Harry Ashfield is one of the characters in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The River.” He’s four or five years old. No one seems to know, and that meshes with the child’s unfortunate family circumstances. Harry lives with his mother and father in an unnamed major American city in a nondescript apartment filled with odd, abstract art. And Harry is neglected.
When we first meet Harry, he’s being picked up by Mrs. Connin, a babysitter. She’s clearly from the country, not the city. And when she appears at the door of the Ashfields’ apartment, which is dark and colorless, his father can hardly get him into a coat properly, and his mother is in bed with a hangover.
The father doesn’t seem to care where Harry will be taken by Mrs. Connin, nor does he care when he will return home. The later the better, as far as he’s concerned. He’s not perturbed when Mrs. Connin, the babysitter, announces that it will probably be later than eight or nine o’clock at night, since she’ll be taking little Harry to a river in the country for a healing service by a preacher named Bevel Summers.
Mrs. Connin and Harry leave the dimly lit apartment and venture out into the gray city, dark at that early hour. On the way to Mrs. Connin’s home in the country, she suddenly asks Harry what his name is. Until this point, she only knew his last name. “Bevel,” Harry answers, which is strange because it’s not his name; it’s the name of the country preacher they will soon meet. But it’s also the first indication that something significant is about to happen to Harry Ashfield. Mrs. Connin has no clue that Harry’s name isn’t really “Bevel.” Nevertheless, off they go to Mrs. Connin’s house out on a farm.
When Harry first enters Mrs. Connin’s house, he soon notices a picture hanging on a wall. Unlike everything else in the story until this point, the picture is in color, and it features a man wearing a white sheet, with long hair and “a gold circle around his head,” who is sawing some wood while children watch him. It’s clear and simple, unlike the abstract art in Harry’s parents’ apartment. Harry doesn’t yet know it’s Jesus in the picture, but later, he would learn that “he had been made” by this “carpenter named Jesus Christ.”
After some time at the farmhouse—enough time for Harry to be teased by Mrs. Connin’s wild children, who turn a pig loose on him—the whole family makes the journey down to the river to the healing service led by Bevel Summers, the preacher. When they arrive at the river, Preacher Bevel is standing out in the river with water up to his knees. He's no more than nineteen years old. He sings, and he preaches. He talks about the River of Life, the only river that matters, the one that comes from Jesus’s blood. It's the river that can handle our pain, he says. It's the river in which we can be cleansed. It's that river that leads to the Kingdom of Christ, says Preacher Bevel.
Eventually, Mrs. Connin raises Harry up above the crowd and announces that this boy has probably never been baptized. The preacher invites little Harry forward, and the child tells him that his name is Bevel, but of course it isn’t. He has no idea what baptism is, but when the preacher asks him if he wants to be baptized, he says yes. Before, in his life with his parents, everything was a joke. But Harry now realizes that this event at the river is no joke. Harry thinks to himself, “I won’t go back to the apartment then. I’ll go under the river.” The preacher says to him, “You won't be the same again. You’ll count.”
Harry is dunked in the water, and the preacher affirms, “you count now. You didn’t even count before.” It’s what Harry later affirms, too, when he returns to his colorless apartment in the city and his mother asks about what the preacher said to him. Harry replies, “He said I’m not the same now. I count.”[1]
This is, of course, what we say about Christian baptism. After we’re baptized into Jesus’s death and resurrection in the water of the font, or the water of the River of Life as Preacher Bevel would have said, we count. Unlike little Harry whose name changed at baptism, our name remains the same. But we are different after baptism. We count in a unique way.
But it's not as if we never mattered before. It’s not as if we aren’t children of God before the water hits our head. It’s not that God doesn’t love us or protect us before we’re baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. It’s just that after we’re baptized into Christ, we aren’t the same, as little Harry said. We can never be the same again, because in the sacrament of baptism, God has done something to us that’s real and mysterious and wonderful. We count. We’re marked as Christ’s own forever. We’re destined for something different. And we’ve been immersed in a way of life that does turn our world from dull gray into color, from a joke into something real and true.
But at its core, today’s feast of the Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ isn’t really about us and our baptisms, oddly enough. And this is such a novel concept to our self-obsessed culture. This feast is about Jesus and who he is. He alone is the Son of God. He alone is sinless with no need to be cleansed from sin. He alone is the Christ, the Messiah, the Word made flesh, perfect man and perfect God. And yet, Jesus submits to baptism as an identification with all of humanity, not to wash away sin but to allow for this moment of epiphany, the moment where he’s manifested to the world as God’s beloved Son.
Unlike us, our Lord doesn’t need to count in a different way after baptism. He’s always been the Son of God and always will be. But when he springs up from the water of the River Jordan, it is as if things go from grayscale to full color. The heavens open, and the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus as a dove, and the voice of God the Father is heard proclaiming Jesus as his only-begotten Son. In human time, in a brief moment of spectacular color and sensory perception, it’s as if the life of the holy Trinity becomes visible and audible to mere humans.
Yes, this feast is really all about Jesus and not about us, even though we want to make it about us. It’s about who Jesus is, because if he isn’t the beloved, unique Son of God manifested in this baptism at the Jordan, then we can’t be counted as we know we are. If he isn’t the Son of God, wholly different from us and yet fully identifying with our human condition except sin, then our own lives remain in grayscale, and they’re drab and lifeless. They’re a joke. Jesus’s baptism is not our baptism and yet it has everything to do with our baptism.
But here’s the wonderful irony of today’s feast. When we make today all about Jesus and not about us, we most fully discover who we’re called to be. When we focus on who Jesus is, then we learn who we are. We see that we’re only truly ourselves when we’re baptized into the One who makes us count.
We can’t help but talk about our own baptisms on this day, but only after we’ve talked about the baptism of him who turns the story of our lives from grayscale into color, from a joke into something real, who makes us count in a way we can never make ourselves count. And yet, this is precisely the modern temptation. We try to make ourselves count in all the wrong ways. We relentlessly climb social ladders. We fight our way to success in our jobs. We live vicariously through our children’s triumphs. We try to make ourselves count in ways that will only change the lighting in our world from color to grayscale, from real into a joke.
But when we focus on Jesus's baptism, and when we’re united in prayer with the One who lived, died, and rose again so that we might be baptized and count, we’re scandalously brought into the divine life. We find ourselves listening in on a conversation between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. And we realize that, because of Christ, we count more than we ever imagined. We count because we have the extraordinary privilege of calling God Abba, Father.
There’s nothing else and no one else that can make us count. Only Christ can do that. And this day is all about him. But when we make it all about him, we discover, incidentally, that it’s about us, too. Because of him, our life is transformed fully into color. Because of him, we aren’t the same as we were before. Because of him, now, we count, and we are his forever, and that’s no joke.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ
January 12, 2025
[1] Flannery O’Connor, “The River” in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (New York: Mariner Books, 2019), Kindle edition