How much time do we spend being disappointed in ourselves for not being able to move past our old and tired ways of thinking, speaking, and behaving? We desire to think, speak, and behave in ways that belong to a new way of being human, and we are regularly discouraged that it’s not happening sooner. Except, it is happening, nay, already did! Paul in Romans 6 makes an astonishing, impossible declaration. “We who died to sin cannot go on living in it. We were baptized into Christ’s death, buried with him in baptism, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead, we also might walk in newness of life.” (Romans 6:1-4) The crucifixion of Jesus that Paul spoke about so richly in Romans 5 is not something that happened remote from us. When we were baptized, Jesus pulled us into his experience of death.
“We who died to sin…” So matter of fact. So plain and simple. We died. That is what is true of the baptized, Christ-centered community. We were buried and raised as something new, something fundamentally different. We have gone somewhere that sin cannot follow us – into death itself.
Let’s be honest – this isn’t possible. It simply doesn’t work to say that we’ve already died, right? And yet, it is true. The fact of the matter is that baptism makes us people of paradox, people of whom a variety of contradictory things are true all at once. As the baptized, Christ-centered community, the impossible and the paradoxical are our bread and butter. This is the gift of Romans and the New Testament – it proclaims all the wild, impossible things that the rest of the world in its its logic is too embarrassed to say. Let everyone else confine themselves to the suffocating limits of what is pragmatic. We come to Romans to, along with Abraham, delight in what cannot be true but is true all the same. We do not resign ourselves to what is possible, pragmatic, and plainly logical because God decides what we are. God has declared us to be new.
Our desire is to think in ways that belong to a new way of being human, to speak and behave in ways that belong to a new way of being human. And we cannot do that until we surrender to the good news, the announcement that God has declared us to be new, surrender to the divine declaration that our desire has already been granted. Maybe the best thing we can do for ourselves is not argue with that declaration! The waters of baptism are where a mysterious death, transformation, and resurrection occur. Baptism is the place where, as Paul wrote a chapter ago, God poured his love into our hearts. Of course, we struggle to surrender to this good news of what is really real. It still seems like sin is winning a great many victories. But what seems so is not so. Paul has asked us a good question. “Do you not know?” Do we know what happened to us in our baptism? Do we know that we already died to sin? Do we know that newness of life is not around the corner, but our present reality? Wherever sin seems to be winning, the simple truth is that sin has in fact lost. We are new. We died to sin. We exist in a completely new reality. God has decided it is so.
Do we know that?
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