Can’t I Sneak Around the Rules?

June 21, 2026  Proper 7  First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield, MA

Romans 6:1-11 (The Message)  So what do we do? Keep on sinning so God can keep on forgiving? I should hope not! If we’ve left the country where sin is sovereign, how can we still live in our old house there? Or didn’t you realize we packed up and left there for good? That is what happened in baptism. When we went under the water, we left the old country of sin behind; when we came up out of the water, we entered into the new country of grace—a new life in a new land!

That’s what baptism into the life of Jesus means. When we are lowered into the water, it is like the burial of Jesus; when we are raised up out of the water, it is like the resurrection of Jesus. Each of us is raised into a light-filled world by our Father so that we can see where we’re going in our new grace-sovereign country.

Could it be any clearer? Our old way of life was nailed to the cross with Christ, a decisive end to that sin-miserable life—no longer at sin’s every beck and call! What we believe is this: If we get included in Christ’s sin-conquering death, we also get included in his life-saving resurrection. We know that when Jesus was raised from the dead it was a signal of the end of death-as-the-end. Never again will death have the last word. When Jesus died, he took sin down with him, but alive he brings God down to us. From now on, think of it this way: Sin speaks a dead language that means nothing to you; God speaks your mother tongue, and you hang on every word. You are dead to sin and alive to God. That’s what Jesus did.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

Friday was the new federal holiday, Juneteenth.  Like the fourth of July, it commemorates freedom.  Our ancestors liked to say we were slaves to England, but they were exaggerating for effect.  Juneteenth, on the other hand, is a holiday that celebrates the end of legal slavery in our country – real slavery, the kind where your children are born slaves and can be sold away from you, even when they’re toddlers.  

Juneteenth is also a nod to the greedy, grasping way that slaveholders held onto their slaves just as long as they could – in this case, by “forgetting” to tell them that slavery had been ended and they were free.  So, Juneteenth is celebrated on June 19, because that’s the day that Union soldiers arrived in Galveston TX and told the slaves there that they were free, that they had been free now for more than two years, according to the Emancipation Proclamation.  Now that the Civil War was over, their theoretical freedom had become real.  And so Black Americans celebrated.

We celebrate too but in a different way.  For us, Juneteenth is not about our gaining our freedom.  We celebrate by remembering the sin of those long-ago days, and paying attention to how the dregs of the sin of slavery still streak the realities of our lives today.

Back then, white people, maybe not our ancestors, but people our ancestors lived with, worked with, were related to, bought and sold human beings, separated parents from children, destroyed families.  When slavery was ended, white people, against maybe not our personal ancestors, set up a world that kept former slaves in economic bondage.  

Many of us remember the struggles for black people to vote; we remember watching Ruby Bridges walk to her school, past the lines of good, white, Christians, who shouted at her, threatened her, hated her, because this little first-grader was now attending their whites-only school.  I can remember the stories of the Pennsylvania elementary school I attended, where the black kids sat in the back of the room, and my astonishment when I realized that up until the year I transferred in, those black kids, all 8 grades of them, were taught in a basement classroom.  

Paul asked,  should we Keep on sinning so God can keep on forgiving? Of course not…. do we ignore the ways discrimination cripples our world because it feels so good when you realize how wrong it is?  And then he says, If we’ve left the country where sin is sovereign, how can we still live in our old house there? Or didn’t you realize we packed up and left there for good? That is what happened in baptism. When we went under the water, we left the old country of sin behind; when we came up out of the water, we entered into the new country of grace—a new life in a new land!

So, what he’s saying is this:  once you know something is wrong, something is sinful, and once you’ve made a public declaration that you want to be on God’s side, on the side of the good, you can’t turn back and pretend “you didn’t know”.  Once we know, once we realize == something as hidden in plain sight as all our black classmates sitting in one corner of the classroom == we can never pretend we don’t know, haven’t seen it anymore.

This is true of all kinds of sinful behavior.  Recognizing sin is life-changing.  Once you realize that your best friend’s spouse is abusing her (or him), you can’t pretend that everything’s all right.  Once you learn how copyright law works, you can never again freely post a movie or song without making sure you pay the creator.  Abuse is wrong; stealing someone’s creative work is wrong.  And knowing right from wrong changes us permanently.

This weekend, so near to Juneteenth, the message is this:  as the heirs of the costs of slavery, as those who have to live with the way it warped our world, we are called to turn away from all sin that grows out of the idea that white people are better, cleaner, smarter, safer.  We are called to dedicate ourselves to God’s community, where all are welcome, all are known, all are loved.  That’s why Juneteenth is important to us.  That’s how we Christians celebrate it.  

We turn away from sin because we’ve left that country where discrimination is just part of the scenery.  Now we live in the world of grace and welcome, colorful and loving, at home with God.

Amen.  

© 2026, Virginia H. Child