New Sheets

Have you ever bought new sheets that turned out to be the wrong size? You take them home from the store, neat and flat in their little envelope and then somewhat magnificently furl them over your freshly stripped bed, full of anticipation. Sometimes you can just see they are wrong, sometimes you get to the other side and realize that no amount of tugging will ever make this fit.

Then you are face with the impossible task of stuffing the thing back in the bag so you can return it. I wonder, actually, whether we all have overflowing linen closets because of un-returned wrong-sized sheets. If you have done this you understand - new sheets have a spring load mechanism which means no matter how much you smooth and primp and fold and cossett they are not, NOT, going back into that bag as flat as when you bought them.

The Church fathers said you could only be baptised once - that is because once that work of naming and saving and honoring and putting aside is done my the Holy Spirit - it cannot be stuffed back in the bag (there's the segway!). You are never the same again. That public proclamation of who we are and who we are becoming in Christ means a permanent chage had occured in us - one which we might try to ignore, we might even try sometimes to shove in a closet, but one which is bigger than that.

I was lucky, I was twelve when I was baptized and although it was a Monday evening, cold church, probably not strictly legal because noone told the priest my grandmother was a baptist sort of baptism, I remember it - and don't mention the lagality to God because I popped out of my bag and despite a few retreats to hidey holes now and then have been changed ever since.

Lent challenged us to think who we might be but only in the context of who we we - we are the baptized, the Church, we are changed and challenged by water and the Spirit - and that is always a good fit.