This is our second week focused on the “already-not yet” reality of creation’s existence and our own experience of this “already-not yet.” Last week, we talked about the truth that the whole creation is groaning and we are groaning too. We know that things are not all right. There is brokenness, pain, and suffering around us, and in our own lives. Before we read Scripture, I want to re-visit some of what I said last week: We are living in two realities at the same time. On the one side, we live in what the Apostle Paul calls the old creation. We are part of God’s original creation which is fruitful, and beautiful, and full of goodness. And, which is at the same time, broken, and decaying, and haunted by death.
Because creation belongs to God, and God cherishes every square inch of creation, including every square inch of your body, God is not content to let sin, and brokenness, and death have the last word over any part of God’s good creation. God’s purpose is renew the whole creation. And, in Jesus the Christ, God has broken into the death trajectory of creation’s life, and through Jesus’s living and dying and rising from death God has freed the whole creation, including us, from the power of sin and decay and death. Just like that, the old creation’s trajectory is turned from death toward life. The Spirit of new creation is unleashed in the universe AND takes up residence in human beings. But the old creation is still here, mixed in with the new creation that has already come into being and is now unfolding, but is not yet finished. We are living in both realities at the same time. We live in this tension. There are two lives going on inside us, the old life, which has been corrupted by sin and is headed for death, and the new life that is being birthed in us, reviving, and converting our old life. This morning, we pick up here, focused up close on what is going on with us personally. Listen for the Word of the Lord. In Romans 6 Paul writes:
3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 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.
5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6 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. 7 For whoever has died is freed from sin. 8 But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9 We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. 10 The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. 11 So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. 12 Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion over you.
John Westerhoff III, an Episcopal priest, begins one of his books with this story of a baptism he witnessed in a small church in a Latin American village. The community of faith had gathered; they had recalled God’s gracious acts; they had proclaimed the Gospel. And now they were about to make a response. The congregation began the mournful sounds of a funeral hymn as a solemn procession moved down the aisle. A father carried a child’s coffin he had made from wood, a mother carried a bucket of water from the family well, a priest carried their sleeping infant wrapped only in a native blanket. As they reached the front of the church, the father placed the little coffin on the communion table, the mother poured the water into the coffin, and the priest covered the wakening baby’s skin with the embalming oil. The congregation’s singing softened to a whisper. The priest slowly lowered the infant into the coffin and immersed the child’s whole body in the water. As he did so, he exclaimed, “I put you to death, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” “Amen!” shouted the parents and the congregation. Then quickly lifting the child into the air for all to see, the priest declared, “And I resurrect you to new life that you might love and serve God and your neighbor all the days of your life.” Immediately, the congregation broke into a joyous Easter hymn!
This story both compels and disturbs. The image of an infant being baptized in a coffin feels all wrong. Talk of death at the beginning of life feels backwards. The assumption that there is something in a newborn that needs to die and be raised to new life comes as an offense to many” of us. All week I’ve been imagining what it would be like if we replaced our lovely marble baptismal font with a coffin, and just left it there. Tourists to the Old Dutch Church would no doubt be puzzled. Parents who brought their babies to be baptized would probably balk. And when we gathered for worship we would be reminded that something happened in baptism that has worked a change in us that will work itself out over our lifetimes. Something has changed in us, and that something is working itself out right now.
“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” Paul asks. It is a rhetorical question. For Paul, it is like asking, “Do you not know that 1 + 1 equals 2?” The answer is “yes, we know that.” But of course, Paul is asking a much more complicated question than whether 1 + 1 = 2. He is asking a question about the state of our being and the patterns of our living. He is asking, “do you know who you are? Do you know that you have already died with Christ? And do you know that when you died you were unchained from the powers of sin and the powers of death? Do you know that these powers are dead to you? Do you know that you do not have to fear them? That you do not have to serve them? Do you know that they no longer run your life? That they do not define who you are nor determine how you live?
Consider this analogy. Once there was a homeless man. He had been homeless for years. Sleeping in doorways. Scrabbling for food in the garbage bins behind restaurants. Accepting spare change from strangers on the street. Then one day, somebody handed him a lottery ticket, and a quarter so that he could scratch off the little strip of silver to find out if he had won anything. And low and behold, he won 10,000,000.00 dollars. Then he tucked the winning ticket into his pocket and went on living as he had lived before. Sleeping in doorways in freezing weather. Digging half-eaten slices of pizza from garbage bins. Accepting nickels and dimes and dollar bills from strangers. Now if you knew this guy, and if you knew that he had won 10,000,000.00 dollars, would you not say to him, “Hey dude, do you not know that you are a millionaire? Do you not know that you have been cut loose from the chains of your poverty? Do you not know that you can choose another way to live?”
I know this is not a perfect analogy to the situation that Paul is describing. I wish it were so simple for us. That in one fell swoop our total life situation were completely changed. That it was just a matter of cashing in the winning ticket and finding ourselves transported into a place where all the struggle was over. A place where our bodies weren’t aging and death was not real. A place where we loved God with everything fiber of our being, and we loved ourselves the way God loves us, and we loved our neighbors without reserve. That would be a place where sin did not traffic in us. A place where sin did not weave webs of woe in the societies we create, then trap us in their tangle. That would be the place where God’s new creation is finished and full.
I do not have to tell you that we are not there yet. But you can believe that we are on the way. Because something has really happened to change the death trajectory of the universe, and that something has happened in us too. The story about baptizing that baby in Latin America in a coffin is a story that tells the whole truth. Death is real. And sin is real. And there is no point in lying about it. Because self-deception doesn’t change the facts, and it doesn’t free us from anything. So the church just tells the whole truth about our situation right from the beginning, in the sacrament of baptism. Death is real and sin is real. And Baptism is the event in which the powers of sin and death are crucified in us, the chains are cut, our enslavement to these powers ends, and the power of new life in the Spirit of Christ lifts us out of the coffin and declares that we are raised as creatures of God’s new creation. We are joined to Christ. In him, we have already died and been birthed into new life. And in Christ’s Spirit we are caught up in a life-long process of dying and rising every day. We are not yet who we are becoming. We are not finished with our dying and rising. And we like the rising way more than we like the dying. So Paul says, remember who you already are. And remember whose you already are. And do not be anxious about the not yet that you feel in your bones. Do not resist the dying, because it is the flip side of your rising.