The Price is Wrong

The Rev. Amy Morgan

September 5, 2010

 

 

 

 

In thirty-eight years, the game show The Price is Right had never seen a contestant guess the exact value of prizes in the Showcase Showdown. For those of you who might not be Price is Right fans, the Showcase Showdown is the finale of the game show. Two lucky contestants get the chance to bid on a showcase of products – luxury vacations, cars, pool tables, high-end bikes. Whichever contestant comes closest to the actual retail price of the items in their showcase without going over, wins.

 

Several people over the years had come close – within $10 of the actual retail price on packages worth tens of thousands of dollars. But only one person has ever been perfect.

 

On September 22, 2008, Terry Kneiss guessed the correct retail value of a camper, a jukebox and a pool table to the dollar – 23,743 dollars, to be exact.

 

Terry had been studying The Price is Right for some time before he became a contestant. He knew the cost of a grill and the cost of a can of Mushroom Soup. In the end, knowing the cost of things won Terry four vacations, thousands of dollars, and several luxury items. Knowing the cost of things changed his life.

 

While we may not all share Terry’s love for The Price is Right, many of us share Terry’s concern for knowing the cost of things. This Labor Day weekend, malls and car dealerships, furniture stores and grocery stores are packed with shoppers looking for great sales. We calculate the cost of sending our kids to college practically before they’re even born. We calculate the cost of retirement versus working a few more years. We calculate the cost of in-home nursing care versus residential care. We even calculate the cost of death – cremation versus burial, cherry casket versus walnut. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, thrifty or a spendthrift. Everyone, on some level, is concerned with cost.

 

So it amazes me that we leave that at the door when we walk into the church. In here, it’s all about the benefits. Here is the place we receive grace and love and community. Here is the place we are filled up spiritually. Here is the place we find inspiration and peace and comfort.

 

And what does it cost us?

 

Some of us might consider what we give to the church annually. It might seem like fair payment for services rendered, so to speak. Come stewardship time, we might do a cost-benefit analysis and make adjustments as needed and discern (prayerfully, of course) what being a member of First Presbyterian Church should cost us this year.

 

That may be a fair, level-headed way of looking at things.

 

But then, we come across scriptures like this one today. Jesus tells the crowds following him that being his disciple is going to cost them everything – all of their relationships, all of their possessions, even their very lives.

 

And we think, “Really, Jesus? Really? God’s love incarnate wants us to hate everyone we know, including ourselves? The one who came to preach good news to the poor wants us all to be poverty-stricken?”

 

This doesn’t make any sense.

 

And yet, here we are. In the middle of a huge crowd of people, Jesus telling people that discipleship is going to cost much more than time and money.

 

Do any of us ever think about this before we come to worship on a Sunday morning? Do we consider this all-in kind of discipleship in our calculated cost-benefit analysis of the life of faith? Have any of us studied the cost of discipleship the way Terry Kneiss studied The Price is Right?

 

Probably not. And neither had most of those who were following Jesus around in the first century. In the gospel of Luke, the crowds around Jesus grow larger and larger as he nears Jerusalem. Meanwhile, Jesus keeps telling these followers to expect persecution and even death.

 

Yet, for some reason, people kept following Jesus.

 

Now, I don’t think they kept following him because they were ready to pay the price, to give up everything, all they owned, all their relationships, even their very lives. I think they followed him because they were miscalculating the cost. They were looking at the benefits.

 

Jesus was a great teacher and a miraculous healer. Some expected he would overthrow the oppressive Roman government and rule over them like a king. Following Jesus would reap them prestige and power. But they were miscalculating the cost of following Jesus. So here, Jesus sets them straight. He explains, clearly and in detail, literally and not metaphorically, the exact cost of discipleship.

 

If, in some biblical version of The Price is Right, discipleship was our Showcase Showdown, Jesus would be in the audience shouting “Everything! Guess Everything!”

 

But we don’t listen to him. We miscalculate the cost of discipleship. We listen to those in the crowd who are telling us that following Jesus will cost us an hour on Sunday mornings, perhaps several hours of volunteer time throughout the month, serving on committees, helping out around the church, going out and doing mission work in the community. We listen to those shouting out the number amounts of our annual pledge, and maybe we add in a little more for Repay and Rejoice or the CROP Walk or the youth mission fundraisers. All in all, we think we can calculate what our commitment to Jesus Christ will cost us. We rarely, if ever, think about discipleship costing us relationships with our loved ones, denial of our own lives, or possibly every last one of our possessions. And as much as we may talk about something (or someone) being our “cross to bear,” few, if any, of us have a notion of what that really means.

 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was the Terry Kneiss of the biblical Price is Right. He guessed the price of the discipleship showcase to the exact cost.

 

Six years before his execution for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Third Reich, Bonhoeffer wrote his most famous book, The Cost of Discipleship. In it, he outlines the dangers of what he calls, “cheap grace”, or grace as an idea or concept that has no practical bearing on our lives. “Costly grace,” on the other hand, is grace that calls us to be transformed, to live differently in the world, to give up everything to follow Jesus.

 

Bonhoeffer wrote, “Such grace is costly because … it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. … it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son…and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.”¹

 

Jesus did not deceive his followers. In fact, one could say that Jesus emphasized the cost of discipleship over its benefits. And yet, people followed him anyway. People followed him to Jerusalem, people carried his cross for him, people prepared his body for burial. After his death, resurrection, and ascension, people kept following. People shared the good news, spreading the message of God’s kingdom to the very ends of the earth.

 

And people were imprisoned for following Jesus. People were kicked out of their homes and disowned by their families for their discipleship. People were killed because of what they did to follow Christ.

 

“What a waste,” we might think. God can’t possibly want people to suffer and die, to have broken relationships in order to follow Jesus. That doesn’t make sense.

 

It’s not what God wants. But it is what Jesus knew it would cost. Because when the kingdom of God encounters the powers and authorities on earth, Christians lose. We’re losers. We always have been. From the executions of some of Jesus’ original disciples to the slaughter of Christians in Sudan, from the persecutions of the early Christians to the second-class status of Christians in Palestine, we Christians are losers. Throughout the last two millennia, we have lost family and friends, we have carried crosses, given up our possessions, and even lost our very lives. It’s not the way God wants it. It’s just the way it is. And Jesus never promised us a bed of roses. Jesus laid out the exact cost.

 

In fact, Jesus paid that cost. He lost his family and was denied by his friends. He was ridiculed. He carried his cross. A real one, not a metaphorical one.

 

When we calculate what it cost God to give us the benefits we enjoy – peace, freedom, forgiveness, abundant life – only then do we really understand grace. And that costly grace transforms us.

 

The cost of walking into this church can no longer be calculated in time and money. There is no dollar amount and no number of hours per month that get anywhere close to the real cost of discipleship. In fact, it’s impossible to overestimate the cost of the discipleship showcase. The cost of walking into this church, the cost of being transformed into a Jesus-follower, is nothing less than the full measure of our lives.

 

How we live into this reality, of course, varies. For Dietrich Bonheoffer, it meant that he couldn’t live safely in America but had to return to Germany to suffer with his people and ultimately die only weeks before the Third Reich crumbled.

 

We don’t live in Nazi Germany or second-century Palestine. We can practice our faith openly and freely. We can even work for justice and peace around the world without leaving the comforts of our own homes. So it’s hard for me to say exactly what the cost of discipleship looks like in each of our individual lives. But I know from the examples of Christian witnesses like Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr., from studying Christian history and learning about the struggles of Christians in other parts of the world, that Jesus was right. Discipleship will cost us everything. And it just makes good sense to consider that cost before we go too much further down this road.

 

So I have a challenge for us this week. It’s an easy-to-remember exercise for considering the cost of discipleship.

 

Your challenge is this:

 

Every time you think about how much something costs, take a moment to prayerfully consider the cost of discipleship. Every time you clip a coupon, consider the cost of discipleship. Every time you look at a price tag, consider the cost of discipleship. Every time you pay for groceries or school supplies, every time to see an advertisement for a sale, every time you withdraw money from the ATM, consider the cost of discipleship. My hope is that if we spend as much time considering the cost of discipleship as we do considering the cost of retail items, our lives will be transformed. We’ll gain clarity as to what this costly grace looks like for us. We’ll be able to identify those crosses God is calling us to carry. We’ll live as people who possess nothing, and therefore have nothing to lose. We’ll give up everything to follow Jesus. We’ll win the final showcase and, though we may lose our very lives, we’ll quit being losers.