I went to Mitchell Road Elementary school over in Greenville. I used to ride my bicycle there and back every day.
One day there was some construction and they repaved a section of the sidewalk.
Unfortunately they didn’t mark off the sidewalk afterward. So that afternoon when all the students were released from Mitchell Road Elementary school I was at the head of the pack, racing down the sidewalk on my banana seat high rise handle bar Schwinn bicycle, and I hit the that wet cement going full speed.
Books, lunch box, bike and Jack went all over the place, I left a full body imprint in the cement, and you could see my surprise forever branded into the sidewalk.
That sidewalk had my imprint for decades. In high school we would run over it in Cross Country, luckily everyone forgot how that sidewalk got that full body imprint of an eight year old. I would just run over it and smile quietly.
Boy was I surprised.
Baptism is like that.
We think we know what we are getting into until we fall face first into the Holy Spirit.
Today is the first Sunday after the Epiphany; this is the day where we always attend to the Baptism of our Lord.
Jesus didn’t know what hit him.
Out of the water, the first thing that happens is that he was anointed by the Holy Spirit, messiah means the Anointed one, and then immediately the Holy Spirit drove him into the desert for forty days to be tempted by Satan.
It depends which Gospel and which interpretation is read, the language used is that he was led, driven, pushed, dragged into the wilderness.
What is interesting in Luke’s Gospel is that in-between when the Spirit descended on him and the Spirit driving him out into the wild Luke gives Jesus’ genealogy going all the way back to Adam.
What this means is that Jesus is the new Adam, humanity starting over, and instead of being cast out of the Garden, Jesus is pushed back in, to take the garden back, and Satan is waiting for him.
Talk about surprised!
Talk about falling face first into the wet mud of humanity, leaving a new fresh imprint of the image God in creation!
The Baptism of our Lord before anything else-is surprising.
The brightness of God is surprising, it changes us and it changes how we change the world.
Reclaiming the Garden, restoring the garden.
We think we know what we are getting into but then we fall face first into the Holy Spirit, and we are anointed with the fresh image of humanity, confronted by the image of God.
We fall off our bikes.
We have to learn to ride all over again.
Today we attend to the baptism of our Lord by renewing our own baptism.
Our lives mark the earth with the image God that we carry.