Dying to Live
Dying to Live by Rev. L. John Gable
April 1, 2018
We gather once again with Christians around the globe to hear the glorious Good News of the Easter day: Christ is risen! He who was dead is alive and He is alive forever more! Alleluia! Let nothing ever distract or discourage us from hearing and believing that Good News!
Yet, in as much as we may celebrate this life-changing, life-transforming Good News, still the cynic in us says, “So what? What difference does that event from long ago really make in the way I live my life today?” Perhaps some of us are asking that very question here this morning, and if you are, you need to know you are in very good company. This is the very question the Apostle Paul asks in our Scripture lesson this morning, albeit in a slightly different way.
Let me make a side note here. My message this morning is going to be significantly different than many of the sermons that will be preached on this Easter morning in other pulpits around the globe. Of course, all of those messages will be based on the Good News of the resurrection, but I will venture to guess that the vast majority of them will take their cue from today’s date: April 1, April fool’s day! I even considered going there myself. What a great spin on the resurrection! It is true, no fooling! But instead we are going to stay with our study of Romans and it is no coincidence that our lesson from Romans 6 speaks plainly about the new life we are invited to live by faith in Christ by His death and resurrection.
Paul asks the “So what?” question in this way. “What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?” Absolutely NOT, is the answer he gives, but he does so in a rather unusual way. Rather than lecturing his readers, us included, about the inappropriateness of our sinful rebellion against God, he takes a different approach by talking instead about the newness of life we are able to live by participating with Him in His death. Paul writes, “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.” Paul makes the radical claim that when we come to faith in Jesus we actually die to ourselves and enter in to new life through Him. Just as Jesus died and was raised again to new life on that first Easter morning, so we too have died to sin in our old selves and have been raised to new life. As we put our faith in Christ we become new creations!
Friends, this is very basic Christian teaching. By His death and resurrection Jesus secures the way of salvation for all who put their trust in Him. We believe that in His death and resurrection Jesus has done something for us which we cannot do for ourselves; namely He has restored us into a right relationship with God by paying the penalty for our sins. Formerly we were living our lives in sinful disobedience, at best trying to earn God’s approval and at worst denying even His mere existence, but in Christ God has opened the door for the forgiveness of our sins and offered us the free gift of salvation. In short, Christ died so that we could live!
Beautiful words! Great theology! But again we ask, “So what?” What difference does that make in the way I live my life?
Pastor and author Fredrick Buechner writes, “If someone wants proof that Christ is alive and that this is so, all I can say in honesty is that I have none to give. No preacher can prove it, no book, not even the Bible. It defies logic and reason, and it breaks the laws of nature as we understand them…But if we have no proof that He is alive, we do have many witnesses, two thousand years of them, and yet we have more than that. We have the witness of our own lives, or at least of certain deep moments when, if only for a minute or two, we have seen in the breaking of bread, for instance, not just the breaking of bread, but something broken for us, a giveness, a source of life. The tale that Christianity tells is the tale of a sinless life given away, in love, to make up in some unfathomable way for all that we mean by our sin, to give us life in place of all that we mean by death. The greatest miracle that Christianity has to proclaim is that the love that suffered agonies on that hill outside the city walls was the love of God Himself, the love of God for His creation, which is a love that has no limit, not even the limit of death. And for us the meaning of that love is that we can now raise our own shrill voices from the hills of our own suffering and say some such words as these:
“There is little that we can point to in our lives as deserving anything but God’s wrath. Our best moments have been mostly grotesque parodies. Our best loves have been almost always blurred with selfishness and deceit. But there is something to which we can point. Not anything that we ever did or were, but something that was done for us by another. Not our own lives, but the life of one who died on our behalf, and yet is still alive. This is our only glory and our only hope.” Friends, let me say this as plainly as I can: Christ died to free us from our sin. So as we put our trust in Him we also die to sin and are set free to live for Him.
This is not only great theology; it is great guidance. It is not only good in theory; it is good in practice as well. It is not only a pleasant thought we can nod our heads in agreement with; it is the new way in which we are to live our lives. It is not only Good News for this day, but for every day, for a lifetime, for eternity. He died so that we might live.
In the late 1960’s James Reddick, a Seattle dentist and experienced mountaineer, took his 12 year old daughter and 11 year old son on a hike up the steep slopes of Mount Rainer, a volcanic peak that towers above the city. It was Memorial Day weekend, a time late enough on the calendar for hikers not to be overly concerned about winter storms. But this family mountaineering adventure became a nightmare.
A sudden blinding snowstorm with hurricane-force winds trapped Reddick and his children against the side of the mountain. Their visibility gone and their body temperatures dropping, Reddick began digging furiously with his aluminum mess kit, carving out a kind of cave in the snow.
He put David and Sharon into their sleeping bags and zipped them up, then tried to figure out a way to seal up the entrance to the shelter. As Tim Stafford tells the story, Reddick fixed a tarp across the opening, but the wind kept blowing it away. Finally Reddick lay down across the opening, using his own body weight to secure the tarp.
Forty-eight hours passed before rescuers saw the edge of a backpack protruding from the snow. Digging deep into the mound they uncovered two children, warm and alive. But James Reddick didn’t make it. In the words of one of the rescuers, he had “taken the cold spot”, using his own back as one of the walls of the protective shelter. He died so that his children could live, just as Christ died so that we could have new life.
This then is the answer to the “So what” question. The Apostle Paul identifies those who believe in Christ with Christ Himself in His death and resurrection. As we put our trust in Christ we die to ourselves and our sinful nature and are raised again to new life and to a new way of living.
Paul uses the sacrament of baptism to illustrate this act of dying and rising in Christ. Admittedly it doesn’t have the same impact for those of us in traditions in which we baptize infants by sprinkling them with water, so picture full immersion baptism. Twice I have had the opportunity to visit the Jordan River in the Holy Land and both times stood in the water as I witnessed individuals being baptized. It is a holy sight at a holy site! But I found one tradition particularly interesting and compelling. The adults who were stepping in to the Jordan River to be baptized were all wearing long white linen gowns. I asked our tour guide about the meaning of this tradition and he told me that these new initiates would then take their baptismal gown and hang them out to dry without washing them in order to save them for a later date, for the day of their burial; their baptismal gowns were also their burial shrouds. In the waters of baptism they were going down in death and then being raised again to new life. So Paul writes, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in the newness of life…So you must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”
Friends, this is the promise of the Easter Day. Not just that Jesus died and rose again, but that the same can happen for you and me, not just on our final day, but today, right now! As we die to ourselves we can live in the newness of life. Imagine that, being able to die without having to die so that we can start over and live a new life.
As a young man Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian author of great works like Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, was arrested for belonging to a group of political subversives judged to be treasonous by Tzar Nicholas I. In order to impress upon these young radicals the gravity of their errors he staged a mock execution. After spending eight months in jail awaiting sentence, suddenly on a frigid morning three days before Christmas, the conspirators were ordered out of their cells and carted to a public square where to their horror an official read the sentence condemning them to death. They had no time to absorb the news and no possibility of appeal. A firing squad stood at the ready. Bareheaded, robed in white burial shrouds, hands tightly bound behind them, they were paraded through the snow before a gawking crowd. Dostoevsky recounts hearing the drums roll and the officer telling the soldiers to ready their guns, then he heard the order to fire. He heard the shots ring out in the air, but he felt nothing. Miraculously, he was still alive. The guns had been loaded with blanks. The Tsar had brought these young revolutionaries to the brink of death only to let them know through this emotionally draining experience that their lives had been spared. In those last few moments before the gunfire rang out, in the moments that he thought were his last, Dostoevsky said that his senses were intensely receptive to the hundreds of sounds and smells around him. For the first time, he recounts, he was really alive to God’s world. Understandably he never recovered from that experience; it was life-changing for him. Upon reflection, he writes that he considered this to be one of the most blessed things that ever happened to him. He had gone through the whole process of dying without having died. He had experienced a virtual resurrection. Back in the prison, he walked up and down the cell block, singing in sheer joy of having his life restored. He wrote a letter to his brother saying, “Never has there seethed in me such an abundant and healthy kind of spiritual life as now…Now my life will change, I shall be born again in a new form.” To mark that transformation he folded away the burial shroud he was wearing to keep as a memento. (Phillip Yancey, Soul Survivor)
Friends, the answer to the “So what?” question we ask today is this. Because of Jesus’ death and resurrection we too are offered new life without having to die to receive it. Because He lives we shall live also. This is the Good News of the Easter day: “Just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in the newness of life.”
Thanks be to God! Amen.