Eleven Seconds and a Schedule

Duane could tell you the running order, which is a strange thing to be able to do about your own baptism.

There were nine of them that morning. He was seventh. The man doing it had a funeral at one and had said so, twice, pleasantly, in the way a man does when he is trying to be helpful and is also watching a clock.

So it went quick. Down, up, next. The whole thing from his feet leaving the step to the towel was about eleven seconds. He has counted it since, in his head, more times than he would want written down.

Nobody did anything wrong. That is what makes it hard to be annoyed about. The man had a family waiting on him at one o'clock and they mattered more than a pause, and Duane has never once thought otherwise. Somebody clapped. His mother took a picture on a phone and her thumb was over the corner of it.

And he got in his truck afterwards and sat in the car park for a while with the engine off, and he did not know what he was waiting for and it did not come.

He is forty-eight now. That was fourteen years ago.

The thing he does, and he knows he does it, is replay the eleven seconds. Looking for something in them. A shift. A weight. Anything he might have missed while he was thinking about the man's funeral and whether his shirt was going to be see-through.

Fourteen years of going back through eleven seconds like a man rewinding a tape looking for a noise on it.

You may know that car park.

Maybe yours was a queue, or a schedule, or a room being turned round for something else, or somebody who was kind and rushed and had somewhere to be. And you have been going back over the whole of it since, trying to find what you were supposed to feel.

The shortest account in the book

Now here is a thing worth knowing, and it took me a long time to notice it.

Mark tells you about the most important baptism that ever happened, and he does it in about two sentences, and there is not one word of ceremony in it.

And it came to pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan. And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him: And there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.Mark 1:9-11

Read what is not in there.

There is no description of the atmosphere. Nobody tells you how long it took, or how many were in the queue that day, and there were plenty, because the whole region was going out to him. There is no note about whether it was well run.

And look at the word straightway. Mark's favorite word. It means immediately, at once, no gap. Even the most significant morning in the history of the world is described in that Gospel at a brisk walk.

And the shape of your morning was never carrying the weight of it. The written word gives the whole account in two sentences with nothing about the arrangements in it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that a relief in a man who has been rewinding eleven seconds for fourteen years.

Where the voice came from

Now watch the order in that passage, because it is the whole thing.

He comes up out of the water. The heavens open. The Spirit descends. And then a voice says Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

That voice is not describing something the eleven seconds produced.

At that point, in that Gospel, Jesus has not preached a sermon, healed anybody, called a disciple or done one recorded work. The well pleased comes before the ministry, not after it. It is not a verdict on a performance. It is a Father saying what was already true out loud, at a moment when it happened to be audible.

And what He says over you was true before the morning and did not depend on it. The word puts the beloved and the well pleased before a single work is done, and the Spirit is the one who lets that reach a man sitting in a car park with the engine off waiting for something to arrive.

And you are not required to produce the feeling that was missing. The word never once makes the descent conditional on what the person in the water noticed, and the Spirit is the one who supplies what a person cannot manufacture by concentrating harder.

What you were actually waiting for

Here is the part Duane got to eventually, and it took a friend saying something unhelpful for it to land.

He was not waiting for God. He was waiting for a receipt.

Something to hold. Some internal confirmation he could take away and produce later when the question came back, the way you keep a docket in a glovebox.

And that is not a shameful thing to have wanted. It is a very human thing. But it does explain fourteen years of rewinding, because the tape does not have a receipt on it and it was never going to.

And your assurance was never meant to be stored in your own memory of a feeling. The word says the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the children of God, which puts the witnessing in a Person rather than in a recollection, and the Spirit is the one doing it rather than you.

Now, I am not going to tell you whether anybody should ever go in the water a second time. That is an argument that has divided serious people for a long time and you did not come here to be signed up to a side of it. If it is a live question in you, then go and find somebody you trust, in a place where you are actually known, and say it out loud to them. Find someone. That is the whole of it, and I am stopping there on purpose.