Church jargon can weaken faith. When specialized church words aren’t explained, we lose the impact of the Gospel. For example, “born again.” Jesus told Nicodemus, “Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3).
When you go to the visitation for someone who has died, you say nice things about the deceased. Maybe he or she was truly a fine person but sometimes not. Whichever, speak no evil of the dead. You know what? That person before you has stopped sinning. “One who has died has been set free from sin” (Romans 6:7). Death, the ultimate horizontal, is when you’ll be freed from sin.
Enter God’s vertical. “You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked…But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:1, 4). Pause now. The last paragraph said you won’t be free of sin until you physically die. Ephesians says death and new life can happen now, before the funeral home. Huh? “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death…” Note: Paul is not talking figuratively, Baptism as symbol. No, a real, admittedly mysterious death happens, and a rebirth as well. “…in order that Jesus as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:3-4). As in Genesis, so in baptism: God creates out of nothing. “You have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Peter 1:23).
“Proleptic” is a little-known word that means anticipating an objection. The new birth of Baptism is proleptic. Before physical death, while we struggle in the paradox of being saints and sinners at the same time, Baptism overcomes the despair and nihilism of sin with God’s present and unending gift of life. “Oh, that day when freed from sinning, / I shall see Thy lovely face; / Clothed then in the blood washed linen, / How I’ll sing Thy wondrous grace” (Lutheran Service Book, 686:3). “We shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5). Now and not yet. How gifted you are!