Resurrection Living: When Death Still Exists (Romans 6:1-11)
Fifth Sunday of Easter
So what are we going to say? Should we continue
sinning so grace will multiply? 2 Absolutely not!
All of us died to sin. How can we still live in it? 3 Or
don’t you know that all who were baptized into Christ
Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 Therefore, we
were buried together with him through baptism into his death, so that just
as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too can
walk in newness of life. 5 If we were united
together in a death like his, we will also be united together in a resurrection
like his. 6 This is what we know: the person that
we used to be was crucified with him in order to get rid of the corpse that had
been controlled by sin. That way we wouldn’t be slaves to sin anymore, 7 because
a person who has died has been freed from sin’s power. 8 But
if we died with Christ, we have faith that we will also live with him. 9 We
know that Christ has been raised from the dead and he will never die again.
Death no longer has power over him. 10 He died to
sin once and for all with his death, but he lives for God with his life. 11 In
the same way, you also should consider yourselves dead to sin but alive for God
in Christ Jesus. (CEB)
I spent
this morning/yesterday morning at a funeral.
A friend of mine made it to 87 and his body decided that was enough, it
was time. It was so good to see his
family, my other friends, and to be in community with these people I’ve known
for a while, who have known me. It was
good to swap stories, to remember, to learn anew who this man was who loved
gardening, who was a lifelong Cubs fan despite his better judgment, who really,
really loved to welcome new people. It
was so good to be, in some ways, in Bob’s presence.
But
we weren’t actually in Bob’s presence because Bob has died. The 87 years he lived are the end of his
earthly story, and now we have the memories that live on but we don’t have
Bob. While I was sitting in this service
of memories, I kept thinking about how it was a heck of a thing to write a
sermon on resurrection living when I’m pretty sure Bob will stay dead for the
remainder of my lifetime. How can I
preach resurrection when there are so many funerals?
In
this season of Eastertide, we’ve been taking some time to examine what it means
to be a person of a resurrection faith and to consider how this story of Christ’s
resurrection affects us. When I talk to
friends of mine who are atheists and agnostics, they gently joke with me about
my love for “zombie Jesus” Who came back from the dead to eat fish instead of
brains, and this is, indeed, such a bizarre story. This is a Man Who came back from the dead—but
not creepily—and this is a Man upon Whom we have built a religion. And it’s so strange in context because we
proclaim in Easter’s miracle that death has been defeated and Christ lives
again, but my friend Bob is still dead; we have had several deaths here at A2
First of late that have made it very obvious death’s defeat has not meant
death’s erasure.
So
if the promise of death’s defeat doesn’t mean that we stop dying, what’s going
on? The first idea is that it’s a lie;
Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, had already thought about
it. He writes not only about what love
is but also that, “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not
been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in
vain and your faith is in vain. We are
even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he
raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised.”[1]
I’ve
experienced God to be a lot of things—top of the list is infuriating—but never
a liar. Thousands of years of other
theologians have not experienced God to be a liar. Hopefully you have not experienced God to be
a liar—the Church most certainly, but not the God we proclaim. And in the Methodist tradition, we prize
experience as one of the core ways we interpret God still speaking into the
world, so if our experience says it’s not a lie, we have to keep digging.
And
Paul kept digging. He continues in 1
Corinthians, “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the
first fruits of those who have died.”[2] So Paul asks us to reframe the question; yes,
Jesus died in the body and was resurrected in the body, but perhaps the death
Jesus conquered is not about our body but about our heart, about our soul.
There’s
a whole side trail about the ways Western spirituality splits body and soul
that I am happy to wander down with you individually if you’d like, but I do
only have so much time in a sermon and I can’t unfold all of Plato’s philosophical
effect on Pauline theology in six pages, apologies.
But
for this, this moment of thinking about what resurrection looks like, we come
back to this piece of Romans. “Or don’t
you know that all who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his
death? Therefore, we were buried together with him through baptism into his
death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the
Father, we too can walk in newness of life.”
It
is the work of the Spirit that we actually had a baptism today; we didn’t when
I chose this Scripture. God’s like that
sometimes. But what a remarkable
opportunity to underscore this thing called baptism that we do in church—we are
doing a groundbreaking, life-altering thing.
Baptism is a death; I know, I know, it’s creepy to think of it that way
because we baptize infants. But this has
the power that it has not just because it’s an opportunity for us to coo over
babies—although it is that—but it’s our opportunity to delight in this new
family member, to declare that who he fundamentally is, who all of us who have
been baptized fundamentally are has changed just a little, has shifted just a
little, will forever have a different path because the compass point has ticked
to a new north.
Kyle
Fever, director of Beyond Ministries in Iowa, writes, “Whatever we might draw
from this passage about baptism, one thing is clear: baptism is more than
another event that takes place in the life of a person, like graduation, where
all the relatives come and celebrate. And it’s more than a religious ritual where
church members commit to one another in word but not action. Baptism is very
serious business.”[3]
It’s
a turning point. It’s a death. It’s a familial understanding that God, Who
is already at work in the person being baptized no matter their age, is now a
recognized part of the fabric of this person’s life. This is why the baptismal vows we have
grown-ups say on behalf of the kiddos or, if a person is old enough, that
people say on their own behalf are ferocious; the very first question
is, “Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers
of this world, and repent of your sin?”[4]
Right
out of the gate, we are not kidding.
Baptism forces you to choose a side.
It forces you to become part of something bigger. It forces us to recognize that how we move
through the world will forever be different because we are not aligning
ourselves with the powers that say life is held lightly.
“This is
what we know,” writes Paul: “the person that we used to be was crucified with
him in order to get rid of the corpse that had been controlled by sin. That way
we wouldn’t be slaves to sin anymore, because a person who has died has been
freed from sin’s power.”
This
is the death that Christ defeated—not that our bodies will fail us
eventually but that in the lives we have now, in the living we are doing now,
we can choose who we are. In this
resurrection life, we can look at all the selfish, petty things that are so
easy to do and say I want to do something different than that. God has equipped me to do something
different. It’s not just “I want to be a
good person” but it is taking the pieces of us that shy away from God’s
all-encompassing love and drowning them in the waters of baptism, showing us
that we are set free to be people of God’s kingdom, to be mercy-makers and
justice-seekers, to rise with Christ in all the fullness of being alive in the
Spirit.
“But,”
you might say, “we’re back to the same problem.
Death was defeated but people are still dying. And if we switch it to the death of sin was
defeated, well, people are still jerks.”
It’s
me, I’m people.
And
this is true. And this is why we talk
about resurrection living, this is why we talk about baptism as a starting
point, this is why Paul talks about this sacrament, this thing we have made
sacred across so many different denominations—just as Christ returned over and
over for fifty days to get His disciples to understand not only that His
resurrection was real but also that they were going to have to do some serious
recalibrating about what they thought this faith was for, so we start on a journey
that takes a whole lifetime to work out.
Death of the body is a one-time event (well, minus Lazarus), but death
of one’s selfishness, one’s pride, one’s sin?
That sort of death is a process.
As Methodists, we talk about this in the frame of “sanctifying
grace”—that being holy isn’t really a thing because it’s all about becoming
holy, choosing God’s path over and over again until it lives in our bones,
refusing to take the way of cruelty and prejudice that is so clearly laid out
for us in this world. We have to learn how
to live the resurrection the same way we learn anything else; for those of us
who tried to learn how to play the piano and failed miserably, we know it’s
about practice. We to put the time into
it; we have to start with baptism but then become over an entire
lifetime and to look at the ways in which we can be something selfish and
closed and say, “That is not what God calls me to.”
Nineteenth-century
theologian and preacher Charles Spurgeon wrote in an 1881 sermon, “If believers
are, in deed, so identified with Christ that they are His fullness, should they
not be holiness, itself? If we live by virtue of our union with His body, how
can we live as other Gentiles do? How is it that so many professors exhibit a
mere worldly life, living for business and for pleasure, but not for God, in
God, or with God? They sprinkle a little religion on a worldly life and so hope
to Christianize it. But it will not do!.. Again, we are dead in this sense, that
we are dead to the guidance of sin….[Those who live by the world steer the] course
by the question, ‘What is most pleasant? What will give me most present
gratification?’…[But] you ask, ‘What is good and what is acceptable in the
sight of the Most High?’ Your daily prayer is, ‘Lord, show me what You would
have me do.’”[5]
The
recessional song at my friend Bob’s funeral was “When the Saints Go Marching
In,” which is a very Bob kind of hymn; if he had been there, he would have been
dancing. Part of the chorus is, “Oh
Lord, I want to be in that number,” and this passage from Paul is saying,
“Here’s how.” This isn’t a matter of
“believe only in this way,” or “ascribe only to this denomination,” or “write
in this kind of Christianity on a census survey.” This kind of death, this kind of resurrection
is “allow who you were when you were living only for yourself to die off.” It’s “embrace a life completely bound up in
the delight of a God Who refuses to shut anybody out, even and especially when
that embrace is the hardest thing to do.”
It’s “Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the
renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is
good and acceptable and perfect”—which, incidentally, is also the letter to the
Romans.[6] (It’s an important letter, I recommend
reading it.) It’s living such a life as
to be in the number of saints—not because of some pie in the sky heaven later
but because when we live as though we are resurrected right now we
change the world around us right now.
We who are transformed transform the people around us and we need it because we live in an age of death—death of trust in institutions, death of species, death of economies, death of empires, death of loved ones, death of expectations. And yet, still, also, alongside, pouring through, over top, down below, we live in a resurrection faith; we live in the promise that death is not the end of the story, that loss is not the only experience, that we who have been baptized can choose every single day to live again in the holy that transforms us, in the baptism that renews us, in the vows that guide us to be the people who shine in love. Death still exists, and it sucks. But “nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord: not death or life, not angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers or height or depth, or any other thing that is created.”[7] Death has been defeated in the best way possible that makes sure the core of who we are is never, ever left behind.
So what does it mean to you to be “alive in God for Christ Jesus”? What pieces of you are so alive that it brings life to those around you, that it proclaims that death has been defeated that joy threads through every story, every choice? May we, like my friend Bob, live so well that the memory reminds us how life continues. May we recognize the resurrection within us, every day. May we be reminded that our stories are yet being written, that the connections we have with each other will continue until the saints go marching in. Amen.
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