"You also must consider yourselves dead to sin, and alive to God in Christ Jesus." Paul offers this summary statement to all the baptized. He does so in response to his own rhetorical question: If its all about grace, why don’t we all just sin constantly so that grace might pile up like autumn leaves?
It’s a good question and one, no doubt, many readers of this letter might pose. Paul’s understanding of the impact of Christ is quite astounding. With reference to Adam, Paul says that one man’s trespass led to the condemnation of all. But by one man’s righteousness, there is acquittal and life for all people. That is grace. Christ’s death and resurrection brings about what Paul calls elsewhere “The New Creation”. And he means this literally. God has started over. Everything is redeemed in Christ, including all of us. Baptism is the sign and signifier of this reality.
But what does that mean? What does baptism really mean? If it is Jesus’ death and resurrection that redeems each of us, why be baptized? For that matter, as Paul’s rhetorical question suggests, why not say, “thanks God” and live whatever kind of life we want?
To answer these very legitimate questions we will reflect on another event that is happening later today at the High School. Graduation. For as long as there has been organized education there have been graduations. Ceremony. Pageantry. Gowns and caps. Pomp and Circumstance relentlessly filling the air until the woodwind players lips feel like they will fall off. In my day we graduated from High School and college and graduate school if one chose to go there. My children have added to that list by first graduating from pre-school and, for Jamie anyway, “graduating” from fifth grade.
Why do we have graduation ceremonies? Are they necessary? Is the ceremony, in fact, when graduation happens? Really, no. Our high school graduates “graduated” from high school at that point when the registrar could affirm that they had successfully received credit in any and all necessary courses in the School’s curriculum. The students “graduate” in a moment, not of pomp and circumstance, but of paperwork.
So what becomes of the student who walks out of the school on the last day, gets in his car, and drives to California? Is he a high school graduate? Having spurned the celebration, the pomp, the degree handed out in the nice folder? Of course he is. And if he has left a forwarding address he should receive his diploma in the mail. But what if he doesn’t? Is he still a graduate? As long as the school retains his transcript then, yes, he is a graduate and the school can and should attest to that as needed.
But this is not what happens, generally, is it? Students do not leave the school on their last day and drive off into the sunset. They hang around for the graduation ceremony. They borrow the cap and gown. The file into the stadium. They hear their name called and receive their diploma from a school official while proud parents cheer and weep and check their watches.
Although not the “moment” of graduation, the ceremony is immensely important. Without such a ceremony, there is no public acknowledgement. There is no ritual. There is no visible, tangible sign of accomplishment. And what is more, the graduation ceremony is a communal event. We might imagine a different scenario wherein students went into a darkened room, one and a time, to receive a diploma and a handshake. But we do not do it that way, because graduation---education---is a shared act of a community. It is a celebration that makes a public display of a moment which precedes it.
And so it is with baptism. According to Paul, it was Christ’s death and resurrection that made life possible for all men. According to Paul, it was God’s act in Jesus Christ that brought reconciliation to all things and creatures. This is the “moment” of redemption. But my analogy to high school graduation is deficient in one very important way. Whereas graduation from High School signifies the accomplishment of the individual, the hard work and effort that has earned the graduate this moment in the hot sun, our redemption in Christ is accomplished for us without effort on our part. In Paul’s thinking, we are all hopelessly lost in Adam’s first sin and only God can bring us back from the brink. So in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting our sins against us, and making us new creatures in Christ. This is grace. Pure, unmerited grace.
So when the question is raised, “so if there is grace why don’t we sin all the time since grace will cover it?” To Paul is a predictable but misguided question. Why, Paul says, if you are dead to sin would you continue to dwell in it? Or may I risk extending high school analogy close to the breaking point.
I have met very few high school graduates who, upon graduation, intend to return to ninth grade the next fall. Why return to that which you have passed through? Instead, the graduate moves into a new life---maybe college, maybe a job, maybe a family, maybe all three. But having completed one thing, we move on to the next.
Paul says, in effect, we have graduated from sin. But unlike all of the late night study sessions that have gotten us through high school, we have graduated by virtue of Jesus’ death and resurrection. And having graduated from sin, we move on into grace.
How then shall we live as graduates from sin? With gratitude. With thanksgiving. Paul’s message to the Romans—really to all to whom he wrote—is that once a person comes to understand the gift of God’s grace in Jesus Christ, they cannot help but live lives of grateful obedience. This gratitude is displayed in many ways. We display it in the way we treat others, in the ways we practice our spiritual lives, by how we are good stewards of ourselves and the natural order. And because we are still of the world, although not bound to sin, we will rub elbows with sin and rub each other the wrong way. So we demonstrate our gratitude to God by the way in which we admit our fault and freely forgive one another. This is how sin loses its power in the world. Through confession and forgiveness. We build the kingdom of God of such grateful lives.
So for Jill, Tate, Erin, and Kelsey—this is graduation day. Some of our number, like Joy, have already graduated from their higher academic institutions. This is the day they publically recognize a prior truth—that they went the distance and met the requirements and may now be known as high school graduates.
This is Matthew Scott’s graduation day, as well. Today we celebrate with his family that his redemption has been secured by God’s grace in Jesus Christ. We proclaim that he is washed free of sin and its power in his life and in the life of the world. His baptism is the outward seal of an inner and prior reality---that he is, by the grace alone, a blessed child of God.
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