May 10, 2026

Saved Through Water

Believe it or not, I never learned how to swim properly until I got to college (and stumbled upon a swim coach who took pity on me one day at the campus pool).  Up to that time, all I could do was a modified dog paddle.  I think my difficulties started when I was seven years old.  There was a raft anchored out beyond the swimming beach at Forest Lake, and swimming to the raft was considered a major rite of passage.  So one day, I screwed my courage to the sticking post and dog-paddled my way out to the raft.  I pulled myself up and sat there exhausted but triumphant.  But then, some older kid decided to have a little fun and pushed me off the raft into the lake.  All I remember was struggling and going down through dark yellow water, believing that I was about to drown.  Someone’s hand grabbed my arm and I was pulled up onto the raft.  I didn’t swim very much for years after that.  I must tell you, to whomever it was that grabbed me, I will be eternally grateful.  But I am also grateful to that college swim team coach who saw me struggling to motivate through the pool, and asked me if I wanted to learn how to swim, and I’m grateful for his gentle hand of guidance in showing me the way.  And I’m grateful that for whatever reason I wasn’t too embarrassed to admit I was floundering and to say, “Yes, I want to learn to swim.”  My relationship with water was redeemed that day.  I swim like a fish now.

We cannot live without water, and we cannot live for long in it.  We can swim, and we can float, but eventually we will tire, become waterlogged, and succumb.  That’s why, according to the ancient legend, Noah built the ark (a legend, by the way, that long predates the biblical account – going back to the story of Gilgamesh and Utnapishtim from ancient Samaria).  The flood waters were going to destroy all living beings, except those who were saved by the sturdy ship designed by God’s providence.  In our scripture reading this morning Peter makes a connection between those waters of the great flood and the waters of baptism.  He says, “. . .  God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water.  And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you – not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience . . . .”  We’ll get to that business of a “good conscience” later, but his phrase, “saved through water,” intrigues me.  He is suggesting that the water of baptism is a vehicle of salvation, as were the waters of the flood.  But those flood waters represented a kind of ultimate destructive force.  How is it that a person is “saved” through waters of destruction?  The search for an answer to that question constitutes my message for today.

I begin by relating to you the true story of a World War II pilot whom I knew well in my earlier days of ministry.  His name was Stan Manierre.  I first met Stan when Dadgie and I moved to Massachusetts about forty years ago.  I was the newly installed pastor of the Park Street Baptist Church in Framingham, and Stan was my pastor.  He was an Associate Executive Minister for the American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts (what we called an “area minister”), and one of the best pastors to pastors there ever was.  He had taken the position after a long tenure as a missionary for the American Baptists.  Stan had served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during the Second World War.  In 1944, his B-24 bomber was shot down by Japanese planes near Saipan.  He almost drowned in the sea, but he was pulled out and captured by the Japanese.  He was held as a prisoner of war for almost a year and half.  He was tortured, faced starvation, and suffered from horrible diseases.  He was filled with rage at his captors then and for a number of years after (including the year he spent recovering in a Navy hospital).  For years after the war ended and his release from captivity he prayed for vengeance, and then for years prayed for release from his inner torment.  Finally, after flailing around in a sea of emotional turmoil for five years, he came to surrender his hate and anger to God.  Stan decided that, difficult as it is to accept, there must be meaning and purpose even in the horrible experiences he had endured.  Ultimately, he went to seminary.  In 1953 he was commissioned as a missionary, but not just to any mission field; he volunteered for an assignment in Japan.  He served as an American Baptist missionary in Japan for twenty years preaching peace and reconciliation.  While there, he arranged a face to face meeting with his prison guards and forgave them.  Stan died about seventeen years ago, but the gentle compassion of his spirit touched me deeply, and his story outlives him, the story of a life dedicated to building bridges of understanding and peace.  I remember him recounting to me that horrific experience of being shot down and struggling to survive in the water.  I remember thinking at the time of my childhood experience of being thrown off the raft at Forest Lake, and the arm that reached down in the water to pull me up.  It was a Japanese hand that pulled Stan up but not to blue skies and freedom.  In a very real sense, he was not rescued from those waters of destruction, but simply transferred from one pool of death to another.  Stan was not “saved,” to use the apostle Peter’s word, until he was pulled up, with the help of Divine grace, out of his ocean of hatred and torment.  What a terrible ordeal he underwent, but what a glorious “salvation” came through those waters of peril.   Through them, he was remade into a shining example of what it is to follow Christ.

Peter reminds his readers of the waters of baptism.  But baptism is symbolically paradoxical.  It is the water of destruction and the water of salvation.  I don’t know if you’ve ever thought of this, but baptism is a kind of drowning.  When it is done in the Baptist tradition the minister gets in a big pool of water with the candidate and completely submerges the person, before pulling him or her up to a new life with Christ.  When we in this church touch the forehead with a little water it’s supposed to symbolize the same act – a submersion in the waters of destruction that mean a drowning death to our old selves, and then a rising from the waters to represent the emergence of a new self, dedicated to the path of Christ and the journey of faith.  The traditional liturgical language for this is “dying with Christ in the waters of baptism and rising with him to new life.”

I once saw a movie titled, All Is Lost.  It was Robert Redford in the haunting role of a man on a sailboat who, despite his great resourcefulness and knowledge of the sea, loses his boat, is adrift in the ocean on a life raft, and ultimately destroys the raft trying to signal an ocean liner that seems to pass by oblivious to his plight.  All of his means of escaping the waters are lost, and he is alone treading water in the dark ocean.  As he drifts downward into the depths of the sea, ready to give in to the inevitable, he looks once more to the surface and sees a light.  As he struggles to reach it, at the end of the film, a hand reaches down into the water from above and grasps his to pull him to life.  I couldn’t decide whether the hand was that of a sailor on a rescue mission or representative of the hand of God found in the final moment.  In one way, it really doesn’t matter.  The point is that when all is lost, in fact, all is not lost.  One way or another, there is a hand.

What is it to be “saved through water?”  I think Stan Manierre would have told us that it happens when you are shot down, when you are pushed off the raft, when you must undergo the greatest trials and ordeals of life.  It is through that struggle that you are presented with a choice and an opportunity: will you succumb to the depths and yield to fear, resentment, isolation, and hopelessness, or will you find in that very struggle the moment of salvation that turns hatred into forgiveness, revenge into compassion, despair into hope, and war-making into peace-making?

It is this kind of life-change that is symbolized in baptism.  Peter refers to the baptismal act “as an appeal to God for a good conscience.”  But I think what the “good conscience” is all about is learning to live for love and compassion and peace – learning to live with hope.  In another place, Peter tells us to “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you.”  And what accounts for the hope that is in us?  It is the knowledge that if we give our hearts to the power of love no waters can overwhelm us, but through them we will be saved.