“Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?” What a great question. Our sermon series on the Letter to the Romans continues today, and Chapter 6 opens with a bang. 

Confronted with the declaration of God’s love for us -- that he has forgiven our sins, and sent his Son to die for us -- perhaps some might conclude that sin is no longer a problem for the Christian. Indeed, why not bury ourselves in sins, if God’s grace is so present to forgive? Let grace increase. But, no, Paul says. This position misunderstands God and our salvation.

I’m going to leave it to next week’s preacher to talk more about sin. (Good luck, Deacon Chris.) I want to spend this week exploring why Paul thinks it is so wrongheaded for the Christian to keep on sinning. There are three words you could memorize: Union with Christ. 

You see, for St Paul, the Christian way of life is defined entirely by Jesus and particularly by his death and resurrection. Scholars have sometimes described this as Paul’s mystical understanding of Christ: that we are in him, and he is in us. It’s certainly a major theme within his writings. Christ is absolutely central. But this feature characterizes other parts of the New Testament as well. 

We might think of the simple statement in Matthew’s Gospel, which we read today: “the disciple is not above the teacher…it is enough to be like the teacher.” Or we might think of the call to take up the cross. The Christian cannot differ from Christ. We are to be in the world as he was in the world (1 John 4:17)

There are other, fuller statements of this principle. In John’s Gospel, chapter 15, Jesus says: “I am the vine, you are the branches. If you abide in me, you will bear much fruit…” A branch does not know a world outside the vine or outside the trunk and root. These things provide structure, life, vitality. So it is with Christ. 

Paul uses this botanical language too, though most translation obscure it. In our second lesson you heard this phrase: “if we have been united with him in a death like his.” That gets at the idea of union with Christ. But Paul’s Greek is more vivid: ei sýmphutoi yegónamen. “If we have been planted with him in the likeness of his death.” We are there in the earth, bound together, rooted and planted with Jesus: Crucified with him on the cross, buried with him in the tomb, raised on the third day in the garden of the new creation. Our death and life are bound to his: there is no separation. This is what union with Christ means. 

Paul describes how this union and mutual planting has come about through baptism. As the sacred waters cascaded over our heads, we were forever changed. Just to be clear: This is not a metaphor. 

It is easy to listen to this and think: well, this is a nice symbol. Or the reading has some good similes. Hear me well that’s not the way I’m trying to talk. I am saying: our union with Christ defines is our reality. 

This is what it means to confess our belief in “one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.” That baptism brings you into the sphere of Christ’s living and dying and rising again. 

It brings you into the kingdom he rules, into the world he defines; and it brings him so wholly into your life that you can never talk about yourself in the same way. For “we know our old self was crucified with him…” Everything in us that belonged to the old age of death, everything that belonged to the fallen world defined by Adam’s sin, everything that belonged to the limitations of ordinary mortal humanity, passed away in baptism. It was destroyed, that the life of Christ might remain.

I recognize how hard it is to live this truth! It is partly why Paul spends such time on it in this chapter. 

For we look at our lives and think: actually, there’s a lot here that seems to be defined by death. These bodies are aging and dying. There’s a lot here that seems to be defined by sin. We still find ourselves failing: foolishly, miserably, frustratingly. There’s a lot here that seems so limited and ordinary. Sometimes we feel we lack the capacity to lead our lives well in this world. How can we be united to Christ, the sinless, the immortal, the perfect Son of God? Surely, it must be a metaphor, for if it were true, we think, we would not be struggling! 

I think that’s lies at the root of some of our unbelief: our disappointment with ourselves, and our desire that God fulfill his promises now, fully,  once and in the way that we imagine and choose. We want glory and honor now, freedom now.

But God has chosen to redeem us in and through the sufferings of this age. In this, we follow the pattern of our savior. Jesus Christ did not come to his resurrection without walking in the way of the cross first, without facing great opposition from sinners, without enduring all the suffering involved in ordinary human life. He took on our limitations. And as the Letter to the Hebrews says, “Though he was a son, he learned obedience” (Heb. 5:8). And God made him perfect through sufferings. 

You, too, are being perfected: not apart from the struggles of humanity, not apart from the traumas of this world. Through what you suffer, and through your struggle with sin, God is conforming you to the image of Jesus, his Son.
There is a great work going on within you through your union with Christ. His character is being formed in you: like hot wax receiving the press of a seal, like molten silver entering a mold, like the branches of a grape vine that are stretched and pruned for fruitfulness. There is a great work in you.

Now, how shall live like this is true? 

Let me give you a simple task this week. Put a small slip of paper by your bedside, or a Post-It on your mirror or on your computer – somewhere you’ll look at it every day. And write down this truth: I am dead to sin, and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

And this week, when you face temptations or you reckon with your limited mortal body, say: I am dead to sin , and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Take this as your memory verse, a phrase to repeat in your prayers, and object of meditation.

Our struggle requires more than this, but not less. If we learn to see our lives as they truly are, we may live them as we should.

We’ve entered the long green months. Outside, the heavy rains are producing tremendous growth; there’s a cornfield I pass on Windsor where the plants are well above knee-high. It’s green inside the Church as well: green vestments, signifying the long season after Pentecost in which we hope to grow as Christians, nourished by God’s Spirit poured into our hearts. 

Every summer at Mass, we read our way through a couple books of the Bible. This year, it is the Gospel of Matthew and St Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The pairing lasts until mid-September. In our sermons this summer, the clergy are focusing particularly on the Letter to the Romans. And there are reasons why. 
 
Positively, this is one of the most important texts in the New Testament. If you want to understand Christian teaching and what we call “the Gospel” or good news, you must read it. Our teaching about God and creation, about sin about salvation, about what it means to live a life in union with God, are all greatly impacted by this letter. The same goes for our teaching about baptism, about faith in Jesus, about the good life, about government, about so many things. We can’t ignore this letter.

Negatively, there’s a reason to preach on Romans for a summer, too. It’s simple. Most Episcopalians don’t know St Paul very well. Our clergy tend to preach on the Gospels, not the Epistles. And St Paul’s writing has been used to support so many forms of subjugation and exclusion, that it has led to a kneejerk reaction against all his teaching, as if the Church is not mature enough to distinguish between what was for his time and what is for all time. But I think we can be mature. 

Today, we’ve read Romans 5:1-8, which means we’re missing a lot of the argument of the Letter already. Chapters 1 through 4 do a lot of scene setting. Paul lays out a vision of God’s communication of himself to all people.

Crucially, too, Paul describes how readily human beings have rejected God’s call, commandments, and love, turning aside instead to their own way. “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” he says (Rom. 3:23).  And by all, he means all. Paul means the people of Israel, who were chosen out of the whole earth to be a “priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” Paul means the whole Greco-Roman culture in which he grew up, which was so marked by idolatry, greed, and violence. Paul means every human person: you, me. 

All have sinned. “There is no distinction” (3:22), no set of people who are faultless and good, uniquely exempt. We’re all in the same boat and it is sinking. I think we know this. Our conscience accuses us when we’re being honest. We know our little sins and the great ones to which we are liable. We know some societal sins with which we are complicit or which we tolerate complacently, going about our lives as if they are not taking place. We know, and we know we ought to know better and do better. 

“All have sinned.” “All have fallen short” of that glory and honor for which God made us. But we have not been left in a place of failure and darkness. God, “who is rich in mercy” (Eph 2), has acted decisively, not counting our sins against us. He would have been right to condemn us as the great judge of all the earth. But God is not only just; he is also, as St Paul says, the one who justifies. He grants us a share in his own justice – through our faith and baptism in Jesus Christ our Lord.

This is the point of triumph, exultation, and “boasting” with which our reading began today. It only makes sense if you know the foregoing chapters, the long tale of human failure, the hypocrisy and weakness of human judgment, the grace God has shown again and again. 

The biblical story of human existence is a tremendous drama, in which the failure of humanity and the mercy of God are twinned.

For while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. … rarely will anyone die for a righteous person – though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.

That is good news. God doesn’t love us because we’re just innately wonderful. Think of the kind of life we would have to live if God’s love depended on our behavior and character. We’d be sunk! “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” That is good news.

As St Paul says, “I am not ashamed of the Gospel. It is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith…” (Rom. 1:16). It is freeing and liberating to know that we are loved in our sins. I mean, my God, I am a sinner! I fail all the time! I’m sure some of you are thinking, “Wait, isn’t it your job to be a good person?” Yeah kind of. But I fail. 

I fail, and I am so thankful for grace, to be “justified by faith,” to know that “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,” and that we shall even share through Christ in “the glory of God.” 

I am so thankful God is not done with me or with you. He is transforming us through the sufferings of this age, producing endurance in us, producing character, inspiring hope. 

Every day, if we have been joined to Christ in faith and baptism, “God is pouring his love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” We have the knowledge of his love now, not just a head knowledge, like when the preacher tells you God loves you, but a heart knowledge and a knowledge in our bodies, in our whole being. 

For example, as we come to the altar rail, the love of God is manifest to us in Holy Communion and in blessing. When the bread hits our hands, we know God has accepted, nourished us, poured out his Spirit.

“God proves his love for us.” God’s love is in our hearts, minds, and bodies. In this green summer season, as we make our way through Romans, let us trust that this love of God will fall upon us like the rains, nourishing us and making us grow. 

The disciples had just failed. A father had brought his epileptic son to them and they could not heal him. Jesus had to do it himself. The failure was still fresh when John spoke up. He had seen a man casting out demons in Jesus' name and he had tried to stop him. The reason, in John's own words, was that the man was not following us. Not "not following you." Following us. Somewhere in the last few weeks the disciples had quietly slid from being those who follow Christ to being the criterion of following. They had made themselves the gate. And a stranger had walked through the wall.

Do not stop him, Jesus says. No one does a work of power in my name and then turns and speaks evil of me. The disciples have read the report one way. Jesus reads it another. Where they see a trespass, he sees the Name doing what the Name does. The Name they invoke does not belong to them. It belongs to him. It reaches further than they reach. It works through people they have never met. And it does something to the one who calls upon it. A man cannot speak that Name and curse it in the same breath. To pronounce it is already to be drawn into its orbit. The Name binds the tongue that calls upon it.

Long before, in the wilderness, the spirit of God had come down upon the seventy elders of Israel. And it had also come down upon two men, Eldad and Medad, who were not in the tent with the others. They began to prophesy in the camp. Joshua came running to Moses and asked him to put a stop to it. Moses had one question for him. Are you jealous on my account? 

Would that all the Lord's people were prophets. Joshua wanted to keep the Spirit close. Moses knew the Spirit was not his to keep. John wants to keep the Name close. Christ knows what Moses knew.

Moses and John are doing the same thing in two different centuries. Both are trying to keep their master's power inside the company they belong to. Both are told no. The Spirit came down on Eldad and Medad, and Moses would not call it back. The Name came down on a stranger casting out demons, and Christ will not call it back. The power belongs to the one who gives it. It does not belong to those upon whom it has been placed. This is who God is, in both Testaments and on every page. He is not jealous on our account. He is not small. He gives his Spirit and his Name where he wills, and he does not ask his disciples for permission. What this means for us is plain. We are not to set limits on where God is at work. We are to become better at seeing where he is already at work. The casting out of demons, the naming of evil and the sending of it away, this is the work of our God. And we are to welcome it wherever he chooses to do it

When we hear that a man is justified, counted righteous, almost all of us imagine a courtroom. A charge, a judge, a verdict, a record wiped clean. It is a tidy picture. But it is not the one Paul is painting. The word he uses, the word our translation gives as “reckoned”, he repeats eleven times in this one chapter, because the whole argument turns on it. And it is not the courtroom word we take it for.

Righteousness, in Scripture, is less a quality you possess than a bond you stand in. To be righteous is to be in the right with someone. So when God reckons a man righteous, he is not scoring him. He is granting him a standing he did not have on his own. And you can hear what that standing is in the Psalms. Who shall ascend the hill of the LORD, the song asks, and who shall stand in his holy place. The righteous one is the answer. He is the one who may stand in the sanctuary and not be turned away at the door. To be counted righteous is to be granted admission. It is the right to come near.

Paul says the promise is made sure to all of Abraham's seed, and then he calls Abraham the father of all of us. The father of many nations. And that is an impossible thing to call him, because by this point his body is, in Paul's own phrase, as good as dead. A hundred years old, his wife's womb long closed. A dead man does not father one child, let alone a multitude of nations. So how is he our father? Paul answers in the same breath, and the answer drives everything else in the passage. Abraham is a father by the God he believed, the God who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Those nations did not yet exist when the promise was made. God had to call them into being, as he once called light out of the dark water. The power to become a father was never Abraham's own. It was given to him, by the God who makes the dead alive.

There is an older name for the one who is given that standing. He is called a priest. The priest's whole office is to come near, to enter the holy place and stand before God for the people. And the first priest was not Aaron. It was Adam. The garden he is placed in is a sanctuary, and he is set there to keep it as God's holy place and to stand in the Presence unashamed. And then he is stripped of it. He reached for a glory God meant to give him, and lost the glory he already had. He is driven out, and God sets cherubim and a sword at the gate to bar the way home. The priest is exiled from his own sanctuary. This is what Paul means three verses before our passage for today. All have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God. Not fall short of a rule. Fall short of a glory. We lack the radiance the first man wore in the Presence and lost at the gate.

So when God reckons you righteous, the robe goes back on. This is how the Syriac fathers told the story of our salvation, Ephrem above all, and Jacob of Serugh after him. Adam was clothed at first in a robe of glory, a garment of light, and at the fall he was stripped of it, and the Son of God came down to give the robe back, to clothe the naked exile and bring him home. You were baptized into Christ, Paul tells the Galatians. You put him on. Christ himself is the robe.

But perhaps you suspect the robe is only a costume, that being counted righteous is a fiction, a pretend verdict over a real crime. So consider what kind of word God's word is. It is the word that said let there be light, and there was light, a word that has never once described the world but only ever made it. When that God says righteous over you, he is not pinning a label on you from across the room. He is doing to you what his word did to the dark and the deep. He makes what he says. Augustine put it plainly. The righteousness of God, he wrote, is not the righteousness by which God is himself righteous, but the righteousness with which he clothes a man when he sets him right. Clothes him. The verdict is a vesting.

But John Henry Newman saw what lifts all of this above a change of clothes. If God counts us righteous, and his counting is a making and not a pretending, then what is this righteousness he puts on us? Newman's answer was that it is not a quality at all. It is a Person. Christ, he said, is our righteousness by dwelling in us by the Spirit. He justifies us by entering into us. The robe is not something God hands you at the door and leaves you to wear alone. The robe is the Lord himself, put on from the inside. The glory that makes you fit for the Presence is the Presence, come to live in you. So the man God justifies is not only let back into the temple. He becomes the temple. Do you not know, Paul asks, that you are God's temple, and that God's Spirit dwells in you? The Presence Adam was exiled from, that the high priest could approach only once a year and only in dread, now makes its home inside the very person it has just set right. This is what the Greek fathers dared to call our being made divine, and it is nothing like a man hauling himself up into God. It is God giving his own glory back to the creature, and coming to live within the one he has clothed. The Word became man, he wrote, so that we might be made God.

And now you can see why none of it could happen unless the God who reckons you righteous is the God who raises the dead. You cannot stand in that Presence as you are. The glory that makes a man fit for the Holy of Holies is the same glory that burns up whatever is unfit, and you cannot vest a corpse. The people God is setting right are not only guilty. They are dead. To be brought near is to be made alive enough to bear the Presence and not be destroyed by it. The reckoning that sets you right has to be a resurrection, or it is nothing. Which is why Paul will not stop with Abraham. This was written for us too, he says, for us who believe in the God who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. The same word that called light out of the dark, and called a son out of a dead womb, and calls you righteous, is the word that rolled the stone away.

And one last thought draws the whole of it together, and carries us back to that impossible fatherhood. Think of how Isaac came to be. His father was a hundred years old and his mother long past bearing, two bodies as good as dead, and the child of the promise was a life God called up out of that dead-ness. He was, from his first breath, a gift given where there should have been nothing. And every one of us who believes comes into this family by that same gift, a life God gives where there was none. Not by bloodline. But by that one life, given out of death, received through one faith, and worn as one robe. That is what makes this gathering a household. Not that we resemble one another. But because the one life of God has come into us all.

So this is the gospel hidden inside a word we thought we understood. To be reckoned righteous is not a verdict filed in heaven. It is to be raised from the dead. It is to be clothed in the glory the first man lost. It is to be brought back through the sword and the veil into the Presence of God, and to have that Presence make its home in you. The word that raises you is the word that makes us kin. Not by blood. Not by agreement. But by one life, spoken over the grave, and given to all of us.

The water was still on him. This is how Matthew's Gospel begins. Jesus had just been baptized in the Jordan, the Spirit had come down on him and a voice had spoken from heaven, and that same Spirit drove him out into the wilderness. There, at the end of a long testing, the devil took him to the top of a high mountain. He showed him every kingdom of the world, all its power and all its glory, laid out beneath him like a feast. Take it, he said. All of it, today, every crown. Only fall down and worship me.

And he would not. He turned the whole world down. He would rather have nothing at all than take it that way, than bow to the wrong god to get his hands on it. He came back down the mountain with empty hands, and he meant to keep them empty.

That refusal had a road in it, and the road ran downhill the whole way. A man who keeps his hands open in a world that grabs what it wants ends in only one place. They came for him in the dark and he did not lift a hand. They stripped him and he let them. They drove nails through his open hands and he kept them open, and he died with nothing in them at all, the way he had come down from the mountain. The empty hands he chose in the wilderness were the empty hands they nailed to the wood. He would rather die with empty hands than fill them by force. That is how far the “no” on the mountain went.

And then, at the very end of the same Gospel, in the reading we heard today, there is a second mountain. It comes after everything, after the grave, and the eleven are waiting on it because he told them to come. When he appears, some of them fall down and worship, and some of them, even now, even here, are not sure what they are looking at. He does not wait for them to be sure. He comes to them and tells them what has become of him. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. The whole world, the very thing the devil spread out on the first mountain and offered him for a price, is his after all, and it has come to him as a gift. He did not seize it. His Father has laid it in his open hands, all of it, free, because he would not have taken it any other way.

And standing there in the middle of the world he refused to steal, he tells them what it is for, and it begins with a name. Go, he says, and make disciples of every nation, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

That name is the answer to both mountains. The question that has hung over this whole story, what kind of God would rather die than grasp, what kind of God turns down the world sooner than seize it, is answered the only way it finally can be, by God telling us his name. And the name is three. He would not seize the world because closing his hand is something he has never done. Before there was a world to close it on, before there was anything at all, he was already giving himself away. 

He did not begin to love on the day he made us. There was no day he began. God was already love, and love must have someone to love, and so, with no beginning, there is the One who loves, the Father, and the One he loves with his whole heart, the Son, the Father's own self given away and never for a moment lost. The Son was not made, the way the world was made. He is eternally given, the way a father gives himself to his child, only with no beginning and no end.

And a love between two, if it is truly love, does not curl up and keep to itself. It opens. It makes room for a third. The love the Father pours into the Son and the Son pours back is so alive, so wholly God, that it is itself someone, a third who loves and is loved, as fully and forever God as the other two, and him we call the Holy Spirit. Three, and one God, because it is all one love, one life flowing among them without end. They are not one God taking turns behind three masks, for they are all of them at once, always, turned toward one another in love. Each one is the whole of God. The Father is the whole of God, pouring himself out. The Son is the whole of God, given and giving himself back. The Spirit is the whole of God, the love that runs between. And not one of them has ever, for a single instant, closed a hand.

He has shown himself like this before. There is an old word for it, theophany, which means a showing of God, the moment he steps out where he can be seen. The great one came at the river, the morning this story started, with the water still running off him. 

He stood in the Jordan, and the Spirit came down on him like a dove, and the Father's voice came out of heaven, this is my beloved Son. That was the first time the world saw all Three at once, the Son in the water, the Spirit upon him, the Father naming him from above. The Church in the East still calls that day the Theophany, the showing, because it was the morning God let himself be seen as what he is. And what was shown at the river is what is given on the mountain, the same Three, named again, by the Son this time, and poured out now on us.

It goes back further than the river. All Three were there at the beginning, in the words that were read here this morning. The Father speaks. The Word he speaks is the Son, and everything that is made is made through him. And the wind moving over the dark water is the Spirit, brooding over the new world the way a bird broods over its nest. The Three who made the world, who showed themselves at the river, are the Three named on the mountain.

On that same first page, when it came to making us, God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness, speaking of himself as more than one. And he made us male and female, in the image of God. We say the Trinity is hard, and we suppose the trouble is the three being one. How can three be one? But the trouble may run the other way. The trouble may be the one being three. For we begin from ourselves, certain we know what we are. We are individuals, each of us separate and entire. 

We imagine we start as finished, single selves, who may then choose, or not, to bind ourselves to someone else. That is not what Scripture says we are. It says we came out of one. There was one man, and out of his own side God made the woman, and out of the two of them a child, and out of that child, in the long run, every face that has ever lived. Abraham was one man, and out of him came Isaac, and Jacob, and a whole people who carry the one man's name to this day. We are one that is always becoming many, and many who are never, in the end, truly apart. That is the shape we are cut to, and it is not the lonely self that later decides to love.

And if that is the image, what must the original be? Perhaps we have stood in front of God all along asking the wrong question, asking how three separate persons could be folded down into one, when the truth underneath us and underneath him runs the other way, that the One was never alone, was always pouring himself out, was always more than one. What we do slowly, down the years, parents giving way to children and children to children, he is forever and all at once. We find him hard to understand not because he is dark to us, but because we are still dark to ourselves. We think we are most ourselves when we are most alone and most our own. We are wrong. To be is to be given, and to give yourself away, and the God in whose image we are made was three before there was a world, because that is what love is when it has no beginning. We were never made to stand alone. We were made to be taken up into the one.

And that is what the water does. The name the psalm says fills the whole earth, the name that has been to the top of two mountains and down into a grave, comes down at last small enough to be said over the head of one baby who has done nothing and can do nothing, who cannot lift her own head. The priest pours the water and says the name, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, and she is taken into it before she knows the first thing about it. She did not earn it. She could not have seized it. It was given, the only way it is ever given, free, into open and empty hands, the very way the Son received the world from his Father. The river and the font are the same water. The Three who stood over him stand over her. She is not merely marked with the name now, she is taken up into the life it names, into the giving that has never stopped, given her place in the one, for the whole of a life that begins right here, learning to take God in and to give him away.

And this open-handed God, the God who would rather die than grasp, is the one we have fought over more bitterly than anything else on earth. We have damned each other over him, torn his Body in two over him, gone to our graves sure we had him right and our neighbor wrong. Of everything there is to seize and clutch, we have seized this, the one truth that is only ever a gift. Paul saw it begin in his own churches. When he had finished pleading with the Corinthians not to tear themselves apart, in the very letter we heard read this morning, he left them the only cure there is, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, the Three named over them in a single breath. 

Those same words are said over you at this rail. We are never nearer to losing this God than when we are surest we have caught him. 

He cannot be caught. He can only be received, the way the baby receives the name, the way your own open hands will take the bread in a few minutes, empty, asking for nothing.

And then he says the last thing, and the book stops. I am with you always, to the end of the age. He says it to the ones who worshiped him and were not sure of him, which is to say he says it to us. He has never once waited for our doubt to clear. He did not wait on the mountain, and he does not wait now. He came into this Gospel with a name an angel gave him before he was born, Emmanuel, which means God with us, and he leaves it making the same promise in his own voice. Whatever we cannot work out about him this morning, this much we keep. He is here. He is not leaving. He told us so himself, in the last words of the book.

I am with you always, to the end of the age.