March 18, 2007
One of the ongoing jokes in the adult confirmation class is how ‘everything always comes down to baptism.’ That’s one of the observations made by one of the confirmands early on in our meetings, and it’s been repeated a number of times since. And it’s entirely accurate, of course: it IS always about baptism. Which is what I say whenever the observation is made: you’re right, it’s always about baptism. And this shouldn’t surprise us; baptism is one of the two sacraments of our church, it is the welcoming into the Christian community, and it is central to our identity as people of faith. The confirmation service is entirely based on the baptismal service, and I tell the teenage confirmands that in choosing confirmation, they are making for themselves the promises their parents and godparents made for them when they were baptized. The ongoing joke at our teenage confirmation class is also about baptism, but it’s that infant baptism is a major point of contention for one of my students: she’s peeved that she can’t remember an event which has such significance.
So it’s a fairly good bet that at one class or another, the adult or the teenage confirmands, someone will often enough make a comment about baptism. Which, as I say, is perfectly appropriate. It IS a momentous event in our lives. It IS what everything comes back to. Which is precisely why we all renew our baptismal covenant four times a year, at least, because we need to be reminded of the gifts and responsibilities of our baptism.
I have done a lot of baptismal preparation with parents and godparents over the past nine years I’ve been ordained, and during the preparation sessions we always go through the service, look at and unpack the promises that the candidates, parents, and godparents make, and try to figure out what they mean for our lives and how we live these promises out. One of the promises that people often get stuck on is this question, to parents and godparents: “Will you by your prayers and witness help this child to grow into the full stature of Christ?” (Answer: I will, with God’s help.) What would that mean, I ask, the ‘full stature of Christ?’ How would you define it, if you were asked? How would you explain it to someone else? There are many answers to that question of what the full stature of Christ means, because the phrase itself is so rich, and can be understood in so many different ways. But one way has to do with the blessings and the responsibilities of what it means to be a follower of Jesus, of what this way of life is about for believers. It’s about being ‘in Christ.’
So. In today’s lesson from the Apostle Paul, in the second letter to the Corinthians, Paul uses this phrase which is of central importance to him, when he talks about being ‘in Christ.’ This is a key concept for Paul, and we know this because he uses this phrase ‘in Christ’ no less than 165 times in his letters. I think it’s worth us looking at what this metaphor which is so important for Paul means. The understanding of what it means to be ‘in Christ’ I owe to Marcus Borg, from his book Reading the Bible Again for the First Time. Borg points out a significant insight into understanding Paul’s writings: that he uses two metaphors for two different ways of life. One is life ‘in Adam,’ and one is life ‘in Christ.’ Life ‘in Adam’ is how Paul talks about the human condition. We are held captive to sin and death, which Paul describes as powers which have dominion over us. For Paul, the human condition – life in Adam – is one of exile and of bondage, of sin and ultimately of death. That is, it’s not that we human beings are bad by nature – we aren’t – it’s that sin has power over us. We aren’t free, is what Paul believes. We are in bondage to sin. It’s an understanding of the human condition which is not especially uplifting. And if Paul is right, and this is all we had in store for us, it would be hard not to live in despair, and without hope. However – and it’s a big however – we do have hope. Life in Adam - life in exile, life in bondage to sin and death - is not what God wants for us, or what God intends for us. Instead, we are invited to a different way of life. We are invited to live in Christ. If we live in Christ, Paul tells us, we are free – sin and death no longer have dominion over us. In Christ, we are freed from our bondage to sin. In Christ, we are reconciled to God. In Christ, we are no longer in exile. As Borg says, “To be ‘in Christ’ is to live in the presence of God as Christ lives in the presence of God.” Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere.
The important question, then, might be to ask how one gets from here - life in Adam - to there – life in Christ. Paul answers this question throughout his letters, and it probably won’t surprise you to hear that it has something to do with baptism. Paul tells us that we get from life in Adam to life in Christ by dying with Christ and being raised with Christ. We use Paul’s words in much of the baptismal service, including in part of the prayer of blessing over the water. This prayer tells us what happens in baptism, and I believe sums up well what we are to understand about baptism. ‘We thank you, God, for the water of baptism. In it we are buried with Christ in his death. By it we share in his resurrection. Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit.’ So the waters of baptism are essential, according to Paul, because of what they represent and where they move us. We die and are buried, we are resurrected, we are reborn. That’s the way. That’s the path. And what we need to remember, and what Paul, and Jesus too, make clear to us, is that the death and resurrection are not in fact a once and for all. It can happen more than once, and does, in our lives. Because this death and resurrection and new birth are about dying to an old self, an old way of life, and being born into a new self, a new way of life. That’s what Paul means when he talks about being ‘in Christ.’ The way – the way of life – the path that Jesus walked and asks us to follow, has to do with just this very thing: dying to self, being born, or resurrected, to a new self. As Borg says, “Being in Christ involves a new identity, a new way of seeing, and a new way of living.” This new life is a life of reconnection with God, a life lived in the presence of God, and it’s available to all of us.
And so, Paul says in this wonderful, powerful passage we hear this morning, “From now on, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” There’s the hope. There’s the power. There’s the theology. You and I are a new creation, as we are in Christ. We are promised a new life, a new way of being, as we reject the values of the world and put our faith and trust in the power of God through Jesus Christ, and as we live our lives more and more in God’s presence. Ultimately, this is a message of hope: if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. In Christ, we can, as a prayer in our liturgy says, live ‘no longer for ourselves alone, but for the one who died for us and rose again.’
And, as always, with the hope, with the promise, comes a responsibility. Paul talks about this responsibility in the second half of the reading that we hear this morning, when he says,
“All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ.” That’s our job description, to be ‘ambassadors for Christ.’ That’s our ministry, the ministry of reconciliation. We are both to represent Christ in the world, and to do the work for others that Christ has done already for us, reconciled us to God. So too do we need to carry Christ’s message of reconciliation into the world. Paul tells us that God is ‘entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.’ That is quite a responsibility. So if that is our job description, perhaps we should explore what that job really entails.
To this end, I looked up the word ‘reconcile,’ and what I found was very interesting. It’s from the Latin, meaning ‘to bring together again.’ Another definition related to this is ‘to bring into harmony.’ Here’s why it’s such a great word for our job description as Christians; think about this: reconciliation means, to bring together again. We are to bring each other, all humankind, and all creation together with God, to bring it all and us all into harmony with God. But it’s not for the first time. The very definition makes it clear that we are doing this again. That’s the best part, as far as I’m concerned: we were once one with God – we are made in God’s image, after all. But since being human is also about life in Adam – life in bondage to sin, and exile from God – we don’t live as our best selves, we forget our divine origins and divine nature. Thus, we need to be restored, and brought back to God – again. To our natural state. To the full stature of Christ, one might even say. That’s what reconciliation is about. And we have already been given this gift of reconciliation, because it is the gift of Christ Jesus. Our job, then, is to act as ambassadors of Christ – to represent Christ in our broken world, and to do this work of reconciliation. Of bringing together people with God, bringing them back together, helping restore humankind and the creation to their original state of union with God.
Sound like a big job? Don’t fool yourselves; it is. But it is our job, one that we should claim boldly, as far as I’m concerned. Having been given this gift of reconciliation, having been brought back together with God, having been offered this new way of life in Christ, it is now up to us to offer it to others. Having been empowered by our baptism, let us embrace our identity as ambassadors for Christ, and to share the message of reconciliation with each other and with the world.
Amen.