Once you’ve drunk from the ocean, no cup will ever do

One Christmas not so long ago, before we had children, which seems like forever ago, I went with my wife and her family to visit the place they immigrated from many years ago, Haiti.

I brought home with me from the sandy beaches a shell. The shell sat on my coffee table throughout the winter. Every once and a while, particularly when it was cold and snowy, I’d pick it up and hold the opening to my ear.

It’s true; if you hold a shell to your ear, you can hear the ocean—or an echo—that sounds like a wave. The sound is a balm for my soul; a sunny, 90 degree sunny with no humidity and no snow balm. The shell is also a reminder of a spiritual experience I had on my trip.

I hear an echo of God in the story of Jesus Baptism too. Do you hear it? “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

John the Baptizer is in the wild world. His hair is long. His beard is bold. His diet is vegan. His words are Jersey City direct, “Yo, you brood of vipers…get right with God and get right with each other. Your culture and traditions are not faith.”

John’s cousin is in the wild world too—Jesus. Son of a mother and a step-father; conduit of mystical dreams; a nearly murdered refugee and subsequent wanderer; Jesus is now back in his homeland. Rather than listening to shells Jesus hears a wilderness preacher.

A story I heard from journalist Al Letson helps me better understand Baptism and Jesus.

Al, like John, grew up the son of a preacher. He was the recipient of generations of hope and education. He took the gifts he was given and began to talk about the world — the beauty, the inequality, the complexity of it.

His voice resonated with people and because of his story telling ability, and because of his skills as an audio engineer he had an opportunity to travel to Malawi on the continent of Africa. Though he was well-traveled in the United States had never traveled to the place his ancestors had come from. He imagined, as a black man, that it might be a kind of homecoming. He and his traveling companions were making a documentary that featured institutions and the ways they worked and didn’t work. They visited schools, and hospitals and jails.

Al knew how to navigate these in the United States, especially jails. He said you puff your chest up and put a “hey don’t mess with me man” look on your face. But the truth is Al also wore a “what is wrong” feeling in his heart.

How is it that in the USA, home to just 5% of the world’s population, we contains 25% of the world’s prison population? And how is it that the number of prisoners has grown by 700% in the last 30 years?

When Al got to the Malawi prison with a “hey don’t mess with me man” look on his face, and audio equipment in his bag to record stories he saw that an African jail looks very much like an American one. His heart fell. This prison didn’t just look like an American one filled with mostly black and brown men…it was filled with only black men.

How is it a crime to be a black man everywhere in the world? He wondered.

And in the midst of his thoughts a note pierced the air…and then another. A concert broke out. Men filled the air with call and response song. He quickly hit record, and listened to the words floating like a balm directly to his spirit.

On the way back to the hotel he had tears in his eyes. He couldn’t bear to hear his companions’ intellectualization of the experience they had just had. He was waiting to listen to a recording that captured what he was sure was the truest, most honest, most beautiful song he had ever heard.

Only there was no song. The file was corrupted. The moment in time was never recorded.

None the less Al knew he had had a spiritual experience, an epiphany.

When he got back home to the United States he tried to go to church, a place he’d been going since a boy. He says his father and mother and aunties and Godparents had given him a cup, to be filled with religious understanding.

But he says, once you’ve drunk from the ocean no cup will ever do.

That’s John the Baptist. No drinking from a cup. He goes straight to the source.

There will come a time when he pays a price for this, for telling the Jersey City direct, “Yo you brood of vipers, get right with God and get right with your neighbor,” truth.

There will be a banquet full of men and cups. There will be tables full of drinking and debauchery. The evening will end with a display of macho power flexing…John’s head will be cut from his body and put on a silver platter.

There will be another banquet. A woman with tears in her eyes and hope in her soul will pour out on Jesus’ head a gift even more rare than myrrh.

None of it has happened yet, but it will. Time is frozen now. The vastness of God, stretching like an ocean. No cup.

Yet something is poured out. The heavens open. The spirit of God descends scriptures says, like a dove. Jesus is baptized. “This is my son, the Beloved, with him I am well pleased.”

Another way to say it. Or another way that a woman at a church I was at in California said it, “Pastor, this is my most favorite thing.”

She showed me a shell.

“It’s my most favorite thing because my granddaughter found it on the beach. She said it was her most favorite thing and she gave it to me.” She wanted St. Philip’s Church to have it. Because that’s what you do with special things, you give them away.

“To use for Baptisms.” She explained.

“Because Baptism is Jesus’ most favorite thing?” I asked.

“Oh I don’t know. But it is special isn’t it?”

(Leave it to a preacher to try to find some sort of religious story in the ordinary. Not just in public but private too.)

All of these things: John, Jesus, jails, Malawi, the ocean, favorite things, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, the first independent black nation in the Western hemisphere, whose independence was gained as part of a enslaved peoples revolt…were on my mind the day after Christmas in 2016.

I sat at a banquet table in Haiti next to beautiful people, some of them famous, all of them fabulous. There was lots of food and the smell of perfume in the air. We were treated to a private concert by an artist who we weren’t able to get tickets to see back in Manhattan at Lincoln Center. He performed a private show for 30 of us. Afterwards he invited us to accompany him to an orphanage for another concert the next morning. My wife, and brother, and sister-in-law and I got in a boat and went to a wild place. A poor place, an orphanage that fed children.

All of the kids were smiling. Some of them were in wheelchairs, some were in high chairs, most of them young, but a few were teenagers too. I looked around the room which seemed for a moment to have had a pause button, just like you find on a camera, or audio equipment, pressed for a moment. This happens sometimes. Time has a way, or rather God has a way of stopping time.

Standing in front of us was the director of the orphanage. She gave out candy. As the musician played his wife passed out candy too.

“Well,” said the artist laughing, “my wife ruined the concert. You are more interested in candy than listening to me.”

So the musician also started to give out candy. (Which to my eyes looked like a sacrament, pressed into the palm of each child’s hand.)

Then the real concert started. A boy came to the front of the room. He said he wanted to sing. He was going to sing one of the artist’s songs.

“Do you know the words?”

 “Of course I do! You play the guitar…”

So the artist played back up musician for an orphan who began to sing his hit, Pa Lage Sa.

" Dèfwa menm si nan lavi ou tout wout bare fò’w pa kanpe… 

Woyo yo yo, woyo yo yo

Woyo yo yo, woyo yo yo”

Everyone in the room was silent as his voice filled the room. I couldn’t understand the words he was saying, because it was in Haitian Creole.

My brother-in-law translated. “He’s singing a song about himself” he said choking back tears. “He’s saying hang in there don’t let go.”

“Sometimes, even if the way is blocked, you must not stop…

God's sun shines for everyone

Woyo yo yo, woyo yo yo

Woyo yo yo, woyo yo yo”

And even though I didn’t understand the words being sung I knew something was happening.

Those people in the desert, were they filled with tears too when a voice spoke? Were they filled with faith when the heavens opened?

Baptism isn’t to polite, Episcopal, intellectual tradition a one-time event. It’s a welcome to faith…a welcome that we live every day. Each time we take a shower or wash our face we’re supposed to remember our Baptism; like seeing a shell or favorite thing.

I’ve got shells not just on my coffee table but all over my house (at least I did before we had kids) because I want to remember every wave, every meal, every child, and every song from that trip.

That’s what Baptism is supposed to be; a pause in the wild world, a promise of God’s presence.  A pause when the rest of life hasn’t happened, the hard parts with evil ones who flex their muscles and dance before cutting off heads; a promise of God even before the sweet times when those with tears pour out everything.

But what if this polite, orthodox tradition of religious interpretation isn’t the only version?

What if there is a mystical quality in water. What if there is spirituality in words and a sacred, magical moment that does happen in Baptism, beyond what we can explain — like a visit to a prison where music is made, or an orphanage where beauty is revealed?

Listen.

Here (in the shell).

it’s the ocean

Here (in the Bible).

“This is my Son, the Beloved…”

Here (in the heart),

heaven is open

“Woyo yo yo, woyo yo yo”

Once you’ve drunk from the ocean no cup will ever do. Amen.