Is the Church a Ship or a Raft?
Sermon — May 10, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings
Nautical enthusiasts and dictionary editors alike have argued for centuries about the distinction between a ship and a boat. Everyone agrees that ships are big and boats are small; as Merriam-Webster puts it, “You can put a boat onto a ship, but you can’t put a ship onto a boat.”[1] What’s less clear is the exact nature of the distinction. Is a ship just a boat of a certain size? Or is a ship what you get when your boat comes with more boats? (Lifeboats, for example.) Who’s to say? Now, don’t worry. That’s not what this sermon is actually about. This sermon is about something entirely different: this sermon is about the difference between a ship and a raft. (Or at least that’s where we’re going to start.)
When I say a “raft,” I mean Tom Hanks tying together logs in Cast Away. And that makes the difference very clear. A ship is a tool for navigation; a raft is an act of desperation. A ship is designed by a naval architect before being carefully built; a raft is lashed together with whatever you have at hand. A ship is what you build to travel from one place to another; a raft is what you build when you mostly just need to float.
I’m not a sailor myself, clearly, but Christianity is full of nautical imagery. The first disciples called by Jesus were fishermen, after all, simple sailors who became the captains of the Church. The apostle Paul traveled all around the Mediterranean Sea, facing storms and shipwreck on the way. Right up there, you can see a stained-glass image of a ship’s anchor, an ancient symbol of steadfast hope. Indeed, the very space we’re in is called, in church architecture, the “nave”; “nave” as in “navy” or “navigation”; it comes from the Latin navis, for “ship.”And if you look up at the ceiling, you can see why: the ceiling of our place of worship is like the hull of a ship, turned upside down.
Is the Church a ship or a boat? Who cares. But is the Church a ship or a raft? To me, that’s an interesting question. Is the Church for sailing, or is the Church for floating? Is the point of all of this to chart a course somewhere far over the horizon? Or are we holding on for dear life, grabbing onto something for help when we’re afraid we might go under? To be honest, it’s probably a little bit of both.
That’s why I think it’s so interesting that the First Letter of Peter introduces the Ark as an image for Baptism. When Noah and his family boarded the Ark, with all the animals, two by two, the Ark had been carefully designed and built. God gave Noah all the details, from its length in cubits to the number of decks it should have. But it was clearly an emergency flotation device. So what do you think? Was it a ship or a raft? Was it for traveling over the water, or just for floating above it? When I learned the story of the Flood in Sunday School, I always assumed the Ark was there to save Noah from the water. But Peter says an interesting thing: he says that Noah and his family were saved through the water, as if the point of the Ark as not simply to float above the dangerous waters but to travel from an old world of evil to a new world of peace. So was the Ark as ship or a raft? It may have been a little bit of both.
And it wouldn’t really matter whether Noah’s Ark was a “ship” or a “raft,” except that Peter suggests that baptism is a lot like the Flood. Just as “in the days of Noah,” he writes, “a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water,” in the same way “baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you.” (1 Pet. 3:20-21) And if the Ark is an image of the Church, and the waters of the Flood an image for the waters of baptism, then maybe this ship-versus-raft distinction can help us see two different aspects of the sacrament of Baptism that we celebrate today.
If we think of the water as a Flood that rises and falls, and the Ark as a raft, then we might focus more on the one-time, once-and-for-all aspects of baptism: depending on your own beliefs, that might be a cleansing from original sin, or a welcome into the family of God, or a nice day to get together and celebrate a new baby. But if we think of the Ark as a ship—then the waters of baptism become the sea through which we travel our whole lives.
Peter suggests that the point of baptism is “not as a removal of dirt from the body”—not a one-time cleansing act—but an “appeal to God for a good conscience.” (1 Peter 3:21) When he says a “good conscience,” he doesn’t quite mean a “clean conscience,” an absence of guilt. He means something more like a consciousness of God, an awareness of God’s goodness and God’s love. And that consciousness of God is not a one-time act. It’s not a raft that keeps us afloat. It’s the purpose of a whole life-long spiritual journey.
This is what we’re doing every time we turn to God in prayer: when we cry out for comfort in a time of need, or for courage to do what’s right; for patience to endure the hard parts of our lives, or in gratitude for the good ones. We don’t attain “a good conscience” in a single act. We grow into it over a long time. And we turn to it, again and again, in rituals spread over the course of our whole lives: from the sacrament of baptism we celebrate today for an infant, to the rite of confirmation that four of our teenagers received from the Bishop yesterday, to the Renewal of Baptismal Vows that all of us repeat whenever one of us is being baptized. We need to be reminded, again and again, that our lives are works in progress—but that they are pointed toward a real destination, a goal at the journey’s end.
And we also need the reminder that we aren’t left alone. That, as Jesus says, although he has left the world behind, he will not leave us as orphans; he will not leave us “comfortless,” as the King James Version says, but will send us another “Comforter,” another “Advocate,” the “Spirit of Truth” to be our friend and guide. (John 14:16-18) If the Church is the ship in which we voyage, and the waters of baptism are the sea through which we sail, then Holy Spirit is the wind in our sails; and I don’t say that just to press the metaphor much too far or repeat an old cliché. I say it because that’s what “Spirit” means—the “wind” or “breath” of God, blowing through the world.
And that’s the best news of all. Is the Church a ship or a raft? Are our spiritual lives about vision or desperation? It doesn’t matter in the end. Because whether we feel like we’re on a ship through life, or on a raft—whether we know where we’re going and we’ve charted out the course, or whether we feel like we’re barely staying afloat—we aren’t left alone, subject to whatever random gusts of wind may blow. We are surrounded by the love of God, who sends the steady wind of the Holy Spirit to carry us across the waves: sometimes confident, sometimes seasick, but drawn continuously closer toward the other shore.
