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Romans chapter 6
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Your faithfulness can only ever be about the life that you live, not the one that you avoid. Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 1:Welcome today. My name is Jeremy. And if we haven't find had a chance to meet yet, then please come by and say hi after the service. I would love to meet you and hear a bit of your story as well. Today, we are continuing our way through the book of Romans.
Speaker 1:But first, a little update here. This weekend, was in Winnipeg, and I was meeting with some of the other churches and leaders in our denomination, the Evangelical Covenant Church. And I got back into Calgary late last night, which was not ideal, but it was a great chance for me to renew some connections and for us to continue to build into this larger community of churches that we participate in. We are working to invest more and more in influencing and shaping and pushing that group of churches in a healthy direction. And so it's great to invest in those conversations.
Speaker 1:But speaking of returning from travel, our team that has been representing us in Zambia for the past month has also returned this week. And they did an amazing job of keeping us updated. There are some photos on the screen right now behind me, but the team stories are also posted or pinned it to our Instagram profile. And if you wanna check them out, you can follow us at commons church. However, if you are really keen to hear some of those stories, then in just over a week, once the team has had a chance to rest and get back on a normal sleeping pattern, we are gonna be hosting a public debrief here at the Kensington Parish.
Speaker 1:And that will be on May 15 from 07:30PM to 9PM. And this will just be a chance for them to come and share some stories and images and give us a chance who are invested in the story of hands at work and the community of Calende to learn and listen and in some sense participate in this larger experience with them. So mark that on your calendar. We'll see you May 15. It'll be here at the church.
Speaker 1:And you can find the information at commons.church/events. Now, today is Romans. And Romans is this big important letter that one of the early Christian writers sends to one of the early churches in the city of Rome. And it's a large letter, so we are taking our time to work our way through it. And our plan has been to take a chunk of weeks in the spring each year to work our way through a few chapters together.
Speaker 1:And then our hope is that over the course of a few years, we will actually make our way through the whole thing. And this is actually our third year coming back to Romans, and this year, me are making our way from chapter five to chapter eight, and there are 16 chapters in this letter. So anyway, regardless, last week, we finished off chapter five. So that means we're gonna look back and then today we'll push into chapter six. So in the second half of chapter five, Paul says, just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, in this way death came to all people because all sinned.
Speaker 1:And this is where that idea of original sin comes from. And that is the idea that in the story of Adam and Eve, it impacts all of us, and we are all now somehow in need of restoration. And within Christianity, that is not a particularly controversial idea. Every Christian tradition has affirmed that in some sense. But what is disputed exactly how Paul imagines this human condition affecting us.
Speaker 1:And so as we talked about last week, it was Augustine, one of the very influential early theologians who reads this from a mistranslated Latin passage. And there he reads, not that all have sinned, but that in Adam all have sinned. And so Augustine's reading is that, oh, well, this must mean that Adam's sin has been passed down to all of humanity. And Augustine will even go as far as to explain that this must be then transmitted sexuality or through sexuality. So this is the OGSTD, go all the way back to Augustine here.
Speaker 1:And that idea kind of stuck around. Even once we had realized that it was actually a mistranslation in the Latin, it just seemed to stick. However, in the Eastern tradition, where they spoke and read Greek, they didn't need a translation of Paul's words, and so they didn't have this miscommunication. And so in the Eastern Orthodox Church, original sin isn't about the fact that God is mad at you because of something someone else did a long time ago. It's about the idea that we all come from the story of Adam.
Speaker 1:And therefore, we are like Adam. We are flawed like Adam. We are imperfect like Adam. We, like Adam, are born into a world where sin corrupts our ability to see the divine in the world around us. It's not that you're in trouble for what Adam did.
Speaker 1:As I said last week, original sin isn't what sets God against you. Original sin is the disease that makes us forget God's name and miss God's presence in the world around us. And that's really what all sin is always about. It is about losing sight of the divine. I quoted Sarah Heiner Lancaster last week.
Speaker 1:And she said that sin is the robbery of God because sin assumes that we are independent of God. And when you think you are independent, then you think that you need to be selfish. And you need to be guarded. And you need to be defensive and mistrusting. But when you open your eyes, and you notice the light that surrounds you, and the goodness that envelops you always, and you recognize the divine that is in the world around you all the time.
Speaker 1:Well then all of a sudden, independence and striving and toxic pleasure seeking and selfishness and defensiveness and fear become unnecessary for us. Because when you realize that all the things you thought were protecting you have actually been injuring you all along. That is what Paul is talking about when he talks about good news. And so Paul says that through the trespass of one man death reigned in the world. But by the faithfulness of one, life has returned all around us.
Speaker 1:You just have to open your eyes to it. Now, if that's the case, then today, we have to talk about why it's still so hard to live in the light of that story. But first, let's pray together. Lord of light, who has flipped the switch and flooded our world with grace and peace. Would you help us to open our eyes and to see your love that surrounds us always?
Speaker 1:Help us to know that we are welcomed and embraced and loved and wanted. That even when our misplaced instincts cause us to run away from you, you are there near us. Might you heal our imaginations and slowly transform our hearts. Reminding us that our worst moments are never final. And that there is always room to begin again in you.
Speaker 1:Good shepherd of the sheep by whom the lost are sought and found and guided home. Feed us so that we might be full. And heal us that we might be whole. Lead us that we might be in love with you. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray.
Speaker 1:Amen. Okay. Today, we need to talk about bad language baptism and some new rules. But let's start by picking up the last two verses of chapter five and that will lead us directly into chapter six today. So Paul says in 05/20, the law was brought in so that trespass might increase.
Speaker 1:But where sin increased, grace increased all the more. So that just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord. Then chapter six. What then shall we say? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase by no means?
Speaker 1:Now, lots to get through today, but a couple things here already. First, Paul's point with the law, as it was back in chapters two and three, is that following rules doesn't get you anywhere. Now that doesn't mean rules are bad. It just means that the rules were never an end into themselves. For Paul, you don't follow rules to impress God or to get God's attention.
Speaker 1:You follow the rules because you know that you are loved. And that's how you respond to God's grace. But the question is, if you know God's grace is infinite and you realize that even when you do your best, you're still not all that great at following rules. Well then, that should actually help you to see God's grace in the world around you. And this is actually a very Jewish way of thinking about the law.
Speaker 1:Sometimes we have this misconception that in Judaism, they followed the law so that they could earn God's love, that they were very legalistic, and that it's only us Christians who really understand just how gracious God is. But that's not really how ancient Judaism worked. They were very in tune with this idea that God was the one coming to them. However, if that's the case, and if the law could only remind them of their brokenness and point them to God's love, then why not just break all the rules? And break them all like God sorted out.
Speaker 1:Am I right? No, Paul says, by no means. And that sounds kind of poetic. It's very nice, Paul. Heaven forbid.
Speaker 1:This is like Pearl, Paul at his pearl clutching best. Good gracious, no. Except that isn't what Paul says here. What he really says is, Meganoito. And, he actually said this back in chapter three, and I believe we talked about it there.
Speaker 1:But what this really means is something more like, oh, hell no. Now before you get upset with my language here, this phrase is one of Paul's favorites, and it actually comes from a very well known Hebrew phrase, khalilah. And that means literally to be profane and thus forbidden. And so a lot of scholars with a lot of letters behind their names are actually well educated and have actually translated this, oh hell no. Regardless, that sets Paul up for chapter six.
Speaker 1:Because he wants now to explore the relationship between this grace and the way that we live in the world. And as much as Paul can veer sometimes into somewhat exotic territory, This is one of those moments where Paul comes right at what it means to live in the light of the Jesus story. And that has as much meaning for us today as it did for Rome two thousand years ago. So let's see where he goes. And conveniently considering that we just announced last week that we will be doing water baptisms coming at the end of the month, Paul goes right to baptism.
Speaker 1:It's almost like we plan these things. Anyway, verse three. Or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the father, we too may live in a new life. For if we have been united with him in death in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his.
Speaker 1:For we know that our old self was crucified with him so the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin. Because anyone who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again. Death no longer has any mastery over him.
Speaker 1:At death he died, he died to sin once for all. But if the life he lives, he lives to God. In the same way then, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Now, let's pick up a couple of things here at the end and then we'll go back and we'll talk about baptism. As notice here in verse 10 Paul says, the death he died, he died to sin once for all.
Speaker 1:But the life he lives, he lives to God. Now, that's an interesting sentence for at least a couple reasons. First, what does it mean that Jesus died to sin? Second, what does it mean that he died once for all? So let's start with this to sin business.
Speaker 1:Because Paul uses that phrase to talk about us when we are baptized. We die to sin. In verse 11, he says, count yourselves dead to sin. But when Paul uses that language to talk about you and I, it's this idea of leaving our old life behind and moving into something new. And that doesn't seem to be how Paul imagines Jesus.
Speaker 1:In fact, Romans is built around this idea that it is the faithfulness of Jesus that heals the world. And when you read the faithfulness of Jesus in Romans, you can hear the sinlessness of Jesus in that. That's all part of it. Now remember here, the faithfulness of Jesus for Paul is not just the fact that Jesus doesn't sin. It is the fact that Jesus is God being faithful to bring the story of humanity to its completion.
Speaker 1:It's the idea that God never leaves us alone. And so remember that for Paul, not sinning only matters if it leads you to living. And sometimes we slip into this imagination in Christianity that our faith is about avoiding what is wrong. That's not the point. We avoid sin because what is wrong is what takes us away from our purpose.
Speaker 1:And avoiding sin is not an end in itself. If it was, then Christianity would just be about retreating from the world and disappearing to a mountaintop. But Christianity is about this purposeful engagement with the world. On earth as it is in heaven, one might say. And so remember this.
Speaker 1:Your faithfulness can only ever be about the life that you live, not the one that you avoid. And so when Paul says that Jesus died to sin, his implication here isn't that Jesus stopped sinning one day. What he's saying is that Jesus died in the same way we all do. He died because sin is created a broken world filled with death. To get technical here, the phrase is in the dative case in Greek, and it could be even translated he died in sin or within sin.
Speaker 1:But we don't translate it that way because that could really confuse things and make it sound like Jesus was a dirty, rotten sinner and that complicates complicates our our theology. Theology. But the idea here is that sin is the location of death. It's the agent of death. It's what causes all of the hurt and pain in the world.
Speaker 1:And Jesus being human wasn't immune from the effects of our brokenness anymore than we are. In other words, what Paul is saying is that Jesus feels all of the hurt and the violence and the death of this world the same way that we do and it kills him. But the big surprise here is that death doesn't end him. And if that's the case, well then maybe death isn't as powerful as we thought it was. And that leads to Paul's next phrase that Jesus died to sin once for all.
Speaker 1:And if you are reading through quickly in English, you might come away with the idea that Jesus died once and for all. And that's sort of an English idiom for finally or conclusively, but that's not exactly what it says here. What it says is that Jesus died once for all. And once again, this is Paul at his most ferociously optimistic. At least I think that's the phrase I made up last week.
Speaker 1:Because Paul's default posture is that Jesus has fixed everything. And if sin is what brings death, then the fact that God has brought life out of death means that sin, and death, and hurt, and pain, and injury are defeated completely. And this is what he's talking about when he says that death no longer has mastery. You see the word mastery here is actually a form of the word Lord. So it's Curion which is a form of the word Curios which is the word behind every time that Jesus is called Lord in the gospels.
Speaker 1:And what Paul is saying is that death has been the Lord of the world. And death has dominion. It runs roughshod over us. It rules over all of us because we all die. But if someone were die and not stay dead, well then maybe death was never as powerful as we thought.
Speaker 1:Think of it this way. Remember that bully from your elementary school days? And how terrified everyone was of that one kid with the rat tail and the starter jacket, Jake? Seriously, kid was mean. Remember how scared everyone was of him until finally someone, one person stood up to him and he backed down.
Speaker 1:And then all of a sudden, everything changed. Because no one was afraid in the same way anymore. That's kind of what Paul has in mind here. And look, death is still a bully. And death is still mean and death still hurts and it's painful, but we know that death isn't what it claims to be anymore.
Speaker 1:And I'm not gonna pretend to know what life after death looks like. I tend to be pretty agnostic about that. Because I think that we can only talk about that using language about this and that necessarily fall short. But what I trust from Paul is that even in death, God will do good for us. And because Jesus died, death will never get the best of us.
Speaker 1:No. That's the story. Then we can go back and look at how Paul talks about baptism as this image of new life. And for that, we have to go back to verse two where Paul says, we are those who have died to sin. So how can we live in it any longer?
Speaker 1:Or don't you know that all of us who are baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead for the glory of the father, we too may live in a new life. And this is how Paul thinks about the metaphor of baptism. You go down under the water to symbolize Christ's death, and then you come up out of the water to symbolize resurrection. And we also have to remember here that baptism, like the Eucharist, are not just symbols for us.
Speaker 1:We believe that in some mystical sense, God actually meets us in these rituals. Technically, the term here is that these are a means of grace, but what that means is simply that somehow we trust that God is present to us in bread and grape and table and water. And that's actually a really beautiful part of the Christian story. That we believe the divine is somehow most present through the most ordinary things in our lives. But I wanna read this passage again.
Speaker 1:And this time, I wanna turn to the message translation by Eugene Peterson. And at first, it's gonna sound like Peterson is playing a little fast and loose with the language here. He's gonna introduce some ideas that don't seem to be there when Paul speaks. But he's doing something really important here that I wanna show you. So here's the passage in the message.
Speaker 1:If we've left the country where sin is sovereign, how can we still live in our old house there? Or didn't you realize that we packed up and left there for good? That is what happened in baptism. We went under the water. We left the old country of sin behind.
Speaker 1:And when we came up out of the water, we entered into this new country of grace, and a new life in a new land. Now, when you compare this with other English translations, the first question that jumps out is, where did all of this leaving one country and building a new house and entering a new land language come from? And it's nice and it's poetic, but what does any of this have to do with what Paul said? And at a strictly literal level, that's a really good question. But what that question misses is the fact that Paul rarely writes at one level.
Speaker 1:So no, he doesn't call sin the country and no, he doesn't talk about moving into a new home and a new land. But all through this chapter, Paul has been dropping in these words that have dual meanings for his audience. So this is words like mastery, which we talked about already. And this is words like slavery. This is words like obedience.
Speaker 1:This is words like allegiance and control and being ruled over by sin. And because we live in a democracy where our individual identity is important to us and it's protected for us, what happens is we tend to read those images in a spiritual context. And that's good. Paul means them in a spiritual way, but at the same time, what he's doing is he's building under the surface a metaphor that's based on the Roman Empire that surrounds his audience. You see in Rome, you were subject to Rome.
Speaker 1:In Rome, you offered your allegiance to Rome. In Rome, you had no option but to submit to the lordship and mastery of Caesar. And now Paul says, just imagine if you could leave all of that behind. So try to imagine moving to a new country with a new culture and a new currency and a new language and starting all over again from scratch. That's the image that underlies all of this language that Paul has woven throughout this chapter.
Speaker 1:And no, Paul doesn't come right out and say it the way that the message does, but he has very deliberately chosen this language for this audience in Rome who knows what it means to live under an oppressive regime. And this is actually where literal translations really do us a disservice. Because sometimes literal struggles to capture the real meaning and intent that would have been read by the audience in the moment. And so what Peterson has done here by paraphrasing this for us ironically, is give us a much better representation of what the Romans would have heard. And here's why that's important.
Speaker 1:Because without the subtext, Paul can come off as a little harsh here. Like don't you know you were baptized into Christ and you died with him so you could live with him? You better not mess that up. When in reality, what Paul is saying is something more like, guys, remember, you don't live where you used to anymore. And the old rules don't apply anymore.
Speaker 1:In fact, Paul will even go on to say, don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey. Whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads you to righteousness. And this again is another image that's hard for us in a lot of ways because we don't really understand the pervasity of slavery the way that the Romans did. You have to realize that historical estimates place the population of slaves or former slaves at between one half and two thirds of the entire Roman Empire. And what that means is that chances are at least half of the people in the room reading this letter would have actually been the property of someone else at some point.
Speaker 1:And they literally had no choice in how they lived. And what Paul is saying here is that you now perhaps for the very first time in your story, get to choose your own adventure. Because you see for Paul, when all you know is selfishness and greed and violence and hate, then you have no choice but to live out of that story. And when all you know is hurt and injury and pain, then you have no recourse but to try to insulate and protect yourself with walls around you. And when the only solidarity that you have experienced is us versus them, and scapegoating the outsider, and when love for you has become defined by those you reject, then you find yourself with no option but to continue that story in your life.
Speaker 1:Because that's what sin does to us. It makes us believe that this is all there is. And that violence convinces us that only violence can save us. And greed convinces us that only more will make us happy. Pain convinces us that the safest thing we can do with withdraw into ourselves and close ourselves off.
Speaker 1:But it's not true. And when the lights come on, and you open your eyes and you see the world for what it really is, The way that Paul sees it filled with love and grace even in the midst of our brokenness. Well then in that sense for Paul, you really don't have a choice to go back either. Because once you actually see grace at work in the world, things are simply fundamentally different for you. And yes, of course you slip up and you fall back into old habits and in weak moments you revert to what was.
Speaker 1:But the thing is, if grace is a story that always affirms the best of you. And once your eyes are open to that story, not even your worst moments can drag you back down into who you used to be. Because Paul's whole point here is that once you see it you can't unsee it. And that's what baptism is about for Paul. That we are buried and raised with Christ into a new world where everything looks completely different.
Speaker 1:It's not that you have it all together, and it's not that you have your theology locked down. It's not that you magically stop being the person that you were. It's that Jesus allows us to change the way we narrate our own story. And so my prayer for you today, no matter how you have found yourself here exploring this Jesus story with us, is that you might open your eyes to a new world filled with light and love. And know that that is what you are surrounded by always.
Speaker 1:Because once you do that, you will never see yourself again as alone and afraid and forced to live out of old stories. Because once you see it, you can't unsee it. Let's pray. God, would you help us in whatever way we need your help To open our eyes to the world that surrounds us. To let go of our illusions that tell us that violence is what saves us and that greed is what makes us happy, that closing ourselves off and shutting ourselves down is the way to safety.
Speaker 1:Instead, might we see the world for what it really is. The creation of a good and generous God who has filled this space with light and love that surrounds us even when we keep our eyes closed. God might we have the courage to begin to open our eyes. And even if the light hurts for a moment, might we trust that once we see it we will never be able to go back. Because when we slip into old habits, when we fall into old patterns, those moments don't define us anymore.
Speaker 1:It is you who narrates our story, and shapes the meaning of our lives and invites us to continue to become the people you know we can be. And so Holy Spirit, be in and through us inviting us to see the world as it really is. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.