Trinity 10July 31 201610am HTW

Thinking about what it means to be ‘raised with Christ’

You have been raised with Christ …..

You have stripped off the old self with its practices, and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our creator and redeemer. Amen.

The pulpit is not generally the place to make a personal confession, I have been taught. However, I am going to break the rules and make one now! There are some classic English authors that I have never read: Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, ArthurRansome to name just a few.

The trouble is that titles such as The Pickwick Papers, Jane Eyre, and Swallows and Amazons are so familiar that I start thinking I have actually read them. It’s only when I start trying to share their stories with a friend that I realise I don’t actually know what happens.

Some phrases are rather like that too. We happily use them thinking we know what they mean, but in fact sometimes don’t …. (like the unfortunatesocial climber, MrsMalaprop, in Sheridan’s play The Rivals, who aspired to be the ‘pineapple of politeness', as she put it!). Her misuse of the phrase betrayed her lack of understanding.

For me there are many such phrases within our Christian vocabulary, so often heard but not always understood. Many come from Paul; phrases such as ‘raised with Christ’ which appears in our Colossians reading this morning. What exactly does that mean? And How are we raised with Christ?

I’d like to begin with the meaning, and suggest ‘raised with Christ’can mean different things depending on whether we are looking at the past, present or future, and yet add up to the same meaning - andthe same ‘how’, achieved in a particular way, which I hope will become clear. Let’s take meaning in the future first.

To be ‘raised with Christ’in the future is something we Christians probably find fairly easy to understand. It speaks of resurrection, doesn’t it? The resurrection of Christ has paved the way for the resurrection of us all. We have been promised eternal life when we die. We look for the second coming of Christ on the clouds of heaven, on that day when all will be raised with Christ. Many are buried facing East in anticipation. In this sense, being raised with Christ is something we can grasp, even though we might wonder at the grace of it all, and what it will really be like. Somehow we shall strip off the old self and clothe ourselves with a new self.

Then there’s the past. ‘Dying to Christ’and being ‘raised with Christ’should speak to us of our baptism. (And this is where we begin to see the ‘How’of being raised with Christ.) Most of us, I suspect, will have been baptised as infants - in the past, from our current perspective. In baptism, we are called out of darkness into God’s marvellous light, we pass through the waters of death as did the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, following the lead of Moses in faith and hope and trust. We become members of the Church, the Body of Christ, and begin our journey of faith, not alone but together, with Christ at the head. As the Baptism service puts it, ‘To follow Christ means dying to sin and rising to new life with him.’ We strip off the old self and are clothed with a new self.

But what of the present, the ‘now’of our lives, suspended between the past and the future? How can we be ‘raised with Christ’in the present? The simple answer is: by living a risen existence now - the risen existence that he has won for us by dying and rising to new life, that we share by dying and rising with Him through our baptism.

But unfortunately that phrase ‘living a risen existence’is another one that, for a Christian, can trip off the tongue so easily and yet mean little in practice. What is a risen existence? Whatdoes it look like? How do we live it? Again, a simple answer is: by living out our baptismal vows - another tricky phrase. Let’s unpack it a bit.

We might think ‘living out our baptismal vows’is about keeping the promises we have made, that promise to renounce evil - about looking to our about individual personal behaviour and ethics - in ways such as Colossians lists: ‘putting away whatever in us is earthly’, all inappropriate sexual desires, getting rid of anger, malice, slander, all those things that mess up our communication with others. Well it is; but there is more to it than that. There is a corporate dimension to it as well.

As Rowan Williams says, to be baptised is to recover that humanity that God first intended and restored to us in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. In vulnerability Christ entered the chaos of this world in order to restore it. We recover our humanity by sharing in his life, death and resurrection through baptism. But that means that with him, as part of his Body, we too are called to reach out to the chaos of the world.

This means, Williams says, that you might expect to find Christian people near to those places where humanity is most at risk, where humanity is most disordered, disfigured and needy. With Christ ahead of us, we are to engage with earthly things, and not reject them, in order to play our part in the reconciliation of the world to God. Williams finds a paradox here: in baptism we are called both to reject earthly things and engage with them. That idea of stripping off the old self and clothing ourselves with a new self in Christ is the key to unlock the paradox.

Conclusion

So where does that leave us? We have been raised with Christ through his death and resurrection. In our past baptism we began to share his death and his resurrection, stripping off the old life and entering into new life, as part of his Body, the Church. We share his risen existence throughout the shiftingpresent of our lives, and will do so in the future for eternity when he comes again. But that risen existence conferred on us through our baptism, brings a duty to live out our baptismal vows - not just for ourselves in personal piety, but for the sake of the world that Jesus came to save - that messy, earthy world with which he engaged to his uttermost.

Let us think on that, both individually and corporately as the Body of Christ. Let us strip off any oldpractices that get in the way of new risen existence today in our present. Let us take steps to refashion our corporate life anew for today’s risen existence in this changing and developing town of Cirencester. Let us continue to seek new ways to imitate Him who is the image of our creator, who reached out to all that is earthly. As we seek to do so, He will renew us through the grace of our baptism; grace that continues to flow throughout our baptised lives. Amen