On 9^th April, 1945 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran Clergyman, was hanged by the Nazis at Flossenburg at the age of 39. His arrest in 1943 arose from his involvement in smuggling fourteen Jews to Switzerland. (We have spoken of him many times before). He likened Hitler to a madman who drives his car in a reckless manner and hurts people. Eventually the man drives up on to the pavement of the city and starts running down pedestrians indiscriminately. Bonhoeffer said that it’s not enough to minister to those who are victims of the madman. The madman himself must be stopped.

Perhaps his most famous work has become a Christian classic, ‘The Cost of Discipleship’, and it was first published in 1937. I’ve said it before, but in that book Bonhoeffer argues that the standard way of preaching justification by faith makes for what he calls ‘cheap grace’.

Cheap grace! Is that what it’s all about? We say a little prayer here, we give a little here, we light a candle there, and we may even go to Church every five or six weeks; we’ll be alright. Is that what it’s all about? Is this ‘true religion’, as our old Prayer Book called it?

Mrs. Donavan was walking down O’Connell Street in Dublin when she met up with Father Flaherty.

‘Ah, Hello Mrs Donavan! Didn’t I marry you to your husband a few years ago?

‘Yes, you did indeed, Father.’

‘And, tell me, Mrs Donavan, do have any little ones yet?’

‘No, Father, not yet’

‘Well now,’ said Father Flaherty, ‘I’m going to Rome next week and I’ll light a candle for you and your husband.’

‘That would be grand, Father. Thank you very much.’

Some years passed by and they met again.

‘Well, Mrs Donavan, how are you these days’

‘Oh, I’m very well, Father.’ She replied.

‘And, tell me, are there any little ones in the house?’

‘Oh yes, Father, we have three sets of twins and four singles, yes, ten in all.’

‘That’s wonderful, Mrs Donavan. And how’s your husband. What’s he doing these days?

‘Well, Father, he’s gone to Rome...to blow out yer blimin candle!’

Back to Bonhoeffer!

Bonhoeffer’s letters from prison were published after his death, and in them he argues that too often God is seen as the source of comfort, helping people in moments of stress or insecurity. Evangelists, he argues, even try to make people feel guilty or insecure in order to make them turn to God. Bonhoeffer called this ‘an attempt to put a grown-up man back into adolescence’. The world today, he has said, has ‘come of age...God is teaching us that we must live as people who can get along very well without him.’ This does not mean atheism. It means rejecting the way of ‘religion’. God’s reality is revealed in Christians serving their fellow beings in a costly and positive way amidst life as it is.

Isn’t that a lovely thought that ‘religion’ is out the window? Bonhoeffer was a man ahead of his time.

I hate that word ‘religion’, anyway; it’s from the Latin, religio, ‘I bind’. Far from releasing you for service ‘religion’ is binding you up! I think Jesus would, very much, go along with that, do you not think? Bonhoeffer put forward the idea of ‘religionless Christianity’. In ‘The Cost of Discipleship’, he argued that the Sermon on the Mount is not to be shelved on the pretext that it sets out an impossible ideal intended only to convict us of sin. This only makes for ‘cheap grace’.

You say a little prayer, you light a candle there and every now and then we come to Church; we’ll be alright! Does it really work that way?

When we read something like Luke chapter 9, are we missing the point somewhere? Do we sing that hymn “Jesus, all for Jesus, all I am and have and ever hope to be... All of my ambitions, hopes and plans, I surrender these into your hands”... and actually mean, well, maybe, 1/10^th to Jesus, or perhaps 1/20^th to Him, or even less.

Either we commit everything to Him or we commit nothing at all. This is where the idea of tithing falls down; it’s very commendable (imagine, for a moment, if everyone in this parish actually tithed!) but it’s very misunderstood or very misinterpreted. From Chronicles, we often say during the Communion, ‘for all things come from you and of your own we give you’. It’s his in the first place! We’re only giving back to him, something that was his in the first place!

‘No-one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God’. We’re all ploughing crooked furrows! And if we’re able just to say, “Oh, sorry about that!” then that makes for what Bonhoeffer calls ‘cheap grace’.

Getting our hands dirty, forgetting about institutional ‘religion’ per se, and ‘being there for others’ is what really points to the reality of God, says Bonhoeffer, and Christ is the perfect example of ‘the man for others’.

In our leafy suburbia, it is easy, perhaps, to forget our call to costly discipleship. Bonhoeffer’s experience was quite extreme and under extraordinary circumstances and, no doubt, he was a very brave man. But what he helps us to do is put in context our own faith commitment. Bonhoeffer helps us, and challenges us to examine our real commitment to our faith when we truly say with our lips, “I will follow you wherever you go.”

It’s more than saying a little prayer here or lighting a candle there. Surely, it is!

God’s reality is revealed in Christians serving others in a costly and positive way – we are released from ‘religion’ in order to serve!

Bonhoeffer gives us a new dimension to our faith commitment, and I offer him to you to make us all think of what we are really about as Christians in this Church!