Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Epiphany 1, 2005
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Robert Duvall in the movie Tender Mercies plays Mac, a washed up country songwriter who battles drinking. With the help of a young widow and her son, he’s able slowly to put his life back togeter. She offers him room and board at her roadside Texas motel in exchange for handyman help.
Eventually both Mac and the widow’s young boy, Sonny, make the decision to be baptized.
Driving home after the baptism, the boy says to Mac: “Well, we done it Mac, we was baptized.” Peering into the truck’s rearview mirror, the boy studies himself for a moment and says: “Everybody said I’d feel like a changed person. Do you feel like a changed person?” “Not yet,” replies Mac. Then the boy says “You don’t look any different, Mac.” “Do you think I look any different?” “Not yet,” answers Mac.
Today on the first Sunday following the Epiphany, we celebrate the baptism of Jesus and reflect on our own baptism or wonder what it might be like to be baptised.
Some of our readings this morning would suggest that baptism makes us look and feel like a changed person, that baptism has an instantaneous and powerful effect on us.
In our reading from the book of Acts we have the rather strange account of a group of disciples who are baptised for a second time when they tell Paul their first baptism was for the repentance of sins only and that they’ve never heard of the Holy Spirit. Upon receiving this second baptism, they are said to have received the Holy Spirit and immediatelt to begin prophesying and speaking in tongues.
In our gospel we have Mark’s account the account of the baptism of Jesus, the first story that Mark tells about Jesus. As in the book of Acts, Mark speaks of Jesus as the one who will baprise the people with the Holy Spirit. And then after Jesus is baptised, Mark says that the sky is torn apart and the voice of God declares that Jesus is God’s son, the beloved.
Baptism as a dramatic, sky-splitting moment. Baptism as something immediately resulting in action. It’s no surprise that Mac looks in the rearview mirror to see if he looks any different.
I was in conversation with one of our newcomers a few weeks ago and we were talking about baptism. I was stammering around trying to explain about what it is. I started with what it is not.
“It’s not fire insurance.” I said “And its not magic.” She laughed at this.
But to tell you the truth, I wasn’t satisfied at all with what I said baptism was, so I’m grateful now for a chance to say more about what I believe baptism is here in this community, a place known for its intense communal experiences of baptism.
Baptism is both a big bang and slow burn. Baptism is both a big bang and slow burn. What Baptism is both a holy moment in which something new happens and the beginning of a slow, incremental and equally holy process.
First the big bang. Baptism is a death in which we let go of our isolation from others, the baggage of our broken past and our own death-dealing habits. What allows us to let these things go, what allows these things to release their hold on us, is not our own best efforts but the coming of a God whose love reaches out and forges what the Book of Common Prayer call “an indissoluble link” with us.
And then baptism is the inauguration of the slow burn, the equisite, and frustratingly slow burn of the Holy Spirit, whose work is rooted in community. The Spirit, a kind of holy esprit du corps works through a process we call “sanctification.” Sanctification is the gradual transformation of perspective and action that comes through praying and living in community with others and then being sent out over and over to live out our lives as Christians in the world.
Baptism: the big bang and the slow burn: the indissoluble love of God reaching out to us and a holy esprit du corps guiding us, nudging us, within a slow process of becoming the Christian folk and living a Christian life in the world—sometimes under fire.
On January 6th 2006, this last Feast of the Epiphany, Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot who served in Vietnam died at the age of 62. I have no idea if Thompson was a Christian, but for me, his story illustrates something about the slow burn of a holy esprit du corps in a community of values and the fruit that this bears under fire.
Thompson and two crewmen were flying on a reconnaisssnce mission over the South Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968 when they noticed something unusual. Thompson landed twice in an effort to determine what was happening, finally coming to the realization that a massacre was taking place. He touched down near a bunker in which a group of about ten civilians were being menaced by American troops. Using hand signals, Thompson persuaded the Vietnamese to come out while ordering his gunner and his crew chief to shoot any American soldiers who opened fire on the civilians. None did.
Thompson then radioed for a helicopter gunship to evacuate the group, pulled a boy from a nearby irrigation ditch, and flew him to safety. He then told of what he had seen when he returned to his base.
“They said I was screaming quite loud,” he told U.S. News & World Report in 2004. “I threatened never to fly again. I didn’t want to be a part of that. It wasn’t war.”
When Mr. Thompson returned home, it seemed to him that he was viewed as the guilty party. “I’d received death threats over the phone,” he told the media. “...So I was not (seen as) a good guy (at all).”
On March 6, 1998, 30 years after the incident, the Army presented the Soldier’s Medal, a medal given for heroism not involving conflict with an enemy, to Mr. Thompson and his men. “Something terrible happened here 30 years ago today,” Mr. Thompson was quoted as saying, “I cannot explain why it happened. I just wish our crew that day could have helped more people than we did.”
Through the years, he continued to speak out, having been invited to West Point and other military installations to tell of the moral and legal obligations of soldiers in wartime.
Mindful of the ostracism he had faced and the long wait for that medal ceremony in Washington, he told The Associated Press in 2004: “Don’t do the right thing looking for a reward, because it might not come.”
How is this related to baptism and to us?
As heroic and singular as Thompson’s acts seem to be, I believe he didn’t act on his own any more than we do. He, like we, are the product of the slow burn of an esprit de corps with others who shape our values, stimulate our courage and influence our actions. He, like we, had more than an individual identity and purpose. For him, that identity and purpose was the army and the basic moral and ethical standards he learned there and he shared there with his men. For us, that identity and purpose is grounded in the household of God we enter at baptism, a household that in its imperfect, halting way under the guidance of our Holy esprit de corps, nurtures our tolerance, patience, courage, forbearance, openness, forgiveness, generosity, hospitality and compassion.
Mac in the movie Tender Mercies was right. You can’t tell a baptized people by the way they look. But if you had the eyes of imagination you might be able to see something more when you look in their direction. For standing around them, just as sure as the young widow and her son and the members of the Baptist church were standing next to Mac, you would see a great cloud of witnesses, some living and many dead, a great cloud of witnesses whose hands and words and glances have supported and challenged them inspired by the Holy Spirit, a great cloud of witnesses whose identity has been secured by a God whose tender mercies are without end.
Works Cited or Consulted
“A Watery Solution: Living by the Word—Baptism in the Baptist Church,” from a column in Christian Century, Dec 18, 2002 by Barbara Sholis
Obituary for Hugh Thompson written by Richard Goldstein, The New York Times, January 7, 2006.
