Amy Harris Wonder of Scripture Lecture
Transcript
So that was that was lovely. Thank you. And I want to thank the Maxwell Institute as well for all the many people there and our authors and editors in this series for the past handful of years that have given me opportunities to explore scriptures in ways that I haven't had via my historical training. Since I'm not trained in theology at all, it was all a new experience and a delightful one.
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All right, so on a September day in 1840, 53-year-old Vienna Jacques rode a horse into the Mississippi River. She'd been standing on the bank, but that prevented her from hearing, from witnessing what was occurring in the river, so she rode closer to the two people standing in the deeper water in order to hear the words they spoke. You might know Vienna Jacques because in an 1833 revelation in the Doctrine and Covenants, she's mentioned by name, where God names her and directs that she receive money to bear her expenses and go up into the Land of Zion. And maybe you know she was from Massachusetts, or that Emer Harris baptized her in 1831, or that she migrated West in the fall of 47 and died in Salt Lake in 1884. Some of you might know Harvey Olmsted, one of the people Vienna was meeting at the river that day. Harvey was 46, another New Englander who was an early member of the church, and you might know he later converted to the Reorganized Church and died in Minnesota in 1880. I bet most of you though do know the third person who met at the river that day, Jane Harper Neyman, the first person baptized for a deceased loved one in this dispensation.
On the 15th of August 1840, Joseph made his first public declarations about the doctrine of baptism for the dead. Jane's son Cyrus had recently died, and like many of her fellow saints, she was encouraged and moved by the possibilities of vicarious baptism on behalf of deceased loved ones. In my way of imagining it, she gathered some of her friends and told them of her plan. Those friends were a married man with many children and a childless woman who'd only married at age 50. They joined the recently widowed Jane and ushered in a practice that continues to shape how saints, how we today, think of our connection to God, to our families and to each other, to all of humanity.
I imagine them making plans to meet, making plans where to dry off and change into warm clothes. I imagine Vienna leaning forward, anxious to hear, to fully witness, while also keeping her seat on the horse. I imagine the cool water rippling the skirts around Jane's legs and the warmth of the horse's breath on her and Harvey, as he said a few sacred words before laying Jane in the river and bringing her up again. And I imagine the three of them pausing for a moment in gratitude for the life of Cyrus and for the transcendent promise of resurrection and connection beyond the grave, the transcendent promise of Christ's Atonement.
Maybe it's easy for me to imagine joining them, because I'm roughly in their age group, and I've lived long enough to experience the loss of loved ones and can see its own pending arrival in my own life, to understand their motivations and their hope. It was easy for many of those early saints to share those motivations and hopes. The impact of Joseph's sermon that August was immense, though sadly, a full text of the sermon doesn't survive. We do have diaries, letters and an affidavit from Jane herself a few years later, attesting to the saint’s grateful receipt of the doctrine.
But that was not the beginning of the doctrine of redeeming the dead. Joseph had already seen glimpses of how salvation could be offered to all humanity, no matter the circumstances of their mortal lives. As he translated the Book of Mormon in the late 1820s, he encountered Mormon's explanation that young children do not require baptism, that they are saved through Christ's Atonement. In subsequent years, the lingering grief over the death of his brother, Alvin, and the cutting griefs He and Emma experienced as their children died in infancy raised questions as well as pain, death, and grief. Emma's, Joseph's, Jane's ultimately drove revelation about salvation for the dead, that death and sorrow would drive revelation and connection should not surprise us, because we believe in a God who weeps, in a Savior who groans within himself, and three ancient Nephite apostles whose only lingering aspect of mortality is a continuing sorrow at the pain humanity experiences and causes.
But that too, was not the beginning of the doctrine of redeeming the dead. Joseph's vision in 1836 of Alvin and the celestial kingdom, accompanied by their parents, who were still living, suggests heaven runs on a different time scale and on a much more expansive plane. In some ways, that train of thought gets us closer to the real beginning of the doctrine of baptism for the dead or redemption for the dead, because it didn't start with Joseph seeing Alvin, or Mormon writing a letter to Moroni, or even the ancient saints mentioned in Corinthians. It's much, much older. The real beginning is outlined in Section 128, despite how many times I've read this section and how many times I've taught it, I had missed the key point about redeeming the dead's place within our heavenly parent's overall purpose and plan. I didn't begin to see the greater wonder of this scripture until I read a brilliant essay by Jenny Webb. She drew my attention to verses 8 and 12 in Section 128.
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Baptism, or redemption for the dead, was not an invention of the 19th century or even ancient Christianity, but was instituted from the foundation of the world. Not only was baptism for the dead established before anyone had experienced mortality, let alone death. It is the foundation of baptism for the living. Baptism for the living was instituted to form a relationship with the ordinance of baptism of the dead, suggesting that baptism for the dead was introduced before, or at least simultaneously, as baptism for the living. And part of the purpose of baptism for the living is to remind us of baptism for the dead. Together, baptism for the living and for the dead form a new and everlasting covenant, even that which was from the beginning, as section 22 puts it. From the foundation of the world, before the world, before baptism for the living, and to form a relationship.
So what about the living? Section 128 says they cannot be made perfect or saved without us, nor we without them. How does knowing about redeeming the dead or engaging in proxy work save us, why allthis expense and time spent on proxy work for the dead when the living are here, suffering and in need right now. Frankly, if the only purpose of the baptism for baptisms for the dead was to build pretty buildings where we could go to ponder how righteous we are, and to support a genealogical hobby for retirees, okay, I'd agree that's a pretty uninspiring doctrine.
But restoration scripture points out again and again that far greater things are at stake. The fate of the world is at stake, echoing Malachi words, Moroni and Joseph declared, the Earth would be smitten with a curse, would be utterly wasted, unless there's a welding link of some kind, upon some subject or other between the generations, unless, as Joseph wrote, that curse preventing connection was baptism for the dead. How can that be? How can proxy baptisms save the world?
They can't, but what they ritually symbolically remind us of, the truth upon which they are built, can save us all if we choose to let it.
The truth upon which it is built is, of course, Christ, the chief cornerstone. More specifically, the love of Christ that is manifested in the atonement and the love of Heavenly Parents, that is manifested in all creation and in the sacrifice of their son, the love that sheds itself abroad in the hearts of men, the love that is God, that love is the reason baptism for the dead was established. The ordinances of baptism for the dead and baptism for the living formed a relationship to underscore the centrality of relationships to the work of salvation. Indeed, one of Joseph Smith's revelatory innovations was expanding ideas about the importance of human relationships to salvation. Christian community is not limited by time or mortality, but is essential to salvation eternally. The universal scope of salvation is about Christ's reach and humanity's connection to each other.
Redeeming the dead prevents the curse or waste prophesied by Malachi by fulfilling the purpose of the earth and providing for enduring relationships. The Atonement of Christ, His redeeming power, saves us individually. But Malachi’s prophesying, in its various forms, and it appears in every standard work in one form or another, highlights that human connections are also necessary for full redemption. As Joseph wrote in 1839, “Those in the spirit world yearn over us, and eventually they and we will join Hand in Hand in bringing about this work.” The combination of individual salvation and connected humanity has the culminating purpose of the Earth. The welding link between generations is the redemptive conduit that restores broken relationships between each other and with God.
The connection between the living and the dead is made explicit in the sections on baptism and the dead in the doctrine covenants, and it's echoed in other Nauvoo era revelations. The restoration was meant to improve mortal relationships as well as refine them for life beyond mortal life. “Let every selfish feeling not only be buried, but annihilated, and let love to God and each other predominate,” Joseph wrote in December 1840. He continued, “The best of feelings should exist in our midst; then, by the help of the Almighty, our evil passions will be subdued, our prejudices depart. We shall find no room in our bosoms for hatred. Vice will hide its deformed head, and we shall stand approved in the sight of heaven.” (Teachings: Joseph Smith, p. 276) In Joseph's inspired formulation, Heaven will be a place where “the same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory.” (Doctrine and Covenants 130:2)
We get to choose what that sociality looks like, but we also don't have to wait for it or wait to start creating it. Even if that sociality looks like photographic evidence of 80s perms or siblings harassing each other –maybe especially siblings harassing each other– or capturing a moment with friends river rafting. And yes, I am in that photo. You might be able to spot my Cal baseball cap, and trust me, I remember that exact moment quite well. Or when I and two other Amys, who also studyEarly Modern English women, stopped for a photo while at a conference. At one time, I had a student say, “Do I have to change my name to Amy study 18th century Britain?” Only of a certain generation. Or the photo of my sister and brother holding his grandkids at the beach, a brother and sister who are less than two years apart and spent a lifetime of doing projects together. And by projects, I mean real projects, involving gardening, home Improvement, and I mean that she was his coach that trained him for the Future Farmers of America cow pie throwing contest in high school. Or the photo of my mom, who passed away just as the pandemic shut everything down, just as Paloma was being born five years ago, sitting with me and my faculty mentor, who just passed away this week. And a million other moments of joy and sadness, of laughter, and forgiveness.
But what does this foreway into my personal relationships, and my power of self-appointed family historian have easy access to a lifetime of embarrassing photos. What does that have to do with redemption of the dead? Although I should point out quickly, all of you are sworn to secrecy about the photo of my four sisters there in the middle where apparently the landscape, their hair and their clothes were all rendered out of the same substance. But again, what does earthly sociality have to do with the redemption of the dead?
Because redemption for the dead is connected to Malachi prophecy about generational heart turning. If your heart can turn to someone long since dead, then it gives you the spiritual muscle memory to turn your heart to the living. If you can see the actions and choices of deceased ancestors with clear eyes and compassion, you develop the ability to offer the same gifts to the living. To build a mortal sociality you want to have coupled with eternity. To build it, with families, with friends and with anyone willing to have their heart turned to you. That is no easy work, because it turns out no one is better at harming humans than other humans.
Figuring out how to repent, how to forgive, how to heal, how to grow and let others grow, while dealing with flawed human beings is no easy path, and encountering flawed human beings in the past, including our deceased ancestors, is not always a sunny flower strewn path, either. In Wilford Woodruff's words, “No doubt, when we trace our ancestors back, we'll find that they trod in muddy places. We will find there was wickedness among them. There can be little doubt about this, because they were human beings. They were exposed to temptation and to sin.” I've sometimes heard people say loving others is the easy way out, that loving God is the more important part, is the more difficult part, and is the most important of the first two and great commandments, because loving others just distracts us from loving God. And I want to say to these people, have you met people? Have you been in a family for more than 10 minutes? Have you had a friend for longer than an hour? Have you watched the news or observed your neighbors and seen what people do to each other? Have you read section 121 where we learn by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all, as soon as they have a little authority, as they suppose, they immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion? Or how quick we are to cover our sins, gratify our pride, our vain ambition, or exercise compulsion upon others? No wonder the heavens recoil and God grieves when we do such things. Loving other people is sometimes easy. Loving some people is easy all the time. But loving everyone all the time, that is hard work. That is rugged work of discipleship, of following and loving a God who sees the inestimable worth of each individual soul and calls us to see the same. It is hard work, but it is glorious and wondrous work.
As Joseph wrote in 1841, “Love is one of the chief characteristics of deity, and ought to be manifested by those who aspire to be the children of God. A person filled with love of God is not content with blessing their family alone, but ranges through the whole world, anxious to bless the whole human race.” (Teachings: Joseph Smith, p. 426) That far ranging love, that sociality, is what Jane, Vienna, and Harvey experienced at the river that day. And they weren't alone for long. In September and October of 1840 and for the next several months, small groups of saints met at the Mississippi River and other waters to be baptized for a parent, a sister, a friend, a stepparent, an uncle, a cousin. Yes, their hearts were turning to their ancestors, their families and their friends, but they were simultaneously turning to each other in a shared, lived, sacred experience. Many came with spouses and other relatives. But not everyone lived in Nauvoo. Many came from surrounding Latter-day Saint settlements in the counties around Nauvoo. Gathering at the river to perform baptisms, therefore, included planning together with saints when already knew and loved, alongside saints you did not know and had not interacted with before.
That kind of sociality is also something I and some students got to experience in the fall of ‘23 when we read and handled the documents of those river baptisms, and this is an example of one of those. We gathered around desks in the church's archives, touching the paper and feeling the ink left by our fellow saints nearly 200 years ago, encountering their sacred sociality, their faith in the redeeming power of Christ to conquer both death and separation, at the same time we experienced our own. Encountering those documents, loose scraps of paper written by different people at different times, thinking of the effort to preserve those loose sheets during turmoil and migration, noting the pen lines and small notations of later efforts to record and preserve the ordinance information, then thinking about how those records were entered on typed cards into the temple indexing bureau in early 20th century, and that information combined with other records in computer systems in the 1960s and 70s, and in the international genealogical index, and reiterated in 1000s of family stories passed to descendants and preserved in the Four Generation project -an ancestral file in the 1980s and 90s- and pedigree resource file, then New Family Search, and finally, after 2012, Family Search: Family tree.
Simultaneously, the original records were photocopied, at least once, shifted around, microfilmed, and then deposited in the Genealogical Society of Utah, which then became the family history department of the Church, which then they became Family Search International. Details copied, preserved, duplicated many, many times over, tumbling together in various ways as exquisitely messy as you can possibly imagine, but always rumbled together in faith and hope. Meanwhile, the originals came to reside in the temple department, until a few years ago, when they were transferred to the church history Library's collection, and that's where the students and I encountered them. Students immediately noticed the water stains, the fragile nature of the pages, and the difficulty of determining who these people on the page were, compared to their possible profiles on FamilySearch: Family Tree, especially married women, whose original surnames are not on these pages, marriage erasing their named connection to their forebears. But it was the water stains that caught one student's particular attention. That's water from the Mississippi River, she declared. She envisioned them coming, dripping out of the river, and immediately wanting to make sure their ancestor was recorded, was remembered, to capture as one scholar has put it: “eternity in a ledger.” And I witnessed in that moment how Malachi’s prophecy works, how it ranges across the world to pull us together. As this student, whose own ancestors joined the church 100 years later and an ocean away from those early saints, felt connected to them, felt their presence in that dried water stain. As real people, encumbered just as we all are by our mortal failings and squabbles, but consecrated as we all are in small moments of humility, faith, grace, and love.
I don't have a photo from that archive visit, which I regret, from a year and a half ago, but I have a different one from about three years ago with a different group of students at the church history library. Because it turns out that each little sociality matters, as Chieko Okazaki taught us, “we meet many people. With some, the association lasts for years. With others, the association is very brief. But in either case, we can make the pattern a beautiful one by making our encounter a kindly one, filled with the desire to serve.” (Build a network of kindness, Okazaki, 1993) When inspired by our best impulses to love, to be patient, to be kind, drives our efforts to redeem the dead and drives our earthly sociality. Our hearts soften, then turn, then change. A love for others opens a space for the Savior's universal love to take root. As President Okazaki put it, “We can never afford to be cruel or indifferent or ungenerous, because we are all connected, even if it is in a pattern that only God sees. I am part of this pattern... You are part of this pattern. And the Savior is part of this pattern. In fact, I like to think the Savior is the spaces in the pattern, for there would be no pattern at all without them.” I've seen those patterns in my life, and scriptures have deepened my understanding and appreciation for those patterns.
I wanted to share one experience, and I did not type this one up, because I wanted to get the sense of the room before I shared a very sacred experience, and especially since it's being recorded, that made me a little hesitant. I’m going to show you the Sharp family from 18th century England. I've written a book about these folks semi-recently based on 20 years of snooping through their family letters and diaries and tromping through the places they lived. They were clever. They were witty, full of great ideas. Always had good times on the River Thames. This is them in the bow of their boat, floating down the Thames, putting on a concert. They were, to borrow a phrase from Jane Austen, “the best company”. About 10 years ago, I went to visit Durham Cathedral in northern England. Some of the brothers and the father had had ecclesiastical positions at the Cathedral. Some of the family had lived in Durham, and some of the family were buried at the back chapel, back where you see the two towers on the right side, and I wanted to see the places they had worshiped and where some of them were buried.
As I crossed the threshold of that back chapel, I suddenly felt the presence of all those Sharps, 14 siblings and a handful of spouses. People I snooped on, like I said, for a decade, and they stayed with me for about half an hour with some specific thoughts that came to mind, and I wondered about that. Why did I get a half an hour with the mighty Sharps who fought to end slavery and alleviate poverty? Not my own ancestors from 18th century England, who lived a decidedly different social class, not the Sharps, because they needed temple work done. Most of their temple work was done in 1880s in the St George temple. So why the Sharps? And why me in that moment?
I thought about that. I thought about what was I to gain from that connection, other than I probably knew them better than any living person knew them. They were amazing, right? They were literally the best people the 18th century could have produced. They were filled with compassion for others, and had the resources, the creativity, and energy to serve the ill, the indigent, the poor, the enslaved, the abandoned. At the same time, they were incredibly paternalistic, racist, classist, sexist, and enormous music snobs. Good and bad. I had learned all of that about them from reading their papers, but I what I learned standing on the stones where they once stood, buttressed by their presence around me, was God's keen awareness of them and me as individuals and as connected individuals. I learned that they were loved, that they were redeemable. As are we all. Our feeble attempts to turn our hearts made resolute through Christ's love, which is mighty to save.
The wonder of scriptures about redemption for the dead is the wonderful offer of universal salvation and the reminder about the sacred work done in relationships where we learn to keep the second great commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. Not in soft focus coffee table books of photos, and not only in the happy collage of photos I shared, but also in ways that could radically change the world. Scripture around redeeming the dead illuminates how to truncate our tendency to seek our own, to seek vengeance. Instead, those scriptures call us to turn our hearts, that most difficult work we learn from redeeming the dead.
When war, vengeance, violence, misplaced beliefs about us versus them, with us always being the right ones, the winners, the ones who get to go to the right school, or the right church, or belong to the right political party, or the right nation, so we have the right to assert dominance or claim superior status, when that turns our hearts cold within us, redeeming the dead, the welding link, the magnificent hope of glorious sociality draws us away from such objectifying thoughts and behaviors, away from the blood and sins of this generation. It calls us to something holier, something healing, something redemptive, that makes our hearts rejoice, that makes the earth break forth into singing, that makes the mountains shout for joy, and the valleys and the seas and the dry lands tell the wonders of God. Makes the rivers, the brooks, the rills, flow with gladness, and the woods and the trees fill with the praise of God. Makes the solid rocks weep for joy, and the sun, the moon and the stars sing together as all God's children shout for joy (Doctrine and Covenants 128:23). No wonder Joseph described baptism for the dead as the “most glorious of all subjects belonging to the everlasting gospel.” (Doctrine and Covenants 128:17) That is no wasteland, that is no cursed Earth, that is wonderful. Shall we not Go on in so great a cause? Thank you.