Romans 6:3- 11 Trinity 6
Saint Paul asks a question in our second reading that is worth sitting with before we go any further. He writes to the Romans, "Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?" (Romans 6:3). It is a striking question, because I suspect that many of us, if we are honest, have not thought about our own baptism in quite these terms. We think of baptism as a beginning — a naming, a welcoming, a washing away of original sin. All of that is true. But Paul wants us to see something even deeper. He says that baptism is not simply a washing. It is a burial.
"Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life" (Romans 6:4).
Think about what a burial means. A burial is not a pause. It is not a temporary state from which the old life continues on as before. A burial is an ending. When Christ was laid in the tomb, His earthly life, as it had been, was finished. He did not go into that tomb to rest and come back the same. He went into death itself, and He came out the other side utterly transformed — glorified, imperishable, no longer subject to death's claim.
Paul says this is what happened to us — to each one of us — in the waters of baptism. Our old self, what Paul calls "our old man," was crucified with Christ, "that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin" (Romans 6:6). Notice the finality of that language. Not weakened. Not restrained. Crucified. Destroyed. Buried.
This is important, because so often we treat our baptism as a distant event, a bit of family history, something that happened when we were infants and that we have little living connection to now. But Paul insists that baptism is not merely something that happened to us once. It is something that defines who we are every single day. We are, at this very moment, people who have been buried with Christ. The old self — the self enslaved to sin, cut off from God, walking in darkness — that self is not simply managed or minimized. According to Saint Paul, that self is dead and buried.
So before we can talk about rising to new life, we have to be honest about this burial. Something in us had to die. And I want to suggest to you this morning that many of our struggles as Christians come precisely from refusing to believe that the burial really happened — from continuing to visit the grave of our old self as though we might dig it back
This brings us to the heart of Paul's teaching, and to one of the most important verses in this whole letter. Paul writes: "Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Romans 6:11).
Reckon. It is an old word, but Paul chose it deliberately, and it is worth pausing on. To reckon something is to count it, to add it up, to treat it as a settled fact. When you reckon your accounts, you do not wonder whether two plus two equals four — you know it, and you act on that knowledge. Paul is telling us that our death to sin is not a hope, not a wish, not a goal we are working toward. It is a fact, settled at the cross and in the baptismal font, and we are called to reckon it as true and to live accordingly.
Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say, "Struggle against sin until you eventually overcome it." He does not say, "Try your best to resist temptation, and perhaps someday you will be free." He says the freedom has already been won. "He that is dead is freed from sin" (Romans 6:7). Sin no longer has a rightful claim on us — "for sin shall not have dominion over you" (Romans 6:14, just beyond our reading, but implied throughout). The old man, crucified with Christ, no longer sits on the throne of our lives.
Now, I know what some of you are thinking, because I think it too. If sin is truly dead in us, why do we still feel its pull so strongly? Why do old habits, old grudges, old temptations still whisper to us as if they never left? Here is where Paul's word "reckon" becomes so pastorally important. He is not naive about the ongoing reality of temptation. He knows that the corpse of our old self does not always stay quiet in its grave — it can seem to twitch, to call out to us, to tempt us to dig it back up and reanimate it. But Paul's counsel is not to go check whether it is really dead. His counsel is to reckon it dead, and to walk away from the tomb.
This is why he says later in this same chapter, "Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof" (Romans 6:12). The command is not "kill sin" — Christ has already done that decisively at the cross, and we have already died to it in baptism. The command is "do not let it reign" — do not go back to serving a master who no longer has any authority over you. It would be like a freed slave who, out of habit, keeps returning to his old master's house to ask what chores need doing. The chains are gone. The debt is paid. What remains is simply the daily discipline of living as a free man, and refusing to answer to a voice that no longer has any right to command you.
Brothers and sisters, this is good news of the deepest kind. Whatever sin has had a grip on your life — whatever old wound, old anger, old compulsion you have carried for years and perhaps assumed you always will — Paul says: reckon it dead. Not because the temptation will never whisper again, but because its authority over you was broken at the cross, and sealed in the waters that once covered your head.
But Paul does not end with a grave. He never does. The whole point of the burial is the resurrection that follows it. Listen again to those words from verse four: "That like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life."
And a few verses later, Paul deepens this by pointing us to the permanence of Christ's resurrection: "Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him" (Romans 6:9). Christ did not rise from the tomb only to face death again someday. His resurrection was final, complete, irreversible. And Paul's whole argument in this passage rests on the claim that our new life in Him shares in that same permanence. "For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God" (Romans 6:10-11).
This is what our life is meant to look like, beloved — not a cautious, half-hearted improvement on our old habits, but an entirely new way of walking. "Newness of life" — the Greek word Paul uses carries the sense of freshness, of something recently made, unworn, unlike anything that came before. This is not resuscitation. It is resurrection. We are not the old self patched up and given a second chance. We are new creations, called to walk — to move, to act, to live day by day — in a manner that belongs to the risen Christ rather than to the buried old man.
And here is what I want to leave with you this morning. We often speak of resurrection as something we wait for — a future hope, reserved for the last day. And it is that. But Paul insists that resurrection life is also a present reality, something we are called into today, this week, this hour. We do not have to wait until we die to begin walking in newness of life. We are already, by virtue of our baptism, people who have crossed over from death into life. The only question is whether we will reckon that as true, and walk accordingly.
So as we come to this altar today, I invite you to remember your baptism — not as a faded photograph in a family album, but as the defining reality of who you are. You have been buried with Christ. Your old self, with its sins, its shame, its slavery, has been crucified and laid in the tomb. And you have been raised — truly, presently, permanently raised — to walk, today, in newness of life.
Reckon it so. And walk in it.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.