New Life
How many times have you heard it said? “I just can’t wait for things to get back to normal.” And of course, we all have felt that way at one point or another, but I wince a little bit every time I hear someone say that, because things may never be exactly like they were before we began dealing with the pandemic. Even if nearly everything practically goes back to its former pattern — work, school, church, our social lives — we will still be living with a world full of people who have been changed by what we have all experienced. There will be a new normal. There is no going back to the way things were before, because we live in the reality of the present moment. To go back is against the very nature of reality.
We as Christians have had the very nature of our reality changed and upended by the work of God in us through Jesus Christ. We deny the reality of that change when we continue with the patterns and sins of our former lives. Paul uses a phrase twice in Romans 6, translated as “By no means” in response to two different hypotheticals that he presents himself, both involving sin and the life of a Christian. The first is this: are Christians to keep on sinning all the more so that the grace of God may be increased? Of course not!
That would be to go against the nature of the new creation that God has made in us. It is not simply a matter of us not doing wrong out of gratitude for what Jesus has done from us, but it is that we have died to our former selves. A way that the church has looked at baptism historically, largely drawn from this passage, is a moment of death and resurrection. We die with Christ, going into the water, and are subsequently raised with him to new life. So our rejection of sin goes much further than a simple remodeling or managing of our behavior. We are given new life, life that is antithetical to the way of sin.
And this is a struggle, because we are not perfect. Paul will famously contend with his own brokenness, a struggle with which we can all relate, in Romans 7. We continue to have the need for God to come and work in us. But we have to realize that sin is not simply some inconvenient portion of our life that we keep under control, but a shadow of the self that we have died to, to be repented from and utterly rejected.
Paul writes: “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.” (Romans 6:12-14)
But death to sin is only half of God’s message. As we are raised from the waters of baptism, we are raised into life in Christ, life according to grace. This is not only a rejection of sin, but an embrace of righteousness. And that is reason to celebrate!
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