Today the conversation about cheap and costly grace moves into a look at the times prior to the life of Martin Luther in "Discipleship" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
The expansion of Christianity and the increasing secularization of the church caused the awareness of costly grace to be gradually lost. The world was Christianized; grace became common property of a Christian world. It could be had cheaply.
Bonhoeffer then points out something quite positive about monastic life when it first emerged.
Here, on the boundary of the church, was the place where the awareness that grace is costly and that grace includes discipleship was preserved...Monastic life thus became a living protest against the secularization of Christianity, against the cheapening of grace.
To which he adds this comment about what became of monastic life.
But because the church tolerated this protest and did not permit it to build up to a final explosion, the church relativized it. It even gained from the protest a justification of its own secular life. For now monastic life became the extraordinary achievement of individuals, to which the majority of church members need not be obligated. The fateful limiting of the validity of Jesus' commandments to a certain group of especially qualified people led to differentiating between highest achievement and lowest performance in Christian obedience.
How interesting it is to see disciplines meant to keep a reforming edge on the the church become the edge of the whole system of religious life that needed to be reformed when we come to the life of Luther. I have never looked at this movement in monastic life quite like this. No longer is everyone called to follow. Following becomes the extraordinary path - not for everyone you know. And yet, Jesus calls all of us - all the ordinary people within the ordinary walks of life to embody the call of Jesus to follow. Monastic life might best serve the Church by being a temporary community that continually brings in ordinary people and spins them around and sends them back into their particular lives so as to be ordinary people living extraordinary lives within the context of every day. In such as case, it is more like a retreat house to which people go in order to return home again and follow Jesus every day. Setting apart a special community as a faithful group who are to be the example of following Jesus leaves room for others to simply turn the notion of following into a good story - heart warming - comforting for a while....but never transformative.
Grace is for all but following into the life of Jesus is just for some might be the way the church looks even today - but it is inconsistent with the call to be a follower of Jesus.
Connection: We are each an extraordinary gift to the world because our God has given all for lives that are so ordinary. So today we are called to take what is ordinary - these elements called our bodies - and begin to walk within the extraordinary life Jesus has walked before us.
Bind us together, O God, and empower your church to be a witness within the world that makes available the living Lord, Jesus, even as we each go about tasks of the day. Bind us together to be for one another the voice that calls us out to follow - so that we all may know of the life you have given us. Amen.
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