First of a four-part series on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Stations on the Road to Freedom.”
“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.” That is H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic summary of liberal Christianity.
The cross is prominent in our church – but the moderating, attenuating spirit is ever at work within us. I like my Christ with His cross, but I would like to be a Christian without crosses of my own.
The Gospel of Jesus sets us free from the guilt of sin. Yet sin as a power still clings to us, inhering in our nature. The inclination to evil desires sometimes takes us by surprise, arising seemingly out of nowhere. How quickly we can give in: one person becoming enraged, another person morose, and yet a third plunging in to pornography or excessive food and drink, all while another voice tells us we are fools, betraying our own better desires.
How broken we are! The great statement of the Reformation, the Augsburg Confession, calls this sinful nature a disease, one we have all inherited and which corrupts our entire human race. How broken we are!
This day is for smearing that brokenness on our foreheads. But there is hope in the ashes, for not indiscriminately are they painted. There is the cross, marking us even in death as one redeemed by Christ the crucified.
And on this day beginning a forty-day journey, Jesus calls us to take up our cross and follow Him. That cross comes in your callings, as you love and suffer for your family and neighbors, your church and country and enemies. But the cross is also within. This day is a call to discipline.
Jesus says, “When you fast.” He says these words to you, His disciple. “When you fast.” It’s the third in a series: “When you give alms,” “When you pray,” and “When you fast.” All this is a call to discipline your life: Alms-giving, praying, fasting, all discipline your life so that money, food, and drink have no hold on you, and your life is oriented to God and neighbor.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a controversial figure in Lutheran circles. Theologically, the work of his contemporary Hermann Sasse is more orthodox. Yet there is much to be gained from taking to heart Bonhoeffer’s radical commitment to following Jesus even when it had grave consequences. As he reflected on his brief life while in Tegel Prison, held for resistance to the Nazis, Bonhoeffer saw his captivity as leading to a much deeper freedom. He wrote a poem called Stations on the Road to Freedom. (Hopefully you received a copy as you entered.) It would be a mistake to try to find the entire content of the Christian faith there. That was not its purpose.
But it would serve a good purpose for us this Lent to think about our own lives as disciples of Jesus through the four stations he outlined: Discipline, Action, Suffering, and Death. (Those are our themes tonight and the next three Wednesdays.)
The first station on the road to freedom, Bonhoeffer said, is Discipline:
If you would find freedom, learn above all to discipline your senses and your soul. Be not led hither and thither by your desires and your members. Keep your spirit and your body chaste, wholly subject to you, and obediently seeking the goal that is set before you. None can learn the secret of freedom, save by discipline.
There is a paradox here: Only by losing your freedom do you gain it. Think about the disciplines Jesus sets forth: fasting (in tonight’s gospel), along with almsgiving and prayer. How is fasting freedom? You are doing without food. Freedom, it would seem, would be eating and drinking whatever, whenever, however much you like. And where is the freedom in almsgiving? Freedom, it would seem, would be in keeping your money and gaining more of it, not in giving it away. And what about prayer? What freedom is there in calling upon another for help? Wouldn’t freedom be in needing no help from the outside?
But the truth is, we are not free, and cannot free ourselves. Food, drink, money and possessions have a powerful hold over us. So now do our devices, smartphones and tablets. People clutch them, and panic when they go missing or forget them at home.
Food does not make us free. Money does not make us free. And freedom will not be found in autonomy—not needing to pray; we will find freedom when we have cast ourselves entirely on the One who sets us free.
The Lenten call to discipline is not made in a vacuum. We err grievously if we imagine that by our discipline we will achieve anything good before God. The Lenten call to discipline is, like the ashes, ever cruciform. Today Jesus tells us to fast. Sunday, we hear of the perfect forty-day fast of Jesus.
The call to discipline is the call to discipleship – they are the same word. We follow Jesus not to learn His secret techniques of self-mastery and success, but to learn from Him that His defeat of the devil is accomplished for us, the wages of sin have been paid by Him in full, and that He has bread to give us in His Supper that alone can satisfy our hunger.
Our disciplines fail because we rely upon ourselves. Yet there, even in failure, is a profound lesson: lamenting the disaster of our lives in ashes, we look to the cross in which our ashes are shaped.
The world urges us to gorge and feast, but it leaves us sick and numb. The discipline of being a disciple of Jesus leads us to true freedom: freedom in forgiveness, freedom from the fear of death, freedom from demanding your own way. In Jesus, you are free from everything that holds you in bondage.