What is in Kelvin's Head?

Easter Sermon

07/04/2018

A number of years ago, I was put in charge of the Information and Communications Board of the Scottish Episcopal Church.

This meant that I was in charge of trying to formulate the church’s internal news and helping to work out our message to the outside world.

I think it was fair to say that there were one or two people who thought this might be just a little risky.

In the end, I did what I could and for much of the time I set about commissioning things from other people and getting them published and with the help of many others worked very hard.

Unfortunately though I had a weakness. I could cope with being serious and good for 364 days of the year (well, more or less) but there was always April Fool’s Day.

There were a number of articles over those years which I wrote myself but which I probably shouldn’t have published in the name of the church.

Amongst them was the one in which I announced that a committee that had never existed had come up with a new corporate image for the church. I changed the slogan from “The Scottish Episcopal Church Welcomes You” to “The Scottish Episcopal Church Welcomes You on Sunday”. Silly though that was, it didn’t seem to bother most people. Rather more startling was that I published a new version of sign that hangs outside all of our churches and in the middle, instead of a bishop’s mitre, I put a kneeling Buddha with the stated hope that this would improve interfaith dialogue.

I think that it would be fair to say that this venture did not particularly improve anyone’s dialogue.

I still treasure one response that I had to this in which someone never mentioned the slogan or the picture but remonstrated with me at great length for choosing colours that were not good for those who are colour blind.

Similarly the next year when I published an article advertising in the name of the College of Bishops that henceforth we would be using a new algorithm for calculating Easter and that Easter would align with Easter in the Church of England only every other year and on the alternate years we would keep an entirely different date in company with the American Episcopal Church.

Again, I got some correspondence about this. The only advice that I have for anyone wanting to go into church communications is never to publish something thunderously stupid in the name of the College of Bishops. The danger is, people believe every word.

All this seems a little redundant in these days of Fake News. Every day is All Fools Day and everyone has trouble working out what is true and what is false.

Carefully constructed April Fool’s day absurdities seem rather inadequate in the face of international politics in which the most outrageous candidate anyone could imagine became the leader of the free world and suggests arming teachers as a way of keeping gun crime out of schools; and domestic politics which seems to be carried out as though food banks are a normal part of the welfare system and not a daily crisis of people crying out for bread.

These things are not jokes. But they make fools out of us all.

As it happens, it is surprisingly rare for Easter Day and April Fool’s Day to fall on the same day. It is sixty years since it last happened and it won’t happen again for another 21.

But must not that first Easter Day have seemed like a day of utter foolishness?

The first witnesses to the resurrection were women, whose testimony was not taken seriously. Not simply because they were women, I suspect so much as because of how everyone had seen him die.

Here in St Mary’s we go through the story of the crucifixion four times. Firstly in the readings on Palm Sunday and then three times on Good Friday.

People are shocked when I say it but the honest truth is that by the time I get to the end of the fourth time through, I really want him to stay dead.

After all, Jesus is far easier to deal with if we think he is safely buried away not making any more demands on us.

But the news of Easter Day is that what seemed like the greatest foolishness is the greatest wisdom. What seemed like the greatest defeat is in fact the greatest victory. What seemed like the ravings of mad fools is in fact the great truth that will help us to defeat the foolishness of homelessness, war, violence and social exclusions of every kind.

For no matter what you do to people, hope springs up.

No matter how bad things are, the news that love conquers death is still true.

No matter what you say to people, someone will always sing Alleluia. And alleluia will always win in the end.

Over the course of Lent, the cathedral clergy have been giving Lent addresses on a Sunday evening in which each person has been asked to address the question – why am I a Christian?

Let me tell you why I am a Christian.

I am a Christian because of Easter Day.

I am a Christian because we are an Easter people and our song is alleluia.

I am a Christian because the utter foolishness of the first news of Easter turns out to be the truth.

The women were the first to spread the news and it was greeted as foolishness but that is now the faith to which I cling. For I can make no better sense of the world.

The first person to wish me a happy Easter this year was a Muslim writing on behalf of his community not just to me but to all of us gathered here to wish us a happy and joyful day.

And in a land riven with Islamophobia, that makes my heart sing.

Easter is about those moments when your heart sings. When you know for sure that love will make a fool of prejudice, will make a fool of sorrow and will make a fool of death.

Jesus Christ is risen.

For if Christ were not risen from the grave we would not be gathered here in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

AMEN

19 responses to “Preferring me dead”

chris

27/11/2010

Well said, Rosemary. As for this business of everyone’s having to remain quiet and reasonable while unspeakable things are spoken … I’m sorry. I have this whined at me more times than I can count, so that my own calm goes out the window and I want to rage, rage, and the advocates of calm sit in their dispassionate heaven and think all will be well if people just shut up for another generation. It’s an affront to any society that this discrimination is still allowed to be seen as anything other than monstrous, and we need to raise a storm of protest that will make this obvious to even the most chilly political mind.

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Rosemary Hannah

27/11/2010

For the comfort of Kelvin, however, let me add this. The people who promote discrimination against queer folk very frequently neither want them dead not yet unborn. What they actually (though mistakenly) believe, is that gay people would be just the same if they were straight. That the person would be just the same, because who you desire is some kind of bolt-on accessory which you can pick from the shelf and have or not have, like adding an MP3 player to your car, or just having a tape deck. Now I know that is a terrible misunderstanding, but it is not actually quite as terrible as wishing that the essence of people was somehow different.

FWIW I do remember teaching a session on this to students, having asked them to imagine what people 100 years from now would think of our attitudes, and having one student tell me that in 50 years all gay people would be ‘cured’, and my suppressing my fury then and trying to explain why I did not want my friends and relatives ‘cured’ – and all the emotion catching up with me in my room at midnight, resulting in tears and all-but lying on the floor banging my heels and screaming. I suppose it was less actionable than banging a student’s head off the wall…..

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Scottish Roundup

28/11/2010

[…] debates at the recent meeting of the Church of England’s General Synod under the stark title, Preferring me dead. More jauntily, the damsel of the dancing scones writes about blogging’s transformative […]

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Elizabeth

02/12/2010

I wanted to post on this when I first read it (via Google Reader) but for some reason the internets wouldn’t let me on the site.

It’s hard to read this difficult words, but I think it’s very important that they’re said. I have only the smallest glimmerings of imagining how difficult it must be to be be a gay or lesbian priest now and fear that all too often I am prone to ignore the wider actions of the Anglican Communion because I’ve found it too painful and aggravating. But ignoring it is my privilege and no good in the long run.
And on this issue, as on others, I find it unhelpful to advocate a quite and slow approach. Movement is not always uni-directional and I agree with Kelvin that we seem to be moving backwards, at least, as far as the SEC College of Bishops and the Anglican Communion leadership is concerned. The softly, softly approach is not justice and is not by any stretch of the imagination the only means by which justice is reached. On this issue, as on others, the question is, if not now, when?

And I really, really dislike gay and lesbian Anglicans being sacrificed on the altar of loyalty to the ++Rowan. This is what happened in The Episcopal Church across the pond in 2006 and thank God General Convention saw fit to reverse the decision in 2009. Loyalty tests of such kind are horrendous!

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Rosemary Hannah

03/12/2010

And bluntly the only loyalty worth giving is loyalty to Truth and God.

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Revd Ross Kennedy

04/12/2010

I didn’t listen or read about anything voted on at the recent C of E Synod so can’t comment.

But frrankly I’m bored with all the obsession with sexuality – I just wish we could obey our Lord’s command to love one another.
But let me say this to lFr Kelvin, I for one certainly don’t want you dead. Life would be so dull without you – I would miss your blog and your excellent sermons ( which I must confess I sometimes plagiarise – bless me Father for I have sinned….) Don’t agree with much of what you say on sexual ethics but accept without question your devotion to our Lord and your ministry at St Mary’s.

Prejudice and intolerance certainly smother any real opportunity for real debate. However, I have experienced this as much from those on the theological left (including correspondents to this site) as well as those on the theological right.

The fact is that we are just as likely to find prejudice among liberals as well as conservatives in the church. I remember Bishop Richard Holloway discussing the ordination of women on the Television in the 1990s and making the insulting claim that most of the men opposed were probably homosexuals.

I’ve also heard many liberals express a definite wish for all those who dare to oppose the consecration of women to the Episcopacy to get out of the Church… or maybe even to drop dead.

The fact is that lots of people experience prejudice for a variety of reasons – a friend of mine who trained as a male nurse in the 1960s experienced a great deal of prejudice from his female superiors and as a result an absolute block to any promotion.

Others are discriminated against because they are too short or too tall or too fat , or not intelligent enough or didn’t attend the right university and even for daring to choose to be a ‘closet gay’!

There is a whole suffering world out there to which we are called upon to bring hope and help in the name of Jesus. So let’s stop focusing on our own personal problems and obsessions and get on with preaching the Good News.

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ryan

04/12/2010

>>>The fact is that we are just as likely to find prejudice among liberals as well as conservatives in the church. I remember Bishop Richard Holloway discussing the ordination of women on the Television in the 1990s and making the insulting claim that most of the men opposed were probably homosexuals.

If +Richard was talking about Forward in Lace types then he might have had a point ;-).

More seriously: can you cite any ‘liberal’ church that is suggesting denying the sacraments to conservatives? Or pining for an age when violence and discrimination against evangelicals was accepted as a good? These days, people have less tolerance for ‘I’m not racist,but…’ or ‘I don’t *hate* Jews, but….” or “the sexes are equal, but” rhetoric but anti-gay discrimination on religious grounds often goes unchallenged. So while it is of course important to challenge all forms of prejudice, there are no major ‘Christian’ Institute type lobbies endeavouring to defend and legitimise persecution of the fat, tall,or short.

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David McCarthy

06/12/2010

Oh, I know that in the secret halls of the likes of Facebook, there are many who feel free to exhibit prejudice against churches and individuals who don’t fit the bill. That reveals what is truly in the hearts of people. I’d hope that no-one would permit such diatribe and speak out against it, just as I have done to those on ‘the right’ who speak and behave badly.

As for you, dear Kelvin, there are many who disagree with you, but in our wee bit of the Church, I seriously doubt if there is anyone who would “prefer you dead”. You are a gifted minister – we’d miss you!

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