Romans 6:1-11
“Baptism into Life”
June 19, 2011 - Trinity Sunday

         “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” Those are Dorothy’s famous words as she looks at the beauty and splendor around her after arriving in the Land of Oz. As we watch her set out on the famous journey down the Yellow Brick Road you and I see very well that Dorothy is not walking through Kansas, but through a new and fabulous country which she’s never seen before.

         As chapter 6 of Romans begins, Paul wants us to feel ourselves likewise on a journey through a strange new country. In particular he wants us to have that Dorothy-like feeling that we’ve left our old land, not Kansas, but the country of sin behind.

         Verse 1 addresses a question that springs to mind for almost anyone who truly gets a hold on the Gospel message of grace. It particularly arises out of verse 20 of the previous chapter, where Paul said, “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.”

         So God forgives anything? And the more we sin, the more He pours on grace? Why not, then, just keep on sinning? Why not pile on the offenses because God is ready to pile on forgiveness? Why not live and die like the German poet Heinrich Heine, who came to the end of a not very virtuous life and said on his deathbed, “God will forgive me. It’s his job.”

         Verse 2 answers with that characteristic Pauline negation we’ve seen before. “By no means!” is one English translation of a Greek phrase that in recent slang we could render as “No way!” Then we read the clue to how Paul understands the relationship between sin and those who believe in Christ. “How can we who died to sin go on living in it?”

         Notice how the language is about being “in sin.” “Should we continue in sin…?” “How can we… go on living in it?” The NIV gets verse 1 wrong when it translates it as “Shall we go on sinning…” Paul is emphasizing not so much what we do as where we are at. For him, sin is a place, a kingdom that we leave behind as we enter a new land. That’s the point of verse 21 of chapter 5, where we ended last week. Once we lived under the dominion of sin, in sin’s country. Now we live under the dominion of grace, in a new country. We’re not in Kansas anymore.

         Next in verse 3 Paul reminds us how we got here, in this new place, and just exactly where it is. “Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” It was a tornado that carried Dorothy off into the land of Oz. It’s the water of baptism which carries you and I into the new land God has for us.

         Now if you are a good evangelical Protestant like most of us, you likely get a bit nervous when you hear things like I just said, that baptism is the means by which God brings us where He wants us to be. In order to avoid any idea that getting dipped in or sprinkled with water is some kind of magic, we tend to emphasize that baptism is just a symbol for deeper, more important spiritual things happening within us.

         I can’t sort out the whole theology of Christian baptism today, but I can say that when you read our Gospel text in which Jesus’ command us to make disciples by first baptizing them, and when you hear Peter in Acts 2 answer the question “What shall we do?” with “Repent and be baptized,” and when you read over and over how important baptism is for Paul, we ought to be a little careful about saying baptism is just anything.

         Baptism pops up here for Paul because he’s got in mind a connection that goes back to what he was working on in the first four chapters, the unity of Jew and Gentile in Christ. By faith in Jesus Christ, God completes what began with Abraham’s faith. In Jesus we become Abraham’s descendants. And remember what happened to Abraham’s earliest descendants? They went into slavery and they came out in a great Exodus led by Moses.

         Paul sees the work of Jesus Christ, the salvation He gave us by dying and rising from the dead, as a new Exodus. As N. T. Wright argues, in chapters 6 to 8 of Romans we see an exodus journey, beginning with the escape through water here in chapter 6. Baptism is the Christian’s Red Sea. In the last part of chapter 6 he talks about coming out of slavery, like Israel came out of slavery in Egypt. He continues on in chapter 7 to a confrontation with the law, the Christian Mt. Sinai. Then in chapter 8 we see ourselves as God’s children coming out into a promised land of new life, where at the end, just like the Israelites, “we are more than conquerors.”

         That sense of journey is how Paul handles our worries about grace leading to sin. He gets real practical in verses 12 and 13 and just says, “Don’t let your bodies do that kind of thing anymore,” but first he frames it all in terms of where we are in Christ. We’re not in Kansas anymore. We’re not in Egypt anymore. We’re not in slavery to sin anymore. We live and walk in a new place, in Christ Jesus. And the way we got here, says Paul, is through the water, through baptism.

         One of the main things about baptism is incorporation. Going into the water means going into Christ Himself. By baptism you and I are placed in and with Jesus. So we share in what He experienced. Therefore baptism into Jesus is baptism into his death. But that’s not where the story stops. The Israelites did not just go down into the middle of the Red Sea, they came back up into freedom on the other side. So verse 4 continues, “Therefore we have been buried with 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.”

         I have a vivid memory of that verse being spoken over and over in the church in which I grew up. As I watched new believers being baptized our pastor would say the words Jesus gave us in Matthew’s Gospel, “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” but then as a white-robed candidate was lowered into the water, he would repeat Paul’s words, “buried with him by baptism into death.” And, as he lifted the dripping wet new Christian to his or her feet, he would say, “and raised to walk in newness of life.” Something happened down there in the water, something that brought you out to a new place.

         Once again the NIV and TNIV get that last phrase of verse 4 wrong because they leave out the walking idea, just saying “we too may live a new life.” But that’s not quite the point. It makes it sound like the new life is all up to us. But the point is that we are raised up and placed in this new life. Like Dorothy’s house snatched up and set down in Oz, the believer in Jesus is picked up and set down in a new life and that’s now where we walk.

         This is Paul’s foundation and ultimate answer to all our worries about Christians and continued sinning. It’s all based in remembering where we are now. We’re no longer in the kingdom of sin. We live in Christ. We no longer live in the old life. We live in the new life. So why then would we want to keep living the old way? Why would we want to keep doing the old things? It’s not where we are. It’s not who we are anymore.

         Of course, it’s not like all this is easy. The whole question comes up because we know very well that those who are baptized in Christ are still sorely tempted to sin and frequently yield to those temptations in glaring ways. It’s true about each of us. Yet Paul wants us to get the fact that we won’t escape from sin and start living differently just by trying harder. Our rising into a new life comes the same way Jesus was raised from dead. It’s as it says in verse 4, “by the glory of the Father.” Jesus didn’t raise Himself. The Father raised Him. We don’t free ourselves from sin. God frees us by placing us in Christ.

         So verses 5 to 8 reiterate the fact that we are incorporated and included in Jesus so that what happens to Him happens to us, especially the fact that He was raised to new life.

         Verse 5 tells us again, that “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be raised with him in a resurrection like his.” Almost all the versions, except the King James, miss out on a nuance of that word “united.” The KJV says, “For if we have been planted together…” That’s the literal sense. If we’ve been grown together with Jesus, then we are going to rise with Him.

         Across our parking lot on the other side of the fence are oak trees where ivy has been allowed to grow along with them and up them. They grow together. Ivy by itself just grows low to the ground, like it does on our side of the fence, but let it have a tree to climb and it will rise as high as the tree does. That’s how we grow together with Christ. United with Him in His resurrection, we rise like He did into new and glorious life.

         You might get the idea that this is all about future hope. We might think Paul is just looking toward that great day we celebrate on Easter when all of us will be raised from the dead into new bodies like Jesus was raised. But when you get the context, when you read the whole chapter, when you read verse 6 about being crucified with Christ so that sin might be destroyed, you realize this resurrection with Jesus is also now. We’re meant to walk in, to live in a new life now.

         The end of verse 6 and then verse 7 connect us to the Exodus story again. We are included with Christ and die with Him so that “we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is free from sin.” The word “freed” here is difficult because it’s actually “justified,” meaning something like “absolved” or “acquitted” in court. If you’re being prosecuted or sued and you die, there’s no case against you anymore. Paul’s mixing some of his legal metaphor with the Exodus idea of being freed from slavery. It gives us the strange Christian paradox that death sets us free, but free because we are now in Christ.

         Verse 8 brings us back around again to our inclusion and solidarity with Christ in the simple statement, “But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.” That became a motto for Christians. Paul repeats it as just that in II Timothy 1:11. Once again, though, this is not just about the future. It’s also about how we live now. That’s why verses 9 and 10 tell us more about Jesus’ own death and resurrection.

         “We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again.” Verse 9 is the key to what makes Jesus different from all the other people who rise from the dead in Scripture. The widow’s son that Elijah raised; Lazarus whom Jesus raised; Eutychus raised up by Paul himself—those were all going to grow old and die once more. Only Jesus rose to live on and on and never die again.

         The thing for us is that if we are raised with Christ into that kind of life now, the life that doesn’t die again and goes on into eternity, then we are in that new life now. The bumper sticker reading “Eternal Life Starts Now” is absolutely right. Believing in Jesus and being baptized into Him means the beginning of a new kind of life here and now, and Paul wants us to understand that new life includes being “dead to sin.”

         In verse 10 Paul writes an odd thing about Jesus, “The death he died, he died to sin, once for all…” He doesn’t mean that Jesus quit sinning when He died, because Jesus never sinned. He means that when He became one of us, Jesus came where we are, into the land of sin, into the temptations that surround all of us. As a human being Jesus was tempted right up until His death, with the last temptation there in the garden, to get away and escape the Cross. But when He died, any power sin might have held over Him was gone forever. He was free. So Paul can say, “but the life he lives, he lives to God.”

         That’s what Paul wants us to grasp as we wrestle with sin in our own lives. In Jesus Christ, we are no longer under sin’s dominion. We don’t live in its kingdom anymore. We live in God’s kingdom. We walk and talk and work and play in a new world, in a new life, because we’ve been lifted into that new life with Christ. Clinging to His tree we’re growing with Him above all that old way of life and leaving it behind.

         It’s Trinity Sunday and we’ve sung several times now that same three-fold name of God by which we are baptized, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Those three persons are God and those three persons live together in eternal joy and love and holiness. What Paul is saying is that in Jesus Christ, you and I are welcomed into and raised into that same kind of life.

         That’s why Paul concludes this bit of the discussion by saying in verse 11, “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” That’s the new place we’re in. We’ve died and moved out of that place of sin and now we’re alive in a whole new realm. We’re alive to God, and to the kind of life God himself has, a shared life of love and holiness rather than the old individual, selfish life of sin.

         In the “Wizard of Oz,” right after Dorothy says those famous words about not being in Kansas anymore, a glowing bubble appears in the sky and draws closer and closer. When it lands it turns into Glinda the Good Witch. She’s wearing a beautiful white dress and wearing a silver crown full of stars and carrying a magic wand. Seeing her, Dorothy exclaims breathlessly, “Now I… I know we’re not in Kansas!”

         When temptation seems way too strong for you, when you want to just give in and count on God’s forgiveness, when you are tempted to sin so that grace may abound, then look at Jesus. That’s when you’ll know you’re not in sin anymore. Look at Jesus dying and rising again for you. Recall your baptism and see in it your own dying and rising with Him. Look at Christ, and Paul says, consider yourself dead to sin, and then consider yourself alive to God in Christ Jesus. Look at Him and you will know where you are. You’re in Him. You’re in His life, not your own. You’re in the grace of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and they will never fail you.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2011 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj