Since We’re Already Dead (Romans 6:1-14; Seventh Sunday of Easter; May 17, 2015)

Since We’re Already Dead

Romans 6:1-14
Seventh Sunday of Easter
May 17, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

I like watching the world outside our windows. It's hard to call it nature, exactly, since the landscape has been profoundly shaped by human activity, unless, of course, we consider that human beings are just as much a part of nature as anything else. Whatever we call it, there is certainly a lot of life happening out there. I am amazed by it. I enjoy watching the birds, the deer, and the occasional racoon or coyote most. They go about the business of living with focused effort.

I like to see some of it up close, so I put out seed for the birds. The bird seed also attracts the racoons, so I have to bring the feeders in each night. My youngest sister Jenny and I have a good-natured running argument about racoons. Jenny works at a licensed wildlife rehabilitation center in Delaware. She is especially fond of racoons. I agree with her that they need rehab, but I have something else in mind. When I forget to bring in the feeders, the racoons will steal all of the seed and wreak whatever additional havoc crosses their sinister little minds. They have torn through the porch screens and raided containers of bird seed (that I now keep in dining room where they do not really fit in with the decor).

But I can't really blame the racoons. They're just going about the business of living. They are fond of being alive. Most of us are. I certainly am. Everything I can see outside of our windows is busy making or catching food or trying to avoid becoming food. Sometimes this struggle takes place in plain sight as when a Cooper's hawk sits on a branch waiting for a mouse to make a wrong move or when a nuthatch wedges a sunflower seed in a crack in the wood and works on it to "hatch" the seed from its husk. Sometimes the struggle can't be seen as when, for example, a tree subtly alters its chemistry to make itself less appealing to pests.

I'm part of this struggle, too, although I have more time for other things, like watching this cosmic drama. It's great privilege not only to be alive, but to be aware of life. It's a privilege I try not to take for granted.

Everything living tries to stay that way, often with enormous effort. I remember a man I used to visit in a nursing home who was tired of life, tired of the effort it took, tired above all of being tired. Ernst wanted to die, actively wished and prayed for it. Two or three times he got really sick with pneumonia and each time he would shake it off and recover. "Why?" he would ask me. I told him I didn't know, except that something in him very much wanted to stay alive. We have a drive toward life. It can't be justified. It just is. As far as I can see all life is like that.

Institutions are like that, too. They struggle to keep going. Like other life forms, sometimes organizations aren't too fussy about who or what they eat in order to stay alive. Other living beings become aroused when their lives are threatened, organizations arouse anxiety in their members.

I will never forget a certain meeting of Iowa United Methodist pastors. It came during a hard time. Within a few weeks the gambling addiction of one of our best pastors became public, another was hospitalized with anorexia, and a third committed suicide. Bishop Palmer called us together for some "holy conferencing." During the course of our conversation one pastor whom I will call Tom--because his name is Tom--stood up and announced that there was an elephant in the room. In a voice cracking with emotion he proclaimed what he said everyone knew but no one had the courage to say. "The fact is," he said, "our church is dying!"

I have a reaction to anyone who claims both to be privy to the hidden truth of our conversation and to be the only one with the courage to speak it aloud, but I dare say he wasn't the only one in the room who entertained that thought.

Just this week, the Pew Research Center published the results of a telephone survey of 35,000 people all around the country.¹ Their chief finding is that in the seven years since the last survey of its kind, the share of Americans who claim to be part of some religious body has shrunk by nearly eight percent. The greatest losses have come from mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics. The greatest gains have come among the folks who are atheist, agnostic or "nothing in particular." Especially troubling for the future is the fact that while the average Mainline Protestant is older, the average non-affiliated person is younger than seven years ago.

There has been a lot of scrambling to explain or explain away these findings, but they are not anything that we haven't suspected before. We know that we have fewer people than we had in 2007. We had a conversation about this last week in the Finance Committee as we continue to come to terms with a "giving base" that has gotten smaller and is likely to continue to do so. We had another conversation about this last week at the Ad Council meeting as we are working out how to look ahead and plan for our life and work in the next few years.

We're pretty sure we can't keep doing things as we have done them. When we think about it, which we don't like to do very much, we're anxious about the future. Some of us may even be worried that our church is dying.

This brings me back to Tom. Tom's elephant wasn't the only one named that day. Before the meeting was done we had enough elephants to repopulation vast swaths of Africa, but his was the one that stuck with me. I chewed on elephant for the rest of the meeting.

By the time I was in my car headed home, I was ready to ask Tom some questions. I come up with my best questions in my car on the way home! Here is my part of the imaginary conversation I had with Tom: Let's suppose for the sake of argument that you are right, that our church is dying. It might be true or it might not, but let's suppose that it's true. Our church is dying. Why do you think that this is a bad thing? We are, after all, the followers of the one who died and was raised from the dead by the Spirit of God. Why do we think that, if we are dead, we, too, won't be raised from the dead? Why is it a bad thing for the church to die?

Paul in today's reading pushes us even further. It's not just that, if we die, God will raise us from the dead. It's that we have in fact been baptized into Jesus' death, as Paul says. This was in order that we be raised to new life. Our death is not just something that might happen, in which case God has a Plan B that involves our being raised. Our dying with Christ is God's Plan A.

Our church is supposed to die. Our denomination is supposed to die. Our annual conference is supposed to die. We are supposed to die.

But, of course, we don't want to do that. We put every bit of effort we can muster into staying alive. Our institutions do the same. We reorganize; we restructure; we conduct campaigns; we reframe our appeals. We do all of this on the assumption that death for the church is a bad thing and must be avoided at all costs. Our leaders are anxious and their anxiety spreads faster than an Ebola outbreak through the institutions of the church, through the annual conference, through congregations.

Anxiety, of course, is seldom helpful. Anxiety makes us less able to see nuances and subtle changes, less able to think in new ways, and--most importantly--less able to hear the sound of sheer silence² that is God's voice.

But we don't need to be anxious. We aren't dying; we are already dead. We are baptized; we are the community of the baptized. We have been buried with Christ. This is accomplished fact. This is not something we have to dread or try frantically to avoid. It has already happened.

So, since we're already dead, since our denomination is already dead, since our annual conference is already dead, since our congregation is already dead, our circumstances are changed. If I woke up tomorrow literally dead, there's a whole list of things that are on my to-do list right now that I would cross off. They would no longer be important.

Paul says that, since we're already dead, there are lots of things we can cross off our to-do lists. We can give up sin. For whose sake would we sin, anyway, if we're already dead? We can give up being afraid, too. Whom will we fear? What can anyone do to us? Can our feelings be hurt? So what if we are fired?

In the church--local, regional, or global--there is also a list of things that we can give up. We can quit holding on to forms of ministry that used to be our way of mattering in the world, but aren't any more. We can let them go. We don't have to worry about keeping our church the way we want it. We can let go of our quarrels over turf and territory. I dare say we could let go of our arguments about who may love whom. We can let go of our worry about offending financial supporters if we should actually proclaim Jesus' message in our day. We can let go of our anxiety about the future. We can let go of being afraid to fail.

We can let go of all these things and, if we do that, it will free up all the energy that we've been using to manage our anxiety. We can let the worried voices in our heads run down and we can begin to listen to what God is trying to say to us, what God has been trying to say to us. We can listen and we can answer. We can, as Paul tells us, present our bodies to be used to do justice. Since we're already dead, there is no reason we should not do all that and more. Since we're already dead, there is nothing left for us but God's new life, the same new life that is in Jesus, the same new life that is transforming the world into God's dream. There isn't really anything we can't think or try or dare, since we're already dead.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

1Pew Research Center. “New Pew Research Center Study Examines America’s Changing Religious Landscape.” Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project. Accessed May 16, 2015. http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12ew-pew-research-center-study-examines-americas-changing-religious-landscape/.

2 1 Kings 19:12