Well, it’s Veteran’s Day week, time for thoughtful
remembrance of all those who have served. Although it doesn’t seem to be
happening this year, this weekend is usually a time when all the movie channels
on TV show a marathon of war movies from different eras in our history. One of
the movies that I will always pause to watch when it’s on is Saving Private Ryan.
If you’re not familiar with the story, it’s set during D-Day
when the Allies invaded Europe during World War II. The opening scenes of
storming the beaches at Normandy are difficult to watch because they are so
realistic and make me pray for the day when war is no longer part of the world.
While the Normandy battle still rages on, we learn that a
young soldier in the 101st Airborne Division, Pvt. James Patrick
Ryan (played by Matt Damon), has lost three of his brothers in combat, serving
in other theaters of the war. The War Department decides to send him home, back
to his grieving mother, since he is the only one of her sons left. Problem is,
no one can find him or his unit as they have cut off for some time.
Captain John Miller, played by Tom Hanks, is ordered to take
a patrol behind enemy lines to find Ryan and bring him back to Normandy for the
journey home. Their mission is a man, and they ponder what it means to risk so
much for one life. Along the way, Captain Miller and his men have to fight
their way through the Germans in order to search for Private Ryan, losing many of
their men along the way.
When they finally find Ryan, he is in a small unit holding a
critical bridge against the German counterattack. He refuses to leave because
he doesn’t want to abandon his unit. “Tell my mother that these are my brothers
now” he says. But while Captain Miller tries to convince him to come home, the
German attack is imminent and Miller and his men, along with Ryan, stay to hold
the bridge.
The brutal battle that follows results in the loss of all
but two of Miller’s men and then, at the climax of the fighting, Captain Miller
himself is mortally wounded.
As reinforcements arrive, a dying Captain Miller looks at
Private Ryan, the man who he and his men have died to save, and the bleeding
captain whispers his last words to the young private,
“Earn this.
Earn it.” In other words, earn the new life you have been given. It’s one of
the most powerful scenes in movie history and it also makes me cry every time.
The power of those words. Earn this, be worthy of your
salvation, echo the words of Paul in the passage we have just read. “I beg you
to lead a life worth to the calling to which you have been called” Paul writes
to the churches from his prison cell. In chapters 1-3, which we have read over
the last couple of weeks, Paul lays out the ways in which God has launched a
rescue mission for his lost people. Remember chapter one—this God blessed,
chose, destined, bestowed, lavished, made known, and gathered up all things
through the blood of Jesus Christ who fights the battle with evil by dying on a
cross in order to bring us back to the family of God. In chapters 2 and 3 we
learn that that family now includes both Jews and Gentiles, brothers and
sisters bound together by the grace and sacrifice of Jesus Christ. And now Paul
says, “Earn this.” As he puts it in Philippians, “Work out your salvation with
fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to
will and to work for his good pleasure” (2:12). Like Private Ryan standing on
the bridge, we have done nothing to earn our salvation—it comes as a gift. But
once we have been saved, we do our best to live up to that salvation. We work
to “earn this.”
We have been rescued in order to live a different kind of
life within a different kind of community—a community that isn’t characterized
by combat but by love and grace. We have been called to “humility and
gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love” (v. 2). Since all
of us have been rescued, and all of us are now of the same family of God, we
are to “make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of
peace” (v. 3). We are no longer disparate individuals, lost behind enemy lines
and holding out on our own. We are now part of one body—a new family–a body
that has a singular focus: one Lord, one faith, one baptism, on God and Father
of all, who is above all and through all and in all” (v. 6). We are the
family—we are the church–these are your brothers, your sisters, your fathers,
your mothers.
So, how do we live in the midst of that family? How do we
live as one body? Paul will spend the rest of the letter talking about this,
but here in chapter 4 he offers us a framework for our life together. “Each of
us has been given grace,” he says, “according the measure of Christ’s gift” (v.
7). We are not just saved from something, we are saved for something. The gift
of salvation for us translates into gifts that we use for the mission of God
and the building up of the body.
Some of those gifts are given for the purpose of equipping
the body for its work. “Some are apostles, some prophets, some evangelists,
some pastors and teachers,” Paul says, whose job it is to “equip the saints for
the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (v. 12). Notice how
this works: the pastors are the equippers
but the saints are the ministers. It’s
not that some have been more saved, more holy than others, it’s rather about
role definition. Every one of us has a part to play in this family. We are all
members of the body and we each fulfill a role. All of us use our gifts,
individually and collectively, to live lives that are worthy of Christ and
worthy of his blood shed for us.
Of course, none us can fully live up to Christ. We can never
fully repay the gift of our salvation. But we are always to be working toward
it! The purpose of the body, the purpose of the gifts we have received, is to
move us toward “the unity of faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to
maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (v. 13). We grow into
the grace we have received. We become more and more like the one who has saved
us!
You know, there is a lot of emphasis in much of Christianity
on being “born again,” and rightly so. Salvation, when we accept it, brings us
to brand new life—a clean slate, a new purpose, a rescue from behind enemy
lines. But Paul also expects the Body to teach people how to grow up—to come to
the “measure of the full stature of Christ.” That takes a lifetime of work, and
an orientation toward living lives worthy of the grace we have been given.
If we fail to grow up, of course, and fail to grow in grace
we’ll be continue to be immature children, “tossed to and fro and blown about
by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in
deceitful scheming” (v. 14). Every time I read this verse I think of kids
watching cartoons on Saturday morning and being enticed by every commercial for
a shiny toy or a fast, cheap, and easy snack with lots of sugar in it. Faith
that doesn’t grow up is faith that produces religious consumers instead of
disciples.
This is what Dietrich Bohoeffer called “cheap grace”: “Cheap grace
is the grace we bestow on ourselves. 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, living and incarnate.”
No, instead, because we have been saved by Christ, we are to
speak the truth in love and “grow up in every way into him who is the head,
into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every
ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes
the body’s growth in building itself up in love” (v. 15-16).
As you know, we have implemented some changes this fall in
our membership and discipleship process. We are asking our new and existing
members to take a ten-week class on learning and living the Methodist way of
making disciples. Next week we will graduate 75 people from that class. It’s a
commitment of time and energy to take such a class, and then to move from into
the discipling relationships of a covenant group. The goal, however, is not to
merely get a bunch of people into classes—rather, it is to provide an intentional
and purposeful opportunity for us all, including your pastors, to learn how to grow
up in every way into Christ. The church is not merely a collection of
individuals on their own spiritual path, it is the body of Christ—a body that
works out its salvation in fear and trembling and then goes to work in the
world as Christ did. We live a life worthy of his saving, redeeming, and
sanctifying love. Everything we do should be aimed at this goal.
The bleeding Christ has high expectations for us—that we not
squander the gift of grace and salvation we have been given, that we not hold
it for ourselves, that we don’t simply stay the way we are but that we continue
to grow to be more like him. Oh yes, Joe was absolutely right when he said it
last week—everyone is welcome here to come as you are, even if you are broken,
battered, under attack, being sniped at all day long. Here, in the Word, at the
font, at the table, you may find the bleeding Christ and know that he has given
his life to rescue you from sin and death. We didn’t earn that salvation by our
own efforts, but once we have received this gift, we can never be the same as
we were. Christ expects that we will grow up, that we will be his disciples,
that we will work in the world—that we will “earn this” with our lives and be
worthy of his calling to the best of our ability, even though we can never
fully pay what he has done for us.
This is “costly grace.” As Bonhoeffer puts it, “Costly grace
is the gospel which must be sought again and again and again, the gift which
must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly
because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow
Jesus Christ. It 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 condemns
sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because
it cost God the life of his Son: “ye were bought at a price,” 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.” This is grace worthy of the one
who gave himself for us. Bonhoeffer not only wrote this, he lived it as a
German pastor who was martyred by the Nazis, just before the liberation of the
concentration camp by American troops—the end of a worthy life.
The last scene in the movie takes us years into the future,
where Private Ryan, now an old man, stands at the grave of his Captain in
Normandy and offers his response to the Captain’s last words:
“Every day I think about what you said to me that day on the
bridge. I tried to live my life the best that I could. I hope that was enough.
I hope that, at least in your eyes, I’ve earned what all of you have done for
me.”
When I look at the cross, when I think of the one who gave
his life for me, I ask myself, “Am I living a life worthy of the one who gave
himself for me?” How about you?
“I beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you
have been called…” May it be so with us, the Body of Christ. Amen.
