Dead People Can’t Sin
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, May 3, 2026
Reading: Romans 6:1-11, 23
We’ve been in a series on the book of Romans here at the church for a month, another month or so to go. I can’t really tell you how important this book is for the church. All Christians are people of the Word (capital W). God speaks a Word to us in Jesus Christ. Especially as Protestants, the closer we are to the Word (that is, the Bible), the better. So, I encourage you to read the book of Romans at your leisure and listen for God. That’s not easy to do. Nor is anything else worth doing easy to do. But it’s good. You’ll meet God that way.
The key passage comes at the very beginning. Paul says: “I am not ashamed of the gospel. For it is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first, and then the gentile. For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed.” The righteousness of God. An arresting phrase. It could mean the righteousness with which God judges us and finds us wanting. Martin Luther, great reformer of the church, saw that phrase, the righteousness of God and it terrified him. How could he live up to the righteousness that God expects? All he did, all he was, was sinful. Luther went to his confessor the way all of us washed our hands during COVID. His confessor once told him “Brother Martin, I need you to go away and commit some real sins before you come back.” But then something clicked. What if the righteousness of God means righteousness from God? That God gives as a gift, undeserved, that we can’t earn or pay back. All we can do is be glad, and enjoy it and share it? That insight birthed the church’s Reformation: the gospel is good news: the God who might have judged and condemned us instead has saved us.
In Romans 5 we studied last week, Paul tells us that Jesus Christ is Adam done right this time. Adam’s fall was a calamity we all still suffer from. Jesus’ grace has to have more of an impact than Adam’s fall, or else Adam is greater than Jesus. If Adam’s fall ruins everything, Christ’s salvation has to do more than just repair everything. Paul’s words:
The free gift is not like the trespass.
For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many
And the gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin.
If, because of the one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
Did you hear it? Is not like. Much more surely. Paul likes his comparison: Jesus Christ is Adam done right this time. Its only flaw is we could think Adam is as consequential as Christ. He’s not. Jesus Christ is the center of all humanity and history, the heart of the cosmos. His gift is greater than any fall Adam or anyone else could bring.
Christians who push for universalism love this passage. That is, the belief that everyone will be saved. If Adam’s sin causes us all to fall, Christ’s grace must be more consequential. How could anyone escape from that? I’m not a universalist as it happens, but I think God might be. I do think Paul’s emphasis on grace is so strong that if we hear it right, we’ll think, wow, there’s nothing more I have to do. Christ’s grace is so overwhelming, I and everyone else is sure to be saved. If we don’t wonder about that at least, we’re not hearing Paul correctly.
Paul Tillich paraphrased the gospel and this passage this way:
You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you ... Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.
If nothing we could do could make God love us more or less, then, why do anything good? Let’s put the question this way. Every time we sin, we receive grace, right? So why shouldn’t we sin on purpose to receive more grace? That’s the Romans question. If we’re not asking it, we’re not listening carefully enough yet.
Now we might ask, reasonably, what is a sin after all? One of you in Bible study said Paul seems obsessed with sin. Our Jewish elder siblings in faith think we Christians are all obsessed with sin. A Haredi rabbi I taught once told me “sin” is just the Hebrew word for foul. Go to a soccer match in Israel and the fans will all screen at the ref “chet!” foul, call it, you imbecile. I’ve been reading a history of our congregation published in the 70s, and it mentions that the Eaton’s stores from which the Eaton family’s largesse came never sold a few sinful items. Alcohol or tobacco. Maybe not so surprising. You know what else? Billiards products. Seedy and unacceptable. Nothing to do with dancing. And nothing to do with card playing. Cards are for games of chance, sinful. So, when the first ladies bridge club started here at TEMC they had to get their cards somewhere else than their favourite store. We’ve got a billiards table upstairs now for the youth. And we have wine at events here at church. In other words, what a sin is moves around in history. So why obsess over it?
For Paul, the big deal about sin is that it brings death. We sin and death reigns. I think of sin as ruin: we do harm to ourselves and others. Nadia Bolz-Weber is a writer I admire. She found the Lutheran tradition the only one that spoke to her soul after 20 years of addiction. Luther has a Latin phrase, Simul Justus et peccator: we are simultaneously justified and sinners. She thought ooh, that’s right, that’s me. She said I have an immense capacity for self-destruction and for harming those I love. And I’m also capable of enormous generosity to those I love and even to strangers. That’s our predicament. If you never do harm to yourself or others, you don’t need Romans. Or Jesus, for that matter.
Paul thinks Jesus Christ has solved our predicament. So why not sin away? That’s his question in chapter 6. “What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may increase?” Now how might he answer this question? No, remember there are laws. Think of the ten commandments. God will judge. Lots of people’s experience of Christian faith is the wagging finger. Don’t do this. No don’t do that. That’s not what Paul says at all. He says this instead: “Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were buried with him by baptism into death.” You were baptized right? You were drowned then. Dead as dead can be. Dead people can’t sin.
I’m reading a biography of Blaise Pascal, genius and polymath in 17th century France. Dude invented calculus, public transportation, the wristwatch, he proved the existence of black holes, and he died before he was 40. What are the rest of us doing with our lives? Anyway, when his father died someone offered their condolences. Pascal responded: we didn’t lose my father today. We lost him at his baptism. Baptism means you’re dead. One thing dead people cannot do is sin. Spend all the time you like in the graveyard—none of the inhabitants will do you or each other a bit of harm. In the mafia they say dead men tell no tales. Steve Martin says dead men don’t wear plaid. Paul says being dead has this one advantage: you cannot sin anymore.
Do you see how substantial Paul thinks baptism is? It drowns our old self. Changes us, from one sort of person into another. What’s puzzling is why anyone who’s baptized ever sins again. Paul has no answer for this. Some centuries later my guy St. Augustine lived in a time when Christians delayed baptism until as close to death as possible. They figured we sow wild oats when we’re young, why not get all that sinning out of the way, and save baptism till death? Augustine is furious at his mother for holding off on baptism. If you’d baptized me, I wouldn’t have sinned like I did. Of course, then we wouldn’t have his book Confessions—no sin means no drama means no good literature. But do you see his point? Baptism changes us into Jesus Christ. He’s not only sinless. He is resurrection life. Baptism joins us to his resurrection life and makes us part of God. “Just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life.” Since we’re part of the resurrected Christ now, how could we possibly sin? It’s unthinkable.
Now I know what you’re thinking. I know some baptized people, and they don’t seem any better than anybody else. Might even be worse! It’s sometimes said in the church that baptism drowns the old Adam. But it turns out he’s a good swimmer. And he seems to have nine lives. Augustine imagines it this way: baptism douses out the fire of sin in our lives, inherited from Adam. But the embers are still there and can rekindle at any time. It was mostly Irish monks who realized okay, whatever baptism does or doesn’t do for us, we need something for post-baptismal sin. So, for this sort of sin, pray this sort of prayer, do this sort of penance. They came up with the Catholic rite of confession, going to a priest, confessing sins, receiving absolution, and going away with homework, this many prayers, that sort of thing. Evangelicalism is a much debated and even feared word. Before it was a swear word in American politics, an evangelical was someone who thought baptism wasn’t enough. You need to believe in Jesus on your own, not because your family did or you were baptized as a child. I bring it up because the evangelical movement also brought an awareness that baptism isn’t enough. It’s step one, but there are so many more steps to go on this pilgrimage of life. Think of AA and other recovery groups. They insist you can’t just make yourself sober on your own. You need God, or some higher power. You also need sponsors and meetings and tokens. That’s life saving work. It’s church, without all the judgment.
So, hear me: baptism is powerful. It washes away our sins, joins us to Jesus Christ, makes us new creatures. It’s so powerful Paul thinks it’s all we need. But the church realized actually later, we need something more, something ongoing. Some way to die and rise again with Jesus Christ not just once in our lives, but every single day. About once a year in here we remember our baptism and rededicate ourselves to its promises. In some churches they set out baptismal water to bless yourself with as you enter and leave. I find prayer helps. When my feet hit the floor in the morning, I say to myself what a 95-year-old friend used to say every day when he woke up: “hey, I get another one of these!” Because one day we won’t. First stop in the morning is in the facilities. I often pray a prayer that Jewish friends taught me: “Lord, you have made me full of holes, without which I could not live!” Then the shower. A church in Kansas City invented this prayer for the shower: “Lord, as I enter the shower to bathe, I remember my baptism.” Actually, I do pretty well with prayers for each part of the day till I get online. But you see how all the prayers have to do with baptism? New life, water, the works.
Most religion, and most people’s view of religion, says this. Be a good person and God will reward you. Be a bad person and God will punish you. Right? Isn’t that what most people think? What most of us think, if we’re honest? Well, that’s not what Christianity is about. Luther pointed out the flaw: what if I’m a bad person and I know it? And there’s nothing I can do about it? Christianity actually says this: faith is about God’s generosity. God gives us everything: life, new life in Christ, more new life the more we ask for it. This isn’t because we earned it. It’s because God can’t help himself. God just keeps giving away divinity all the time, and especially to all the wrong people.
I got to do a funeral here once for a woman who’d done spectacular good in her life. Oceans of benevolence for others. And yet I had to make the point I often make at funerals. This is not a job interview. Folks tell me about their accomplishments in life and it’s like I’m supposed to read their cv so God will bless them. But that’s not what matters at our death, in our judgment by God. So, I said what I think Paul says: the final word on her life is not her goodness, her accomplishments, the way we should emulate and remember her. No. It’s that Jesus Christ saves her. Her salvation started before the world even began when God first thought up the idea of her. It continued in her baptism as an infant before she knew her own name. And it concludes with her death when, again, she didn’t know her own name. Isn’t it sobering that the most important things in our life we don’t choose, and never could, and maybe wouldn’t choose if we could have? Her adult kid stopped me after. Okay, if the most important thing in her life isn’t all those accomplishments, why’d she bother? Why do all that work for others? Because, thinking with Paul, we’re so full of gratitude for God’s generosity to us, we can’t help but be generous to others. Faith doesn’t go behave-do good-get rewarded. That’s a recipe for despair. Faith is like this: God overwhelms us with gifts-we do good out of gratitude-we’re so much part of God there’s no difference between us and Christ anymore.
That brings us to the last verse, the lonely island cut off from the rest of the passage: “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” I heard an interview with the great Denzel Washington once, who’s a Pentecostal preacher’s kid. He was asked why he plays so many villains so well. And without skipping a beat, and without crediting his source, he said simply this: because “the wages of sin is death.” If you didn’t know he was quoting the Bible, you were lost. But if you know, you know. Paul doesn’t stop there, does he, Denzel? Does he, friends? The next part of the verse is infinitely more important: “But the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Wages, gift. These are two different things. Wages are owed for work done. They’re important—most of us work for our living, and our wages make life possible, thank God for them. I work for you guys in addition to working for God, I do thank you for feeding my children. But wages are a different kind of economy than gift. Paul might have said the wages of sin is death, but the wage of faith is heaven. Nope. Paul shifts from wages to gift. We all sin and so we earn death. But God interrupts the logic of wages and earnings with a gift. Here, this is my son Jesus, he is all the life there is, all the life I have, and he’s yours. We kill him. He rises and takes us with him to God. And that’s the best good news there’s ever been.