July 13 sermon - The Walking Dead - But In Reverse

What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or 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. 
(Romans 6:1-4)

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     I don't know how many of you pay much attention to the entertainment scene, but if you do, you might have noticed that in recent years zombies have been all the craze! I, personally, have never really been much into zombie stories. I actually like horror movies, but my taste in them runs much more toward werewolves than zombies. Werewolves are very spiritual creatures – or at least there's a very spiritual message connected with them. They represent in a very graphic and frightening way the inner temptations we all have; the inner beast so to speak that wants to be let loose. And – for the most part – they're just plain fun! But my tastes notwithstanding – zombies are in right now! They are the current “creature” of choice for Hollywood. Cities have zombie walks, and lots of people show up for them. I haven't heard if it's happening this year – but last October 21, Welland held its third annual zombie walk! It's where people dress up as zombies – and, well, walk through town! Zombies are big. But I was never much into zombies – until about a year ago, when Lynn and I started watching the first three seasons of a television show called “The Walking Dead” on Netflix. It's set in Georgia, and it's about a zombie plague. Almost everyone has become a zombie, and the show follows a handful of survivors trying to escape. What I like about the show isn't so much the zombies – I actually find the zombies in “The Walking Dead” kind of boring, and rather easily done away with as long as you don't panic. What I like in the show is the characters. There are some interesting and well developed characters in it. And I like the fact that the plague is explained. Most of these zombie movies or shows feature a plague, but they never really explain how a person becomes a zombie, except that you get infected by something. One episode of “The Walking Dead” did offer an explanation. The virus attacks your brain and shuts it off, apparently killing you, except that anywhere from 20 minutes to 8 hours after you “die” - the virus re-animates your brain stem and nothing else, meaning that you can't think and you have no memories or emotions, you just have basic motor skills (so you can walk) and you act on instinct, which means you have to be able to catch your food – and guess what zombies apparently have a taste for! Anyway, Lynn and I watched the first three seasons, and now we're anxiously awaiting season four on Netflix – and it's supposed to appear in the next two or three months! And as I was reading through Paul's letter to the Romans, I started to think that, in a way, Christianity has the same effect as that zombie plague – except that it does things in reverse!

     “... We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” There's a couple of assumptions being made in those few words. If “we ... have died to sin” then that must presume that at one time or another we lived in sin. And, if we don't “live in it any longer,” then we must have some new sort of life that we're living – because I submit that all of us are demonstrably still alive. So, to go back to the analogy with the zombie plague for a moment, how did we die to sin and then come back? How did our previous life get reanimated into a different kind of life with different goals and different possibilities?  Those are really my questions for today.

     Let's start with the whole question of what it means to “live in sin.” We're not talking here about people living together before they're married, although that's how the phrase has entered the lingo. The idea that Paul wants to get across is that somehow in our natural state we are under the control of sin; that sin has some sort of authority or power over us. It doesn't mean that we're constantly doing evil things. In fact, I'd suspect that the vast majority of us here today (and maybe all of us) have never done anything in our lives that we'd consider to be truly evil. To live in sin means basically that we're unable to perfectly do what God wants us to do. It's really that simple. Our human nature within us is battling the image of God that should be shining from us – and the human nature more often than not wins. Or you could say that the flesh is always battling the spirit, so that we respond to our own wants and desires more than we respond to the will of God. That's all it means to say that we “live in sin.” It's not that we're horrible and hopeless and evil people. We're simply not all that God wants us to be. I make that confession about myself freely. I have a long way to go before I'm going to be all that God wants me to be, and all I can say is that I don't think I'm at all unique in that regard. 

     To boil it down, to “live in sin,” I would say, is to live with broken relationships. The broken relationship might be with God or it might be with others – and I would argue that if we have broken relationships with others then we have, de facto, a broken relationship with God. Can any of us claim to have perfectly loving relationships with everyone? Can any of us claim that we always put the needs of others over and above our own needs? Can any of us claim that anger has never raised a barrier against God or others? Can any of us claim that we have never in any way hurt another person? Or ignored an obvious need? I submit that none of us can make such claims – not perfectly. And simply because these things happen, we find ourselves “living in sin.” Not doing horrible things all the time; not being the epitome of evil. Just not perfectly doing what God asks of us, and what God asks of us is primarily love. The Gospel and Christian faith I would argue are primarily relational – love God, love your neighbour, love one another and even love your enemy. If we can't love perfectly, that's sin at work in us. We need to let go of the knee jerk, “oh no, I'm not a sinner” reaction we often have, and understand that this is what the word means. Basically, it's a term that originated in archery, and it means “to miss the mark” – and the mark set by God is love. And, of course, once we realize that to sin means to act unlovingly and in ways that God doesn't want us to act in, then we dig ourselves deeper by creating rules to follow. And then we break the rules we've created, and then we start to lay upon ourselves (and sometimes on others) the burden of guilt and shame because the rules have been broken. This is the life of sin that Paul wants us to die to – a life sapped of joy because we're fixated on what we think the rules are. What God asks us for is not slavish obedience to a set of rules – God asks us for love. Love God, love your neighbour, love one another and even love your enemy. But if we can't do that, then where's the hope, we ask. The hope is in dying to that life and entering a new way of seeing life. To die to a life of sin doesn't mean to escape from it and become suddenly perfect. Even Paul didn't escape it. Had we gone on to Chapter 7, we'd see Paul lamenting, saying that he just keeps doing these things. He does the things he knows he shouldn't do, and fails to do the things he knows he should do, and he doesn't understand himself. So dying to sin doesn't mean living suddenly perfect lives. It means that we will no longer be held in bondage to sin. We will live as free people: freed to love God, freed to love our neighbours, freed to love one another freed to love our enemies – even freed to love ourselves in the best possible way once we realize that we ourselves are loved by God, and therefore worthy of love. What are we freed by? That's easy. We're freed by grace.

     People misunderstand divine grace. They think of it as cheap or easy grace. They think there's no cost to it. They think of it as being like a “get out of jail free” card in a Monopoly game. That's not what it is. Grace is neither easy nor cheap. Grace means the ability of one party (in this case God) to set aside a debt owed to them by another party. It frees the recipient of grace from punishment, but grace isn't cheap and grace isn't easy. It's costly for God to give, and it's humbling for us to receive. The letter to Titus tells us that Jesus was God's grace come to earth, and Jesus paid a heavy price for being God's grace come to earth. The cross stands as a reminder of the costliness of grace to God, and it should be humbling for us to receive it. And this costly grace represents a new way of life for us.

     I started my comments today by thinking about the zombies of “The Walking Dead.” When they die, they come back, but their higher functions, so to speak, get taken away and they're left only to act on instinct and to respond to their most basic and primal needs. We're kind of the reverse. When we die to sin, the desire to meet and satisfy those basic and primal needs that come from being human is diminished, and we enter a new way of life that's focused not on ourselves and meeting our needs, but on others and meeting their needs. To die to sin is to live by grace. Living by grace is living with Christ. Next week, I want to focus on the next few verses of Romans 6 and we'll think about the new life in Christ. For now, I just want to celebrate that we live by grace; that we are free to live for God and for others.