In the face of sin, death and injustice, we are called to walk in newness of life. (Listen.)
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
With these words, the poet Wendell Berry describes a way of life that, simply by being born in this time and place, we have all been trained to desire.
Paid work with upward mobility, holiday pay, even long service leave for the lucky ones. Ready-made clothes and meals, entertainment and erotica. Constant turnover of cheap goods. Streaming services; binge watching; porn on demand; social media. Single family homes and neighbourhoods built for privacy. Independent car travel. Suburban sprawl. Yet what are the consequences of this way of life?
Berry puts it succinctly: “Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die.” That is, we are seeing record rates of loneliness. People report having far fewer friends than once was considered normal; young adults are far less likely to engage in sexual relationships than their elders did at the same age.
There’s been a collapse in volunteerism, and of just hanging out. There’s the widespread sense that other people are hell, or at least an inconvenience we are unwilling or unable to put up with; so we walk around with headphones on in public, even at home. What else do we see? Atomization and isolation. Skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression. High rates of addiction and other pain-numbing tactics, and all the rest.
Every context has its own ways of sin and death. It might be the buying and selling of human bodies in the slave trade, or the slaughter of human bodies in war, or the negation of female, intersex and trans bodies in the patriarchy. It might be the environmental destruction wrought by first century Roman invasion, or eighteenth century Anglo-French wars, or nineteenth century colonization, or the ongoing devastation that a Western way of life demands.
Or it might be the slow death that Berry implies, the death which comes about through blind participation in a capitalist economy. It’s death through gross consumerism; death through hyper-busyness and hypermobility, through being too rushed, too absent or too distracted to hang out with one’s neighbours or the members of one’s church. It’s death through social atomization and loneliness, and death through lack of real connection or community in our lives.
The people of first century Rome were very familiar with sin and death. It was a brutal, rapacious society governed by brutal, rapacious men. Power resided, first, in the male head of household, then up through various male patrons to the ultimate power, the emperor. Those lower in the social hierarchy constantly curried favour with those a little higher, even as they were frequently shamed and treated with contempt. As for the lowest of the low, women, children and slaves: they had no bodily autonomy. Their bodies could be bought, sold and used in any way at any time by their master and his friends.
More broadly, a long period of invasion and war had seen the slaughter, displacement and enslavement of millions of people, and had had devastating effects on the land. Yet Rome proclaimed its greatness. The emperor was a self-declared Son of God, who claimed to bring peace, justice, and liberation wherever his amies went. Whenever Rome colonized a new region, glad tidings, good news, gospel, were proclaimed—even as women were raped, villages razed, captives funnelled into slavery, and whole societies torn apart.
It’s into this context that the Apostle Paul writes a letter to the Christians in Rome. Generations of translations have tried to depoliticize the text, treating it as a theological treatise or a rant about personal morality. It’s not. Paul is taking the language and symbols of empire and deliberately subverting them. We see this in the opening lines of the letter, where he introduces himself as a slave not of the emperor, but of Jesus Christ; he says Jesus, not Augustus, is God’s Son; he proclaims the gospel not of Rome, but of God; and he declares that peace, liberation, and justice come not through the military, but through Christ.
Perhaps you have not previously thought of Romans in this way, but the word commonly translated as ‘righteousness’ is, quite simply, ‘justice,’ and the word ‘wickedness’, ‘injustice’; the word ‘salvation’ means ‘liberation’, and we are ‘made just’ by faith. So Paul invites readers to read between the lines as he alludes to the violent sexual excesses of the emperor, the injustice of the Roman empire, and the imperative of love and justice in the life of faith. He then invites readers into a new citizenship and a new way of being in the world which subverts empire, challenges loyalties, and dances to the beat of a different drum. Wendell Berry might be paraphrasing the letter’s major themes when he writes:
Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag.
The Apostle Paul says it more obliquely and at greater length, but he makes very similar points: Give your allegiance not to the emperor, but to the God made known in Jesus Christ. Pay lip service to the emperor, but respect where respect is due. The earth groans; care for it tenderly. Don’t work simply for money or status or the things Rome values, but for justice. Love without expectation of return; love those who persecute you; love those who have been shamed, especially the Jews, who were expelled from Rome by the emperor. Recognize the injustice, violence and exploitation of the state and call it what it is, for only love is the fulfilment of the law. Even so, bless your enemies, even the governing authorities who make your lives so hard. Pay your taxes, fly under the radar when you can, and overcome evil with good. (You’ll find all this and more in chapters 8, 11, 12 and 13.)
It’s a big ask. All around, empire looms and sin and injustice seem inescapable. So, asks Paul, do we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? Do we continue to capitulate to the lies and harms of the society around us? Do we praise God on Sundays yet live the rest of the week like everyone else? Do we trust in grace to paper over the chasm between our stated faith and our actual lives?
Perhaps. Because, let’s be honest, continuing in sin feels easier. To put it in our context, continuing to be hyper-busy and hypermobile, constantly travelling, working, shopping, organizing, and juggling our diaries, substituting social media for embodied relationships, retreating to private homes and ordering readymade clothes and streaming readymade entertainment: well, it’s the path of least resistance.
Resistance means discomfort. It means living differently and making hard choices. It means being poorer, less important, less sexy, and somewhat out-of-step with what everyone else is watching and doing and being. In the face of the combined juggernauts of capitalism and climate catastrophe, resistance feels futile. And as Jesus warns, it may lead to rejection by family, friends, and the wider community.
But, Paul asks, how can we who died to sin go on living in it? Why would we choose that? We know it leads to atomization and loneliness. We know it’s an embodiment of injustice. We know it leads to slow death from the inside out. We know it contributes to social disintegration and climate collapse.
And we have been invited into something new, something good. For he writes, Those of us who are baptized into Christ were buried with him into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead … we too might walk in newness of life.
Hear that? In baptism, we have died with Christ, and in doing so we have died to our way of life. We have died to the desires and lies of a society which turns neighbours into rivals and corrodes relationships and creates an epidemic of loneliness. We have died to “the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay … everything ready-made.”
We have died to the rapacious consumption which chokes the planet with rotting clothes and microplastics and wildfire smoke. We have died to endless travel and its carbon cost; we have died to hyper-busyness and all that prevents us from knowing and loving our neighbour.
Indeed, we have died to everything that destroys right living; and by God’s grace, we have been raised into newness of life. A life that is no longer enslaved to sin (in Paul’s words), and which no longer fears neighbour or death (in Wendell Berry’s). Instead, we are raised to a life shaped by justice and joy; a life that is infinitely enriched by good relationship with God, other people, and the land.
When we try to go it alone, as indeed our society suggests we should, the forces of sin and death are too powerful to resist. But when we are united in Christ, we are not alone and death has no dominion over us. Through Christ, we have one another, and when we present ourselves to God as instruments of justice, then by God’s grace, sin will not prevail.
Of course, how to embody this, how to live into newness, will always be a work in progress, but Berry offers some pointers:
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest …
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
My friends, with Christ we died to sin so that we might walk in newness of life. So when all seems dead and the norms of this world threaten to overwhelm, join with others and choose life. Be brave. Be vulnerable. Go deep. Trust God. Slow down. Love people. Seek justice. Plant trees. Try things. Hang out. And don’t worry about getting it all right. In Berry’s words:
Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
In all things, indeed, make tracks towards newness of life — and over and over and over again, practice resurrection. Ω
A reflection by Alison Sampson on Romans 6:1b-11 and beyond, given to Sanctuary on 25 June 2023 © Alison Sampson 2023 (Year A Proper 7). Quoting lines from “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” by Wendell Berry. Found in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Counterpoint Press: 1999. Read the full text here. For further reading, see Romans Disarmed, by Sylvia C. Keesmaat and Brian J. Walsh, also this. Photo by Olga Kononenko on Unsplash.
Alison and the whale 