September 8, 2013 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Intentional Discipleship

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 1
Luke 14:25–33

“For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost?”
Luke 14:28 (NRSV)

The church is the church only when it exists for others, . . . not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell [people] of every calling what it means to live for Christ, to exist for others.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Letters and Papers from Prison

A few years ago after worship one Sunday here at Fourth Church, I was greeting people after the service. A worshiper, a woman, came up to me and shared with me that she’d just returned from Holland. I said, “That’s interesting.” I obviously wanted to make the connection so I spoke about how I had a number of friends from Holland and that I had visited there. I said it was very close to Saugatuck, Michigan, and that I’d seen the tulips and the wooden clogs and everything. “No, no,” she said. “I mean the Netherlands.” It was then that I began to feel that I’d been living in the United States for too long.

My wife, Missy, and I found ourselves in that very place, the Netherlands, last week. In fact, last Sunday we worshiped at the English Reformed Church in Amsterdam. The English Reformed Church is a historic church; it was given by the city of Amsterdam to the English-speaking congregation in the early 1600s. It is now a part of the Presbytery of Europe, of the Church of Scotland, so it’s a very interesting congregation and very international, as you can imagine, in its outlook.

The English Reformed Church was the first place that the Pilgrim fathers went when they left England and arrived in Holland. There is a stained-glass window at the front of the church that commemorates the visit of those Pilgrim fathers. It turns out that they found Amsterdam, even then, a little too hedonistic, and they left for Leiden, on the coast, before coming across the Atlantic. I had been in Amsterdam only once before, very briefly. Missy had never been, so we did the tourist thing for three days essentially. We toured the museums and did, of course, a canal trip on a boat. We saw the famous Rijksmuseum with its amazing collection of Rembrandts. And we visited the Van Gogh Museum, of course, with its amazing collection.

To be honest, Missy and I found ourselves becoming quite irritated by the crowds in the museums. Now I’m a pretty tolerant person and pretty outgoing, but we discovered that there were hundreds and hundreds of people who seemed not to be interested in looking at the art; what they wanted was to get a photo of the painting or, more frequently, for themselves to be photographed in front of a famous painting by a friend or a family member holding up a tablet or iPad or iPhone or camera. It became very annoying. I see some heads nodding; you’ve seen that in the Art Institute, haven’t you? I hope I’m not offending anyone out there who has had their photo taken in front of a famous painting, but it did become an irritation for us.

As part of our being very touristy, of course, we included in our time in Amsterdam the Anne Frank House museum, which was a very different experience from the crazy business of the art museums. As people lined up to get in, they were quiet; they were respectful of the people around them. There was, I would even say, some sense of reverence among the people who were coming into the house and then going through it. It was an extraordinary experience. I know you know the story about Anne Frank, the girl and her family who hid from the Nazis in occupied Netherlands during the Second World War. They hid in the secret annex that was a part of her father, Otto Frank’s, office complex right there in central Amsterdam. The family spent two years there until an anonymous tip-off to the Nazis meant that they were discovered and arrested. Ultimately Anne and her sister, Margot, were shipped to Auschwitz, where they both subsequently died of typhus.

There was something almost holy about being in that house, of experiencing the cramped, claustrophobic conditions that the Frank family and some friends of theirs lived in for that period of time. As I went through the house, up the steep stairs through the door with the cupboard that was covering the entrance, my thoughts went not just to those who were in the house in hiding, but the people that Anne in her diary called “the helpers”—the colleagues and friends of Otto Frank and the Frank family who made it possible for them not only to be hidden, but to receive food, to be given news of the progress of the war.

In the diary, Anne writes about how these helpers would seek to boost the Franks’ morale during that time. I’m going to name them: Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies and her husband, Jan, and Bep Voskuijl, whose father was Johannes. Those six people risked their very lives to help a group of Jews hide from the grasp of the Nazis. As I was touring the house, my thoughts went towards the incredible bravery that was involved for these Dutch people to take it on themselves to help these poor persecuted Jewish people. They could, of course, have been executed by the occupying Nazis for hiding Jewish people. And I think what we see in the actions of these six people, the helpers, is an intentionality in their commitment to helping, in this case, Otto Frank and his family and their friends. That is symbolic, I think, of intentional acts of commitment to humanity. And the reason I think about it and use that word intentionality is that each of these six people knew the risks at the start; they counted the potential cost of undertaking this effort to save these people.

Now I believe it is this kind of intentionality that Jesus is speaking about in our text this morning. It’s that kind of intentionality with which Jesus in our text calls us to engage. This is a hard saying of Jesus; it’s a difficult text when we think of Jesus, the incarnation of, the paragon of Love, using language about hating, about suffering, about self-giving, carrying our cross, giving up possessions. New Testament scholar Charles Cousar comments on this passage, saying, “Some texts comfort the disturbed. This one disturbs the comfortable.”

For many of us this Sunday after Labor Day marks a kind of the beginning of the church year. Summer is over. I know that some of you don’t believe in going to the church over summer anyway, but I’m glad to see you back this morning. The summer is almost over, and as Vicky mentioned, the youth programs and Sunday School are up and running and we have kickoff activities today for our youth and children and families. They will be having lunch in Anderson Hall, and then out in the Garth they’ll be dropping buckets of water on John Vest and things like that, so they’ll be having a great time. So in many ways this a good time to ask ourselves, what does it mean to be intentional in our discipleship? What does that look like for each of us as we look into the next three, six, nine months of the regular program life of the church? What does it mean for us in our lives? As Bonhoeffer puts it, quoted on the front of your bulletin, “What does it mean to live for Christ and to exist for others?”

We will see some examples of this in the weeks and months to come here in the context of worship at Fourth Church. We will be commissioning musicians and the choir members and people who bring their gifts and share those with us in worship; we will commission Sunday School teachers and youth leaders who will take time out of their week to educate and nurture and mentor the young people in our congregation, helping us as a congregation to live into the promise that we made at baptisms this morning—that we will guide and nurture these little ones who received the Sacrament. We will commission members of this congregation who will give up time to go on mission trips. I’ll be asking you soon to consider giving up some of your time to tutor one of the children in our Chicago Lights tutoring program that starts up in just a couple of weeks. And so I’m going to do something we don’t do very often at Fourth Church: an altar call for you this morning. Now I don’t expect you all to stand up and come forward necessarily. You can, if you wish. I’m going to make an altar call in the form of a question. To each of you: Will you be intentional about how you might serve Christ and other people with the talents and gifts that you have? Because if each of us were willing to do that, it would be transformational in our church, in our community, even in our world. What might that look like?

One of the great thinkers for the church in the twentieth and twenty-first century is the German theologian, Jürgen Moltmann. Moltmann wrote his theology after the Second World War, so he is what we would call a post-Holocaust theologian for whom part of the struggle in theology is to understand where God was in the Holocaust and where God is calling us to be in a post-Holocaust world. Moltmann’s theology is sometimes complex and grounded in academic philosophy. However, in one particular book he speaks in plain language about what this means for the church, this theology of hope and liberation, and what it means for what the church can be.

This is his vision: “We would no longer come together just in order to confirm for each other the eternally same stories, jokes, and opinions, but would rather create an open and hospitable community, which would bring friendliness into the unfriendly corners of this society.”

What a charge that is from Moltman to us, to the people of the church, to bring friendliness to places where there is unfriendliness. Moltman goes on and says,

The congregation then is no longer the sum of all those who are registered as members on the church rolls; rather it is a new kind of living together for human beings. That the church affirms that no one is alone with his or her problems; that no one has to conceal any disabilities; that there are not some who have the say and others who have nothing to say. That neither the old nor the little ones are isolated; that one bears the other even when it is unpleasant. And, finally, that one can also at times leave the other in peace when the other needs it.

These are the marks of intentional discipleship and its fruits. I love Moltmann’s clear thinking, thinking of the church not in terms of exclusion or some ideal of teaching the correct doctrine, but people who live together with friendliness and kindness, because that is transformation. Towards the end of pastor emeritus John Buchanan’s book A New Church for a New World he asks the question, “What is the church for?” And he writes that the church is there “to convey the transcendence and mystery of God and to show the world what community looks like and to help men and women give their lives away and in the process save their lives.”

Amen.