Sermon Archive

It is a joyful day for us in this church as we gather to baptize Christian Andrew – long awaited – long anticipated – long loved before his birth. We are so grateful so many family and friends have come from so many times and places in the lives of Peter and Juliet to be here. You will always be part of Christian’s life, and it is wonderful you can be here to witness this once-in-a-lifetime event.

We want you to know that we also will always be part of Christian’s life, that he belongs to us too – so we are going to have to learn to share!

He does belong to us too, and we belong to him through the promises we will make in this sacrament. But most importantly of all, we all have to learn that Christian belongs to Christ. This is the day he is claimed as Christ’s own.

Now, there’s something else you need to know about us: we are a community here at Rutgers, a community of people, quite diverse, quite imperfect, but closely bound one to another by our common faith, our common pursuit of justice and our deep care for one another.

And so, we naturally celebrate the events of one another’s lives, every new life brought into the community and also every life that has run its course, every person who has left us through death. Christian in the third baby we’ve welcomed through baptism in the past few weeks. At the same time, we have experienced the deaths of several members of the community, one our friend Alex, just this past week. So, we are full participants in the rhythm of life which at its most profound includes death.

This is the context in which we come to the Scriptures this morning and hear their message for us. From the sixth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans, the first 11 verses:

“What then are we to say? Should we continue to sin in order that grace may abound?

“By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.

“For if we have been united with Christ in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

Here ends the lesson.

Well, Paul has been lecturing the Romans on his favorite topic: justification by faith. It goes like this: We are made right with God, justified, not because we deserve it, not by anything we have done to earn a right relationship but through what God in Christ has done. That Christ died for the sins of the whole world once and for all time. Forgiveness is freely given, the love of God is freely given. We are saved by God, not by ourselves.

So the Romans, being very clever, argue: “That’s great, so are you saying that since we are right with God anyway, no matter what, we can continue to sin? In fact, it seems that the more we sin, the more God’s grace will be given to us! Why not sin some more because the more we sin, the more grace we’ll get, right?”

Now Paul is under considerable pressure here; his answer is very important. Paul obviously knew that all Christians continue to sin. The moral and ethical foundation of society hangs on the answer.

It is not enough for him to say: “it’s just not nice to sin, it will give Christians a bad reputation.” And that’s not his explanation. So, instead he says: “You can’t continue to sin because you have died to sin. It’s just not possible any more. Sin is over for you.”

With the Romans, we respond: “Say what? What are you talking about?”

“You heard me right,” says Paul. “In your baptism you were buried with Christ. You can’t get resurrected to new life if the old life hasn’t yet died, so in baptism, you die…”

Well, we know that the death and resurrection of Jesus were the obviously pivotal events for the early Christian community. They made all the difference. And so Paul here finds the solution to this ethical dilemma in the symbolism of baptism. In Paul’s day, baptism was normally carried out by means of immersion in a lake or pond or river. He compares baptism to dying and being buried with Christ, and being raised to a new life in him. Having died to and being freed from sin, it is no longer possible for us to live as before.

Death doesn’t seem like something to encourage, nor a way to win converts to the faith. And yet Paul persists in using the image of death with the idea that with death comes freedom.

When long anticipated physical death comes, perhaps after a long illness, there is often a kind of release, the worst is over. Life may never be the same again, but the worst has happened, and somehow we have survived.

In the aftermath of the death of his beloved daughter, Mark Twain said: “The amazing thing is that we can survive such a thing and continue living.” There does seem to be a theme of courage that comes when a person has faced death. One of my heroes survived three years in a Nazi concentration camp. When I asked her how she did it, she said: “I just decided that I was dead. Then I could go on, there was nothing more to lose. My life began—in a totally different way—after the day I died.” Could this be what Paul is getting at?

Like my hero, Paul also is not speaking about physical death—at least in this portion of the passage: in baptism, you die, you die to sin and you die to all the parts of your life which hold you back from faithful discipleship.

When I was in seminary, I attended a revival meeting in a huge tent in Trenton, New Jersey. There must have been a thousand people there. This was the text. The preacher talked about baptism as the opportunity to die to the old and be reborn to a new life. He asked each of us to imagine ourselves going down into the water and drowning those parts of ourselves, those experiences in our past, those fears that held us back…and emerging from the water into the air with the sensation of all that stuff being left behind…emerging into the air with the new life that the death of all those burdens made possible. It was a transforming experience for many present who were able to imagine their baptism as a real death of the old – finished and gone, and a rebirth of a new life.

Some weeks ago, I asked Scott Morton for his reflections on this passage. (Scott is a beloved member of our community who has been a minister for almost 65 years.) True to form, Scott gave me a thoughtful written response! On this issue of being dead to sin, Scott writes: “I don’t know if it is part of just growing older for me, but I think dead to sin means – yes, once decisively choosing Christ instead of sin, but then gradually having God reduce our desire for sin, as though perhaps slowly, God makes the attraction for certain sins shrivel and die, begin to die off anyway.”

Scott goes on to say: “Of course this has to do with how we define sin. So often and for so long: purity, the absence of sins of desire and sex has been the ideal. But Jesus was more aware of so many other sins, like pride, lack of charity, sheer negligence – passing by on the other side, not facing our lives, not thinking out what it means for me in my particular circumstances to live as a follower of Christ.”

Of course the flip side of the sins that Scott lists for us is the life we try to follow. This is what it means to walk in the newness of life that Paul talks about. The resurrected life, the moral life, the ethical life:

To consider the needs of others before our own.
To be generous with all we have, to be attentive to those in distress.
To see the face of our neighbor in the wounded among us.
To be honest with ourselves and to always ask ourselves the question: What would Jesus do? And then not duck the answer.

The only way such a life is possible at all is when we are freed from the forces that cause us to be wrapped up in our self-centered concerns. When we have no fear of losing our life, we will find it … Jesus tells us. Of course, this is a life-long process—and it never seems to proceed in a straight line, except perhaps for saints like Scott.

As we pray for Christian this day, let us also pray for ourselves that we will remember our baptisms, that we will keep Christian and all the children in our midst alert to God, modeling in our lives the pattern of Christ – dying to self and rising to lives of compassion and justice and peace.

For Sally, CB, Claudia and Alex, the pattern of Christ is complete. In their death is their resurrection; the promise made by God in their baptism is fulfilled – totally, completely.

For Shae Kimberly Rainey and for Christian, the pattern of Christ now begins. For Christian, it begins today. His baptism is the spiritual force that will shape his life…in ways that transcend any influence we may have upon him. Of course, being human, Christian (like each of us) will fall short.

And yet, grace abounds. Even when he experiences moments of doubt in his life, even if there are times when he chooses to be away from God, grace abounds. As a young theologian reminded me: “Infant baptism means that even if you grow up not to accept God, God still accepts you, loves you, chooses you…not for what you have done or will ever do, but just because you are.”