Judging the Cost (by Jonathan Storment)

This post is by Jonathan Storment.

Judging the Cost

“You know how much I love you right?” –a brother talking to his addicted sister in the show intervention

“Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth” St. Paul

A few weeks ago I introduced a short series talking about what it feels like to be inside of “Christian Love”.  Most of the time when someone starts an email or a conversation by saying that, I brace myself for the other shoe to drop.

And I don’t know if that is a bad thing.

Have you ever seen the show on A&E called Intervention?  It is this heartbreaking show about people whose addiction has completely taken over their lives.  The first part of the show is introducing you to the addict, and how their dependence has destroyed their careers, families, and friendships.  And the second part of the show is their friends and family all gathering together and surprising them with an intervention, asking them to get help.

If you get a chance, watch the video above.  I think this is a good parable for what it is like to live in Christian community.  It is an actual intervention.  A woman named Miriam is about to lose her family and her life to her addiction, and her friends are taking the step to judge her.  It is gut-wrenching.

You can tell that her friends and family really do care about her.  You can tell she is angry and bitter.  This is an extremely awkward situation to have put on cable T.V.  She doesn’t want to be in that seat.  Nobody wants to be in that seat, but we all need seats like that from time to time, and church, at her best, has plenty of uncomfortable seats like that.

I know that we church people often judge each other from a cruel place.  We try to make ourselves feel better about ourselves by pointing out the speck in our brother or sister’s eye (and it is often by calling attention to a sin we don’t struggle with…or worse, one we wish we could participate in).  But sometimes it is not done from those places, sometimes it exactly what love looks like.

1^st Corinthians is the letter where Paul writes his famous poetic section describing love as something that always hopes, always protects, always trusts…but in that same letter Paul also writes them telling the church to expel the man who is sleeping with his step-mom, he tells them this just isn’t right, and that they have to take the hard steps of saying this is not what a Kingdom community looks like.

The same guy who writes those poetic things about love, writes these instructions for church discipline not in some other letter, years later as an older, kinder, more reflective church planter.  He writes those words about love just a few pages later, because Paul envisions a love that confronts people when things are off.

It is often pointed out that Western Churches are not very good at Discipleship. The surveys show that Christians in America live shockingly similar lives to people who are not Christian.  Churches are great at helping people become “Christian” but not very good at helping them become disciples of Jesus.  We can get people into buildings or programs, but not much Jesus into people.

But the heart of this problem is not Church programming.  I think it is the lack of real community in our lives.

There is a reason that the word disciple comes from the same word as discipline.  Think of the way Jesus did this.  Jesus gets twelve guys together and they live life with each other.  I think to be inside loving community with Jesus was difficult. He called one of his best friends Satan (and you haven’t had a bad day until Jesus calls you Satan).  He seems to always be irritating them.  He is always challenging their value systems.  He is constantly trying to help them see people and God differently.  He is always correcting them, arguing with them, and putting ears back on people when one of them pulls out a sword at the wrong time.

That is Discipleship according to Jesus.

At one point in Jesus’ ministry he talks about the Cost of Discipleship.  He tells the people who are considering following him to think long and hard about it before they do.  This is not because he doesn’t want more disciples, but because he wants them to know just what they are getting themselves into.  This isn’t a religious country club you are signing up for, this is a new way of being in the world, and it is not going to happen overnight, and it is not going to be easy, but it can happen.

That is why the last few weeks I have written about being a part of a local community of faith with which you make some kind of internal pledge to stick it out.  Because I work in the Bible Belt, and for as long as I can remember our churches have had a problem with creating disciples, mainly because we don’t have any mechanism to lovingly confront each other, because we know if we do, people would just leave, and go to the church across the street.

But to follow Jesus involves being pruned, and shaped, and challenged, and changed.  It involves submitting yourself to the community around you because of the deep awareness that we have that we are not perfect, and that we actually may not be able to see ourselves clearly at all times.  This is not for everyone to speak into your life, but for a few specific people to be able to speak into it.

Part of judging the Cost of Discipleship is realizing the cost of judging.  It is painful, it is awkward, it is embarrassing.  We will never want it at the time, but it is the only way to become the women and men that God made us to be.

So back to the video clip:  It is the show Intervention on A&E.  It always centers around a person struggling with substance or alcohol abuse.  They are destroying their lives and so the friends and family gather to confront them and plead with them to change.

If you want to be reminded of what the human condition looks like, try watching an episode.  And pay close attention to the way the person who is addicted responds.  They almost always use words like freedom, or talk about minding your own business.  They blame the other people there for the way that their lives have turned out, or accuse them of trying to control them.  And they almost always say something like, Don’t Judge Me.  But for you, the viewer, you have a different perspective.  You are not addicted, and you are not emotionally involved.  You can see that what these people want has nothing to do with impeding freedom or condemning their friend.  It is out of deep love that they have mustered the courage to confront, and in the more successful interventions they ask their friend to choose between their relationships or their addiction.  And while it is painful to watch someone in that seat, it is even more painful to be in it yourself.

But part of the Cost of Discipleship is to allow love to put you in seats like that. And when it does happen, (and it will, because you are not perfect) don’t immediately reach for words like freedom and independence, because those words don’t belong to you there.  You gave that up.  That is the Cost.

So sit in the chair and open up to the people that you have allowed to love you – to actually love you.  Because the only thing worse than being in that seat…is not having a seat like that at all.