is our “ness” the very thing that makes us who we are, our humanness. But at the same time, it is an individual “ness” our Peterness our Billness if you will.  We are individuals, but we are also one. In that sense we are very Trinitarian, we have separate natures, but we also share the same nature, God.

In this passage today we see three movements that are distinct but at the same time similar.

In the opening phrases of this passage Paul is saying that if we do not love we have nothing.  If we do not love, unconditionally we have nothing.  We can do all of the good in the world, we can speak as the prophets, we can become martyrs, but if we do not have love, it is all worthless.  Remember this love is the agape form the same form used in John 3:16, “for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” But that verse does not just end there it goes on to tell us why God did this, “so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” God loves us not matter what.

The second movement describes what love is, this is the part that is usually read during weddings. Love is patient, kind; it is not envious, jealous, boastful, arrogant, or rude. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends!

So what Paul is saying here is that if we love others than we have to be patient with them, even if we disagree.  We have to be kind to one another we cannot be jealous or envious of others.  We cannot be boastful pointing out all the things that God has done for us or how great our lives are.  We cannot be arrogant, thinking that we have all of the truth or have found the true way, and we certainly cannot be rude, a Christian should never be rude.  We cannot get irritable or resentful, we do not look to get back at those who have harmed us, we seek justice, but we also seek mercy.  We cannot rejoice when another stumbles but we must be there to pick them up and help them along the way.  We must bear all things, hope all things and endure all things.  Because in the end love never ends!  The love that God has for us never ends and the love we should have for others should never end!  Remember this is unconditional love.

The final movement of this passage speaks about the future and how we might not have all of the answers now but one day we will.  But it also points out to us that our journey never ends on this earth we have to keep learning and striving and growing in our Christian life. Just like in verse 11 I pointed out above, Paul says when he was a child he spoke as a child and reasoned like a child, but now that he is an adult he needs to put away childish things.

We have to develop the agape love in all of our dealings, image what our world would be like if we just loved people because they are people.  I have to learn this as well.  I am not always tolerant of others who do not see things the way I do, and I need to work on this.  What Paul has laid out for us in this passage is the ideal, the place we all should strive to get to, but we will not get there overnight.  However, if we start here, in this place and we just start to love each other a little more we would start to change the world.

One of Pastor Bill’s favorite songs is “Let there be peace on earth” and the closing line of that song is “let it begin with me.”  If we want the world to be more peaceful, we have to be more peaceful.  If we want the world to be move loving, we have to be more loving.  It all starts with us, not the government or anything else.  It begins by asking God to bring us the peace that passes all understanding into our lives and our souls.  There is enough hatred in this world, let’s start with some love.

And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

Very often in our day to day lives, we want to know what the cost of something is.  We go to the supermarket or some other store to buy something, and we are interested in what it is going to cost us.  Everything in life has some cost associated with it and what the Scripture is telling us today is that discipleship requires us something.

One of the greatest theologians of the 20th century was Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  In 1937 he wrote a book titled The Cost of Discipleship.  The Germany of 1937 that Bonhoeffer was writing about had become secularized and was spinning out of control.  Now just a point of clarification here, not all secularization is bad and the church of the 21st century needs to learn to live in this new reality much as it did for Bonhoeffer.  The time that Bonhoeffer was writing was the dawn of the Second World War.

The aim of his little book was to call people back to a sense of what it means to be Christian in what is considered to be the modern world.  He is suggesting that there is a cost associated with being a follower of Jesus Christ, and in some cases that cost is our very lives.  For some, like Bonhoeffer it is their physical life, but for the vast majority of us, it is our spiritual life.  I have said this before, and will undoubtedly say it again, to be a follower of Jesus Christ we must change the way we think and act and view the world.  We must have a Christian worldview.

The words we heard today were spoken by Jesus while he was on the road to Jerusalem.  He knew that he was on his way to the cross, but the people with him thought he was on his way to rule an empire.  He spoke to them in vivid terms so there would be no misunderstanding, but like most of the Scriptures, he was not speaking literally.  He was telling them that the one who follows him would not be on their way to worldly power and glory, but that they must be ready for loyalty which would call them to sacrifice the dearest things in life in exchange for a suffering which would be like the agony of a person on the cross.

Wait, Jesus is saying that we will have to suffer to be his followers?  Will we have to turn our backs on worldly power and possessions?  Yes, that is faithful what he is telling us.  He is telling us that to be a faithful follower of his we must be willing to sacrifice the things that are the dearest to us and that no love in life can compare to the love we must bear to him.

So we are faced with this question this morning and each and every day.  Is it possible to be a follower of Jesus without being a disciple?

Let’s turn for a moment back to Bonhoeffer.  He writes about what he calls “cheap grace.”  Cheap grace is, “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline.  Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”

Sadly the church of his time had fallen into the trap of cheap grace.  People wanted religion, but they wanted it on their terms.  They wanted to dictate to the church what they will believe, and they will dictate to the church the discipline they are willing to follow.  We see much of the same thing happening today.  Some have watered the faith down so much that there is not much of what the Apostles taught.  There are more than 40,000 Christian denominations today.  That boggles my mind.  We have taken the basic message of grace and reconciliation and love and turned it on its head.  We have taken something so straightforward and made it complicated.  By watering down the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we have cheapened it, and in that it has lost all of its meaning.

Faith comes from obedience to something that is outside of us something that exists in spite of everything we do to try and make it go away.  We cannot have it both ways; we cannot do what we want to do but still call ourselves followers of Jesus Christ.  To be a follower requires obedience to Jesus and His Gospel.  And this obliges us to work at it every day.

When Jesus called His Apostles, they had to leave their possessions and their lives to follow Him.  We see Peter, the future leader of the Apostles, leaving his fishing nets to go and follow Jesus.  Matthew, the tax collector, left his coin box at the gate and followed Jesus.  These are concrete examples of how the lives of the followers of Jesus need to change if they are going to be authentic followers.

In the story of the man who comes to Jesus and asks to follow Him but he has to go and bury his father, who has just died, first.  Jesus says to him, “let the dead bury the dead.”  He tells the rich young man to go and sell everything that he has and follow Him.  Lives need to be transformed if we are to be authentic followers of Jesus.

In sharp contrast to “cheap grace” or what I like to call the easy way, Bonhoeffer advocates for “Costly Grace.”

“Costly grace confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus; it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” ”

Faith comes with obedience and obedience comes with faith.  It was not easy for the Apostles to leave all they had behind, and Jesus is not even asking us to do that, He is asking us to think and act in a certain way, to conform our lives to a certain way, and that way is His way the example he left for all of us.

Our world is not much different today than it was in Bonhoeffer’s day.  Organized religion has done a terrible job, and for that, we are paying the price.  When the leaders go off on a tangent and seem to be more interested in legislation than a transformation of lives, there is a real problem.  When the concern is more for the institution of the Church then for people who are the church there is a real problem.  When the shepherds forget their job is to protect their sheep and to lay down their lives for them, it is no wonder we see less and less people in the church.  If I require you to be an authentic follower of Jesus, then I need to be a genuine follower of Jesus. Otherwise, I should just shut up!

Obedience to not an easy thing for us.  We are not designed for it if you will.  We have been given free will, but that freedom comes at a cost.  We have the ability to choose the narrow way, the way filled with rocks and crooked paths, the way where the bushes grow over the route and where sometimes we cannot see the road in front of us, the way of Christ, or the wide open, easy way, the way of the smooth way with plenty of pit stops, the way of the world. Jesus never promised His followers that life would be easy.  Jesus told us, explicitly told us, that we would be persecuted.

In the 15th chapter of the Gospel of St. John, Jesus tells His followers, “If the world hates you, you know it hated me before it hated you.”  This fallen world we live in hates everything that Christ stands for and will do everything to destroy it.  Evil and hatred exist, but we bring love and compassion to the world, Christ, and His Church, are all about love, that is the simple message of Gospel.

Church let me say this as plain as I can, if the world is hating you for being a Christian then you are doing it right!  If you are standing up at a time when people are yelling at you to sit down, you are doing it right.  If you feel like you are the lone voice crying in the wilderness, you are doing it right.  If you post the love of Jesus Christ for all of the humanity on Facebook and your friends and family unfriend you, you are doing it right!

“Costly Grace” is the call of all of us, me and you, the call to follow in the footsteps of the Apostles and the footsteps of Christ.

But what it is not is a throwing off of whatever we have.  Jesus is not calling all of us to sell all we have and give it to the poor.  He is not calling all of us to live in a monastery or something like that.  No, these are not bad things, things are not bad, it is how we use them, and they use us that is bad.  We have been given the capacity to think and to discern those thoughts and beliefs and then we have to choose which way we are to go.  There is a cost associated with being a follower and that cost is not being a slave to our passions. The cost is not doing it our way but doing it God’s way.  The cost is conforming our lives to what God wants and how God wants us to act.  And yes, that requires work, it requires listening, and it compels us to recommit our lives each and every day.

Those who liked in the early days of the church write about how we need to get our passions under control.  Anger is a passion.  We have all been angry, some of us may be angry right now because I keep going on and on…  But anger is a passion, and it can lead us to do some pretty nasty things.  Psychologists will tell us that the passions are irrational, all of the passions and we should not make decisions from a passionate point of view.  When we are angry, we are not thinking straight, and we might say or do something that is harmful to ourselves or another person.

But is anger always bad?  No, anger used in the right way can lead to change.  It is all in how we use the passions.  Do they control us or do we control them?  We should be angry that our faith has been co-opted by some and twisted around, so it is hard to even find the words of Jesus in there.  We should be mad that our faith is being used to hurt people and to marginalize people when it should be a faith filled with love and acceptance.  Church if you are not angry about this then we are not doing it right.

As followers of Jesus, we are called to obedience to the Gospel of Christ.  We are called to obedience to His church, not just the parts we like, but to the whole program.  We cannot have a foot in both the church and the world we need to make a choice between the easy way of cheap grace or the difficult way of Costly Grace.

Let us decide right this minute that we will endeavor to be obedient to What Christ is calling us too.  Let us decide at this moment that we will endeavor to follow the path of Costly Grace and not that of Cheap Grace. And let is decide, right now, that we will begin anew the process of transformation of our lives.  If we are to truly be disciples, true followers of Christ, then the transformation has to begin with us.  We need to turn our anger into love, our hatred into love, our fear into love there is no other way.

There was a man from Russia who came to Alaska in the early part of the last century.  He came as a missionary to the local population and is an example to me of how to bring the love of Christ to those we minister to.  He is known as Herman of Alaska, and he summed up our lives as followers of Christ this with these words, “From this day forth, from this hour, from this minute, let us love God above all, and strive to do His holy will.”

Let us make that our prayer this morning and every morning.  Amen.