No good will come to the cause of the Gospel by followers of Jesus being regarded as crazy dissidents who will not cooperate with the most basic social mechanisms.
Any note on its own can be perfectly fine. But bring it together with others and they will strike a chord or a discord – harmony or disharmony. It is the same with us.
We have been reconciled to the King by the King because of the King so we may be for the King—not when it is convenient and more tasteful and fashionable, but as a bold and confident proclamation.
God’s newly reconstituted Israel occurs in and around Jesus to include both Jew and Gentile, not by ethnic association but by faith and water (baptism) and blood (atonement and Eucharist).
The Earth itself, into which the blood of Christ seeped, will be redeemed and renewed, just like our spirits in Holy Baptism, just like our bodies on the day of the resurrection.
Our passage from Romans steers us between these two dangerous misconceptions: The mythical monster Scylla of believing the body to be evil on the one shore, and the beast Charybdis of believing the body constitutes all there is on the other.
St. Paul asserts the baptized have died in Christ but this death then makes them free to live unto Christ. Complicated? Yes, a little. Let us try to clarify things a bit.