SPEAKER_00: Well, we've been working our way through Romans.
SPEAKER_00: This is a fantastic book.
SPEAKER_00: And as you may recall, last week we talked about the differing of the powers of sin and the powers of God.
SPEAKER_00: The powers of sin and death as they compare to the powers of the Spirit and grace.
SPEAKER_00: And we saw that these are asymmetrical powers.
SPEAKER_00: That the powers of grace, the powers of the Spirit, are disproportionately greater than the powers of sin.
SPEAKER_00: That is, that whatever sin does and damages the consequences of sin in our life, that whenever grace comes in, it's not as though grace is just salvaging, you know, what sin has destroyed.
SPEAKER_00: But actually, Paul gives us a picture that with grace there's a betterment.
SPEAKER_00: I use the example of if sin knocks you back one, when grace comes in, grace knocks you up three.
SPEAKER_00: That every time sin comes in, there's the that uh it takes away, and when grace comes in, there's a betterment.
SPEAKER_00: Uh it is to say that we get further by grace than we could have ever gotten by ourselves alone without it.
SPEAKER_00: And so, as Paul says, right, wherever sin abounds, grace superabounds.
SPEAKER_00: Well, if you listen to that sermon, the logic of it, you're probably sitting exactly where Paul was assuming the church in Rome was sitting in his point of the argument.
SPEAKER_00: Because the very next verse that we get in Romans chapter six is trying to unpack what seems to be an enormous theological hole that Paul just dug for himself.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you go around telling people, right, wherever sin abounds, grace superabounds, right, that sin knocks you back one, grace knocks you up seven.
SPEAKER_00: If you go around talking like this, it seems like you're digging quite a big hole.
SPEAKER_00: And so the first thing, right, that Paul says, anticipating, you know, how this logic is bearing on the church at Rome, he says, Well, what shall we say then?
SPEAKER_00: Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?
SPEAKER_00: Should we just keep this thing rolling?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, if if grace is always going to superabound, then better to just keep on with a life of sin, knowing that whatever the consequences of sin, they'll be far outrun by the power of grace.
SPEAKER_00: And so what Paul is doing here is he's going to say that this grace that comes in and redeems and forgives and covers sin, that this grace not only forgives, but it actually transforms.
SPEAKER_00: It transforms the one to whom the grace is poured out on.
SPEAKER_00: And this transformation is radical.
SPEAKER_00: It's a transformation of our patterns of thinking, feeling, believing, and behaving.
SPEAKER_00: It's a full transformation of the human person that Paul calls being alive to God.
SPEAKER_00: Being alive to God.
SPEAKER_00: Now, what we see here in Paul is that Paul understands being alive to God is a great paradox, because for Paul to be alive to God is actually to be dead.
SPEAKER_00: It's to have died a serious death.
SPEAKER_00: And this death, the benefits of this death have been communicated to us in the present.
SPEAKER_00: See, what we see in Romans chapter 6 is that Paul actually believes that the Christ event, that this coming of God in the flesh, in space and time, in history, that this single event of the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus, produces benefits to us that we experience not only in the future, our future, but in the present.
SPEAKER_00: That the benefits that have come from this singular event in space and time in history are communicated to us by means of baptism.
SPEAKER_00: That in baptism there is this unification of us and Christ, so much so that Christ, God in Christ, seems to rush our death.
SPEAKER_00: This is what the Christian life is.
SPEAKER_00: The Christian life is the life you live after you've died.
SPEAKER_00: That's really what the Christian life is intended to be.
SPEAKER_00: There's a saying on the Orthodox monastery, Mount Athos, as you're going in, a Greek inscription on the top of the door, and it says, if you die before you die, then when you die, you don't die.
SPEAKER_00: That's what it says as you're going into the monastery, which is the Christ mystery.
SPEAKER_00: The mystery of death and resurrection, the mystery of picking up your cross, the mystery of not refusing the shame of crucifixion or discipleship.
SPEAKER_00: But for Paul, what he understands baptism to be is this act whereby God has kind of stacked the deck.
SPEAKER_00: And what I mean by that is in baptism, God in Christ seems to take your death, your future death, and then Christ's past death and slam it together in the present in the middle of your life.
SPEAKER_00: And then the Christian life is the result of those deaths having died.
SPEAKER_00: Well, this is really confusing, Paul.
SPEAKER_00: Is he really digging himself out of a pit?
SPEAKER_00: His argument is actually really technical.
SPEAKER_00: Because Paul says that we know for the one who has died has been set free from sin.
SPEAKER_00: So for Paul to be alive in God is actually to be dead.
SPEAKER_00: And the question is, to what are we dead that after we die, the death of being dead to that makes us alive to God?
SPEAKER_00: We've died to sin, according to Paul.
SPEAKER_00: What does this mean?
SPEAKER_00: Dying to sin, dying to the world, that our old self has been crucified.
SPEAKER_00: Paul will say elsewhere, right, the world has been crucified to me and I to the world.
SPEAKER_00: What is this language of death and crucifixion in relation to sin, flesh, and the world, such that we are alive to God?
SPEAKER_00: I believe I've told this story.
SPEAKER_00: There's an old story in the Desert Fathers about a monk who goes up to this desert father and he says, you know, father, uh, you know, they always ask, What must I do to be saved?
SPEAKER_00: You know, that's kind of the typical question.
SPEAKER_00: And the father uh tells the monk, he says, uh, okay, what I want you to do is go to the cemetery, and I want you to hurl a bunch of praises on the graves there, the people in the graves.
SPEAKER_00: You know, just bless them, all get out and give them all these accolades.
SPEAKER_00: So the monk leaves, he goes to the cemetery, and he's hurling all these praises on the dead, and then he comes back and reports to the father, and the father says, Well, what do they do?
SPEAKER_00: And the monk said, Well, they didn't do anything.
SPEAKER_00: And then the father says, Okay, we'll go back, but this time curse the dead.
SPEAKER_00: I haven't given this instruction in spiritual direction yet, but I plan to do it at some point.
SPEAKER_00: He goes and he curses the dead, and he's throwing, I think the father actually tells him, like, throw stones at them and cast on and hurl insults and curse.
SPEAKER_00: And Monk does this, and then he comes back and he reports to the father, okay, father, I went and I cursed the dead and I threw stones at them.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, now what?
SPEAKER_00: And then the father says, be as they are and go and know the way of God.
SPEAKER_00: That is, that you are dead to the praises and the blames of the world.
SPEAKER_00: That if you recognize this freedom born of the kind of death, the death that it's like you're unresponsive to the accolades and the esteem and the concerns of the world.
SPEAKER_00: You're just you're unresponsive to it.
SPEAKER_00: This is that's what it means to be dead.
SPEAKER_00: It's it's unresponsive.
SPEAKER_00: It's like you can't you can't get a reaction right out of it.
SPEAKER_00: And this is the vision that Paul has.
SPEAKER_00: We consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God.
SPEAKER_00: Now, what's interesting is that for Paul, we have already died with Christ by by means of baptism.
SPEAKER_00: We have already died, yet Paul says in the same instance that we are to intentionally and consciously enter into that death by an act of our own will and faith.
SPEAKER_00: This is why Paul says to consider yourselves dead.
SPEAKER_00: The assumption being that this can be a reality that's happened, but you're actually not consenting to it or surrendering to it or believing it.
SPEAKER_00: To believe and consider ourselves alive to God and to be dead to sin.
SPEAKER_00: I think in many ways, to be dead to sin and to be alive to God, to be like those bodies in the grave and that story that the monk and the abbot told.
SPEAKER_00: It's born out of not taking the world too seriously on its own terms.
SPEAKER_00: It's not taking the world too seriously on its own terms.
SPEAKER_00: I was uh I was talking with somebody about this this week, but I believe it was last week, I was listening to uh a lecture that Thomas Merton was giving to uh some novitiates at the uh Abbey of Gethsemane, and he was started out by saying that one of the things that we actually need to cultivate as monks, he's talking to all these people who have these aspirations to be really good monks.
SPEAKER_00: And he says, one of the things you need to cultivate is a really good and profound sense of humor.
SPEAKER_00: And you could hear like the nervous laughter.
SPEAKER_00: You know, every nobody has any idea what he's talking about.
SPEAKER_00: And then Merton goes on to tell these monks, he's like, Let me tell you your problem.
SPEAKER_00: Merton was known to talk like that.
SPEAKER_00: He he looked out at these aspiring monks and he said, Your problem is that when you took these vows and you renounced the world and you renounce money, you thought you were doing something impressive.
SPEAKER_00: He said, You all take the world far too seriously.
SPEAKER_00: He's like, I can tell just by looking at you.
SPEAKER_00: He's like, the the renunciation of the world, the flesh and the devil, it's born out of a looking at what the world offers as laughable.
SPEAKER_00: Like this is a like this doesn't even compare, like Christ doesn't even compare to the promises that the world makes.
SPEAKER_00: It's about like not taking the world seriously on its own terms.
SPEAKER_00: And I can't help but that being alive to God and dead to sin, that Jesus is touching upon this in our gospel reading, right?
SPEAKER_00: When he says that, look, if you don't love me more than you love any of your other family members, or if you love anybody more than me, you're not worthy of me.
SPEAKER_00: This is one of the maybe the more embarrassing aspects of the of the gospel that embarrassing for us, but for the wrong reasons.
SPEAKER_00: The fact that we open up the gospels and Jesus is not begging us to follow him.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus can say these things, right?
SPEAKER_00: And he'll say elsewhere, unless you hate your mother, father, wife, brother, sister.
SPEAKER_00: You know, don't bother.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is content.
SPEAKER_00: We see in the Gospels of whole crowds walking away because he says a hard saying, and then the disciples come up to him and they're like, Jesus, this is a really hard saying.
SPEAKER_00: Like, why are you talking like this?
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus looks at them and says, Do you want to leave too?
SPEAKER_00: So I can't help but to see that to be dead to sin and alive to God is Paul's way I think of saying is to be completely oriented to Christ as the reason for living, the reason for dying, the reason for everything.
SPEAKER_00: To be oriented and to see Christ is infinitely valuable, so much so that when Christ says, you gotta leave money to follow me, we look at money and we're like, well, of course.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Or you gotta leave your job to follow me.
SPEAKER_00: Well, obviously, I'm gonna leave my job.
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's fishing, whatever.
SPEAKER_00: That this is what it means to be dead to sin and alive to God.
SPEAKER_00: That we're actually deeply bored by the things of this world.
SPEAKER_00: That was another thing that Merton was fond of saying is that uh he he he said people when they're just encroached in sin, he can't help.
SPEAKER_00: He sounds just like a Columbia University literary graduate, but he just said, they're just boring.
SPEAKER_00: Sin is so boring.
SPEAKER_00: To consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God is to see and behold a Christ who is not begging us to follow him, but who loves us dearly and can say these things.
SPEAKER_00: Say things like, if you love anybody else more than me, you're not worthy of me.
SPEAKER_00: He can say these things precisely because he knows who he is, he knows he's worthy, he knows he's infinitely valuable, he knows that he is the one we truly need, and that to compromise in placing any other value, take anything else in this world more serious or more determinative than Christ is to be alive to the world and dead to Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Be alive to the world and dead to God, to be unresponsive to the call of God, unresponsive to the call of discipleship.
SPEAKER_00: May we see this Christ beckoning us, as Bonhoeffer says, when Christ beckons someone to follow him, he beckons them to come and die.
SPEAKER_00: May we see that Christ has invited us to die a death that he has made possible, so that we could be alive to God, so that we cannot take the world too seriously, that we cannot take ourselves too seriously, that we not take our families too seriously, not take ourselves too seriously, but to take with utmost seriousness the Christ who calls us.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.