Read Romans 6:3–4
ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“And now why do you wait? Rise and be baptized and wash away your sins, calling on his name.” (Acts 22:16 NLT)
Symbols carry memory and meaning far beyond words. The Church has always leaned on them—sometimes hidden in plain sight, sometimes dismissed or distorted. Yet the most powerful symbols are those that subvert the world’s expectations and draw us back to the radical heart of the Gospel. In this series, we’ll look closer at the sacred signs that shock, unsettle, and ultimately call us deeper into Christ.
Part 6: The Seashell. Today seashells are everywhere. They decorate bathroom walls and beach houses. They hang from necklaces and sit in souvenir shops as reminders of vacation days and ocean breezes. Harmless, pretty, sentimental. But in the early church, the seashell was no trinket. It became a vessel of death and life — a sign not of leisure, but of dangerous allegiance.
Why? Because baptism itself was subversive. To step into the water was not just to make a personal choice, but to renounce everything Rome held sacred. Baptism meant dying to this world and rising in loyalty to Jesus — the one Rome had executed as a traitor. It was not merely symbolic. Families could disown you. Inheritance could be stripped away. Neighbors would brand you disloyal, suspicious, immoral. To be baptized was to be cut off from your household gods, from your family name and protection, and to join a subterranean movement with a terrible reputation.
To grasp the shock, imagine the reversal today: a Christian family’s child announcing they were now an atheist—or even a Satanist. The backlash wouldn’t just be private disappointment. It would ripple socially, touching reputation, relationships, even employment in some communities. That’s the kind of upheaval baptism triggered in the first century.
That reputation was fueled by rumors: that Christians held secret “love feasts” filled with sexual immorality, that they practiced cannibalism when they spoke of eating Christ’s body and drinking his blood, that they upended the household order by welcoming women and slaves as equals. To go under the water was to step into that reputation. You were no longer respectable. You were part of a sect Rome saw as both treasonous and depraved. Baptism was treason, and the seashell — often used to scoop and pour the water — became bound up in that act of rebellion.
The shell carried other echoes too. In Greco-Roman culture, shells were tied to fertility and birth. Venus was often pictured rising from the sea on a scallop shell. Christians didn’t directly borrow that imagery, but they reframed it. The shell whispered of a different kind of fertility — one that required spiritual death to this world and rebirth into a new humanity brought forth from the waters of baptism.
As time went on, the seashell became a pilgrim’s badge. Those who traveled to holy sites, like Santiago de Compostela, carried a scallop shell as a mark of their journey. It was practical — used to drink from streams — but also deeply symbolic. To wear the shell was to announce: I am not traveling for leisure, but for transformation. My life is a road of discipleship.
Put together, baptism and pilgrimage gave the seashell a dangerous beauty. It was never just decoration. It was a summons. The seashell told the world that you had died to Rome and risen into Christ. That your loyalty no longer lay with emperor, household, or inheritance, but with the crucified and risen Lord. That you were willing to walk the long road of discipleship, even when it meant being despised.
Today, we’ve tamed the shell into a souvenir. Pretty, harmless, something to match the curtains. But the shell still asks its ancient question: what does your baptism mean? Do you remember that in those waters you died — not just to sin, but to empire, to family idols, to all lesser loyalties?
And as the band Demon Hunter reminds us, the world is crowded with lesser gods — idols demanding our loyalty, false saviors promising security, belonging, or power. Baptism drowns them. It puts them to a watery grave. To rise from the water is to declare that none of those idols rule us anymore.
Because Rome still has its names today. Sometimes it waves the flag and baptizes nationalism as faith. Sometimes it hides in markets that tell us our worth is what we consume. Sometimes it creeps into families that demand loyalty to prejudice instead of love. Sometimes it sits in churches that bless power instead of bearing the cross.
To carry the shell is to reject those false lords. It is to live as if your life is a pilgrimage — marked not by comfort, but by costly transformation. To say with your whole being: my baptism was treason to the powers of this world, and my life is now hidden with Christ in God.
The seashell is not a trinket. It is Christ’s rebellious mission in your hand.
THOUGHT OF THE DAY
The seashell is not a souvenir. It is a summons.PRAYER
God of new birth and long journeys, remind us of our baptism. Remind us that we have died to old loyalties and risen to follow Christ. Give us courage to walk the pilgrim’s road, to bear reproach, to seek justice, to love mercy, and to trust that you go before us. May every step of our lives echo the vows we made in the water. Amen.
Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).
