What is in Kelvin's Head?

Unlikely alliances – sermon preached as farewell to Fr Chucks

15/02/2015

Here’s what I had to say to my Nigerian colleague Chucks who is moving away from St Mary’s to go and work down south. God be with you, Chucks – we are looking to you to sort out the Church of England.

Sermon preached by Kelvin Holdsworth on 15 February 2015 from Kelvin Holdsworth on Vimeo.

There was a lot of coming and going in the first reading that we had this morning. The story of Naaman that we read today is one of the most dramatic in the bible.

Come with me, the author of that story seems to say, come with me to a land far away. Come with me to the land of the Arameans. Come with me to the banks of the Abana and the Pharpar – the rivers of Damascus. Come with me to a place outside your comfort zone.

And of course, the naming of those rivers as the rivers of Damascus tells us that the story is placed in a part of the world that that we think about every day and pray about all the time. We are being taken for this tale to Syria.

And this story is a vignette of war. There’s a women taken in slavery, there’s conquest and there’s Middle Eastern strife and it all seems horribly familiar to us today.

The young woman taken as a captive from the land of Israel is one of the characters of the bible who always moves me, whenever we read this tale.

She, like Naaman’s wife has not been given the dignity of a name. Only the men are named in the narrative. She has been scooped up and carried off as a souvenir, a trophy of war. And in her day, who missed her? Who from her own town even knew that she had gone missing.

She was probably not that economically important at home and now here in this foreign land she is a slave in the house of her captor.

There was no social media in her day. There was no twitter campaign. There was no hashtag saying #bringbackourgirl. She was just missing – probably presumed to be dead.

And the fact that she was a slave seems almost incidental to the writer of the tale. For slavery would have been perfectly acceptable both to this story’s writer and its first readers.

We now have the firm conviction that slavery is wrong. Though all we continue to learn about people trafficking means that we must never as Christians feel smug that it was a Chrisitan, William Wilberforce which ended the slave trade. For we know now that though Wilberforce and his associates succeeded in outlawing the slave trade it went underground and continues in one rank form or another to this day. Wilberforce should continue to call on us all to bring a real end slavery by helping to end the trafficking of people from one part of the world to another.

But slave-girl she is.

And even though she has probably been forgotten back at home, she hasn’t forgotten the place she came from and so comes out with this extraordinary recommendation that her captor should venture to Samaria to speak to a holy man – a conversation which eventually leads to his healing.

I’d like to think that she gets some reward for this but it is he who is rewarded in the end, only emphasising that good things seem only to happen to men in the story.

Naaman’s indignance at having to go and wash in the River Jordan is rather magnificent. Why the Jordan and not the Abana and the Pharpar? Well, why not indeed? Yet the fact that he ends up being healed anyway after slagging off the Jordan as much as he was able is testament to God’s ability to love anyone. Indeed, the fact that the Lord blesses even the most pompous, is something that I find, well, just a little bit reassuring.

There’s grace even for the most unlovely in God’s world. And that’s news that is good and wonderful and holy.

At its heart, this story reminds us too that stories of great journeys are built into the stories of the bible.

We should perhaps pause more often and think about them in those terms.

The idea of migration being a positive thing is under such challenge politically in this country. Xenophobia, fear of foreigners, seems to be the stock-in-trade of the most disreputable politicians and some, though thanks be to God, not all, elements of the media.

And where xenophobia flourishes, the unwelcome consequences of racism, anti-Semitism, islamophobia, violence as we’ve seen overnight in Copenhagen and all of that stuff follows on all too easily.

It is worth saying publicly that without migration, this land and this city and especially this congregation would be very much impoverished.

On a Sunday morning here in St Mary’s we are a gathering place for the world and I hope that we always will be. Our key word here is welcome. And we try as hard as we can to mean it as fully as we are able.

But this Sunday we are not saying welcome – we are saying goodbye to someone. We are saying goodbye to Chucks. And not just Chucks but the whole family – Adanna and Christian and Mary-Isobel too.

It is a time for parting. And like all times of parting it is a time for thanksgiving.

Chucks, I don’t know exactly why you chose to come to this city.

For some years ago now you came across the world. You left the land of the Niger River and the Cross River. You decided that for at least a portion of your life you wouldn’t stay by the banks of the Otamiri River but would seek out a new land.

And, wonder of wonders, you came to Glasgow.

You came to this city, an amazing city of not one but two rivers – the River Kelvin and …. that other one.

And you’ve made a home and a life here. And we are glad you did.

The sorrow of parting is testament as it always is, to love and affection and respect.

And it is those things we feel for you today as we say goodbye. For thanksgiving is the antidote to sorrow.

The story of the slave girl and Naaman is the story of a rather unlikely alliance.

So is the story of you and I.

I never thought that I would be the person in the Scottish Episcopal Church who would end up with a Nigerian curate. But I’m glad I did.

And at a time when the Anglican world seemed full of poison and bitterness, I’ve never been more proud of St Mary’s than of the period of time when I stood at that altar regularly with a Nigerian priest on one side of me and an American on another and we celebrated God’s love together.

Let no-one ever think St Mary’s is a place of extreme theology. This is the heart of the Anglican Communion. This is a place of bridge-building and I’m proud of that.

And I’m proud of you Chucks too.

I realised when I was thinking about your being here that I understood why you might be moving on.

We’ve been working our way through the sacraments haven’t we.

I’ve been beside you through your ordination to the priesthood, your wedding to Adanna, the baptism of your children and stood next to you at countless services of communion.

There’s aren’t many sacraments left for me to share with you.

I think I’ve only got the last rites to offer, so I quite understand why you need to get out whilst the going is good.

But in all that you’ve done, you’ve been a person of God in this place. And we are pleased to have got to know you and proud to have had you here.

You’ve had all kinds of achievements here. But Paul told us in the letter to the Corinthians this morning to be wary of getting excited about perishable garlands.

You leave here covered in imperishable garlands – our love for you, our joy in knowing you and our pride in having shared your life with you here in Glasgow.

You’ve shared in sharing the good news that we share every week at St Mary’s – that God is good and God’s love is wonderful.

And there is no greater garland.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Church of Nigeria, Fr Chucks Iwuagwu, Scottish Episcopal Church

8 responses to “Assisted Dying – Why I’ve changed my mind”

BobS

16/03/2026

You lucidly illustrated an example of a family seeking to pressurise someone to influence the process of death. But what was possibly missing was the voice of the person nearing death. Where was their perspective, their reasoning? Assisted Dying starts and driven by the person dying. They are the ones who, with mental capacity, take those steps, if necessary, to expedite death at that final stage. They, together with medical experts, make those decisions.
The examples cited refer to a family desperate for a skiing holiday and your concern of funeral directors making money through direct cremations.
I fully agree with your desire for a better palliative care system. Having witnessed their work it is amazing. But that is another argument. To conflate the two dismisses the voice of those seeking assisted dying.
Your concern over assisted dying seems to be interwoven by a call for improved palliative care and a demise in direct cremations.

Reply
1. Rev Owain Jones
  
  16/03/2026
  
  Respectfully, Bob S, I think you’re overlooking the one thing that struck me very forcefully from this incident. I’ve always felt profoundly uneasy at the likelihood – I’d say ‘moral certainty’ – that the voice of the dying will in some cases be influenced, even swayed, by the dying person’s assumptions, inferences or intuitions (correct or not) about the needs of those closest to them, and even their desires. These desires might not be articulated, or even correctly guessed – but they might, and as soon as the dying person is subject to them, they are, by definition, influenced in their decision. At that point, Assisted Dying can no longer be said “to start and driven by the person dying.” I’ve been there for a long time – but what I suddenly realized reading Kelvin Holdsworth’s post, was that there’s a much darker issue here, and it relates to a fundamental principle to which I’ve always adhered. Please bear with me, and entertain for a moment an analogy which you might consider to be extreme, and which I’d be appalled to hear deployed by the religiously fanatical opponents of Assisted Dying. It’s this. I have always been opposed to the death penalty for a number of reasons, but very prominent among them is that it takes to an extreme the testing of a fundamental principle of justice (which I know I’m modifyng here to make the analogy a better fit, and of course, you’re free to take issue with that): “It is better that a hundred guilty men go free than that one innocent person be punished unjustly.” I’m aware that there’s a very significant separation between that and this, but I don’t believe it amounts to ‘clear blue water’. Let me try and articulate my conviction in a reasonable way, for you to consider, even if you reject it. I think that there’s a huge danger inscribed in legislation which will, of a moral certainty, permit circumstances in which unwilling dying individuals give assent under pressure to the active premature termination of their lives. This holds true even if a hundred times as many individuals assent freely, and even actively seek, such termination. One of the things that always made me uneasy about the Vulcans was the assertion that “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”. There seems to me to be no way in any legislation to protect the needs and rights of the few in this issue. At the very least, I think that needs to be acknowledged openly by proponents of Assisted Dying. If we’re about to be taken across a Rubicon, I believe that everyone, on both sides of the decision, need to acknowledge that. (Incidentally, I completely agree with Kevin Holdsworth’s horror (I hope I’m expressing that fairly) at ‘Direct Cremations’ and the way they’re advertised. They seem to me to be open profiteering from the death-phobic culture in which we’re immersed. I fear that the impulses behind Assisted Dying as currently advocated may be a good-faith manifestation of the inability of society to look at the full actuality of human mortality and the relationship between life and death. I may be deluding myself, but I think I’d say that even if I were an atheist.
  
  Reply
  1. BobS
    
    17/03/2026
    
    Rev Owain, thank you for your response. I fear your analogy was stretched to fit your argument, and, apologies if my education lacked in this quarter, where the reference to Vulcans was applicable.
    If we are concerned that a very small percentage will be wronged, then many practices today should be stopped. The statistical error you describe will always be possible, albeit minimised as much as possible.
    The proposed law tries to cater for such concerns. What appears to be the argument against assisted dying is that it is not error proof.
    If a person who is deemed to have mental capacity with less than six months to live, with suitable medical provision, seeks to alleviate their suffering, and is capable of themselves administering the medication to ultimately ease that pain, then their voice has been heard.
    I also would hope that palliative care continues to improve but that is a separate argument, as are direct cremations, and now the cost of the funeral to families. These arguments are all used to conflate the underlying issue of assisted dying.
    
    Reply
2. Val Dobson
  
  16/03/2026
  
  You are wrong to connect funeral companies’ promotion of Direct Cremation with the push for assisted dying. Nowadays, many families simply cannot afford a “proper” funeral / cremation, and funeral grants come nowhere to covering the the costs. The funeral companies are simply responding to customer needs.
  
  Reply
  1. Kelvin
    
    16/03/2026
    
    I’m happy to speak out about funerals being too expensive. However, it is manifestly not the case taht funeral companies are simply responding to customer needs. If they did they would promote these as being about price. They don’t – they promote them as being about not causing a fuss, which is the point I’m making here.
    
    Reply
Nigel Kenny

16/03/2026

Thank you for your wise and persuasive words – may they influence MSPs to vote against the Bill.

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Chriatine McIntosh

16/03/2026

Thanks for this, Kelvin – I’ve been thinking more about this as contemporaries begin to vanish from this life.

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Helen Leslie

16/03/2026

Thank you Kelvin. I am someone who has spent the majority of my working life caring for people at the end of their lives. You said exactly what I would want to.

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