Creekside Church Sermon of June 20, 1999 "We're Dead and Alive" Romans 6:1b-17	Rev. David Bibbee
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If you have had a similar experience, you know how unpleasant it can be. But if there is something I dislike more than eating and socializing with dead people, it's worshipping with them. It's a downer to be in worship that generates the enthusiasm of a yawning festival. Few things are more pathetic than churches with no joy or enthusiasm and that seem as though the very life has been sucked from them. This is the kind of death to be avoided. To be a Christian is to be alive, enthusiastic, full of optimism, and hope. God's design for us is that we become new creations in Jesus Christ. But to become new creation, you must first die. It is a great irony that the church filled with the presence of Christ, is the church that is full of dead people who continue to die a little more day by day.

"Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 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." What do we do with a text like this with all it's talk about death and burial as a prerequisite to new life with Jesus?

Before we probe the particulars of Romans 6, I want to tell you a story that came from Nuremberg war crimes trials. A witness took the stand who had lived for a long time in a grave in a Jewish graveyard in Poland. It was the only place he and many others could live after escaping the gas chambers. During this time the he wrote poetry, and one of those poems described a young mother who gave birth to a boy in a grave close by. An eighty-year-old grave digger assisted in the birth. And when the baby uttered his first cry, the old man prayed, "Great God, has thou finally sent the Messiah to us? For who else than the Messiah can be born in a grave?" Three days later the poet saw the child sucking his mother's tears because she had no milk for him.

The theologian who relates this story says, "We have forgotten that the manger of Christmas was an utter expression of poverty and distress before it became the place where angels appeared and the star pointed. We have forgotten that the tomb of Jesus was the end of his life and work before it became the place of his triumph." Christianity is the most life-affirming of all religions. But what puzzles us so is that death is how we get there!

Paul begins with an odd question ... "Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?" Or as Eugene Peterson put it, "So what do we do, keep on sinning so God will keep on forgiving?" In the first five chapters of Romans, Paul laboriously set forth the scheme of salvation. We are brought into right relationship with God not by what we say, what we believe, or what we do. We can no more make ourselves right before than we can sit in our own laps. Salvation is by God's grace. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else. It is not an achievement. It's a gift. Salvation is a pure gift freely given.

But prone as people are to excess, the Romans devised some interesting reasoning. "Since it is our nature to sin and it is God's nature to forgive, let's sin boldly so God's great grace may abound. The more we sin, the greater the grace. To err is human, but to forgive is divine, right?" "Wrong," Paul said.

To better grasp how flawed this logic was, let's apply it to the parable of the Prodigal Son. When Junior squanders his inheritance and doesn't have even two dimes to rub together, he comes to his senses and heads home. And while he is some distance away, his love-sick father runs out to Junior, smothers him with kisses and puts a ring on his finger and a robe over his shoulders and won't even let his son say, "I'm sorry." A huge party is thrown for him and when his big brother who has always been good and done right saw all the love and forgiveness shed upon his little brother who wasn't good or hadn't done right, he thought to himself ... "If the old man is so forgiving, why shouldn't I take my turn in reckless living in a far country?"

If God's grace covers a multitude of wrongs, then I can do pretty much whatever I want knowing I can always return to God's grace and love. Trust God and sin on boldly and all that. If this is the way we understand God's grace, we could have church attendance down to zero in no time. This is the logic of sinfulness. "But how in the world can we who died to sin still live in it?" Paul asked. You don't live in sin anymore. You died, remember?

It would do us some good to remember that when we were baptized, we were buried. There is more involved with becoming a Christian than thinking religious thoughts or having a little change of attitude. The place Jesus was raised was a tomb before it was a womb.

I spent last Monday at Cedar Point with John Berkebile, Rick Rodgers, and the Jr. High group, and as a result of John's constant goading and badgering, I rode rides that reason would have kept me from if I had been by myself. One of the rides was the Power Tower. On this ride you are harnessed, strapped, belted and bolted onto a seat which is on the outside of a device that pulls you to the top of a huge structural steel tower nearly three hundred feet high. I am not fond of heights, especially unenclosed heights, and all the way to the top John was saying to Rick and me, "Isn't this great?" I didn't say much. I was trying hard just to breathe. After reaching the top, you stay just long enough to see Canada, then you fall so fast most of your major organs fill the space where only your brain had been seconds before. You scream and holler for your mother. Your instincts tell you you are going to die. And John, overdosed on adrenaline kept screaming, "This is fantastic!"

While we waited in line for this ride, I wondered what it would be like if at the end of the fall you were plunged under water ... high altitude, high impact baptism. Baptism is not an easy thing to submit to. It is scary. Saying you believe in Jesus and will endeavor to live by the teachings of the church is one thing, but baptism has a high degree of difficulty. I don't believe that immersion is the only legitimate mode of baptism. Pouring and sprinkling can be just as significant. But going completely under, being buried beneath the surface captures more of what baptism does. The old you goes under ... your pride, your past; you are shoved under three times because the old you is a good swimmer. It is a new life that you come up to.

To exchange a known for an unknown even when the one accompanying us through it all is Jesus, is frightening. Many of us are afraid of the dark, but as someone said, "We must go into the darkness because that is where God is. The darkness is not sin or evil. Those are the side paths by which we escape." I know from experience this is true. Like many, I ran from the very thing I wanted because God was calling me to a place where all I could rely upon was him.

My invitation came through a dream. In it, I was in an unknown city, accompanied by an unknown guide who led me down a street lined with magnificent shops that were exquisitely decorated and beautifully lit. "Impressive, isn't it?" the guide said. "Would you like to see more ... something to exceed all this?" he asked. We walked to an intersection and stopped. Behind us were the bright lights, and across the street, pitch black. "Are we going to cross here?" I asked. "If you choose to," said the guide. He crossed the street, turned and asked, "Are you coming?" "I can't now," I replied, then the guide disappeared into the darkness.

The fear that kept me from crossing was the fear that the darkness was an enemy. What I have since discovered and am still discovering is that the dark isn't full of dangers or demons. It is full of God. Crossing over into the dark wasn't done all at once, like John, Rick and I falling and screaming from the Power Tower. It has been in steps and stages, learning to trust God little by little. Dying bit by bit and discovering that his grace has led me safe thus far and trusting that grace will lead me on.

In the Episcopal book of Common Prayer it says, "In the midst of life, we are in death." Members of the Benedictine order are instructed to, "keep death daily before your eyes." I'm speaking to many of you who know what this means. You have faced the reality of death and aren't anxious. You know what you were and you know who you are now. You know what Paul means when he says in Philippians, "For to me to live is Christ. To die is to gain." To those who don't know Jesus or anything about him, this doesn't make sense. But you who have been buried with Him in baptism know what he means. You have died, over and over and have lived to tell about it.

As I was writing this message, I thought about my father. He has been gone now for almost four years. He knew he was dying. He had done everything possible to fight the cancer, but it was apparent that cancer was going to have its way with his body. My dad didn't talk much about dying, at least not with me. He did not appear to be anxious or afraid. This was because he believed something and Someone better awaited him. But I think he faced his death for another reason.

On a cold November night in 1977, we stood by a bed in intensive care unit as my twenty-year-old sister died from a head injury suffered in an automobile accident. I saw it clearly. I could tell it in how he cried and in what he said. When Ann died, my dad died. After that he was different. Having gone through this, what was there to fear about his own death? There is no fear in facing what you have already experienced.

In the film, The Mission, Robert DeNiro plays the character Rodrigo Mendoza, a mercenary slave trader among the Indians of South America. Mendoza was a cruel, ruthless man who treated the Indians no better than animals. He then kills his brother in a fight over a woman, and for months afterward is plagued with guilt and grief. After pouring out his soul to a Jesuit priest, he is told to atone for his great sin by choosing his own penance. Mendoza decides to drag his heavy armor and sword by rope around his waist. He pulls this great weight for months, through thick, steaming jungles and rugged mountains. He was nearly swept away to his death by a waterfall.

One day he was met by some of the Indians whose family members Mendoza had captured and sold into slavery. They had hated this man, but they can tell something is different now. Humble. Penitent. One of them then pulls out a sharp knife and cuts the rope, sending the armor crashing down the mountain. Feeling the weight of the armor and his own past removed, he is renewed and immerses himself in the study of Christianity. He builds a large mission church and into the mission he pours himself, ministering to the people he had sold into slavery. The life that amounted to nothing now counted for something. The old Rodrigo died. The new Rodrigo was full of life.

It seems strange, that whoever loses his life for Christ and the gospel; whoever orients their lives "away" from their lives and toward life in Christ, will find them. The only way to live is to die ... to die to sin, to die to self, to die to traditions that have outlived their usefulness, to die to ways of doing things which prevent the church from moving forward.

Since we have been baptized in Christ, we cannot continue in death. Christ was raised from the dead so we too might walk in the newness of life. It makes me wonder ... will we?

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