The River Jordan, Leonardo da Vinci, and Black Lives Matter

This is the marble baptismal font in a humble little church in an obscure Tuscan village in Italy by the name of Vinci. This the font where Leonardo da Vinci was baptized.

When Jesus came to the River Jordan, something leapt inside John the Baptizer, as something had leapt inside Elizabeth, John's mother, when Mary the mother of Jesus came to visit her.

Something leapt inside me when I found the place where Leonardo was baptized and I remembered my own baptism. I think that something is called Holy Spirit.

Richelle Thompson puts it this way in Waiting and Watching:

The grit of the sand, the sweat on the brow, the crispness of the water all flow from the Jordan banks through space and time to the luster of a marble font and the lace on an heirloom baptismal gown. A cosmic pull-thread connects the baptism of Jesus, the beginning of his public ministry, with ours, as we make the outward sign of full initiation into the Body of Christ, the Church.

Did you know that it was illegal to baptize slaves? Can you wonder? That pull-thread that runs from the baptism of Jesus through the millenia, through Leonardo, through each of us, would have exposed the foolishness of the notion that one baptized Christian could own and abuse the body of a sister or brother, as today it exposes the rejection of the Spirit that leads one person to murder another for the crime of selling cigarettes, or allegedly passing a bad check, or sleeping in her own bed.

Every time somebody is baptized in our church, each of us takes hold of that thread again that binds us to the life and the ministry of Jesus. The way we put it in the Episcopal Church is this:

Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every individual?

We answer, I will with God's help.

With that promise, the pull-thread is woven into a web. It's a big promise, and it means a lot of things. Surely it means that Black Lives Matter.

And those words cause something inside me to leap again.

What do you think? When Jesus stands in front of you, will you be holding that cosmic thread that runs from Jesus' baptism to our own? Will I be holding that thread? Will we be woven into the Jesus web in which black lives matter?