The Big Dipper
By Robert Meyers
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Just a few hours ago I had an interesting, accidental encounter in a Wichita hospital with a German Baptist. I had gone to visit one of our members, but while waiting my turn I saw a man with a magnificent beard lying in a nearby room. On impulse I walked in and began a conversation.
I supposed the man was Amish or Mennonite, but he was not. He told me that his religious group had about six thousand members in the United States. In the course of our talk I learned that they practiced triple immersion in the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He explained carefully that the candidate was baptized forward, not backward. I could tell that this was as weighty a thing with him as staying out of the Ministerial Alliance is with some of my colleagues.
Then a dim memory arose sluggishly. "Are you ever called 'Dunkards?'" I asked. (I am always careful to enunciate perfectly when I ask this question). The grand beard moved up and down on the hospital sheet. "Yes," he said, "that is a nickname people have applied to us." Ah yes, friend, I thought, recalling those childhood days when my local minister spent hours each year explaining how we were not really "Campbellites," but Christians and Christians only and the only Christians. I felt a curious sympathy with the strapping farmer from Pratt, Kansas.
I told him then that my father had once been a Dunkard back in Hoosier country. He remembered Meyerses from Indiana. Probably some of my relatives. And many Fischers (my grandmother's side) who had been dipped three times--forward. We felt almost kin.
But despite this man's superiority to us on the matter of submersions, it is not he to whom I refer in the title. I got to thinking, later, about Naaman. It was natural, I suppose to go from a three-dip man to a seven-dip man and to think of the latter as The Big Dipper. I do not mean to be facetious and I bring up the Naaman story only to point out something which escaped my attention for a long, long time.
When I was a boy, the Naaman story was used for one purpose in sermons. It was pointed out emphatically that Naaman had to dip, whether he liked water or not, and that he wasn't healed until he came up the seventh time in complete obedience. I remember preachers saying that when he came up the fourth time he had as much skin trouble as when he first began. I do not know just where they got that idea, but I suppose it is an embellishment of little significance. The point was that Naaman had to dip, and that until we do, our disease stays with us.
Jesus used the Naaman story once, too, but for quite a different purpose. He referred to it in Luke 4 as a lesson in the sin of racial discrimination. The crowd reaction was typical; they got infuriated, ran him out of town, and tried to kill him by shoving him off the edge of a cliff. I suppose this may explain why some of us who preach do not use the Naaman story for the same reason Jesus used it. It is a great deal safer to aver that a seven-fold dipping supports the single one of Christianity than to hammer away on the sin of racial prejudice.
I got to thinking about how some of Jesus's sisters might have talked to him after that little riot. "My dear brother, this only proves again what we've all been telling you-- you ought to have stayed with carpentry. Haven't you any idea how embarrassing it is to all of us to have you running around the country stirring people up? And if you just have to preach, please tell me why you pick on a subject like that. Our scrolls are full of grand tales of our Jewish heroes. Why bring up Naaman and irritate everybody with how gracious God was to a - - Syrian?"
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Perhaps it means little to you, but the fact that Jesus used Naaman for a lesson on racial bias and not for a lesson on baptism fascinates me. It illustrates once again how closely our use of Old Testament stories corresponds with our primary interests. We need to examine our motives as well as the scriptures.