Dying to live. . .

We seem to remember too well the part about those who have died in Christ rising in Him but we have skipped over too easily the part about dying.  Our preoccupation with how we live in defining us as saints is not simply tragedy but a destructive omission.  The saints are those who have died in Christ.  This baptismal language is meant to remind us not what we ought to do but what has been done to us and for us when we drowned in the baptismal flood.  The saints are those who died.  There is no life apart from that which is born of our connection to Christ's death.  But this dying in baptism has profound consequences for who we are and how we live.  

Live free or die is a great slogan for a state in the time of the American Revolution but it has become for us the idea that living means the freedom to live as you please and do as you please without even the Law able to question or constrain or guide your choices.  How odd this is!  Jesus insists that the shape of our baptismal life is not life but death -- denying yourself, taking up your cross, and following Him and not your own ways or will.  This is the great mystery.  He was born to die and we are born again also to die.  This has become the forgotten fact of a Christianity in pursuit of pleasure, self-expression, and self-interest.  

The saints are those who died in Christ and who continue to die every day.   "For Your sake we are being put to death all day long," says St. Paul in Romans.  And to the Corinthians:  "For we who live are constantly being delivered over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh."  Then there is the letter to the Galatians:  "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me."  I could go on.  Self-denial is not an option but the way we live out our baptismal new life.  It is marked by dying over and over again.  Even marriage is thus defined -- husbands who die for the wives and children daily and wives and children who learn from him also to die to self.

It seems that we talk too much today about our freedom and not enough about the self-control that reigns in what we think, speak, or do.  It is not about sex but about everything.  I used to have a joke that said everyone has a right to MY opinion.  I laughed when I read it but self-expression has become something bigger than it was intended to be without any constraint of goodness or morality.  Social media is corrupted by unrestrained self-expression.  No, the government is not equipped to be the power over this but we ought to be a power to ourselves -- especially Christians!  I love how one of my favorite hymns sings keep me from saying words that later need recalling.  It is a little death.  Stifling the need to speak.  The saints are those whose lives are marked by many little deaths precisely because they have died in Christ and live in Him.  I only wish we talked about this more.