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Paul says, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were buried, therefore, with Him by baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” You may be seated.
In the name of Jesus, Amen. Dear saints, dear baptized, Paul’s preaching in this text, Romans 6, completely turns us around. Or maybe we could say it like this: Paul’s preaching about, in this text, about how baptism completely turns us around. It completely changes us. It gives us a totally new life. So that it’s no surprise to us that when Martin Luther is asked, for example, about the significance of baptism, what does baptism mean for our everyday living, our day-to-day life, he had straight for this text, Romans 6, what does such baptizing with water indicate? It indicates that the old Adam in us should, by daily contrition and repentance, be drowned and die with all sins and evil desires, and that a new man should daily emerge and arise to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.
Where is this written? St. Paul writes in Romans chapter 6, “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead to the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.” We want to meditate on that this morning.
Now, Paul is in this text and in the surrounding verses making a quite beautiful and even somewhat sophisticated theological argument, but before, I think before we can see what he’s saying, we have to do a little bit of work. Before we get to the good news, we have to get to some bad news. And the bad news is this: you are dying. Now, you should know this; I mean, this should not be a surprise to you. There’s one thing that we know about life is that it will come to an end. Unless Jesus comes first, all of us, every single one of us will have a last breath.
Now, we don’t know when it will be, if it will be today or tomorrow or sometime further down the road, but we know that we are dying, that we are mortal. And yet, even though we know this, we pretend like it’s not true. I think we’re all bad at this, but our culture is particularly bad at this. We hide from death as much as we can, or we hide death from us as much as we can, and this is not good because there’s some plain old wisdom in simply facing up to our own mortality.
Moses tells us, Psalm 90 verse 12, he prays to the Lord, “Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” And if there’s nothing else from that text, it is to know that your days are numbered. They don’t go on forever. The old existentialist philosophers had a category for us; now I don’t understand everything that they were talking about, but they talked about this, on being towards death. That is, this understanding that all of us are headed towards death, and every day is a day closer, and we have to keep that in our own minds.
Now this understanding, this reflecting on our own mortality, is going to push us in two directions, probably at the same time. First and helpfully, it helps us prioritize things in this life. When we meditate on how our time is a limited commodity, then it forces us into thinking how we ought to spend it rightly. Now I’ve been to enough deathbeds to see this happen. I’ve never, I’ve never heard anyone say, “Pastor, I wish that I would have just spent more of my life at work and away from my home.” Or I’ve never heard anyone say, “I’m glad that I never made amends with my brother” or whatever.
In other words, when it comes to the end, when we realize that there’s a deadline, I mean literally a deadline, it forces us to prioritize things, and it motivates us, at least for the Christian, it ought to motivate us to love God and to love our neighbor. And even for those who are not Christian, thinking about their own death is pressure to get it together. Now that’s probably a good direction, but there’s also a dangerous direction or a hard direction that reflecting on our own death takes us, and that’s the realization that all of us are finite, that we are small, and that we are in a battle that we cannot win.
One day the grave will claim us, and it doesn’t matter, I mean it doesn’t matter how good you are, how healthy you are, it doesn’t matter how rich you are, how connected or powerful you are; the grave will claim us. And this is pretty bleak, I think, this reflection. And perhaps, because every one of us, believer and unbeliever alike, has this deep down realization that we are not supposed to die, that we were never meant for death, that death is an invasion in the human condition. There is a very deep and profound disconnect in every human heart as it wrestles with the fact that death is coming for us and for everyone that we love.
Now, we as Christians know the source of this discontent. Even though we are told over and over by our own culture that death is natural, that death is part of life, we hear Elton John singing about the circle of life in the Disney movie and so much other stuff, we know better. We know that God created Adam and Eve in the garden to live forever with Him. We know that they were never supposed to die. Even as God gave the warning, “On the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.” We know that we also were never meant to die, but that death is what we deserve because of our sin.
A few verses after the text in Romans 6, we read from St. Paul, “The wages of sin is death,” so that we know why we’re dying. It’s not because it’s a natural part of life; we’re dying because we’re sinners. And so our death is a judgment, and our death brings us to the judgment of God. Hebrews 9 says this, “It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes the judgment.” Now that’s a fearful verse, but important, and important for us to know this, not only I think about ourselves, but it’s also very good for us to know this about our neighbors, about the people that we work with, and the people that we talk with.
Because all of us are in the same boat. We are all dying, and we are all in one way or another wrestling with our own mortality. We are all, all of us, all of humanity, is headed towards death, and this is where Paul comes; this is what it means to be ready for Saint Paul, because once we realize that, we realize how wild what he preaches is. This is where Paul comes in with this incredible sermon in Romans 6, because while all of humanity, you and I and everyone else in the world, are all marching towards death, all of us have death in our future, Paul comes along and says to the Christian that you are different.
That you, in fact, have already died. That instead of looking forward to death, you look back to death. “Do you not know,” Paul says, “that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?” Listen, nothing else from the sermon, listen to this. You who have been baptized have already died. You have already been buried, and you are already up out of the grave with Christ. Now this is a hard thing to imagine, this text, but perhaps it’s helpful, so let’s give it a try.
I want you to think of yourself as one of the thieves being crucified next to Jesus. Or maybe just, you could put a fourth cross up there and imagine yourself on it. And you are there to die with Him, and you do. Jesus dies, and you die. And as they come to peel the body of Jesus off of the cross, they take your body down too, and they lay you both on the ground, and they cover your bodies, and they wrap you in a cloth; and a few men come and pick up Jesus by the ankle and by the shoulders, and a few others come and pick you up too by the ankles and by the shoulders, and they are carrying you.
And they carry you down the road and down the path and into a garden, and they duck and carry you inside a little tomb carved in the side of the hill. It’s cold; it’s cold, it’s dark, and they lay Jesus down, and they lay you down next to Him, and they roll the stone over the grave. You are buried with Christ. But then on the third day, you are alive. You turn and you look and see, and there Jesus is alive as well, and He’s smiling at you. And He says, “Let’s get out of here,” and He helps you up, and He walks out of the grave with you. That’s your baptism.
“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were buried, therefore, with Him by baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life,” which means that you are no longer walking towards the grave, you are walking away from it. You are no longer walking towards the tomb; you are walking away from it. Not towards death, but from death. You have already died with Christ, and now you live with Him, and that, dear saints, changes absolutely everything.
It changes, for one thing, how you look at death. I mean, there’s no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For us, to live is Christ, to die is gain. Our physical death, the day that we breathe our last and our heart stops beating, in fact, is what the Bible calls not dying, but passing from death to life. And it is one step closer for you to the full joy of the resurrection. That changes, not only how you look at death, but also how you look at life.
Now, that’s what Paul’s going to preach, and he picks up this idea in the text. He says, “If you are a slave, you are…” and here’s the idea. If you are a slave, you’re required to serve your master unless you’re dead. So imagine it like this: imagine that you’re the slave of a tyrant, and he sends you to go get some water, right? So you’re going down the road to the well to get some water to bring it home, and on the way down the road carrying this bucket, you die.
And there you are laying on the side of the grave, and your master’s back home, and he’s getting thirsty, and he’s saying, “What is taking him so long?” And so he goes to check, and he finds you dead on the side of the road, and he says, “Get up! Get me some water!” You know what? You don’t have to. You’re dead. That master is going to be very disappointed because if you die you are free from his tyranny. Now that’s the picture that Paul is painting for us. We were born slaves to sin, but we’ve died. We’re no longer under the tyranny of sin, no longer under the dominion of sin.
We owe nothing to sin. We are dead to it and alive to Christ. Listen to the verse: “We know that our old self was crucified with Him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For the one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with Him. We know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over Him. For the death He died, He died to sin once for all, but the life He lives, He lives to God, so you also, you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”
Do you see it? You don’t owe sin anything. You don’t owe death anything. You don’t owe the devil anything. You dear saints are baptized and that changes everything. You no longer belong to sin; you no longer belong to death; you belong to Jesus Christ who has rescued you and forgiven your sins. You belong to eternal life. You’re baptized. Amen.
And the peace of God that passes all understanding, keep your hearts and your minds through Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.