LIVING THE RESURRECTION
Text: Romans 5:1-2;20-21; 6:1-11
April 3, 2005, Dave Philips
Well, Easter is over, the excitement has died down. This Sunday is what is traditionally called Low Sunday. That means usually that the attendance is low, the offering is low, spirits are low, and the preacher leaves town and goes on study leave. Not only that, THIS Sunday the time changes, and half the people forget to spring forward with their clocks, so we’ll be expecting some to drift in when we’re about finished. Low Sunday is a nothing kind of Sunday.
So, how can we get excited about it? What’s different about this Sunday than any other Sunday in the year?
I wonder how the disciples would have answered that question. Can you imagine asking them a week after the resurrection of Jesus why this Sunday is different from any other day?
I can imagine one of them replying, “What’s different about this Sunday, and why is it worth getting excited about? Good heavens, why is any Sunday worth getting excited about! It’s the first day of the week, it’s the day our Lord Jesus rose from the grave! What a question! What’s different? EVERYTHING is different! I’m different! I’m a new person now because of what has happened! Life will never be the same again! Don’t you get it? Jesus is risen! Forever! Death has no more dominion over him. And since death has no power over Jesus, it has no power over me, because he’s my Friend.”
So, how can we get excited about what happened so long ago? Simple: we can’t... unless we exercise our gift of faith. The point is not that the resurrection happened long ago. It could have happened within the past five minutes, but if we don’t get in touch with it or act upon it, it makes no difference to us at all. Air was not created in the past five minutes. It has been around forever. But none of us scorns breathing on that account. Water was not created in the past five minutes. But none of us stops drinking because water is so very ancient.
And Jesus did not rise from the dead within the past five minutes. But, don’t you see, if he rose once and is alive forever, then he was alive five minutes ago. And he’s alive now. And he will be alive five minutes from now, and if he’s alive now, doesn’t that makes all the difference in the world?
So, don’t you think that’s worth getting excited about on this Low Sunday, this second Sunday of Easter?
Paul writing to the Romans shows us that the resurrection of Jesus is something that we can live out every day of our lives. It’s an ongoing reality in our lives, like breathing, and drinking, and eating. The resurrection of Jesus is the central reality for Christians. The resurrection of Jesus is something that touches us every day of our lives.
Our relationship with God is transformed because of the resurrection. Our outlook on life becomes totally different because of the resurrection. And our behavior changes because of the resurrection.
Our relationship with God changes. Before we get in touch with Jesus’ death and resurrection, we kind of keep God at arm’s length, don’t we? We like to think of God as being at a distance anyway, don’t we? “God is watching us from the distance,” sings Bette Midler in the popular song.
But when we get in touch with the death and resurrection of Jesus, a change takes place in our relationship with God. Paul reminds us of the meaning of baptism: it’s not just a symbol of our cleansing from sin. It’s a sign that we have entered into the death AND resurrection of Christ. Listen to Paul’s words: “Don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection.”1
Your baptism, Christian, is a sign of your death to sin. But it also means that you have come to life in Christ and will live forever. The reality that the sign of baptism points to is your life now intertwined with the life of Christ. Where he has been, you have been, too. Where he goes, you now will go. He has died, so sin must die in your life. He rose from the dead and lives forever – so do you.
Because of the death and resurrection of Christ, those of us who have trusted Christ and received him are in Christ and Christ is in us. God is no longer at a distance from us. You get it? We’re intimately involved in his life, and he is intimately involved in our lives.
Our outlook on life changes, too. We change the way we look at the world. Because we are in Christ and Christ is in us, we now have “the mind of Christ.” Now, I don’t think this is an automatic thing. Nothing Paul says here indicates that God zaps us spiritually and suddenly we have the mind of Christ. The mind of Christ is something we learn as we grow as Christians. Paul’s language indicates a learning process.
Paul tells us to see ourselves as dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.2 The word he uses has been translated several different ways: we are to “think” (MSG), “reckon” (AV), “consider” (NRSV), “look upon” (JBP), or “count” (NIV) ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ.
The language of Paul points to mental attitude. We hear these amazing words of the gospel. We are told that they apply to us. They seem too good to be true. Nevertheless, since everything else makes sense, we conclude that they are indeed true. And we make them a part of our daily thoughts. We reinforce them with study of the Bible. We pray about them. We hold them in our minds. And the more we engage in this mental discipline, the more we experience and act out the reality of these marvelous truths.
Once upon a time a few years ago I got pneumonia. Getting cured of pneumonia was a most amazing experience of faith. The way it felt to me was that my battle against pneumonia was mainly mental. I didn’t feel particularly bad. I knew something was wrong, I had one unpleasant episode with a chill, but most of the time I didn’t feel particularly sick.
But I went to see the doctor and he said to me after examining me, “You’re sick. You have a serious disease. Now, behave yourself, stay in bed, and don’t try to go to work, because if you do, you’re going to be even sicker.”
So, I trusted my doctor and I did what he told me to do, even though I didn’t feel all that bad. When I went in for my final examination, he told me that I was pretty well recovered, but, he said, you’ve had a bad case.
You could have fooled me! If he had told me that what I really had was a psychosomatic reaction to the Jerry Springer show, I would have believed him. But he’s the guy who looked at the x-rays. He’s the guy who prescribed the antibiotics. He’s the guy who knew what he was talking about. I’m glad I paid attention to him and didn’t get a case like my next door neighbor in Albuquerque who didn’t pay attention to her pneumonia and spent three days in the hospital as a result.
I had to trust my doctor in much the same way we have to trust God. I took on the “mind of my doctor” so to speak, and his mind, even if I didn’t understand it completely, became my mind. And because I adopted his thoughts, I got better.
In much the same way we change our mental attitude as we take on the mind of Christ. Sin is often asymptomatic. We sin, and yet our sin doesn’t make us feel particularly bad. But God tells us that we need to take his prescription for sin and behave ourselves or it will kill us. And so, we do. The cure is often asymptomatic, too. God tells us that since we’ve taken his prescription, we’re better. But we don’t always feel dramatically better. Still, we trust our doctor, continue to take his prescription, and continue to behave ourselves. And our lives do become better as a result.
Which brings me to the last thing I want to underline from this passage: the resurrection of Jesus means a change in our behavior. In the early church, some people began to teach that since God is so gracious, we can sin to our heart’s content, and God will still love and forgive us. In fact, we should sin in order to experience God’s grace.
Even in modern times we run into people who teach such things. Rasputin, the horrible priest, who exercised such a devastating influence in the Russian royal family at beginning of the last century, taught that the more you sin, the more wonderful is your experience of God’s grace as you go to him for forgiveness. So, he, a priest, set out to increase his sin so that his experience of God’s grace might be even more intense. He was known as a ladies’ man, he acquired several mistresses, and you could never trust him around your wife or daughter.
Rasputin never learned his theology from Paul. Paul says, “where sin increased, grace increased all the more . . . [but] shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?”
Paul uses the most powerful negative in the Greek language to underline his absolute abhorrence of such an idea. It is unthinkable to Paul that people who have been saved by God’s grace from sin which is leading them to death should insult God by continuing to live in sin.
In the last several years I have seen a steady decline in the understanding of church people of this teaching. We’ve got the message about grace! No question! Most of us understand the grace part very well. We love to sing “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” But we’re weak on morality. We’re definitely not as enthusiastic about singing, “How I love thy law, O Lord, daily joy its truths afford.”
On a church retreat in another congregation, one of our single girls came to me and told me that a divorced man from our congregation had invited her to sleep with him on the retreat. “But we’re not married,” she said. “That would be wrong.”
“No it wouldn’t,” he said. “You’re my sister in Christ. That makes it all right.”
What is going on in our heads when we say such things? Our Presbyterian special committee on sexuality which reported to our General Assembly back in 1991 came up with stuff like this. Thank God we rejected their report. Paul tells us that our baptism is a sign of our death to sin. It does not mean that we’re free to redefine sin to suit our desires.
A farmer named McTavish lived alone in the Scottish countryside with a pet dog he doted on. The dog finally died and McTavish went to the Presbyterian minister and asked, “Reverend, my dog is dead. Could you conduct a funeral for the beast?”
Rev. Montgomery replied, "No, we cannot have services for an animal in the church, but there's a new denomination down the road, no telling what they believe, but maybe they'll do something for the animal."
McTavish said, "I'll go right now. Do you think 50,000 pounds would be enough to donate for the service?"
Rev. Montgomery said, "Och, McTavish! Why didn't you tell me the dog was Presbyterian?”
Folks, there are a fair number of theological and moral dogs that are applying for membership to the Presbyterian Church. Some of them are very handsome dogs! But even though the payoff to compromise is often very attractive in the short term, the wages of sin is still death. We need to pay attention to God’s word and listen to God instead of listening to our inclinations, or those handsome theological and moral dogs, no matter how much our hormones egg us on to give them credence.
Because not only does the resurrection of Jesus transform our relationship with God, not only does it change our way of thinking, it changes our behavior. In Christ we can eat our cake and have it, too: there is an abundance of cake! There’s cake in this life and cake forever and ever. We will never run out of Christ’s wonderful cake.
But Jesus tells us that we can’t eat his cake and have the devil’s cake at the same time. We must make a choice.
So, friends, on this second Sunday of Easter, let’s rejoice in the reality of Jesus’ resurrection. He’s still alive today on this second Sunday of Easter. He still offers all people everywhere a new relationship with God. He still transforms our attitudes and ways of thinking. He still transforms our behavior. We can live the resurrection by his grace in this life and forever.
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!