I published this to the parish last week:

The new rector has begun to move the furniture around! There’s a joke in Interim Ministry that one of the chief jobs of an Interim is to move the furniture around in the church. The idea is to break people from old customs and old habits. When I visited Grace Church before receiving my call, I noticed that there were two baptismal fonts. One, filled with water, was at the entrance to the nave. When I returned in August, that font had been placed somewhere else, out of sight.

I hope you have noticed that it is back at the entrance to the nave, filled with water. That is where it belongs, not just on Sundays when there are baptisms, but every day throughout the year. It should be filled with water that has been blessed by the priest. Some of you may be uncomfortable with that, thinking it is too “Catholic.” In fact, there are sound theological and spiritual reasons for its placement there. We, all of us, enter the church through the Sacrament of Baptism. The font is a reminder of that and of our baptismal vows. It should be a source of reassurance when we are troubled or doubting—an aide-memoire for the words in the sacrament, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.” The font reminds us of that. Dipping one’s fingers in the font, and marking one’s forehead with the sign of the cross is not some superstitious guard against vampire attacks (garlic works better), but another, concrete reminder of the waters of baptism in which we have been washed.

The person who can guess which piece of furniture will be moved next will win a prize.

Apparently some parishioners are trying to figure out what I’ll move next while others are concerned that I might move something important. It won’t be the altar rails and the reference to vampires might be a clue that I am not always to be taken literally.