INI

Colossians 2:13-15* March 24, 2010 * Midweek Lent 6 * Rev. Dr. Paul Lehninger

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

In the name of the Father, and of the ] Son, and of the Holy Spirit

The theme for our Lenten services this year is “We Preach Christ Crucified,” and our focus tonight is that the message of Christ crucified assures us that we’re “No Longer Dead, but Alive.” So let’s talk about life and death.

Last Sunday was my 59^th birthday, and for my birthday brunch Jeanne and I met our daughter, Annie, and her husband, Kolt, more or less halfway between their house and ours, in Oshkosh. It just so happens that I was born in Oshkosh, and I thought it would be fun on my 59^th birthday to drive past the hospital where I was born. To my surprise, that hospital is now a retirement living center. Just think: I could spend my twilight years in the same building where I first saw light.

Young people: birthdays are still exciting. Older: still grateful for another year of life and can review the blessings of that year, but the number of your age keeps getting higher and higher, and there’s a limit to how high it can go. Especially as you get older, birthdays often lead you to think more seriously about your life—because you’re getting so much closer to death.

A lot of people don’t like to think about death—especially their own—which I suppose is why a lot of people, as they get older, would just as soon not make a big deal of their birthdays. But if someone asks you what word you immediately associate with the word “inevitable,” either death or taxes usually takes first place. Unless Jesus returns before we die, all of us will eventually die. And as Lent progresses, we get closer and closer to a day on which we annually commemorate a day of death, the day Jesus died on the cross.

And that day, in one of the great paradoxes of the Christian faith, was our birthday. That’s because, as St. Paul says, Jesus triumphed over the powers and authorities by his cross. What powers and authorities? One obvious candidate is sin. According to our text, He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross.

God’s law—the written code with its regulations—is good and wise, because it reveals to us what God’s holy will is. But ever since our first parents said, “Not thy will, but my will be done,” all of us enter this world turned in the wrong direction, focused on ourselves. There’s a wonderful Latin phrase for this: incurvatus in se, which means “curved in on oneself.” We’re selfish, self-centered, and self-absorbed. Adam and Eve were created by God to do his will by nature, but following their disobedience, by nature we and all their descendants also disobey God and say, “Me first.” As a result, God’s good and holy law exposes our rebellion against God with sharp relief.

St. Paul writes about this problem in Romans 7, in even stronger terms: in the sinful nature [I am] a slave to the law of sin. What’s the solution? He immediately says in Romans 8, Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit. The written code was nailed to the cross with Christ, who once for all perfectly kept and fulfilled God’s law, and once for all offered the perfect sacrifice for our sins. As a result, St. Paul writes in our text, When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ.

So another one of the powers and authorities Jesus triumphed over by his cross is death. Christ’s death day is in that sense the day that gives us new life; it’s our spiritual birthday. That Jesus paid the price for all the sins of all people of all time is true no matter what, regardless of anyone’s attitude about his sacrifice. Think of the most despicable, lawless, destructive, amoral person you can imagine; that person’s sins have been paid for. But obviously not everyone gets the benefit of Christ’s atonement; far too many people still die in their sins. So how do we actually make forgiveness and new life our own?

Let’s back up and look at what St. Paul writes immediately before the words of our text: . . . in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority. In him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature, not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead. St. Paul says something similar in Romans: 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.

We can’t live spiritually unless we first die and are buried, and baptism is the key to this. Holy Baptism is a central and decisive moment in the life of a Christian. It makes us Christians and affects every aspect of our life as Christians, and every moment of that life. This is because it’s not just an act of obedience to Christ’s command or an outward ceremony. It’s also not only a change in identity, and not only—if it’s possible to speak this way—not only a means of conversion and imparting of faith. Holy Baptism is also the means by which we’re supernaturally and incomprehensibly—mysteriously and mystically, in the biblical sense of that term—united to Christ.

Baptism unites us to Christ, and it also unites us to his work for us. In baptism, we die and rise with Christ. This was pictured dramatically by the mode of Holy Baptism practiced in the early church, in some areas for 1,000 years or more. The church had a shallow pool instead of a tiny font. As a candidate for baptism you stepped in, knelt down, and either had lots—quarts or gallons—of water poured over you, or you were immersed three times, drowning the sinful nature and rising from the waters reborn, united with the Holy Trinity, and spending three days—symbolically—in your watery grave with Christ, as he spent three days in his tomb. In some cases the baptismal pool was constructed so that you walked into the pool from one direction and walked out in the other direction, to show that you had left your old life behind and would now be walking “in newness of life.”

In addition, most baptisms took place at the end of a night-long service, the Easter Vigil, as the sun rose on Easter morning. After a period of instruction in the faith, candidates for baptism, called catechumens, entered a more focused period—Lent—of preparation for baptism, which involved further instruction and training, training in a quite literal sense which included giving things up: giving up time, for more frequent prayer and worship (think midweek Lenten services), giving up possessions by giving alms to the poor, and giving up food by fasting, so you would have more food to share with the poor. These spiritual disciplines were intended to dramatically illustrate to catechumens the importance of putting to death the old sinful nature—in a sense, giving it up—and this reached its climax with the observance of the death of Christ on Good Friday, when He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross.

Then the old self, the sinful nature, was drowned in the waters of Holy Baptism at Easter, just as surely as Christ truly died on the cross. The same is true for us. In Holy Baptism, we, our sinful nature, died with him. This made a decisive difference in our lives, and is still making a decisive difference.

Every year I rent a garden plot from the County Grounds and plant a vegetable garden. The digging and cultivating are good exercise, the sunshine and fresh air are healthful, and the produce is delicious, nutritious, and free of pesticides. Then there are the weeds. One summer I gave the weeds a chance to grow and waited until it looked like the weeds might gain the upper hand, and then did a major weeding all at once, covering the weeded soil with a thick layer of mulch. I knew that never again would the weeds dominate the good cultivated plants in my garden. From time to time a new weed would sprout, or an old one would re-sprout from roots I hadn’t pulled out completely, but those weeds were no mortal threat, and with a little effort I could pull them. I knew they wouldn’t, and couldn’t, take over the garden and turn it into a weed patch. The weeds were pulled and had died; slavery to weeds had been done away with; my garden was freed from weeds.

Holy Baptism is just that kind of decisive “weeding out” of our sinful nature. We still sin, but the major and decisive excision of sin from our lives has been accomplished. We now have the power to weed out these minor outbreaks of sin and need never be slaves to sin again. Being buried with Christ in baptism and rising to new life with him has made all this possible. The author of Hebrews writes, Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death (Heb. 2:14-15). It’s another paradox, but another glorious paradox: only when we die with Christ are we truly alive: I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me (Gal. 2:20). We preach Christ crucified, because the message of the cross is that we’re no longer dead, but alive. Amen.