We can love God enough to risk loving the world.
I will love as much and as hard as I can, for as long as I can.” In the end that’s all that any of us who try to be Christians can do. Racelis writes, “I wouldn’t be a Christian if I wanted to stay safe. Yet not to love would be even riskier it would be to choose death, both for ourselves and for the world. Love makes us risk the best parts of ourselves getting hurt. Racelis responded like this: “When faced with life’s many uncertainties, the answer is never going to be ‘love less.’ If that’s the answer you come up with, you are asking the wrong questions. To choose to do something, to stand up to what is unjust, is to resist the culture of destruction that surrounds us. Upstanding is like standing fast-the literal definition of the word resist. When they see someone being hurt or mistreated, they want to be the people who do something about it, not the ones who choose to avert their eyes and keep walking. They said that instead of being bystanders, they try to be upstanders.
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We were talking about bullying and how to respond to it. Several years ago, some of the young people in my church’s confirmation class taught me a new word. So each time the news informs us of something that’s happening that we know is not right or just, the question to ask is what response does God want from us in this moment? When we learn to ask ourselves this, and to truly discern God’s will for us, we begin to find that the greatest risk we can take, the one thing that will make us lose the life we have been given, is to choose not to risk anything at all. In Christ we are given a new freedom to respond to a world in need. As Jesus says, to save your life you have to lose it.Ĭhristians are not called to recklessness, but we are called to action. But the mission of the church is not to avoid causing a stir, nor to hold on to things that cannot save us. This can be hard for North American Christians to understand, since we have rarely faced persecution. The great threat to Christian faith is not that we will not be safe from the world’s dangers but that we will be held captive by our fear of them-that we will have more faith in our fear than we have in Christ.
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We allow fear to deprive us not of heartbeats and breaths, but of something even more precious: the fullness and beauty of a life lived well.įor those of us who believe that we rest in the hands of an eternal and ever-loving God, living a life full of fear is worse than dying.
Yet there’s something else we seem to be willing to risk our lives for: our fears. Choosing to do the right thing probably won’t make our hearts stop beating.īut what if it did? What would be worth that risk? If you are like most people, your list of people and ideals you’d be willing to die for is a very short one. While there is a chance that the choices faith asks us to make will result in physical death, as it did for Bonhoeffer, the cost is likely to stop short of that. In treacherous times, when powerful people and systems threaten us or others, we have to ask what God wants us to do-and we have to accept that doing it will cost us something.
It is through costly grace that we receive our real lives. “It is costly because it costs a man his life,” writes Bonhoeffer, “and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.” Bonhoeffer points us to the false dichotomy between preserving our lives and responding to the needs of the world. But costly grace is not just costly it is also grace.
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