Jack Hardaway
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I went to Mitchell Road Elementary school in Greenville SC. 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.
My bike flipped, my book bag popped and scattered the contents there of, my hot wheels lunch box burst open, my Scooby Do thermos landed splat in the gray goop, and I gracefully belly flopped like a beached whale. I wish you could have seen it! It was spectacular.
I left a full body imprint in the cement, and you could see the surprise on my face forever branded into the sidewalk.
A lasting impression.
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.
Years later when I served as the assistant priest at a nearby parish I ran and walked over that reminder in bodily form of surprise. I would bump over it with the stroller with my baby son inside. It’s like there was no escape!
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.
In Luke’s Gospel the Holy descended in bodily form, not when he came out of the water like in the other Gospel accounts, but when he was praying afterword.
Baptism and Prayer and the divine encounter.
Out of the water, in the self-surrender of prayer, he is anointed by the Holy Spirit. Messiah means the Anointed one. Immediately the Holy Spirit drove him into the desert for forty days to be tempted by Satan.
Depending which Gospel and which translation, the language used is that he was led, driven, pushed, or dragged into the wilderness.
What is interesting in Luke’s Gospel is that in-between when the Spirit belly flopped onto 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 God’s image in creation!
The Baptism of our Lord before anything else-is surprising.
The imprint of God splashing down into the wet mud of our humanity. Our books and lunch boxes scattered and tossed.
A lasting impression.
Reclaiming the Garden, restoring the garden, the divine image sealing our humanity.
We think we know what we are getting into, but then we fall face first into the Holy Spirit.
We are anointed with the fresh image of humanity and confronted by the image of God.
We fall off our bikes.
We have to learn to ride all over again.
Our lives, they mark the earth with the image of God.
We make a lasting impression.
Today we attend to the baptism of our Lord by renewing our own baptism.
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