Vicar’s sermon 21.6.26 Romans 6.1-11

So, Kim and I are back from holiday. More than 2 ½ thousand miles covered down to the south of France and back, stopping off both on the way there…and back.
Our first stop however was on this side of the Channel. An overnight stay in Rochester that enabled us to tick off another of the 42 English Cathedrals with a visit to Rochester Cathedral on what was a gorgeous May day with the sun shining and the beautiful cloister garden full of roses. Rochester has the most unusual ‘strap line’. ‘Welcome’ say the signs ‘ to the second oldest Cathedral in England’. ‘Second oldest’ doesn’t seem to boost what is a glorious place. But ‘second oldest’ it is to Canterbury (of course): Gregory the Great having sent the reluctant Augustine to convert the Anglo- Saxons at the end of the sixth century. It was in the year 597 that Augustine baptised King Ethelbert and Bishop Justus baptised hundreds of Saxons on Christmas Day in the year 600 in the River Medway – which I guess would have been a somewhat chilly occasion.
A journey with the car on ‘Le Shuttle’ and our next stop. Reims (though the French say ‘Raams!) St Remigius (or St Remy) one hundred years before Augustine and King Ethelbert baptised Clovis (King of the Franks) at the Cathedral that had already stood for 100 years and would go on to become the place where most French Kings would be crowned down the years. There is a sculpture of St Remy baptising the King outside the other major church in the city: the basilica – quite a walk, on a hot day, from the Cathedral across town and back.
Baptisms. Two baptisms that shaped two nations. The early middle ages. Culture and practices very different to ours now. Hard times. Sometimes violent times. But as people were baptised – as these kings were baptised- something shifted, something changed, the kingdom of God took a step forward and something new became possible. At this distance, history helps us to see these conversions as being particularly significant but I am fairly sure that the significance of their being baptised was not lost on either Clovis or Ethelbert. We have no way of knowing of these men’s faith or ‘spirituality’ but we might guess that a public commitment of this kind would have involved a fair amount of thinking through, a degree of consideration for them at a personal level and for their kingdoms.
Romans 6 – which we have heard reads this morning- speaks of baptism. Our baptism. That moment when you – as a child, or young adult or in your later years- were presented to the congregation and then led to the font to be baptised ‘into Christ’. In these verses Paul is at pains to tell his hearers that however that baptism took place (in the case of the Romans it might have been in a river or behind the closed doors in the bath house of a large house in Rome) something shifted in their lives, something changed, something happened. What was that ‘something’?
The verses we have make it clear – when you are baptised you are set ‘free’. It’s there in verse 7. Throughout the first chapters of his letter Paul has explained that all humanity is bound by Sin (we might give Sin a capital ‘S’). It is not just that we do things that are less than wonderful but that, since the Fall, everyone (without exception) and everything (the whole of creation) falls short of God’s purposes. We might play this down – we’re not that bad, we’re certainly not as bad as that person over there. We might deflect attention from ourselves by pointing the finger at others, creating a rather pathetic scale of goodness. But ‘Sin’ (with its capital S) has affected and infected everything and, by so doing, has made it impossible for us to come anywhere near the glory that was God’s original intention for us – being His vice regents in the care of creation, reflecting fully God’s image into the world: we can’t do this. It’s not that we have eaten too many biscuits or said something a teensy bit cutting to our nearest and dearest – we have fallen from being able to enjoy the presence of God and we have fallen from a very, very great height. Paul knows only too well that neither he nor anyone else can scale that height in their own strength.
The good news is that none of us have to do so. We can’t win God’s favour by doing good stuff. Instead, the free gift of God, the ‘Amazing Grace’ we sing about, is precisely that God, in Christ forgives and accepts those who put their trust in Jesus. He ‘dies for us’ and for our salvation. Sin is dealt with.
But the bit that we usually miss out or leave unsaid is that we have also died. It’s written there in front of you 3Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Or again (verse 6) 6We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.
I don’t know how you were baptised. My guess is that Clovis and Ethelbert were led to the nearest river and dunked in it…though in one of the museums Kim and I visited in the south of France we discovered a truly ancient font made of sculpted lead that was big enough to climb into. Most folk here will have had a splash of water sprinkled across their foreheads as I did – ‘in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’. My guess is also that you probably (if you were old enough to know what was happening) did not feel any different after your baptism to how you felt before. But how you felt has got nothing to do with it: That you have been baptised is the thing. Paul wants his readers to ‘know’ something not feel something. ‘Do you not know’ is what he says. And ‘knowing’ that we have died with Christ opens up what lies on the other side of that ‘dying to Sin’ which is being able to ‘walk in newness of life’, being able to share in a ‘resurrection like Jesus’.
We don’t live the life of the Kingdom in order to win God’s favour: we can’t do that. Rather, God has made it possible for us to live the kind of lives that he intended for us. We are no longer held captive by the law of Sin and Death instead we are set free to live ‘in the Spirit’ – we are empowered to change and to be changed from glory to glory.
So I wonder whether as Christians we settle too easily for too little. We treat our faith, our worship, our being here, as being something akin to a little bit of self-improvement. A discipline – not too much because that might mark us out as being too keen- a nudge here or there to do a little better, try a little harder: but we don’t allow the stakes to become particularly high because God loves us any which way and holiness of life is so ‘old style’.
Maybe a more helpful way to see it is that God wants so much more for us. We can be better, we can better reflect Jesus’ life in ours – and why would we not want that? If we struggle – with our thoughts…our temper…an addiction…with hard baked attitudes of heart and mind that have plagued us since childhood and which bring us down we need to hear again that we have been set free from Sin and we can ask for help to change.
Positively, we have before us the example of Christ’s life. We know that we are called to grow the ‘fruit of the Spirit’ in our lives. To aim to live lives that are filled with love and joy and peace, to want to show patience, kindness and goodness, to be faithful in our dealings with God and others, gentle of Spirit and ‘self controlled’ ( not blown off course by our feelings or emotions) – these things are possible. But none of these things are easy – they don’t just ‘land on us’ they need to be nurtured, they need to be ‘grown’. And that they are grown is important because if those who might be won to the faith look at Jesus’ followers they need to be able to see what difference faith in Jesus makes in our lives. Does being a Christian change us…indeed does it change anything at all? Why would I become a Christian if becoming one makes no difference to me? Well it does make a difference…but for that difference to be seen ‘we must consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus Christ’. Grasp this truth and your baptism becomes the first step of a lifelong journey of change and transformation that will increasingly show Jesus to others.
Just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. – the power of the resurrection is there for us. May it transform and rebew our lives day by day.