As the A-Team’s irrepressible Hannibal Smith would say, “I love it when a plan comes together!” For me this week it’s the plan to preach through Romans and in the first part of the year push those texts into the mix with the assigned readings from the lectionary. It works out beautifully for this last Sunday of that strategy. The Gospel lesson for June 19, Trinity Sunday is Matthew 28:16-20 and the Romans text up next is chapter 6:1-11. And both center around baptism.
In Matthew it’s the command to baptize with the Trinitarian formula, “in the name of the Father and of the Son of and of the Holy Spirit,” which makes it a fine text for Trinity Sunday.
In Romans 6, baptism is the route by which we die with Christ to sin and then are raised into a new life.
The texts fit nicely together once we realize that the “new life” into which baptism raises us in Romans 6 is none other than the holy life of God Himself as three persons sharing one life together in the Godhead. It’s that life of trinitarian sharing and love which we are given in Christ.
Verse 12 puts in succinctly by saying that we are “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” That phrase “alive to God” means alive to all the possibilities of living in the divine social life of harmony and peace while being distinct persons.
I’m part way through Charles Portis novel Masters of Atlantis, a send-up of secret societies and all the pseudo-historical and pseudo-scientific nonsense associated with Masons and Rosicrucians and lost continents like Atlantis and Mu. Portis has fun picturing various silly initiations into these secret orders, with recitations of absurd secret doctrines, eating of figs, and ridiculous processionals and handshakes. All of these machinations leave the initiates as weak, foolish and sinful as they were before engaging in them.
Paul’s point is that our initiation into the Christian faith is no sham show like those of a secret society without any tangible change in our lives. Baptism is a huge transformation, from death to life, and from the ways of sin to the ways of righteousness in Christ. That’s why he answers the charge that we might go on sinning in order to make grace abound with such indignation. That’s unthinkable if our initiation into Christ is the true transformation it’s meant to be.