Death by Baptism

Sacramental Liberation in a Culture of Fear

Frank G. Honeycutt

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506470047
• eBook ISBN: 9781506470054
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Our days are filled with a variety of known and lurking fears. Christians who name Jesus as Lord on Sundays are inundated with stories (real and imagined) inducing fear and caution throughout the week: random violence, health concerns, the perceived threat of people different from us, and economic worries, to name a few. News sources and national political leaders manipulate these fears in a fashion that threatens (and sometimes usurps) the church's ultimate trust in Christ.

A pastoral assumption: at the core of this national anxiety is the looming fear of death, spawning various supplemental protections that have little to do with the promises of Christ. This fear of death (and the false promises claiming to shield us from such) may prompt us to nudge the One we call Lord to the margins of daily life, or even solely to the afterlife--a savior we'll all meet in heaven one day but whose quaint teachings have little to do with problems we're now facing.

In this book, gifted storyteller Frank G. Honeycutt calls on his many years of pastoral experience to examine one of the most stunning (and overlooked) theological claims of the New Testament: how baptism radically unites followers of Christ in his death and resurrection. In baptism, we have already died (Romans 6). Disciples commence life in the kingdom on this side of the grave. Believing this with theological rigor and trust relieves personal (and corporate) anxiety about any day in the future when a believer stops breathing.

1

Fear in Parish Life

Healer of our ev’ry ill, light of each tomorrow, give us peace beyond our fear, and hope beyond our sorrow.

—Marty Haugen

Near Tampa many years ago for a conference exploring modern implications of the historic catechumenate (the ancient protracted process preparing adult candidates for baptism), I heard a story offered by an Episcopal bishop who described a congregation—near the Smokies in the mountains of East Tennessee—within his diocese and general oversight.1

Due to a shrinking membership census, the congregation was served by seminary interns in a succession of one-year stints. One seminarian, poring over past sacramental history in the church archives, came upon an entry with a name, date, and cryptic two-word comment alongside an eye-catching asterisk: “Grover Crockett*, Partially Baptized.”

Perplexed, salvifically vigilant, and more than a little curious, the seminary intern (I’ll call her Ginny) phoned her pastoral supervisor thirty miles away. “Ask around,” he said. “You’re not there for very long, but part of this year is learning how to become something of a clergy sleuth. I suspect there’s an interesting story among your older parishioners.”

Vicar Ginny visited Milt and Garnett—both born near the church and married in the sanctuary—who recalled Grover, then in his late eighties, who’d never been baptized but grew up in the Baptist tradition. He wanted to be baptized during the Easter season and fully immersed in the creek that ran below the church building.

Easter came early that year. “About as early as it could possibly fall,” Milt said.

“Late March,” said Garnett. “On the second Sunday of the season, after a stirring sermon about that rascal Thomas, my favorite disciple, most of the congregation hiked down the hill and assembled on the creek bank. It was a warm day in early April, but let me tell you, that water was cold from snow-melt from way up in the national park.”

“Our pastor at the time wore fishing waders for the baptism,” Milt continued. “Old Grover went all the way under once and then again, holding his nose throughout. Nobody so much as coughed. It was pretty dramatic and all.”

“When he came up that second time, though, sputtering and shaking,” Garnett said, “you could have heard Grover yell all the way up to Clingman’s Dome. That old man was practically running, yelling, as he made for the creek bank and a dry towel.”

Milt and Garnett looked at Vicar Ginny and quoted Grover’s chilly groan in unison:

“The Father and Son were hard enough. I can’t take the Holy Spirit!”

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*

In her short story “The River” (first published in 1955), Flannery O’Connor writes about a young boy, Harry Ashfield, whose need to belong to something larger than his strange family causes him to deceive his new babysitter, Mrs. Connin, and adopt the first name of a local preacher, Bevel Summers, who draws crowds to an “old red water river” where people come for baptism outside an unnamed Southern town. Harry/Bevel walks to the river one day with Mrs. Connin, a fervent believer, and decides to come forward for the sacrament:

“Have you ever been Baptized?” the preacher asked.

“What’s that?” he murmured.

“If I baptize you,” the preacher said, “you’ll be able to go to the Kingdom of Christ. You’ll be washed in the river of suffering, son, and you’ll go by the deep river of life. Do you want that?”

“Yes,” the child said, and thought, I won’t go back to the apartment then; I’ll go under the river.

“You won’t be the same again,” the preacher said. “You’ll count.” . . . He held him under while he said the words of Baptism and then he jerked him up again and looked sternly at the gasping child . . . “You count now,” the preacher said. “You didn’t even count before.”

The little boy was too shocked to cry. He spit out the muddy water and rubbed his wet sleeve into his eyes and over his face.2

A bevel in carpentry is “a sloping surface.” The arc of the story suggests this preacher (and the boy) may indeed be on a theologically slippery slope in their understanding of baptism. The babysitter’s last name reveals Flannery’s own theological suspicions that many of her regional kindred are “conned” by promises of a false identity composed of now “counting” in the Lord’s eyes only as a result of baptism. It’s also entirely possible that the similarity of the writer’s own last name to Mrs. Connin’s may reveal Flannery’s own sometimes silent complicity in such an understanding. O’Connor was a savvy and committed Roman Catholic churchgoer her entire adult life before succumbing to lupus at age thirty-nine. She also was well aware of the flaws and foibles of the church and local theology applied misguidedly.3 O’Connor deftly recognized that the Christian vision in her stories, addressed to a culture that increasingly did not share this vision, should often be administered “by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”4 In her novel The Violent Bear It Away (1960), a baptism shockingly results in an actual drowning.

A parish pastor for thirty-one years in four different locales—rural, small town, and urban settings—I received more than one frantic phone call from a worried parent eager to schedule the sacrament lest some dark event might befall their child. This lingering perception of the sacrament suggests magical inclusion, a protective shield from all evil, and minimal understanding of baptism’s biblical purpose.

“What’s that?” the child asks of baptism in O’Connor’s story. According to Rev. Bevel Summers (and many other clergy of my acquaintance still mired in a missionary understanding that once fueled arduous journeys across the world primarily initiated to save heathens from hell), baptism is centrally a “counting” exercise and little more.

I can’t take the Holy Spirit. Perhaps Grover Crockett’s amusing “partial” dunking unintentionally reveals what’s truly at stake in baptism with a Spirit that brings “a new creation” (2 Cor 5:17) into being whose identity is so grounded in the promises of the Holy Trinity that any threat, any fear (future or present) is given relative and persistent demotion in a believer’s daily existence.

If this is indeed a central part of the Holy Spirit’s job description, as I intend to clarify in these pages, then such a dunking for many can be quite a lot to “take.” Relying on God rather than myriad supplemental protections may indeed cause one to run like hell toward the hills with Grover. But such a radical identity can also certainly form an enviable “peace of God, which surpasses all understanding” (Phil 4:7), guarding the hearts and minds of the baptized to face any obstacle or perceived threat.

I’m thinking here of the amazing peace and calm exhibited by Paul and Silas, who land in prison after healing a soothsaying slave girl (Acts 16:16–40) possessed by “a spirit of divination” (16:16).5 Her mother may have been happy after the healing, but the Chamber of Commerce is livid. For Philippi, a town only a couple miles from the Aegean Sea with a fair number of seafaring tourists, the girl was something of an economic boon.

Money isn’t funny. People vote with their pocketbooks, then and now. Two disruptive pastors—perhaps emboldened from a fresh encounter with Lydia and other converts down by the river (16:13) in the local congregation’s origin story—are perceived as threats to the local economy, “disturbing our city” (16:20). Paul and Silas are stripped naked, beaten with rods, and placed “in the innermost cell” (16:24) of the prison with their feet in stocks—basically “under the jail” as my public defender daughter puts it when she visits clients who’ve really messed up.

I (a sometimes-jaded pastor) can imagine any number of jaded responses from these two river preachers with bloodied backs and nobody to call. Instead, around midnight, “Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God”6 (16:25) in a surprising choral testimony to other prisoners listening nearby. God apparently heard them also. An earthquake liberates the two pastors and the entire inmate population, but you really have to conclude that the hymn-singers possessed an enviable freedom long before the chains fell off. Their true liberation resided in an identity capable of withstanding this or any bruising, bloody night that might come their way.

This truth is underscored, in contrast, by the reaction of the jailer, roused from the rumbling, who comes close to dying by suicide (16:27) upon discovering (on his watch) a seemingly empty jail. The man holding all the keys to the place—jangling in his pocket, surely reminding him who was in charge—is actually in bondage to great fear and trepidation, under the thumb of another perceived power. It’s a delicious literary twist and conjures several important questions: Who in this story is really free? Who is imprisoned by what? What ultimate power truly holds the keys to liberation?

Please note that the jailbirds make no attempt to escape postearthquake. Give credit to the jailer, moved by the events of this night, for asking the right question: “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” (16:30)—a loaded evangelical question, centuries later, but here having loads more to do with this life than the next. The man could have put it another way: “How in the world can I discover in my fear-filled life the freedom you two seem to presently have in yours?”

Paul and Silas reveal the true keeper of the keys to this frightened man and all in his household. The water used to wash pastoral wounds (16:33) undoubtedly flowed from the same local spring used that night for the baptisms of the jailer and his entire family.7 Unlike the superficial sacramental benefit espoused by Rev. Bevel Summers in O’Connor’s short story, these two river preachers share a gift with a spiritual depth far beyond “counting” new souls magically added to a faraway promised place.8 Paul and Silas are so secure in their conviction concerning the true possessor of the keys to freedom that they still make no attempt to flee the premises but decide to hang around until the next morning to confront the very men who bloodied their backs (16:37–39). Only then do they return to the relative safety of the home (16:40) of their early church council leader, Lydia, who sold purple cloth (16:14) and perhaps took note that some of her colorful cloth ironically matched their raised bruises.

It’s natural for modern Christians to perhaps ponder with some envy the bravery of Paul and Silas and pose the understandable question of the man who jangled all the keys in his pocket: What must I do to get what you’ve got? Future chapters of this book will address how pastors and local congregations might shape a vigorous process of Christian formation resulting in a holy confidence similar to these two jailed pastors. For now, however, I want to linger with this jailer; his initial fear and its paralysis are mirrored in the lives of many church people of my acquaintance.

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*

Women received their dead by resurrection. Others were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented—of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground.

—Hebrews 11:35–38

People of faith have historically resided in a world full of violence, unexpected disease, and various maladies associated with aging.9 I suspect at least part of the spike in personal and corporate fear (along with the erosion of ultimate trust) among baptized Christians early in the twenty-first century—and the accompanying advance of protection devices ranging from gun technology to home surveillance gizmos—finds a direct correlation in the rapid increase in general life expectancy over the last fifty years.

Followers of Jesus know that life generally has a finite term limit,10 but medical and health discoveries have undeniably extended the sense that we’ll all live appreciably longer than our forebears, postponing conversations about death and common mortality far into the future, if indeed they ever occur at all.

Sherwin Nuland, a doctor and writer who admits that he knows better, describes his family’s reaction to the approaching death of his beloved Aunt Rose: “It was like the old scenario that so often throws a shadow over the last days of people with cancer: we knew—she knew—we knew she knew—she knew we knew—and none of us would talk about it when we were all together. We kept up the charade until the end.”11

My father, a wonderful man and active each Sunday in his Lutheran church choir for decades, surprised me a bit on a visit. My mom had died in the previous year. Several health setbacks left Dad largely confined to a wheelchair and under the care of an excellent nursing staff in a nearby residential facility—about the best possible outcome given the circumstances. One day, as it often did, the conversation drifted to a litany of his health woes. “I never thought this would happen to me,” he said, with head in hands. My brothers and I sometimes smiled about my father’s penchant for “the single” (head resting in one hand) or “the double” (head in both hands). This was decidedly a day for the double. “What did you think would happen?” the pastor-son (c’est moi) inquired. “I don’t know,” Dad replied. “Not this.”

My wife, Cindy, and I were heading somewhere special recently, a rare date out, both of us standing in front of the bathroom mirror preparing to depart. “Which of us do you think will die first?” I asked, out of the blue. “I don’t know, but I hope it’s you,” she said. “Why would you say that?” I responded, rather stunned. “Because,” Cindy replied, “women handle the death of a spouse better than men.” She’s generally right, I suspect.

The sisterly reaction to their brother’s death in John’s Gospel, however, suggests mortality paralysis is not gender specific. Martha and Mary each confront their friend Jesus on the road and levy a duplicate and rather brassy accusation not long after Lazarus’s demise: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21, 32).

Their words here serve as an honest internal gut check for many (including myself) whose emotions at untimely death are almost closer to anger than grief. It’s not hard to imagine what the sisters were really thinking—maybe this chastising internal zinger: “If you’d gotten off your ass, Jesus, if you’d stopped screwing around with your pals for almost a week after you first he...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Treasure in Clay Jars
• 1. Fear in Parish Life
• 2. How Baptism Confronts Fear
• 3. The Role of Preaching and Pastoral Care in Forming Sacramental Identity
• 4. Shaping Local Baptismal Practice
• 5. Interlude: “Digging”
• 6. Casting Out Fear Every Sunday
• Notes
• Bibliography