The Hands That Were On Me

Mateo found out on a Tuesday, from his cousin, in a message that started with have you heard.

The man who baptized him. Twelve years earlier. A man Mateo had liked enormously, who had a laugh you could hear through a wall, who had come to the house twice and sat with his mother when she was frightened and had been, at the time, the best example of the thing Mateo could point at.

It had come apart. That is all I am going to say about it, and it is all Mateo would want said, and the details do not belong in this and never will.

He read the message twice and then put the phone face down on the counter and stood there.

And what he felt, in the first ten seconds, was not what he expected to feel. There was sadness, and there was a great deal of it, and underneath the sadness, arriving fast and unwelcome, there was something small and cold with a question in it.

Does that undo mine?

He was ashamed of the thought. It felt selfish to have it at all, at a moment when there were people much closer to it than him whose lives had just been taken apart. He pushed it down and went to work.

It came back. It has come back for four years, usually in the car, and it has never once been asked out loud to anybody.

Were those hands the thing, or were they just the hands.

You may have your own Tuesday.

Maybe it was a man, or a woman, or a whole leadership, or somebody who did not fall in any dramatic way and simply turned out to be different from what you had understood. And a thing that happened to you while they were standing there has felt unstable ever since.

Paul answers exactly this and he is impatient about it

The church at Corinth had made a version of your problem into a whole culture. They had sorted themselves by who had done what for them. I am of Paul, I am of Apollos, I am of Cephas. Their spiritual standing was being tracked by whose hands had been involved.

And Paul takes the question apart in three sentences.

Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man? I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase.1 Corinthians 3:5-7

Look at what he does to himself in that.

He does not say Apollos is nothing, but I am something. He puts himself in the same sentence and reduces both of them to the same size, and the phrase he uses is astonishing. Neither is he that planteth any thing. Not: he is a small thing. Not a thing.

He is not being falsely modest. He is describing a mechanism. Somebody has to plant, and it matters that they do, and the growing is not in their hands and never was, not on their best day.

And that man was never the one giving the increase. The written word says neither is he that planteth any thing, and it says it about apostles, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man standing at a counter with a phone face down on it.

And what happened in you was not stored in him. The word puts the increase with God in the same breath as it empties the planter, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a floor rather than a technicality to somebody who has been carrying a question in the car for four years.

What he actually had to give

Let me be exact, because vagueness helps nobody here.

That man gave you real things. He came to the house. He sat with your mother when she was frightened. He put his hands on your shoulders in water and he was glad about you, and none of that was fake at the time, and one of the hardest parts of this is that it probably was not fake at the time.

Hold that. It is allowed to be true.

What he did not have to give, on his best morning, was the thing itself. Nobody has that to give. It is not withheld from fallen men and available to standing ones. It has never been in any human hand at all, which is precisely why Paul can be so blunt about it without insulting anybody.

And you did not receive something from a man that a man could later take back. The word says the increase is God's, and it does not make that conditional on the later conduct of the one who planted, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than routing through anybody's reputation.

And you are allowed to grieve the man without renegotiating your own morning. The word says put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help, and it says it without contempt, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person hold real sorrow and real steadiness at the same time.

This is not the article that prosecutes anybody

I want to be plain about what I am not doing.

I am not going to tell you what that man's whole life amounted to. I do not know, and neither do you, and neither does the cousin who sent the message. The parts you saw were real parts. What came out was also real. Both of those can be true of a person and usually are, of all of us, at different scales.

And I am not going to hand you a lesson about his church, or his tradition, or the people who did not see it coming. There will be people making that argument somewhere and they are not making it here. You did not arrive carrying a case against an institution. You arrived carrying a question about your own baptism.

And you cannot fail a category on this page. The word hands out one baptism and does not attach a questionnaire about who administered it, and the Spirit is the one who settles rather than examines.