Practicing Death, Practicing Resurrection - Easter Vigil, Romans 6:3-11
I love a good mystery. Book or movie or television show, it doesn’t matter as long as the dialogue is good, the characters well developed, and the plot unexpected. The best mysteries are those where the central character turns the tables on the bad guy. The latest to fit this bill for me is the PBS television show Baptiste. I recently finished season one, and just toward its close there is a brilliant scene where the detective, Julian Baptiste, makes a daring move to force the hand of a Romanian gangster.
Sitting across the table from one another, the gangster reminds Julian of the brutal murders he’s committed, saying: “If you’re not scared then you’re a fool.” The detective looks him in the eyes, and calmly responds with a quote from Montaigne: “To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned to die has unlearned to be a slave.”
I think the Apostle Paul would have loved that scene from Baptiste and he may have even heard an allusion to his own theology in the show’s title. Baptism, for Paul, is a means of practicing death and as such it is the door to freedom. That’s what we heard tonight from the Epistle to the Roman. Our attention this week has been on Jesus, and rightly so, but Paul reminds us that our call is to join with Jesus in his death, to participate with him in the crucifixion. The call to discipleship we answer in our baptism is, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer once put it, an invitation to “come and die.” And through this practice of death we have been made free.
The problem, though, is what to do with our freedom? The ancient stoics, the samurai of Japan, Montaigne—they all saw the truth that death brings liberty. But that is where they stopped. We can learn to live bravely, we can stand up to the evils of this world, but death doesn’t bring healing, it doesn’t accomplish reconciliation or flourishing. We learn to die and so throw off the chains of fear, but where is the power for renewal?
Two thousand years ago, Jesus practiced death so well that he turned an instrument of torture into a symbol of grace. In his death he liberated us from the power of sin and evil, but his work didn’t stop there and neither should ours. When Jesus was raised from the dead his resurrection was not for him alone, but was a first gesture in the healing of all things, the renewal of all creation.
As a people who have been joined with Christ in his death, we now live in the expectation of that resurrection, that healing of the whole world. And because of this, practicing death is no longer enough for we cannot be satisfied with mere freedom. In Christ we have been given the hope not only of liberty but of flourishing. Our call now, in the reality of Easter, is to practice more than death. We are invited to “walk in newness of life”; we are called to practice resurrection.
In practicing resurrection, we live with hope despite the death all around us, bringing the presence of the living Christ to all the broken people and creatures and places of the world. Practicing resurrection does not need to be some grand or dramatic action. It could mean rewilding a backyard, planting trees and flowers for the creatures God made and loves. It could mean taking the time to hear someone’s story, being a friend to those on the margins who live in loneliness and isolation. It could be visiting the sick or writing to those in prison so that they know that they are not forgotten. It means, most of all, a constant communion and dependence upon the One who gives us life, following where God leads us. In all these actions, small and large, we are practicing for what is our future—not death but newness of life evermore. Christ is risen! And we will be too. It is time to get ready.