Palm-Passion Sunday
29 March 2026
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
Gregory Pope
LIVING OUR BAPTISM #7: DYING WITH CHRIST
Mark 8:27-35. Galatians 5.16-26
The sacramental waters of our Baptism says that: We are the Beloved of God who have turned from our sins – sins now washed away in the waters of God’s love – and turned toward God’s grace with a commitment to Follow Jesus, Name Him Lord, and Pledge our Allegiance to the Kingdom of God. We the Baptized are Anointed by God’s Spirit and Called to serve the mission of Christ in the world as part of the family of God to which we belong, members of the Body of Christ into which we have been baptized. As we begin Holy Week where we walk with the baptized Jesus toward his death and resurrection we are reminded that our Baptism symbolizes our own death and rebirth, in this life and in the Resurrection life to come.
The Baptist form of baptism, full immersion in water, is a vivid and dramatic picture of death and rebirth. Growing up I heard many ministers say these words of Paul from Romans as they lowered the person under the water: “Buried with Christ in baptism,” and as they brought them up out of the water said: “Risen to walk in newness of life.” Those are the words I heard and that’s what I felt 48 years ago at the age of ten when I came up out of the water – something like newness of life.
Living into our Baptism means that something dies and something is born. This Holy Week we should perhaps ask ourselves the question: “What needs to die in me so that new life can come?”
I think this imagery of dying and being buried with Christ is part of what Jesus had in mind as he talked to his disciples that day at Caesarea Philippi: “Who do you say that I am?” he asked them. Peter’s hand shot up, “You are the Messiah, the Christ”, he answered. And Jesus commended him.
Then Jesus began talking about what was to come: how he would be arrested and put to death by the powers-that-be. And Peter said, “No Lord, this could never happen to you!” Jesus rebuked him and said, “Put these thoughts of Satan away.”
The idea of a Suffering Messiah did not compute in the Jewish mind. Messiah was to come and end suffering, not suffer himself. Knowing this expectation and misunderstanding Jesus called the crowd to gather in with the disciples, and He said to them all: If anyone wants come with me let them deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me. Then he added, to drive the point home: For those who want to save their life will lose it; and those who lose their life for my sake and the kingdom’s sake will save it. It is a paradox, the mystery of the gospel that: Finding comes in losing, and losing helps you find.
There is a kind of dying that leads to new life. Sufi mystics talk about “dying before you die”. It’s about letting go of the things in your life that are bringing death to you and to those around you letting the things in your life that need to die, die so that we might more fully live. It’s part of what Jesus called “denying self”.
The spiritual journey is the daily letting go of the false self so that we may connect more deeply with our true self created in the image of God. The false self is the ego-driven self, full of compulsions, like those the church in its early centuries called “The Seven Deadly Sins”: pride, sloth, envy, anger, greed, gluttony and lust. In his letter to the Galatians Paul called these and others the death-dealing works of the flesh. These are the workings of the false self, not the true self God created us to be. In contrast, Paul names the life-giving fruit of the Spirit as: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. We put to death harmful habits and dispositions so that other healthy habits and dispositions can grow and our lives can flourish.
But this false-self / real-self distinction goes even deeper, down into our spiritual identity. The false self is shaped sometimes by the world around us and sometimes by harmful choices and bad habits that become addictions we can’t seem to shake, behaviors that grip us in their death-dealing power. The false self can be many things. It can be the self imposed on you from people and culture outside, even the church itself with expectations of family and society that are not right for you. The false self can be your idealized self, your “perfect” self. We might call it the “social media self”: the one we send out to the world seeking “likes” and approval. It sits on your mantle like an idol. But the time comes for almost everyone, often publicly, when the idol of our perfect idealized self tumbles from the mantle and shatters into a thousand pieces.
When this happens, as painful as it is, we should thank God for this shattering, for now we can begin to discover our true self. We can begin to let go of those things that are killing us, and begin dealing with your real self, the self God created you to be in God’s image. You can begin living as the Beloved Child of God you are. At its best and deepest the Holy Spirit we receive at Baptism can help us topple this false god.
Next Sunday we will have the opportunity to renew our baptismal vows. What if you took the time during this Holy Week and each day wrote down something about your life you would like to change: habits, attitudes, behaviors that are harming you and your relationship with God and with others. We all have them. Christ wants to help us bury them so that we might live as Easter people better be able to walk in the newness of our baptismal life.
So sometimes there are things within us, things about our lives that need to die. And sometimes our dying with Christ pictured in our baptism may lead to our literal physical death.
One person whose faithful following of Jesus, whose life and writings cost him his life in Nazi Germany was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer refused to bow the knee to Hitler’s violent nationalism and challenged the church to follow the teachings of Jesus was arrested and sentenced to death in a mock trial on April 8, 1945. The next day, April 9, one month before the end of WWII, he was hanged to death along with five other prisoners at Flossenbürg Concentration Camp.
His best friend and chief biographer Eberhard Bethge writes on April 9th: “On the morning of that day between 5 and 6 o’clock the prisoners were taken from their cells and the verdicts of the court martial read out to them. Through the half open door in one room of the huts I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer, before taking off his prison garb, kneeling on the floor praying fervently to his God. I was most deeply moved by the way this unusually loveable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution he again said a short prayer and then climbed the steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years I worked as a doctor I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”
Bonhoeffer taught us that genuine Christian faith seeks to enter the suffering of others, expressing itself in acts of love, and that the church must speak for those who cannot speak and stand with those who suffer. He said that when Jesus Christ calls a person, he calls that person to come and die. Bonhoeffer lived the faith, a faithful witness to and suffering servant of Jesus Christ which finally cost him his life. He enacted his belief that faithful discipleship results in suffering for the sake of the world. That was, for Bonhoeffer, the very real cost of discipleship.
Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran faith was certainly buoyed by the words of that famous 16th century Lutheran hymn he no doubt sang many-a-time:
And though this world with devils filled
should threaten to undo us,
we will not fear,
for God hath willed his truth to triumph through us.
Let goods and kindred go,
this mortal life also.
The body they may kill.
God’s truth abideth still.
His kingdom is forever.
Such is the testimony of the baptized followers of Jesus willing to die with Christ their Lord. Amen.