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After preaching the following sermon I thought it should be more pointed: Resurrection today could be called "wokeness." For Romans chapter six to speak to us today, we must say: We have died with MLK, with all who have been lynched, with George Floyd and all who have been executed without trial by the police. We rise with them by being “woke.” We can't understand resurrection without "dying" to racial injustice.
To translate or paraphrase the text, Romans 6:1-13, which appears below within the sermon, I had to work through chapters 3-8 with Greek, the NRSV, the Message, and the Jesus Seminar's Scholars' Version. I struggled with what Paul meant by sin and grace and justification, what Bonhoeffer and Barth meant by "religion," and what Tillich meant by "acceptance."
New life for Paul is definitely "wokeness" in today's vernacular.
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For all the 5 years I have preached here I have been writing my book, a memoir that became an entire autobiography of more than 500 pages.
As I wrote I came to realize that I was writing not just my story but the story of the mainline prot churches to which I gave myself during my life.
Also it is the story of national and world affairs during the time of my life, from WWII to Vietnam, Watergate, through the cultural wars of civil rights for POCs, abortion rights and the rights of gays and lesbians and now transgender persons.
I thought the book was about me and that the last chapter would be the one about what I now believe, but I was wrong.
The last chapter is what happened in the church and the world and how in last few years we have learned that we did not understand who we were and are; how much we did not understand, and how fragile the church and the Christian faith have been.
We didn’t understand our nation, or what killing native Americans, and what racism and slavery had done to our country and even to you and me in the 21st century.
We didn’t know how delicate our democracy was and is.
Some of us now speak of being “woke” to these realities and truths, and hope that we are done with fake news and false narratives.
Being “woke” is a way of talking about resurrection.
“Sleepers, Awake” could be my call to resurrection today.
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I re-wrote in my memoir last month about my becoming Christian in 1966.
I was thinking about how strongly I was affected then by the teachings and death of Jesus.
But I don’t remember thinking much then about the resurrection of Jesus.
Now I realize that my strong feelings of being deeply renewed in my own life was perhaps the intended purpose and meaning of the resurrection stories.
In other words, our emotional experience of faith has something to do with resurrection itself.
When I was first reading the gospels 55 years ago, I was also reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who thought Hitler was destroying both Germany and Christianity, who joined a plot to kill Hitler, and who was imprisoned and executed for his opposition to the Nazis.
Bonhoeffer wrote in prison: “To live in the light of the resurrection – that is the meaning of Easter.” [LandP, p. 207]
Sharing in the resurrection of Jesus wasn’t about life after death, which is how we usually think of resurrection.
Rising from the dead was not about life after death, but about new life now.
New life can rise from immersion in Jesus’ teachings and the stories of his life and death, so that I didn’t have to think about the resurrection of Jesus; I was experiencing it for myself.
This I think is the meaning of being born “again,” or born “anew,” or born “from above” in the Gospel of John.
“Unless you are born again you cannot see the Kingdom of God,” John says.
Bonhoeffer would say with John, “If you live in the light of the resurrection, you can see and participate in the Kingdom of God.
Paul was writing about this experience of resurrection long before John wrote about being born again.
[read religionless text of Romans 6]
So how do we end our bad behavior and guilt?
Should we continue to live as before so that we can experience acceptance again?
That would be ridiculous! How can we who have “died” to the seductive power of corruption continue to live as if we were still in its grasp?
Or do you not get it that we who were baptized as a way of identifying with Jesus, were symbolically immersed into his death?
When we went under the water, we left the old ways behind; and when we came up out of the water, we entered into a new life in a new world!
If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in rising to a new kind of life like his.
Our old self was crucified with him, so that we would be free of the demands of our old life!
Christ has been raised to new life and is not going to die again; death no longer has any power over him.
We, too, have been raised to new life so that the old ways of living will no longer rule us.
He died to end hate and hurt, to live for love and good.
So you also must think of yourselves as dead to hating and hurting yourselves and others, and alive to love.
Therefore, do not let the seductive powers of controlling behaviors lead you to submit to worldly desires.
Don’t let any part of your body or mind be an instrument for doing wrong, but make yourself an instrument of justice as one who has been brought from death to life.
Treating others badly will no longer be your style of relating to others, not because you ignore the rules, but because you will know deep inside that you are acceptable and have been and are accepted.
This is a paraphrase and translation. I have expanded words like “sin” and “grace” to make them more understandable to us moderns.
And likewise we read in 2nd Corinthians 5:17: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”
Paul speaks often of being “in Christ” which means to participate in his death and risen life.
Before we can speak of resurrection, we have to speak of death.
Studying Romans 6 helped me understand the meaning of the slogan, “Christ died for our sins.”
This means nothing magical or supernatural, as in a trade with the devil, or as if God made a sacrifice to pay a debt of sins that we have run up.
Those are metaphors about old Hebrew practices of blood sacrifice and scapegoats which I read to you from Leviticus some months ago.
Instead, let us say that Jesus died in solidarity with all others who suffered and were killed by the Romans and other Empires.
Someone said about Bonhoeffer what was true of Jesus: Hitler could only kill Bonhoeffer once; No more could be done to him.
Nothing could stop his teachings or end the stories of the friendship and love others experienced from him.
The Romans could kill Jesus only once, but not his words or the memories of him.
Resurrection is a kind of resistance by God and those who proclaim it against Rome and all empires like it.
We can say that Christ died because of our sins, as if our sins of rejection and hate and omission killed him.
His death in itself does nothing for our sins which are PAST; Forgiveness of sins is about cancelling the past so that we can live into the future,
If we forgive others we allow them to rise from their past which is like a living death to them.
Resurrection is how we live from here on.
We experience those who have died as present to us, and so we tell stories about how we experience their presence,
The more powerfully we are affected by the loved one who has died, the stronger the sense that they are not gone from us forever.
Resurrection has become the symbol for the possibility of our transformation, in this life as well as afterward.
Before the war Bonhoeffer had written that we don’t say the words of the creed because we believe them; we believe them because we say them.
I think this needs explanation: Because Christian faith may be understood as responding to what is perceived or identified as a call from Christ, it is only necessary for the one called to respond by saying “I believe.”
I see that when I came to faith many years ago, I declared not exactly what I believed, but I was declaring that I believed, which became real and true by speaking it and by repeating it.
Bonhoeffer also said: “No one wants to know about your faith or unbelief, your orders are to perform the act of obedience on the spot. Then you will find yourself in the situation where faith becomes possible and where faith exists in the true sense of the word.”
For Bonhoeffer this became ultimately true when he was martyred for his participation in a political action of revolt against Hitler as an act of Christian faith.
When I was born in May, 1944, Bonhoeffer was in prison writing words that should concern us on Easter Sunday, 2021.
In prison he was thinking about the Christian faith and the Christian churches and how they had failed to prevent or stop Hitler and the rise of nazism.
So he said: the churches and the old ideas about God and the gospels had become corrupted by becoming “religious.”
What did he mean?
When trust in the God of Jesus becomes written beliefs, and when anything other than what the church teaches is considered “heresy,” and rules replace “good news,” then we are looking at “religion,” not faith.
Commitment to following Jesus had become commitment to churches and leaders, and to one way of interpreting the Bible, with rules and rituals that only touched the surface of life and not its depths or heights.
When religion becomes just a part of life, one commitment among many, when the Gospel doesn’t apply to the rich and powerful, then Christianity has failed, and we need, as Bonhoeffer said, a “religionless Christianity.”
A religionless Christianity he said would require a new language and new ways of being church more honest to Jesus and to God and to each other.
It was in reading Bonhoeffer again and thinking over my entire life in the church, and being invited to preach here, on Easter Sunday, that I learned something new about the meaning of resurrection, not just what it means in the abstract, as a word or a concept, or a story from the Bible, or something we are supposed to believe.
What Bonhoeffer taught, and what some others had thought before and after him was this: What we believe or say we believe when we recite the creed, doesn’t matter.
Faith isn’t about believing anything. Being a Christian should be about rising to new life.
How do we do that? By walking away from what we thought was important and taking Jesus seriously and simply as a way to live, in community, marked by love.
This is the resurrection. We should live the resurrection, not wait for it.
On a personal level we will give up:
Wanting things, thinking they will make us happy.
Wanting success or power to control other people.
Manipulating or even paying others to do or not do what we want.
Wanting other people to live the way we want them to.
Giving in to the desire to argue or strike back at those we think have wronged us.
Ignoring those around us, even those we love, because we don’t want to be involved.
On a public level it’s political because Jesus’ death was political.
How we live together and treat each other are the business of both church and state.
It’s a bit like the show Law and Order, the Church should teach how to live, and the state should make it possible for us to live together, with equal justice, under law.
Having some Irish roots, I remind you that one of the meanings of “rise” is to rise up in solidarity against oppressors. In Ireland that is called “a rising.”
Now I ask you to rise, to rise up, to say together some semblance of what we believe, but mostly to declare that you believe – by dying to racism.
