My grandfather was a very wise man. While his formal education ended at the eighth grade, he was what we would call today “a life learner.” From him, I learned many life lessons, the chief of them was his insistence that I “learn something new every day.” I make every attempt to do that. On last Monday, for instance, while reading a journal on preaching, I came across the word perseveration.* I did not know what it meant but learned that perseveration is a brain condition that causes people to get stuck in a particular behavior pattern. The article offered an interesting example. Perseveration is what led Manfred von Richthofer, the legendary WWI flying ace known as “The Red Baron” to pursue a British pilot far beyond the limits of safe flying and prudent dog-fighting. On April 21, 1918, he flew his red Fokker triplane into British airspace, allowing aircraft and ground fire to shred his plane to ribbons and kill him.

“He had a target fixation and a mental rigidity,” says clinical psychologist Daniel Orme. The Red Baron “flew into a shooting gallery violating all kinds of rules of flying, rules from a manual he himself wrote.” Perseveration is a brain dysfunction that causes people to persist in a task, to carry on in a completely illogical way, even when a chosen strategy is doomed and could lead to death. The Red Baron was not born with this condition. He suffered a traumatic brain injury in a dogfight nine months before his death and researchers now believe this caused his dysfunction.

Perseveration, as I thought about it, I concluded that it just might be an issue for many of us. For instance, what guy here this morning has not experienced it? I mean your wife tells you a particular behavior is unamusing, unappreciated, and even unacceptable, yet for some inexplicable reason you persist in that behavior? It is a fatal fixation. More seriously, perseveration pops up in many situations. Think of that father who works night and day to provide a particular life style for his family, only to end up with nothing of himself to give to them. Or think of the mom who spends so much time and energy engaged in her children’s activities only to be so immersed in kid’s stuff that she cannot be a good adult role model. Think of the Christian who works endlessly to be faithful, who strives tirelessly to be righteous, only to become unable to hear the Word of grace, only to miss the Good News. What is the answer to such fatal fixations? Theologically speaking, it is that transition from darkness to light, from bondage to freedom, indeed from death to life, the Gospel proclaims. This movement is at the heart of what Paul announces in out text for this morning.

Paul has carefully presented his case to the Romans. In Romans 1:18 to 3:20, he has argued that the whole human family, Jew and Gentile alike, stand under the dominion of sin and death. In 3:21 to 5:21, Paul presents God’s response. God has acted to justify us, to make us right with Him, by grace received in faith. In other words, apart from the Law, independent of human good efforts, God has forgiven us and made us right with him by a love that we can not earn and do not deserve. It is all a matter of God’s grace, not human achievement. “Does this mean,” asks an imagined opponent, “that we then should go ahead and sin since justification depends on God and not us? In fact, should we sin gloriously, that God’s gracious love might abound? Are we free from any ethical or moral requirement?”

Paul’s answer is emphatic: “By no means!” He then proceeds with a tightly constructed and theologically thick response. He draws on both the theology and imagery of baptism to show that what his imagined opponent suggests is an utter impossibility. He points out that when a believer is baptized, he or she dies with Christ and is buried with Christ, as is imaged in going under the water. Likewise, when the baptized is raised up out of the water, that symbolizes his or her being raised up with Christ Jesus into newness of life. Theologically speaking, Paul maintains that baptism is our participation in the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus. When Jesus was crucified, Paul maintains, he died not only physically, but he also died to the power of sin and death. He broke the power of sin and death. When he was raised by God, he opened the way to new life in which sin and death no longer have dominion. As he writes in verse 4: “Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the death by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” The believer is freed from sin and death, concludes Paul, so it is not possible for her or him to continue in sin as suggested by his critic. The believer no longer lives in the world of sin, no longer is the prisoner of perseveration, but is free to live in the new world. Does this mean the believer never again sins or falls short? No, says Paul. What it means is the believer now knows forgiveness and freedom are theirs in Christ Jesus.

The fullness of this new life, however, is yet to be realized. It lies in the future. Yet, there is no question that it will. Paul reminds his readers that just as Christ Jesus will never die again, that sin will never again have dominion over him, so the believer may be certain that he or she has passed from death to life and sin no longer has dominion over them. This leads to Paul’s ethical imperative which holds that the future glory of the resurrection impels one to live in the present age in a way consistent with and worthy of that future reality. Such is the basis of the hope that we have in Christ Jesus. Anglican theologian and Church of England Bishop, N. T. Wright, in his new book, SURPRISED BY HOPE, argues that this dying and rising with Christ Jesus is the content of our hope. He points out that once we get resurrection rightly understood---namely that it is the defeat of death, not some spiritual experience or bodyless soul floating off to heaven, we encounter the reality of the hope we have in Christ Jesus.

Now what does this say to us here this morning? I think it says that when you and I come to faith in Jesus Christ, when we understand our baptism, we too can make this transition, this movement, knowing we too have died to sin and death and are free to walk in newness of life. That is very significant. In fact, it is life-changing. In order for us to know this new life, this future hope, something else must die. Will Willimon tells of an experience a few years ago at a church in Tupelo, Mississippi. He was leading a discussion on this text from Romans and asked, “Has anybody here ever died to be a Christian?” To his surprise, he said, a woman immediately raised her hand. “I had always been afraid to be alone,” she said, “so when my husband would go out of town on business, I would go and stay with a friend, so fearful was I of staying in the house alone. Since the night my daughter died, I have never been afraid again.” Willimon admits he was somewhat puzzled. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t get the connection. What did your daughter’s death have to do with you not being afraid to be alone?” “She looked at me surprised,” Willimon says, “as if pained to explain the obvious.” “Don’t you see,” the woman explained, “When my daughter died, I died. Once you’ve died, what else can they do to you. What more do you have to fear?” Even as the group was processing these words, an elderly man raised his hand. “I thought I could never live in a world where black people were the same as white people. When segregation ended, I thought I would die,” he confessed, “But I didn’t. I was reborn. My next door neighbor, my best friend is black. Something first in me had to die, before something new could be born.” I hunch St. Paul was smiling as he listened in that night in Tupelo.

Yet, if we are honest, these are difficult words for you and me to hear. They contradict some perceptions of the Christian faith prevalent among us, perceptions which hold that being a Christian is becoming a better person or getting our lives fixed, or being on an ever upward journey toward the open arms of a warm, affirming, inclusive God. Paul tells us being a Christian is about dying and living, about dying to certain behaviors, certain understandings, certain priorities, any of those expressions of the power of sin and death and being raised to a whole new way of living. It is to be liberated from any expression of perseveration, any of those fatal fixations.

Does this mean you and I, once delivered, will never sin again? Never slip back into old behaviors? No, not at all. That came home to me a few months back. I was driving to our cabin in Michigan after evening meeting here at church. So it was quite late, about 1 am, as I was on the final leg of the journey. Suddenly, I came upon a barricade across the road. The sign said, Road Closed to Through Traffic. I hate such signs and it was late and I would have to take a detour and I was only about five miles from the cabin---all reasons why I slipped in an old pattern. I didn’t see any evidence of construction, so I drove around the barricade. About a mile down the road, around a lengthy curve, I discovered the reason for the barricade and sign—a section of the road had been removed. I turned around and retraced my route. As I approached the initial barricade from the back side, I noticed someone had scrawled a message across it. The message read: “I told you so!” Yes, we will stumble and revert to old patterns. I have and some have been a good deal more significant than not obeying “Road Closed” signs. But there is a difference now---a difference I had to learn. The Christian life is not aout being sinless, never slipping, never coming up short. It about knowing that we need forgiveness and knowing who offers it. We have moved from death to life, died to that old self and been raised to a new self. So, we confess our sin and decide again, perhaps daily, to die and be raised, realizing that gracious liberating love and its power to move us from death to new life.

That is really what it is all about, this Christian life. We move from one world to another, die to one way of life and are raised to another. Such is the meaning of our baptism into Christ Jesus. A friend tells of witnessing a baptism in a Baptist Church, where full fledged immersion is the only option. My friend is not a Baptist. He is one of us---a “sprinkled Methodist!” He tells of this new Christian being baptized being thrust under the water three times and each time being raised up. However, on the third time, he came up spitting and sputtering, gasping and grasping. As he watched, my friend said he thought to himself, “Man, you could kill someone doing something like that!” And then he said he thought he heard a voice whisper in his ear, “Right! Now you’re catching on!!

So, let me ask: “Has anybody here ever died to be a Christian?” I hope so! I really hope so!! For it is by dying with Christ Jesus that we are raised by him to new life! Thanks be to God! Amen!

*HOMILETICS, May/June, 2005, p.59