The Call of the Newness of Life

Romans 6:1-14

          Every morning, I continue the same routine.  I usually wake before my alarm sounds and swing my legs over the left side of my bed where my toes search for the flip-flops I discarded there the night before.  After a dash to the bathroom, I pull out a coffee filter, fill it with grounds, fill the coffee maker with water and then push the [brew] button.  As I turn on some music and walk around my apartment opening all the window blinds to allow the new morning light to fill the rooms, I listen for the bubbles and clicks and dripping of my coffee into the coffee pot and the relished [beeping] that indicates it is ready.  Once my coffee is poured and my granola bar is in hand, I sit at my computer, open e-mails, and quickly scan Facebook before diving into my news page of trusted news sources reporting on today’s world and U.S. news.  

And every morning, though the stories’ details may change, it happens.  I read through the news and witness mass deaths across the globe like those in Nigeria and in Kenya.  I read how our own U.S. government is again acting like spoiled little children throwing tantrums because they are not getting their way while their hungry constituents watch from the cold.  I read of violence, of wars on the horizon, of human aid diverted.  I read of atrocity after atrocity, of crisis after crisis, like it’s a sports page of winners and losers in team colors and wing-tip tennis shoes.  

And then, it hits me, it rolls over me, the “newness of life” Paul mentions in Romans.  It’s uncomfortable and annoying, like a pebble stuck in my shoe, but nevertheless, it forces me to think of all the people, all the many, many people, all those members of my human family that are suffering, crying, gasping for air.  I shake my head disgusted.  As I take another sip of my coffee, the “newness of life” convicts me again and whispers that whether I want to accept it or not, I am actually responsible for some of that mess out there.  As I sit in my cozy apartment drinking coffee from Seattle and eating granola sold to me by Food, Inc., the “newness of life” judges me rightly.  

To be honest, it is enough to make me want to go back to my bed, crawl under the covers, and go back to sleep literally and figuratively.  It is enough to make me want to go back to before the newness of life, before I had died to blissful ignorance, to reenter the tomb, cover my eyes, and hope and pray that maybe God will swoop in one day and fix this disaster of humanity, that maybe Christ will return and, like the money-changing tables in the temple, turn this immoral human system we have built upsidedown right side up again.  Ahhh, but the “newness of life” won’t let me slumber.  It echoes Paul and says, “What shall we say, then?  Shall we go on living in complacency so that God may someday save us?” 

When I first read this text in Romans, I had no idea that the phrase the “newness of life” would become of such profound interest for me.  Nor could I have imagined how this “newness of life” would evoke response and action beyond my simply answering “no, no, we shouldn’t sin” to Paul’s seeming rhetorical question.  Being raised in the Christian tradition, I have heard the phrase “newness of life” countless times when referred to becoming Christian, or embarking upon a Christian life.  And while I figured I understood its meaning all these many years, Saturday before last, I was surprised in discovering its even deeper impact.  You see, last week, my baby sister had her very first baby, a son she and her husband named Flint, and “newness of life” took on a fuller, personal, substantive meaning.  With respect to this passage in Romans, I believe that, like the experience of the birth of a newborn, our Christian “newness of life” inspires us, convicts us to be God’s grace in the world, to be God’s embrace of our world in its suffering, vulnerability, and nakedness.

As God would have it, I happened to be in town at the time Flint decided to grace the world with his presence, three weeks early, as my sister, Tara, and I in the process of touring nursing facilities to care for my Dad who is suffering from the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease.  Suddenly, in the midst of our grueling, grief-filled week, arrived Flint, that “little bundle of joy,” a cliché I finally now truly understand.  Smiling widely with joyful tears in my eyes, I sat in amazement over his teeny-tiny fingers and toes, his even teenier-and tinier fingernails and toenails, and his plump, rosy cheeks framed by his soft strawberry-colored hair.  This sleeping, still newborn caused all my experiences of nursing home smells and somber, sad elderly faces to seem distant, like an entirely different life divorced from mine.  And as I watched little Flint sleeping, I believed that perhaps our family had finally embarked upon a happy era.  Now things would be delightfully different.  Everything will change.

However, with newborns, especially those that you don’t have to live with, it’s a bit too easy to get caught up in the idea of the “newness of life” as the bundle of joy.  The reality is that true newness of life also comes with screams and wailing, with the discomfort of leaving the old, that which provided so much contentment before.  Stripped of his comfort, his warmth, his endless supply of nourishment, and his lullaby of tossing water and muted sounds, the new baby was jarringly pulled into the poking, prodding, loud, static-filled world.  Its newness is uncomfortable and scary.

And yes, it’s true that everything changes, but the transition is not always so smooth.  Similar to the Gentile and Jewish believers learning how to live with one another to whom Paul is writing, even the parents of the newborn have to adjust.  “This is so much harder than they say it will be,” my sister has confided.  Her marriage has changed.  Her sleep has changed.  Her ability to go meet friends for lunch or go for long contemplative walks has changed.  The newness of life is not just the rainbows and butterflies of nurseries.  The newness of life is also storms thundering overhead and caterpillars writhing in the dust. The life my sister had is gone.  

As for the newborn, Flint, well, now Flint means everything – EVERYTHING!  Our devotion to his livelihood, his well-being, is unsurpassed.  There is nothing in the world anyone of us wouldn’t do for that new little life.  The amount of love we feel for him simply cannot be adequately be expressed.

I think this experience I have described of welcoming a newborn into the world resonates as something familiar when thinking of our own Christian lives, doesn’t it?  Is not the death to the old self and resurrection into the newness of life that Paul describes much like this experience of a newborn baby being thrust into the world?  Yes, newness of life is beautiful and joyful, but the reality of it is also startling, scary, and ever life-changing.  And doesn’t this incite more than a simple “no” answer to Paul’s question about sin, but rather a resounding “yes” response to actively engaging a life lived toward God? 

Imagine it for a moment.  It is as if before our “newness of life” we simply wandered a womb that was like a tomb where we lived in blissful ignorance.  We were never skeptical of the structures and systems of existence, never questioning of the information we were provided, never challenging of the identities to which we were bound, the allegiances we were innately given.  In fact, we found odd comfort in being told who we were, whose we were, and what we were to become.  Easy answers made for easy living, and we bounced along in our insular lives believing that everything was exactly as it should be, as it had to be, that any change was not just impossible but unwarranted. 

But then Christ came along and invited us to see ourselves as He sees us.  When we accepted His hand, that’s when we were birthed; we were awakened.  Like Neo in the movie, The Matrix, we gulped down the red pill, and were bolted, startled and screaming excitedly, into the newness of life, acutely aware of the true reality in which we live.  Our eyes were opened, and we could see.  Together, we experienced and uncovered our interconnectedness, and we discovered that we are all a part of the same newborn body.  We became aware that when one breathes, we all breathe.  In this newness of life, we died to the self-sufficient self or the victimized self that separated us from one another.  We became disbelieving of the lies we’d been told to keep us content, lies that told us we were powerless, insignificant, ugly.

And yet, in the newness of life, as joyous and liberating as it is, we also uncomfortably see our own complicity in our participation in turning the wheels of an immoral human system, a machine that simply uses humanity.  Thus we change significantly when we watch our own hands churn the machine’s gears that chomp at our sisters’ fingers and slice at our brothers’ feet.  Outside of the tomb, we see how the wheel of economy fits in the grooves of government that springs into action both drones to kill and aid to revive.  Yes, being in the newness of life lifts us out and up to see us as God sees us, newborn, suffering, vulnerable, and naked.  And thus, our glorious but cumbersome Christian “newness of life” inspires us, convicts us to do the hard work of being God’s grace in the world, of being God’s change of the system, of being God’s embrace of our united tiny fragile body.

So I guess the answer to Paul’s question of shall we go on the same as before really is, “No, by no means.”  No, we cannot go back to sleep and simply pray the human system will change.  No, we cannot sit idly by and watch our human family suffer at our own hands, at the whim of our government, or for the profits of the companies we financially support.  Instead, we must act, we must work, we must advocate for change!  If we really live in the newness of life, if we care, we must rise up from behind our coffee and computers, and become incensed.  We must, to quote the movie the Network, “get mad as hell and say we aren’t going to take it any more.” We must scream that we are ALL human beings in this together and every one of us has value.  In the newness of life, we must share, love, embrace!  And we must, MUST, treat each and every person as if they were our very own newborn for whom we are responsible. 

For God did not resurrect us into the newness of life just so that we may live.  God resurrected us into the newness of life so that all may live.  Therefore, let us go and BE God’s abounding grace!