After the Baptism

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton IL, Jan. 25, 2009

A good deal could have gone wrong.  In Carol Bly’s short story, After the Baptism, the Benty family comes home from the baptism of their newest member to share a catered meal and celebrate with friends and family.  In the process, we learn something about the individual characters involved and about the ways religion and culture ebb and flow in the everyday lives of people like us, and we’re faced with questions about love and death, about causing and enduring suffering, and about sin and salvation.

The list of characters is long, and includes patriarch Bill Benty and his wife Lois who live next door to the chemical plant Bill owns and manages.  Their son Will and daughter-in-law Cheryl are new parents:  their newborn daughter Molly is the one being baptized by Father Geoffrey.  Cheryl’s parents, Merv and Doreen Oppedahl, are in attendance as well as the three people asked to stand up as godparents:  Bill’s cousin, Molly Wells, who gave Will and Cheryl a large chunk of money as a wedding gift;  and two friends of Will’s, Chad and Jodi Plathe, apparently the only vegetarians for miles around.

A good deal could have gone wrong, but as it was… well, that’s the story.  Little Molly gets properly baptized using the 1928 liturgy rather than the strange-sounding 1979 rewrite. No one believes any of those old words anyway, but luckily, Father Geoffrey has been out of seminary long enough to have developed a manly enough voice that he doesn’t sound too silly saying them.  Sure, things go wrong, but so much more could have.

After the baptism, when the group gets back to the house, the expectation is that all things will go well because of the fine work Bill Benty has done within the family system long before the actual day of the ritual.  Bill, who considers himself quite the master with people, has brought everyone together in the preceding weeks to air out all the interpersonal difficulties and to fight out to the end all the things that he can’t find quick agreement on.  The list that Bill is aware of among this small group of people is considerable:  marital strife, spousal abuse, a shotgun wedding, unwed pregnancy, felony convictions resulting in prison time, religious differences, simmering disparities in wealth and class.  But Bill is thorough, and is even willing to share his very strong opinions on the way his daughter-in-law sings hymns and on the food choices his son’s friends make. 

A good deal could have gone wrong.  At the meal after the baptism, things seem to be going Bill’s way.  The caterers set out trays of food and drop the live lobsters into boiling water.  Doreen snidely makes fun of the serving choices Lois has made as Merv quickly gets drunk and loud on the Scotch Bill is plying him with.  The experienced vegetarians defend their eating habits and moral choices against the onslaught of the arrogant carnivores (Carol Bly’s words, not mine).  The festivities will not be interrupted on this special day:  the usual protesters will not show up next door in front of the Benty Chemical plant carrying their silly signs saying, “It is hard to be proud of chemical warfare,” and saying trite things about torture and the agony of death and such.

In fact, the first overt sign that anything might go wrong is when people don’t sit where they’ve been assigned by their hostess but instead head for the screened-in porch with their plates and cups.  It’s out there in the dusty air that one of the vegetarians asks Aunt Molly why she was crying during the baptism.  As Aunt Molly holds baby Molly and tries to deflect the question, the drunken Merv barks at her and Bill bullies her until she begins to share her story. 

“I have to confess to daydreaming through most of (the ceremony) – I never liked church,” she says, and goes on to recount meeting, as a seventeen-year-old, a boy named Jamie at a church summer camp and falling in love with him immediately.  Jamie’s wealthy family was nice to them and supported them in their decision to marry and the couple eventually moved to a mountaintop home Jamie had built for them where they lived in love for thirty years. 

Everything had been idyllic until Jamie was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer.  They’d gone through radiation treatments that killed off the cancer cells, but Jamie had grown weaker and died within a few months anyway. 

{then an extended quote from bottom of Bly’s p. 101 to top of p. 103}

 

Baptism is no longer one of our stronger UU traditions, though some of you have seen me perform that sacrament here in this sanctuary at least once.  And I’ll tell you, even though I feel empowered to do that with people who want it, I have to admit to struggling with the kind of language that Bly uses, which actually comes from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, where the final words of baptism are prescribed to be:

“Heavenly Father, we thank you that by water and the Holy Spirit you have bestowed upon this your servant the forgiveness of sin and have raised her to the new life of grace. Strengthen her, O Lord, with your presence, enfold her in the arms of your mercy, and keep her safe for ever.”

“Safe forever.”  The words stuck with me, more than any of the Trinitarian trappings, more than all the author’s other literary allusions to the words of the baptismal rite.  For instance, Bly has the main character say at one point that “a charming accent can’t bring dead words to life,” which I understand to be a critique of old, tired ritual as well as of our propensity to believe that meaning is carried solely in words alone and that getting the words just right – and in the right order - will somehow save us.  Then the priest is mocked for exhibiting “an everlasting love for everything and everybody,” universal and eternal love not presently being a culturally acceptable way of approaching the world.  Later, the drunken father-in-law refers to “life-restoring glasses of Scotch” – an ironic twist when for many, it’s not the challenges of chemical addiction but rather the sacraments of the church that are supposed to restore and protect life.

But “safe forever.”  That one really got me, and I wondered long.  Do the people who profess belief in such words not pay attention to the troubles in the world?  Do they not see that none of us are safe, ever safe, from the randomness and chaos of life events?  Do they feel safe because they live in gated communities and are out of contact with reality?  Do they feel safe because they’re so sheltered that they’ve never experienced pain or loss?  Do they feel safe because they don’t know that Afghanistan is in shambles, that Iraq is a wasteland, that Gaza is devastated?  Do they feel safe because they’ve not yet been touched by the economic crisis?

It defies reason and logic to think we could be ‘safe’ in any individual bodily sense.  And yet…

After much struggle, after I was able to leave aside Bly’s Trinitarian Christian language, after I was able to sit alone and quiet my mind and examine my own deeper being, I came to see that I have a confession to make:  beyond all reason and logic, I harbor a deep faith that everything will be okay, that all will be well, that we are all safe forever in a certain sense.  Not that we won’t be touched by hardship, not that we’ll never be lonely, not that we won’t be hurt or hurt someone else ourselves, not that we won’t get sick, not that we won’t all die, but that no matter what happens, we’ll be okay in the end.  And it doesn’t matter who you are or who you know or what you believe or where you’ve been or how you act or how much you own or how much you know or how much you’ve suffered in this lifetime on this earth.  My faith is that you and I and all of us will be okay in the end.

 

Maybe that’s what Bly is saying.  A good deal might have gone wrong, she says.  In her story, plenty does go wrong.  People behave badly toward one another, they make mistakes both consciously and unconsciously.  Sometimes they’re aware of the minor slights they perpetrate; sometimes they’re blind to their own culpability in systems of evil and mass destruction. 

And then, to this gathering of broken souls comes yet another broken one, guilty in her own ways but yet able to offer a blessing on all the assembled, able to find a way of saying that love comes in many guises:  love in romantic relationships that last or don’t; love in pity for the changes that time brings; love in the vomit and excrement of serious, even last, illnesses; love in the moments when loss is washing the ground from beneath our feet.  Love is what’s left after all the struggle and the strife and the terror and the torment. 

After Aunt Molly Wells pronounces her tale of love at the Benty family baptismal meal, a simple thing happens:  it begins to rain.  In the end, it is not the administrative genius of a chemical weapons plant manager nor the moral philosophy of some organic vegetarians, nor even the suffering of the servants and spouses that offers salvation.  It is, instead, the universe that washes us clean and sweetens the air and brings life-giving sustenance to all.

That sort of baptism is a good deal, freely offered without cost, there for anyone open to such a gift.  Such a gift, for me, requires my response – it requires that I do my best to acknowledge it, that I do my best to remain mindful of it, that I do my best to give back some of what I receive.

Now I don’t know whether you’d call this faith of mine Christian or pagan or Buddhist or Humanist.  I don’t even know if you’d call it Unitarian Universalist.  But I don’t have to cal it anything for it to lift me when I’m low and give me a place to stand when there isn’t anywhere else.  I hope you’ll take the time to consider your own faith commitments and your own most deeply held convictions from wherever they came and find there both comfort and challenge.

So may it be.