What is in Kelvin's Head?

To be an Episcopalian is not to be respectable

21/08/2017

To be an Episcopalian means not to be respectable.

This morning’s gospel reading is one of the most interesting of the stories about Jesus that are ever told. Even if we’ve heard it before, it still has the capacity to surprise.

He said what?

And what did she say in response?

A mother begs for healing for her daughter and the one we now recognise as king of kings and lord of lords brushes her off with a remark that reads very much like racism.

“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs”

Nevertheless she persisted and her cheeky reply has an edge to it. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

In that moment, she seems to know his mission to save the whole world considerably better than he did.

And she changes him. He thinks again.

Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.

The issue of race has been very much in our minds this week as night after night the news here has been filled with the events in Charlottesville in the United States and the obscenely inadequate response of President Trump to the racism and violence which occurred there.

The far-right mob that was saw on television was shocking to behold though for me not that surprising. The same forces which stoked that hatred were turned on us here at St Mary’s using the internet just a few months ago and we met under police protection for our worship for a while.

As has been the case at a number of times in our history, we were known then as a congregation to be not entirely respectable.

We are so used to seeing Jesus as the epitome of everything that it stops us short to hear his response to the woman we meet today.

Is he on the side of equity and justice or isn’t he.

The trouble is, then as well as now, that our notions of God can make us think that all that we behold in Jesus outshines all that is in the human heart. We think of him as perfect, eternal goodness, notwithstanding our view that he became fully human.

The danger of thinking of him in quite that way is that it might dazzle us so much that we cannot see the truth that God is in everyone. Everyone is made in the image and likeness of God and even the presence of Jesus next to someone should not drown that out.

And it doesn’t.

She speaks the truth. God’s truth. She has a conscience. She uses her cheek and guile and yes, maybe her sheer cussed desperation to challenge something that she knows can’t be right. She is not quite respectable and she doesn’t care.

And the Lord of Lords changes his mind. His heart is melted and he brings and end to suffering.

Never again do we hear of him attempting to turn someone away because they were not of the right people. Or indeed not the right anything. He ended up being the saviour for everyone.

God is with her as she speaks. God is with her even as she speaks the truth. And God is with each and every one of us demanding no less.

Even if it is the most righteous, Godly, holy person who confronts us with what seems to be racism, this gospel suggests that God will be with us as we confront it anyway.

The racism in the USA this week is real and must be confronted with the narrative of justice. It must also not blind us to such things here either.

Just up the road from here in the last 10 days there was a violent homophobic attack in a street in which I regularly walk.

Speaking truth to such violence can be costly.

My friends in the American church are trying to find the words today to speak truth and God’s wisdom to their situation.

They will be emboldened on this day by the memory of one of the people they have put in their calendar whose feast day falls today – Jonathan Myrick Daniels.

He is not so widely known here but he would be a good suggestion to enhance our calendar of saints too. He was a young Episcopalian seminarian who in 1965 answered Martin Luther King’s call to clergy and seminarians to go to Selma to work for Civil Rights.

Having been unjustly imprisoned, on his release he and those with him were attacked and he lost his life shielding a young black woman Ruby Sales. He died. She lived. And she went on to be a human rights advocate in Washington DC. He was a hero of the faith who died saving others. She is a hero of the faith who lives still, saving others still.

In the commemoration of his martyrdom today, I hope that our beloved Episcopalians in the USA find strength and courage and wisdom for this moment.

And so should we too.

For as I said, it is not just in the USA that such forces must be confronted.

I spent some time this week working on leaflets for the Pride march which some of us went on yesterday. As I was doing so, I went online to ask others for some ideas.

I was sent a piece of writing about the Scottish Episcopal Church written about 15 years ago which I’m going to end with.

It is from Robin Angus, one of the living saints of the diocese of Edinburgh.

He said this.

To be an Episcopalian means to be on the side of the poor and persecuted everywhere. For nearly a century our worship was outlawed, our churches were burned or raided by soldiers, our priests were banished, imprisoned or killed, our people harried and fined, informed against and ostracised. For this reason, it is the glory and honour of every Episcopalian also to be a Jew, a Palestinian, gay, black, untouchable, and every other kind of person who ever has, is, or will be persecuted or disadvantaged. This is why, too, Episcopalians glory in racial diversity, a tradition which goes far back into our history. Bishop Forbes of Ross proudly recorded how he had confirmed two young [black people] at one of his crowded Highland Confirmations in 1770, at a time when even to attend such Confirmations, let alone minister at them, was still a criminal act.

To be an Episcopalian means not to be respectable.

Remember that this day as you worship in this beautiful house of God in the oh so respectable West End of this glorious city.

To be here is to be part of something decidedly not respectable.

And as we give honour and love to God here in this place for an hour or two a week, it is our joy, our destiny and our delight to give love and honour to God as God appears to us in the faces of the souls we meet for every other hour.

That is who we are.

And if you are here this day or find yourself in any of our churches, then that is the kind of faith to which we call you.

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

Amen.

pisky, respectable, Scottish Episcopal Church, what is the Scottish Episcopal Church

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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