First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Isaiah 42 and Acts 10

“Dumber than a Bag of Hammers”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

January 13, 2008

Everett, Pete, and Delmar were three escaped convicts, criminals in search of a great fortune. Everett, so he claimed, buried a treasure in a valley. This was for safekeeping while he was in prison. It was a good idea until the state decided it would flood this valley to make way for a hydro-electric dam. Everett heard of this and convinced his fellow inmates that they had four days to retrieve the fortune before it was lost forever. Thus they agreed to flee their chains in Mississippi, even though Pete was just a few days away from release, and dash through the countryside to find this buried treasure.

Their story is set in the depression and the south, hence along the way to find the treasure they encounter many people facing hard times- one farmer shares a meal with them and admits it is horse meat that is “starting to turn.” They make friends with fellow vagabonds, or as we are fond of saying in our house, hobos. Being thieves by trade they avail many an unknowing acquaintance of food, vehicles, money, and aid. Additionally they make a recording of a song, disrupt a Klan meeting, and find . . . well . . . I won’t give away the ending, whether they find the treasure or not.

Needless to say the story is the adventure not the treasure. And along the way their characters emerge as they face challenges, hope, and disappointment together. Everett is the brains of the group. (If you haven’t guessed this story is a movie entitled, “O Brother Where Art Thou?”) Everett is also a Dapper Dan man, which is the brand of pomade he continuously applies to his hair. He is the leader of the little band and a bit pompous. His arrogance is seen when, in Pete’s assessment of him, it is claimed that “one of us is a know it all who can’t shut his mouth.”

Each scene has an element of this tension, but the best one is Everett’s view of baptism. His view emerges when Delmar and Pete join a throng of people being baptized in a river. Sitting in the woods the three are startled to see a host of folks in baptismal gowns heading walking past them to a near by river to be immersed. Moving slowly by them, the throng sings a hypnotic spiritual about “going down to the river to pray, studying about the good old way, and who shall wear the robe and crown, good Lord, show me the way.” Caught in the moment Delmar runs straight for the water and then shouts excitedly coming up from his baptism, “I’ve been redeemed fellas. All my sins have been washed away. It’s the straight and narrow for me. I am living in the promise of heaven’s ever lasting. Preacher said, ‘all my sins are gone.’ Come on in boys the water is fine.”

For Pete this is far and away enough motivation, enough of a promise. He hands off his hat and rushes to the water and is baptized. Everett just stands and watches with a look of amazement.

Later, as they drive away, Pete and Delmar are elated. They feel like they have won the lottery, or in this instance, received the pardon. The only unsettling thing is Everett’s refusal; their joy is only abated by their confusion over why Everett didn’t want baptism as well.

What wouldn’t Everett want freedom from punishment and death? “The preacher said we were absolved. There were witnesses,” Delmar argued. “For him” you were absolved, Everett responds referring to the preacher, “but not with the law.” Then it starts to come clear to the audience just how much stock these two were putting in baptism. Pete and Delmar believed that baptism had truly erased, washed away, cleared the slate of misdeeds that had occurred up to that point in their life, been their life. Everett continues, “even if it did put you right with the Lord, the state of Mississippi is a bit more hard nosed.” He paused and then offered his assessment. “Baptism: you two are dumber than a bag of hammers.”

I love this exchange, this little slice of the story. There are a lot of great metaphors of baptism in literature, life, and history that seek to illuminate the sacrament. Of all the stories of baptism, though, there are none that truly capture the way baptism is illusive like Pete and Delmar being “dumber than a bag of hammers.” All the sacraments have an illusive quality as they are mysteries of the faith, invisible grace made manifest to sight, but not to our understanding per se. Baptism seems obvious, but it is really wily.

Watch. Baptism: is it an initiation or a completion? Is it a kind of get out of hell free card or an assurance of heaven? Is it a cleansing of sin or a sinful condition? Is it for the believer or the believing community? Is it a choice of the baptized or a recognition of God’s choice about creation? Does it restore us to a state of grace like Adam and Eve or is it an engrafting into the new state of grace which is Christ? Is it about sin or acceptance? Does it save us from death or save us for life? Believe it or not, this is a just a cursory list of first questions. Baptism is a wily one.

So Pete and Delmar are baptized and they believe it is a kind of pardon, a kind of forgiveness for all their misdeeds. Delmar says I am now forgiven for holding up that piggly wiggly to which Everett counters; I thought you said you didn’t do it. Delmar pauses and says, I lied and now I am forgiven for the lie too. Is he?

And if it is about forgiveness of sins and pardon, then with whom does this pardon carry weight? The pastor says the Lord has forgiven you, but Everett suggests, the state of Mississippi is a bit more hard nosed. This is funny until you think of our own prison population. What role does a baptism play for those whose sins we consider crimes? Does redemption have value for God alone or for us? Imagine the line that would form if confession and baptism led to immediate release if we believed it absolved all sin. But here we are venturing into the question of authenticity and that is when baptism gets murky real fast. Whose baptism counts and how much and whose doesn’t or how little?

There was a Baptist pastor who made it a point each time he stopped by my first parish to open the fount and say, “now tell me again how you get them critters in here.” Which is a funny way of saying we don’t see your baptism as one that counts.

And, right or wrong, I have to admit my favorite baptismal founts are close to the ones that embody immersion. Standing in the ruins of St. John’s basilica in Ephesus on the coast of Turkey there was a great one. It is a cross-shaped hole in the ground with a set of stair on one end and a mirror set on the other. The one seeking baptism descends as if unto death only to emerge on the other side resurrected. I love this kind of fount because it points to the way baptism is about new life coming from death-, which doesn’t make things clearer- but is true.

All of these elements are in our story from Acts. Peter is in Caesarea baptizing Gentiles for the forgiveness of sins. Caesarea is not a place of chance but choice and the choice is there for the sake of controversy. This is a Roman city with no ties to ancient Israel. This was a gentile city and thus the perfect place for the gentiles to be accepted, except they really weren’t. When Peter baptizes the Gentiles he sets off a firestorm in the church. Our passage here is the opening salvo of a debate that has been going on for two millennia.

Either by fault or design, this debate has been mainly in the dark. Take our passage for instance. There are no notes to this baptism, no instruction or prescription. There is no mention of the water, or who did it, or who was not included, or if there was any requirements. The only description of the baptism itself is that it was in the name of Jesus Christ and for Gentiles who believed, but we don’t know what they really believed. And this is true of almost every mention of baptism in scripture: there is enough information to start a good argument, but not enough to settle one.

For instance, just as there is no record of how it happened, there is also no river nearby Caesarea. You might not think this important, but with no river, this baptism couldn’t imitate Jesus and John at the Jordan. This is just enough information to start a conversation, but not enough to settle it.

Although, it is on the coast so theoretically they could have been baptized in the ocean for those who argue that without immersion it doesn’t count. Yet, immersion would have been tough in this age given that it was in a gentile home. Wealthy Jews had a kind of private bath for ritual use, but a Roman would have used the public bath. So it seems those who sprinkle or moisten have an ally here, unless a wealthy Jewish merchant was open to Gentiles defiling their bath of ritual purity.

You might think such considerations are silly, but an ocean of ink has been spilled trying to determine how the early church baptized. We have a great need to do this the right way, but only enough evidence to get people going in a host of directions. And the right way has some high stakes here. Debates on baptism ultimately filter their way down to trying to determine whether or not you get into heaven or if you get an awkward moment at the pearly gates: “sorry, but with only an infant sprinkling and lacking a confirmed sinner’s prayer we have not found your name on the list. So sorry.”

Baptism conjures this kind of debate. It has for centuries. And by consequence, unfortunately, these debates leave the church looking a little dumber than a bag of hammers. It’s not our best moment.

Before you say “this is what really turns me off about organized religion,” consider this. Consider, what if baptism is so profound, so powerful it will always prove difficult for us to handle, let alone understand? What if baptism cuts so deeply to the core of what is truly good about being human and at the same time what is so difficult about our life and how broken we are it is just beyond our ability to determine? What if it is that wily?

A part of me doesn’t want to know if God has truly redeemed the criminal who claims salvation in prison. There is a voice that says, that’s God’s business. Yet, we are the church who is the body and blood of Christ. And our message to the criminal or to our neighbor should be, “hey, that’s up in the air, you should hope for the best.” Our message needs to be, “you are forgiven.”

While the question of baptism shouldn’t be, is yours authentic or does it count, we need to bear in mind the boldness of our passage that Peter basically said, “although everyone will say you’re out, you’re in.

The church would debate whether or not this was true, but we need to remember, Peter points to the deepest part of baptism here: people who were considered sinful were not considered beloved. It was not an accident to the story that Pete, Delmar and Everett were prisoners. It is not by accident that we stumble over forgiving those who offend us.

Pastors may spend too much time arguing over the meaning of baptism until it looks a bit silly. But we, the church, don’t spend enough time considering whether we are living in ways that reflect baptism. Are we dying to live? Are we accepting our acceptance by offering grace to the undeserving? Are we like Everett in our sophistication about how unlikely is the power of forgiveness to redeem life, or are we like Pete and Delmar so deeply convinced that grace can literally erase misdeed?

No one wants to look dumb as a bag of hammers. And I want to say that determining baptism is not a likely prospect given the fact that for the last two thousand years the church has been arguing about baptism. Even though we may not be able to determine the reach or design or degree of baptism, baptism should determine how we treat each other, what we are willing to be for each other.

The only real great clue about baptism we have in our passage today is when it says, for the forgiveness of sins. The church has often taken this clue and tried to rush the gates of heaven or make demands on those seeking baptism that they are truly repentant. Yet, the clue of our passage isn’t about the baptized, but the church. How is the church the one who welcomes the unwashed, the unwanted, the outcast? That is the nature of baptism, accepting the undesirable. That is what fueled Delmar and Pete with such great hope: maybe the world would no longer see us as criminals.

The church would debate this issue for the next fifty years directly, and from that point on indirectly. Maybe arguing about this is the way we work it out. Maybe struggling with inclusion and acceptance and seeing each other as right with God is the nature of the church. Maybe.

Yet, what if we do more than argue? What if we are bold with grace? Sometimes the fight is life. Pete and Delmar believed they have been given something truly profound and powerful in baptism, is that what we believe? To be forgiven, to be free of sin: this is what Christ has called us to offer to the world. Are we without ability to contain the joy of this hope or are we a bit too realistic, a bit too much like Everett?

Freedom from sin, acceptance, being made right with God that is what Peter offered to the house in Caesarea. How that is, how much, does it include the fine State of Mississippi, that is open for debate? And we can. Yet, what we must do, what we must be (somehow and ever) is bold in offering grace, bold in our inclusion and acceptance. Baptism is a truly wily sacrament. Amen.