Alive in Christ - A Teaching Montage

June 21, 2026

Romans 6:1-11

Our second reading this morning comes from Paul’s letter to the church in Rome.  With Romans, Paul is weaving a complex and nuanced theological tapestry… that can easily be misunderstood and misused when we cut it up into smaller pieces.  So… this morning we’re going to try to keep our eye on the bigger picture and not get too far into the weeds. Listen as God speaks to you from Paul’s letter to the church in Rome.

            READ

            Romans invites a teaching sermon.  Especially with this passage… as we’ve done before… we’re going to have start with the meaning of the word “sin”.  Maybe by now, you already know what I’m going to say. 

Lots of time when we use that word “sin”, we’re often referring to a specific action or behavior… or a social cultural theological concept.  This is a very law-oriented understanding of sin.  You don’t do this or do that because this or that is against the rules… or in Paul’s time… it was against the Jewish Law.  The way to lessen the amount of sin in your life is to follow the rules.  Clear.  Simple.  Easily understood.  The more I break the rules, the deeper I am in sin’s debt.  The more I follow the rules, the more pious and holy I am.  This way of understanding sin puts it right on you.  You are in control of the sin in your life… for good or for bad… we know who to praise or who to blame. 

But… I also want you to see the other side to having this type of control over sin.  Defining sin in this way… I am given the reasonable power to judge you in your sin… because it doesn’t take a genius to see how you are doing in following the understood and accepted rules of what is and what is not a sin.  This type of judgement usually does not lead toward any form of reconciliation outside of the pressure of getting you to follow the accepted rules.  It also creates the space for me to judge my own level of personal holiness against others… so I can see myself as better… or at least better than you.  Yes, I too have sin… but my sin is less than their sin… and as long as there are others whose rule breaking sin is worse than mine… I am holier than they and closer to God.  It’s like being chased by a hungry bear… all I have to do is run faster than the slowest person.  Those who getting eaten up by sin… it’s their own fault… God has no need for sinners.  God’s punishment and abandonment of the sinner under this way of thinking was completely justified.  We just have to hope that wherever that cut off line is for punishment… we are somehow on the right side of it. 

But… that thought exposes another problem with this definition.  Outside of giving the rules we are to follow… God is not involved.  God only rewards or punishes based on some idea of how much sin… or which sins are understandable… and which sins require punishment.  God’s involvement is a very low level form of transaction.  Sin is all on us.  We have all the power over sin… even… theoretically… to be sinless… if we follow the rules.  

I heard some of this thinking about sin the other week at the Montreat Youth conference from one of the Youth in my small group.  He was still struggling with the whole “love the sinner but hate the sin” formula of dealing with another’s sin.  Again… such thinking is very law-based.  How do I not give the impression that I condone or… what’s the right word… affirm the sin of this person who is so clearly breaking the rules.  As I listened to him and the group struggle with this law-based understanding of sin, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “What sins of their own has his congregation normalized… what sins of their own have they downplayed because to judge their own sins in the same way as they were judging the particular sins of others would have brought them down into the level of punishment.”  I was thankful when I heard him make the connection in their discussion to the whole “don’t judge the speck in your neighbor’s eye without first examining the log in your own.”

I mean… who is deciding the ranking of sins?  Which sins are worse?  Which sins are not so bad?  Sexual sin.  Bad.  Greed.  Not so bad.  Apathy towards another’s suffering.  Also not so bad.  Not obeying the strict rules of the Sabbath.  Very bad.  That’s the one Jesus likes to poke at in the gospels.  In some form or another… his is always where the thinking about law-based sin leads… to some artificial ranking of sins.

Paul comes and shakes up that understanding of sin.  Paul talks about grace and the power of God’s grace in the forgiveness of sins… regardless of our sin status.  Grace doesn’t fit easily into a strict law-abiding understanding of sin.  Grace disrupts the system… breaks the rules… doesn’t show respect or deference to our knowing who to praise or who to blame.  In his experience of spreading this good news of grace, Paul was met then with the response that perhaps sin no longer mattered… that grace took away any need for us to follow any sort of law.  We were free to do whatever we wanted.  There are no longer any consequences to anything we do or how we act.  Sounds familiar, right?  It’s a common response whenever any law-based definition of sin gets challenged.  God’s grace will always bail us out in the end.  That’s where the opening question from our reading comes from.  “Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?”  If you take away the idea of reward and punishment when it comes to sin… and replace it with a generous grace… then what does sin matter?

So… what if we understood sin in a different way.  And this is where I hope you’re now thinking that you know what I’m going to say.  What if… instead of being connected to specific actions or the keeping or breaking of specific rules… what if sin instead spoke to the condition we were in… whether we want to call that a condition of the heart or the condition of the soul… what if sin was instead used as a word to define a condition of brokenness… or of separation.  Paul, in his letters, argued how as a Pharisee… as a Pharisee… he was very adept at following the rules of the law.  Ranking his… and other’s… sin quotient based on how much he broke the rules.  Paul was a fairly sinless man to hear him describe it.  He had all the right credentials… he knew all the right things to do and did them.  He was blameless before the Law.  And I think for Paul… that’s what made his experience of grace all that much more devastating because that experience didn’t support what ought to have been.  He ought to have been holy and righteous… close to God… but instead found himself to be broken and separated from God.  Sin was the word that described that separation from God.  

We are all sinful in that we are all separated from God… and we alone cannot repair that brokenness because it isn’t based upon how well we follow whatever set of rules are placed before us.  With this definition of sin… we are not in control.  God is in control.  And God is set free to exercise a wider understanding of judgment.  The God of a law-based understanding of sin is strictly binary… reward or punish.  The God of grace can choose to forgive… to redeem… to resurrect.  The God of grace can choose to be present with the sinner… going to great lengths to repair the brokenness of relationship.  The God of grace can overcome the separation of sin and do the work of reconciliation.  God is set free to be the God of steadfast love.

With sin… with separation done away with by grace… through the loving self-giving act of God through the death and resurrection of Christ… with separation done away with and ourselves reconciled… with the heart or the soul or the individual transformed by this experience of grace… in transformation… in the revealing of our broken relationship with God… why would one want to reintroduce separation?  Why would one… having had such a love revealed to them… why would one want to go back to being separated from God… or from one another?  That made no sense to Paul.  That should make no sense to us. 

But Paul saw that it was hard to get rid of those defining rules.  It was hard to let go of long-term distinctions.  As he went out among the Gentiles… as he witnessed to them as sinners redeemed and reconciled… his fellow Christian missionaries… those who were also from a Jewish background… had a hard time letting go of the old Jewish laws that created distinction… that created Jew and Gentile… that created an us and a them… that recreated separation.  And… I believe… we still have a hard time with that today… dying to those rules and understandings that keep us separated one from another… that keep us in our safe tribes… or behind the walls of our own ideological gated communities.

  Saints, it’s hard to come fully alive in Christ.  Transformation is not fully a process that we control or guide ourselves through… it truly is that journey of faith where we are constantly being remade and undone… where we are having to live into each moment and evaluating what is the death that surrounds us and where is resurrection breaking in… transformation is a messy process… but as Paul teaches… it is something we do with God and not alone. 

When we talk about our sins… the ones of either commission or omission… the ones that usually show up in our prayers of confession… notice how those sins listed are often the sins that separate us from one another.  We talk about our failure to love our neighbors.  We confess how our fears control us… or how our prejudices work in our making decisions.  We will talk often how we cannot put our full trust in God… that we hold back.  That, to me, is what our Matthew reading was about… holding back… not being willing to lose the life we know so well… not being able to trust in the power of the cross.  It’s not the rules we’ve broken… it’s how we keep introducing brokenness into a world made whole through Christ.  It’s our attempts at undoing the resurrection and reembracing the sureness of death.

Let me end this morning with these two thoughts… first, my experience in becoming a father… and then something from Dietrich Bonhoeffer since we’re learning from him on Wednesdays. 

When I became a father… when I first held my son in my arms… an immediate transformation happened.  In that moment, I was no longer who I had been… I had become something else.  That experience is the closest thing in my life that I can relate to Paul’s experience of Christ through grace.  Why would I want to go back to that time before?

Paul’s question… “Why return to the separation Christ has already overcome?”… meets its echo in Bonhoeffer’s warning about cheap grace. Cheap grace is what happens when we treat reconciliation as information rather than transformation, when forgiveness becomes a law-based loophole instead of a new life. Bonhoeffer said cheap grace is “grace without discipleship,” grace that asks nothing of us because it never actually touches us. But costly grace… the grace Paul is teaching… breaks us open and remakes us. It is the grace that pulls us out of the old patterns of death and into the living Christ. It is the grace that refuses to let us retreat into the safety of our tribes or the comfort of our judgments. Costly grace is the grace that ends our separation from God and from one another… and then calls us to live as people who know that separation has ended.

Saints, the transformed Christian disciple doesn’t return to the old life because the old life no longer fits. We have died with Christ; we have been raised with Christ; and now, by grace, we are becoming what we already are… people made whole, people made new, people who refuse to undo the resurrection in ourselves… or in anyone else.  Amen.