Raised, United, Alive
John Wilkinson Third
Presbyterian Church June 19, 2005
Romans 6:1-11
Next Sunday, we will move into our summer schedule. Church
school will look a bit different. We will hold one service of
worship at 10:00 a.m. in the Sanctuary. I hope you will join
us when you are in town – we are the stronger when we
are together. And if you are traveling, drop in to your local
church, whatever its stripe. May our summer be a time of recreation
and rejuvenation. With that, and with a word of appreciation
to Wilson Fitch, let us pray.
Holy and gracious God, we thank you this day for blessing upon
blessing. We thank you for the church, the cradle of our faith.
We thank you for fathers, and grandfathers, and every paternal
figure who had made our lives the better. We remember those
fathers who have gone before us whom we so dearly miss, and
for deeply cherished memories. And we pray for those who fill
such a role these days, that what they do may be done with integrity
and good character. Strengthen us all in faith and for joyful
service, and even now, open your word to us, and transform us
by your truth. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
***
John Wesley, a Church of England minister, was dissatisfied
with the church. He was restless. He even had traveled to the
colonies to seek some new experience that would give him new
inspiration, to no avail.
Returning reluctantly to England, on May 24, 1738, Wesley grudgingly
attended a religious meeting, a kind of evening Bible study
and worship. Hear his own words: “About a quarter to nine,
while [the teacher] was describing the change which God works
in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely
warmed. I felt that I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for
salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away
my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”
Wesley, along with his brother Charles, went on to establish
the Methodist movement within the Church of England, which eventually
became the Methodist church proper. Wesley was an indefatigueable
itinerant preacher, bringing the word to the people rather than
waiting for people to come to the word. He traveled extensively,
and returned to America.
His brother Charles’ legacy is strong as well –
the author of such well-known hymns as “Love Divine, All
Loves Excelling” and “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today.”
By my calculations, yesterday’s hymn-a-thon would have
been a quarter of an hour shorter without the contributions
of the Wesley brothers.
At any rate, John Wesley provides the peripheral point this
morning. The central point is the subject of that May 1738 prayer
meeting, and what it was that so “strangely warmed”
Wesley’s heart. The theologian from whom that evening’s
teacher was teaching was Martin Luther, and the topic was Luther’s
writing on Paul’s letter to the young church at Rome –
what we call the book of Romans. It was Romans, and Luther’s
appropriation of it, that led the Protestant church’s
earliest activity. It was Wesley’s encounter with Romans,
through Luther, that led similar movements two centuries later.
John Calvin, our theological progenitor, had similar experience.
Karl Barth, the great Swiss Reformed theologian of the twentieth
century, hung his primary theological insight on Paul’s
words to the church at Rome.
And so we will as well. This summer, we will dabble here and
there in Romans, and with good benefit, I hope. In many ways,
Romans is the biblical Magna Charta, Paul’s attempt to
summarize the core tenets of Christianity. What so compelled
Luther and what so inspired Wesley was the notion of grace through
faith – that faith was a gift given to us by a loving
and merciful God and that grace was God’s unmerited movement
toward us that welcomed us into God’s everlasting care,
regardless of anything we could ever do to earn it and in spite
of all the things we could do to reject it.
This coming program year, we will spend some quality Wednesday
evening time with Romans. For the moment, I would invite you
to read Paul’s words, perhaps as summer beach reading
in between a second run through The DaVinci Code or the new
Harry Potter book.
Paul starts strong and builds from there: “I am not ashamed
of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone
who has faith…in it the righteousness of God is revealed.”
Paul lays out the argument that has become the central affirmation
of our faith: true righteousness has been revealed in Jesus
Christ, and our relationship to God rests not upon anything
we do, but fully on God’s redemptive activity in Jesus.
Those hymns that we sing are teaching hymns: “There’s
a Wideness in God’s Mercy,” “Amazing Grace,
How Sweet the Sound,” Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.”
All the big-ticket doctrines appear in Romans: faith, hope,
grace, love. It is a primer in the faith, with the core affirmation
being that nothing, not even death, can separate us from God’s
love that we know in Jesus. Nothing. Obedience to a law will
not earn it; disobedience to a law will not lose it. Nothing
– not an indulgence, not a priest or minister, not a government.
Nothing. Grace alone, that we receive as a gift.
Paul is concerned about many things, but a primary concern
is the way that sin enslaves us and the ways that we therefore
live in fear. I am not sure that’s the way we would say
it these days, to talk about sin so overtly, and yet the reality
of things that are less than helpful holding control over our
lives is ever-present, is it not…a real “fear factor?”
This will be a trivial example, to be sure. I was a junior
in high school, and up to that point had enjoyed relative success
in three sports. It was late fall, the beginning of basketball
season, and my desire was to make a seamless and successful
transition from junior varsity to varsity. I had a strong tryout
– I even executed a nifty little turn-around jumper over
a senior, older and taller than me. I was, in the vernacular,
“in his face.”
And yet, the next day, when the list went up, and my name was
not to be found, was as devastating an experience as a high
school kid can have. Talk about one’s worth being invested
in something. Talk about a misplaced sense of control.
There will be moments even now when I look back and can quickly
convince myself that the coach made a tremendous mistake, and
that I re-visit that turn-around jumper in my imagination as
justification.
It is a trivial example. And yet it is a window to the human
condition. We face disappointments all the time, hardships,
losses. We do not live up to our own expectations, or worse
yet, the expectations of others. Our jobs disappoint. Our lifestyles
ring hollow. Our relationships falter. Our commitments fade.
Our intentions remain just that. We carry around with us, all
of us, versions of that varsity basketball cut-list, and our
very personhood feels up for grabs.
But Paul, channeling somehow the very grace of God, will have
none of it. Just as we have been buried with Christ in our baptism,
so we have been raised by Christ, so we too may walk in newness
of life.
It is that newness of life that most intrigues us. Paul is
concerned about many things, as we’ve said, but a primary
concern is the way that sin enslaves us. No more, Paul says.
No more. There will be sin, to be sure. We will do things, or
not do things, that will strain our relationship with God and
with one another. But those things do not define us any more.
Ever. We must consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God
in Christ Jesus. Newness of life. Now.
In considering these words, scholar N.T. Wright invites us
to consider a map. Where we live on the map is a different place
because of our faith. Sin is still a destination, and a very
real reality in our lives. Death will befall each of us, sooner
or later, and the ones whom we love. But the place where we
now live is a different place, a grace-filled, hope-filled,
life-giving place, a destination and residence that gives us
ability to face disappointments and shortcomings and sin, and
face them differently, because of hope. We are realists, about
ourselves, about each other, about the world in which we live.
But we stand in a different place, on new ground, resurrection
ground, that allows us to face life not with fear, but with
hope. (New Interpreter’s Commentary, Volume X, pages 536
and ff.)
And we are not alone. We enter this newness of life with God,
by God’s grace. But we dwell here also with fellow travelers,
who share our burdens and sorrows as well as our joys and celebrations.
Scholar Katherine Grieb, whose book on Romans will help to
guide our study in the next year, writes that this thinking
may be foreign to we 21st century Westerners. We do not think
of faith as a location, and we think as individuals, rather
than as part of a community. And yet here Paul is insisting
that because of our baptism we live in a new place, and that
because God’s love has been poured into our hearts, we
know peace, we share in glory, and we even face human suffering
differently than we would without this gift. (The Story of Romans,
pages 68 and 69.)
It is never simple, nor is it ever easy. People who insist
that it is are wrong, I believe, as if faith were a light switch
to simply flip on. They have not considered fully the implications
of faith, of sin, of baptism, of community, of living in the
real world. The promise is not a cocoon that one enters, nor
a sanctuary with permanently locked doors and sealed windows
that shelter us from life.
The promise is this – newness of life, that makes the
living of our days, and the facing of disappointments, qualitatively
different.
Life goes on when you are cut from the team. Life goes on when
bad things happen. When a loved ones dies or when life does
not turn out precisely as planned. Life goes on. That is not
a cavalier claim. Life goes on.
But it is new life. Different life. Eternal life. Made real
and true by the one who has faced death for us, and who now
invites us into something powerful and extraordinary and redemptive.
We are made dead to sin and alive to God. Alive to grace. Alive
to love. Alive to life. Alive. Amen.
