Romans 6:1b-11
Easter Vigil - Years A, B, C
Proper 7 (12) - Year A
How many of us get stuck between the way we used to be or wish we weren't and the way we expect to be or wish we were? This stuckness of the moment can be an eternity.
The moment between one breath and the next makes a difference. Take an intentional deep breath or use a baby's dive reflex - by the time we surface or are lifted out, the next breath is being breathed in the land of new heaven and new earth. Baptism, that moment between breaths. Remember your baptism and be glad.
When we have passed through the last temptation, know ourselves to be nailed to a cross, we have committed ourselves to trusting G*D, come what may, even death. Death will never again have the last word and so we can see clearly now. Remember your crucifixion and be glad.
Do you have before and after pictures of yourself? Before a baptism? After a crucifixion? Try sketching one and putting it on your refrigerator door.
Are you willing to click the "reply" button here and let us know about your moment between sin and grace or what it is like for you to walk in the resurrection of newness of life? I hope you are so willing and able to follow through on it.
When we honor all these before, during, and after times, in ourselves and in others, we find ourselves talking in new ways - G*D language of oneness and pluralism (together) comes alive. Religious multi-lingualism is a delight.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2002/june2002.html
If we live with Christ (symbolize this with Baptism) we will live into his life which includes a willingness to take what comes as a consequence of living into fullness.
So are we going to live a life or are we going to die a death? If we are dealing with a living Jesus the focus needs to be on his life. His death is seen in its light, not the other way around.
So what does baptism mean to you? To those around you? Does it encourage you, day by day, to walk in newness of life? David Lawson, two bishops ago here, used to emphasize knowing our baptismal date and to use that information as part of our spiritual growth. My sense of clergy response was seeing a good technique we could use to deflect the question from themselves by shaming congregations. "Why you don't even know when you were baptized." I suspect it didn't have the power it might have because, for whatever reason, a connection was never made between the act of baptism and the life of a baptized person.
Baptism is not just a personal growth technique, but entering into a community that eggs one another on to fully live, riskily live, live past fear of death.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2005/june2005.html
Verse 5. The word we translate as "united" comes from symphytos , meaning "planted with". The New Interpreter's Study Bible suggests this is "a horticultural metaphor indicating that sanctification is a process of growth."
How many plantings has it taken you to move on from death to as much resurrection as you currently have. As you have matured in this process, do you find that it takes fewer deaths to move to the next plateau of resurrection?
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2005/june2005.html
How do I arrive at a place of "fearing not"? A significant view of this is the magical concept of correspondence - if I am like something else, then I am that something else. This is similar to much of the self-help therapies. In each case it is important to identify the specific correspondence and run with that one little thing in expectation that it will grow into a fuller identity or protection.
"It is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master." In what way does this happen without a disciple becoming a teacher or a slave, a master? Is this perpetual adolescence?
"Everyone who therefore acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven." What are the limits of acknowledgement? Is it naming only? How much emulation or becoming of Christ in one's own setting is needed for acknowledgement?
"For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his." What death is a death like his? Is it the form of crucifixion? Is it looking beyond the current principalities and powers until they unite to legally murder? And what happens if you live like him, rather than die like him?
"Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac." When did Sarah stop laughing? What died in her? What fear rose up? It is one thing to begin to move from disciple to teacher, slave to master, and quite another to move from teacher to disciple and master to slave. Again we see limits of external correspondence.
- - -
finding our fearless place
pushes us beyond the surface
where crosses around necks
are protective amulets
saving one from so living
that a cross come to our back
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html
While appreciating plays of concepts on several different levels, this passage is particularly dense. Issues of death and resurrection, baptism and sin weave and interweave until it may sound as if the only bottom-line available is that we are baptized into death rather than into resurrection and that sin needs to die rather than be baptized and resurrected.
Consider Hagar whose vision of a well may be her equivalent of baptism and how it leads to life in a new land or an entering into a new country of unexpected grace (using some of Eugene Peterson's imagery). Consider the disciples invited to live so openly and beyond their tribal past that the derision of the cross would become inevitable for them.
Certainly there are those who arrive at this position and understand that their beginning spot was focusing on their sin in order to do it in, to overcome it, to reduce it to naught. Their driver is death of sin. Baptism comes as a flood of grace.
Certainly there are those who arrive at this position and understand that their beginning spot was focusing on new life where none seemed possible - to revision the world, to undergird it, to bring forth new relationships. Their driver is resurrection past the sin of others. Baptism comes as a crack of grace in a cosmic egg (reference to an interesting book by Joseph Chilton Pearce).
Do we need to set sister against sister against brother against parent against all others to chose one of these? Will the "end of death-as-the-end" have to play itself out once again as Christianity comes to another opportunity for definition?
So what do we do in the midst of such language that seems lawyerly enough open more loopholes than it closes?
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2008_06_01_archive.html
Oh, right. To be born is to die. Belovedness does not exempt us from being buried, becoming as nothing. Belovedness does not promise surprises will only be appreciated.
If there is something worth pursuing, it is going to be something larger than one life can give to it.
The projects we sign on to don’t stop with asking our all. They need more than our all, they need all our all and more. In case that wasn’t clear, they need our corporate all as well as our personal all. So what community we are joined with does make a difference. How inclusive will that community be will be a measure of the worth of the endeavor. A narrow slice of life, like preaching to the choir, has a certain amount of appeal, but if that is all there is we find it soon grows thin.
To claim our death is to consider ourselves dead to narrowness and alive to the surprises that “more” brings. It’s challenges enliven us. This sort of death is worth diving into to see where we surface later. Blessings on your dive.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2014/04/romans-63-11-vigil.html
The value of the cross is not that Jesus died on one in order to save you or anyone, but that it might indicate for us the investment in life we are called to, baptized into—a fullness of life that does not swerve for fear of death. The image of a cross here is not limited to Jesus, but beckons each of us to face death, decide it doesn’t make all that much difference, and proceed to make a larger difference than first imagined.
In this way the cross is not some token of atonement, but a sign of grace.
It is always a little iffy to try to follow Paul’s legal mind too closely. He goes around enough barns to confuse us into a smaller than larger picture of life. Suffice it to say here that grace does abound, regardless of any sin measurement. Asking about this or that kind of sin is simply beside the point. Asking about bounding grace leaping through the various gates of life will be quite sufficient for a vocation or hobby.
I’m not sure where this line came from, but it is worth passing on:
From the church of perpetual astonishment...we shall not cease to be amused.
Use it in good health.