Today's story of baptism comes from Ralph Wood, Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University.
A former student of mine, Jim McCoy, the pastor of a rural Baptist congregation, recently invited me to lecture at his church. After finishing my duties on a Saturday morning, I was preparing to make a quick exit for my two-hour drive home when my pastor-friend halted me with a hesitant question: Would I accompany him to the local minimum-security prison for a baptism? The prisoner's family and home-town preacher would probably not attend, and so the cloud of witnesses celebrating the new birth of this convert would be small indeed. My presence might, in fact, double the congregation. Thinking of all the yard work I could do that Saturday afternoon, I was tempted to decline, but in the end I agreed.
Over lunch I learned the newly professed Christian was no ordinary prisoner. He was incarcerated not for stealing cars or selling dope but for the crime our society is perhaps least prepared to pardon. In a drunken stupor this man had molested his ten-year-old daughter. He had thus committed a triple violation-of the girl's sexual integrity, her filial trust, her moral innocence. No wonder that child molesters are the most despised of all criminals and that their fellow inmates call them "short eyes." Convicts understand, as many of us do not, that no clearly considered human motive-however sinister-could prompt such an act: it must spring from a blindness made all the more terrible for being self-inflicted.
My suspicions were instant and numerous. Was this a convenient jail-house conversion that might lead to a quicker parole, a sentimental turning to God because there was nowhere else to turn, a desperate search for pastoral acceptance when societal rejection was sure to come? The pastor told me something that caused me to doubt my doubts, however. He said this criminal did not make his profession of faith amid abject panic. His conversion was not prompted by the dread that, unless he reformed his life, no one-least of all his family-would ever accept him again. The real turn had come several days earlier when the man's wife and daughter had visited the prison in order to forgive him. It was only then-when freed from the burden of his sin by God's humanly mediated grace-that the molester got on his knees and begged for the mercy of both God and his family. Surely, I thought, this is the true order of salvation: our repentance is always the consequence and not the condition of divine grace.
The baptism turned out to be an event for which joy, though a good biblical term, is altogether too tame and tepid a word. It was as close to a New Testament experience as perhaps I shall ever have. A guard escorted the prisoner from behind a fence topped with razor wire. His family was not able to attend because their broken-down car had failed yet again. There were just the three of us, with the guard looking curiously on. To the strumming of the chaplain's guitar, we sang a croaky version of "Amazing Grace." We did not balk at declaring ourselves wretches. After a pastoral prayer, the barefoot prisoner stepped into a wooden box that had been lined with a plastic sheet and filled with water. It looked like a large coffin, and rightly so. This was no warmed-and-tiled First Baptist bath, with its painted River Jordan winding pleasantly into the distance. This was the place of death: the watery chaos from which God graciously made the world and to which, in rightful wrath, he almost returned it.
Pronouncing the trinitarian formula, the pastor lowered the new Christian down into the liquid grave to be buried with Christ and then raised him up to life eternal. Though the water was cold, the man was not eager to get out. Instead, he stood there weeping for joy. When at last he left the baptismal box, I thought he would hurry away to change into something dry. I was mistaken. "I want to wear these clothes as long as I can," he said. "In fact, I wish I never had to take a shower again." And so we walked to nearby tables and sat quietly in the Carolina sun, hearing this newly minted Christian explain why his baptismal burial was too good to dry off. "I'm now a free man," he declared. "I'm not impatient to leave prison because this wire can't shackle my soul. I know that I deserved to come here, to pay for what I did. But I also learned here that Someone else has paid for all my crimes: my sins against God."
We warned him that his new life in Christ would be rough, that temptations would be fiercer than ever. The pastor recalled Martin Luther's confession that, even in baptism, the old Adam remains a frightfully good swimmer. I added that, when faced with satanic assaults, Luther would grab a slate and chalk these words: "I have been baptized." For our baptism signifies-we all three confessed gladly together-that we belong not to ourselves, not to our guilty past, not to our fearful future, nor to the demonic powers of alcohol and sex: in our baptism we have been reclaimed as the property of Jesus Christ and his kingdom. The pastor then fetched his guitar and sang a down-home gospel song about what it means to be free in Jesus.
Before returning to the prison yard, the new Christian made a final affirmation. He said that he had once doubted he could ever go back to his home town, so great were the shame and scandal of what he had done. But now he was determined to return there, to take up his work as a carpenter, and to become a faithful father and husband. More important by far, he declared his hope to join a local church and to live out his new life in Christ as a public witness to the transforming power of God's grace. "When I get out of this place," he added, "I want to do two things. But without a car, I can't do either one. I want to find a church where I can get on my knees and thank God, and I want to get home to my family." The pastor assured him that he would provide both the church confessional and the ride home.
The wonder that I witnessed on this Saturday could prove a sham. The repentant molester may return to his old abusive habits, destroying both himself and others. It will take careful and prolonged nurture in the faith to free him from such bondage. But I believe it wrong to insist-as many voices would insist-that this man's family should never have forgiven him, that to do so was to sanction his violence, indeed to collude in rape. I believe that this mother and daughter brought a dead man back to life. Their act of forgiveness opened him to the one reality by which our common slavery to sin can be broken: the power of salvation in Jesus Christ.
Ralph C. Wood, Preaching & Professing: Sermons by a Teacher Seeking to Proclaim the Gospel (Eerdmans, 2009), pp.166-168.
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