I walked up to the bin thinking about where I should put my trash. There were so many choices to make. It appeared that some items fit into two different categories. There is a plastic cup on the left and in the middle. How am I supposed to know which one is the correct one? I locked eyes with my friend sitting on the left. He urged me to choose his pathway.
His way is almost unknown to me. I don’t have a pile behind my house that we tend and stir and try to break down to create renewed soil. I’m afraid it will stink and draw attention to my wasteful ways. Instead, we put our stuff in bags and watch it disappear down the street in big blue trucks, thinking that some of it will be turned magically back into useful materials. I have had a couple of conversations about how much of our recycling is actually turned into goodness. I’ve read a couple of articles that make me believe that what I have thought is a bit of a fiction.
This green bin, however, hardly ever darkens my thoughts. How could I redeem my own trash? How could I bring good out of bad? How is the way forward a greater emphasis on my own personal responsibility to sit with my trash long enough for God’s processes to redeem it take effect instead and shipping it downstream for others to deal with?
It’s a bit like the gospel. Many of us cheaply hustle our sin onto the cross of Christ. What Bonhoeffer called cheap grace.
Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.
Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble; it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.
Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought 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.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
Years ago these words gripped me and they still do. As we move through the season of reflecting on the cross, let's not fool ourselves into thinking that our sin does not stink, that our sins are so minor that they barely necessitate the cross, that we can so easily sweep them away into the unknown. Instead, let us take a serious moral inventory and smell the rotting decay of the disobedience within us that required Jesus to die for us on the cross. Use your sin, see your sin long enough that God can actually redeem it in your life. Then you will have a testimony to tell the world of what God has done for you - how grace has been real to you.