If we were living in first century Palestine, we’d probably know the names of others who died on a cross. There was that day when the Romans crucified 2000 Jews, stopping only because they ran out of wood.

And being raised in the south, I understand the lynching tree as a type of cross, where over 3400 African-Americans were hanged by white mobs from 1882 to 1968.

So, to be true to Jesus we’ve kept the cross, but to make it easier on our psyches we turned the cross into a work of art or a piece of jewelry.  And we tend to avoid reminding ourselves that Jesus, our Master, explicitly tells us to take up our cross and follow him.

But nobody in their right mind wants to hear that. We want what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls cheap grace:

In the 1930s as he and others unsuccessfully fight Hitler and the Nazi takeover of the German Lutheran Church, he writes in his book on discipleship:

“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.”

We know that when we’re trying to sell a product, we need to make it sound easy to use and inexpensive. No one has time for something hard to use and expensive, least of all our religion. After all, how could we invite our friends and family to that?

Yet, every time I walk into this space there it is. Hovering in judgment over all my desires for cheap grace, for a faith that is easy to use and inexpensive.

Jesus asks us today a haunting question: “When the Son of Man returns will he find faith on earth?”

Not: will he find beautiful churches filled with beautiful people, but will he find faith, or a better translation of the Greek word “pistis”, “will he find faithfulness”?

Will he find women and men following him with crosses firmly on their backs manifesting the Kingdom of God to the world God loves?

Jesus this morning in the parable of the persistent widow is teaching us that there is even a cross at the heart of prayer. Jesus knows we want to pray quickly on the go, maybe while we’re walking the dog or driving the kids to school.

Reminds me of the story of the monk who skips out of worship to smoke a cigarette: His abbot scolds him later saying “You are not allowed to smoke while we pray. To which the monk replies, “Well, am I allowed to pray while I smoke?”

 Some preachers even tell us that if you pray twice for something that’s a sign of a lack faith that God heard you the first time.

But for our Master and Teacher prayer is both hard to use and expensive. He would often pray all night and on his last night his prayer contorts his body, mind, heart, and soul—so that it looks like blood is dripping off of him.

Fred Craddock remembers an old Black preacher in Atlanta once saying:

“Until you have stood for years knocking at a locked door, your knuckles bleeding, you do not really know what prayer is.” Craddock page 210

I think about people like Elijah Cummings, US Representative from Baltimore who died this week. He descended from sharecroppers and Baptist preachers. When he is 11, he tries to integrate a whites-only swimming pool and is attacked with rocks and bottles, leaving scars for life.

He was a faithful member at New Psalmist Baptist Church and once said: “My life is based on pain, passion, and purpose.” Which explains why he was willing to make friends with his political enemies across the aisle in Congress. Sounds like there is a cross at the center of his life. Brainy Quotes

In our first reading, Jacob has been running from his older brother Esau ever since he stole Esau’s blessing from their father Isaac. Now Jacob is about to meet his brother and he is afraid for his life. During the night he wrestles with a mysterious stranger and receives God’s blessing, emerging from that struggle with a limp. It is a costly night of prayer.

Jacob is wrestling, not only with God, but with himself, with his shame and fear, and a worldview that says he is the only one special to God.  Through this encounter God gives Jacob a new name: “Israel”, one who struggles with God, just as God struggles with him. 

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I want to suggest that we too must wrestle with our worldview that keeps my ME at the center of the universe. This false worldview has two problems. First, it is all about ME, and second, it places God on the outside looking in.

Often both liberal and conservative Christians share this worldview: the liberals say God is far outside the natural world and therefore can’t do miracles, making us the center of everything. The conservatives say God is way out there, high and lifted up, but sometimes, if we pray just right, God will show up and work a miracle for me.

Both worldviews are inadequate because they divide the cosmos into the natural here and the supernatural way out there.

In John 15 Jesus says “I am the vine, you are the branches”, that is, we are part of an organic whole that is Christ, or as Saint Paul puts it, “Christ is the head and we are the Body.”

Jesus echoes this at the Last Supper in John 17, when he prays: “that they may all be one, just as you Father are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us.”   

In Jesus’s worldview of the Realm of God, God is both center and circumference, so that everyone belongs, healings happen, and injustice is overcome by an expensive Love.   

But getting to this worldview, I am finding, is a lifelong struggle, and costs us everything.  

++++Not, however, because we have to beat down heaven’s door, no, God comes to us in Jesus Christ!++++

But because we have to beat on the door of our false worldview that divides the world up into men vs women, gay vs straight, black vs white, rich vs poor, cosmos vs God.    

Therefore, the faithfulness Jesus wants to find are communities that make visible the Oneness of all people in God.  

In raw, practical terms, Jesus has only to look at our checkbooks and our pledge cards to see which worldview is dominating our lives. Looking at our finances Jesus can tell if we are hoping for cheap grace or if our lives have a cross in the middle of them.

Are we living inside the Kingdom of Me or the Kingdom of God?

Richard Rohr said in a recent sermon, “The opposite of gratitude is not ingratitude, but entitlement.”

In the Kingdom of Me I am entitled. Entitled to use all my money for me and mine, because I work hard for it and my life is more important than all other lives or causes, and because God is far away and can’t be counted on to supply my needs.

In the Kingdom of God, we are grateful for the incredible gift of abundant life we have been given. We are grateful that God is closer to us than our breath, and has the same great affection for us that we feel for our children, and therefore God supplies our needs like a mother.

In the Realm of God, we gladly take up our cross and follow Jesus in God’s Way of Peace, Justice, and Resurrection.