Come All You Green: a baptismal prayer
This is an opening prayer or collect for a baptism out of doors in a natural body of water.
It is intended primarily as a supplemental prayer for communities that typically baptize indoors and have set order of service. The prayer orients worshippers to place and relationship to land and offers a liturgical answer to the question, “why are we doing this outside?” As much as is possible this prayer should include the community interacting with the water in its place.
Come, all you green ones who turn sunlight into food
Come, all you creeping and wriggling ones
Come, all you who fly
You who swim
You who graze and browse
You who hunt and you who hide
And you who return all that lives to earth
Ancient ones and ephemeral
Bear witness to these promises
Come you who seek to live a different way
Come in/to this water
(Name the body of water, its key species and its place in the local watershed
Eg Come into Stoney Creek where salmon spawn in the waters that run off Burnaby Mountain, tributary to the Brunette and to the Fraser that flows into the Salish Sea)
Remember that this land and these waters have cared for and been cared for by (name the Indigenous people of the region) from time immemorial.
Remember that water, teeming, living, imperiled water, covers most of this planet
but a tiny precious portion is fresh, and clean, and drinkable
Remember that John baptized Jesus into the Jordan
into his history, his liberation story,
into living water
Remember that The Spirit came as a bird
and drove Jesus into wilderness
where his companions were angels and wild animals
Feel how the water embraces each of our good and hurting bodies
How it holds us up and supports us
Notice how water moves to the lowest place
How it persistently changes what seems immovable
Remember too that water is fierce and powerful
And that each of us, and all of us together have a place in the cycling of waters.
Come, remember and bear witness. Amen.