Floating Into the Future
The closing (and titular) song on the new Fleet Foxes album Shore was inspired by a surfing accident. Robin Pecknold, the band’s lead-singer and lyricist, was out in bad conditions, and after the leash snapped off his board, he had to swim through pummeling waves for nearly thirty minutes. He wasn’t safe until he felt “sand on my feet.
But Pecknold complicates this picture at the end of the song. Here’s how he describes the final couple minutes: “The vocals break apart and then it's like you're getting back in the water and you're catching one sound and your voices are blending together and falling apart. You're subsumed by water, and then the seas calm, but you're floating into the future.”
At Parking Lot Praise this Sunday night we’re going to baptize nine (!!) of the children in our community. Baptism is a sacrament – one of the ceremonies Jesus gave the church that gives spiritual gifts. Sacraments involve an outward sign that conveys an inward, spiritual grace. The ceremony of baptism (or outward sign) is straightforward: we either immerse or pour water on those receiving it. What spiritual gift (or inward grace) is being conveyed?
Baptism represents the end of something. Like Israel making their way through the Red Sea, we pass through the waves and find ourselves settled in the Promised Land. Like the song “Shore,” those emerging from the water will always be safe because they now find themselves on the firm ground of the Kingdom of God.
But that is not the whole story. Baptism also represents the beginning of something - the start of a new loyalty and conformity to Christ. We thus close the ceremony by charging the newly baptized to confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share with us in the royal priesthood of all his people (BCP, 170). This kind of life is joyful and exhilarating, but it’s not tranquil. “To be baptized into Jesus,” writes Rowan Williams, “is not to be in what the world thinks of as a safe place. Jesus’ first disciples discovered that in the Gospels, and his disciples have gone on discovering it ever since.”
Be encouraged to make every effort to be there Sunday night. We will witness Christ marking these children as his own. We will pledge to do all in our power to support them. And they’ll need it as they ‘float into the future’ that God has prepared for them.
Nick