What is in Kelvin's Head?

Bathsheba, our Sister

27/07/2015

Here’s the sermon I preached on Bathsheba on 27 June 2015

Sermon preached by Kelvin Holdsworth on 26 July 2015

It so happens that later today I’m going to be on the television in a short slot on Songs of Praise. Blink and you’ll miss me – it won’t be long.

From time to time I get the chance to be on both television and radio. And I’ve learned to treat them very differently and prepare what I have to say to suit the medium.

Generally speaking, I really like doing radio work because, as people often say, the pictures on the radio are far better.

Its true. Radio is about painting pictures and television is about telling stories.

And I think Radio and Preaching are very similar, which is why my preaching is very visual. My aim is to get you to see things in your head as I’m speaking.

And so I find today my own gaze turning over to my left as I look amongst the high windows of the church for one of the protagonists of the Old Testament story which is what I’m going to preach about today.

For every day, he catches my gaze when I’m over there saying morning prayer and you can’t see him from where you are, so this is going to be like radio with me describing him.

As I recite the psalms at Morning Prayer, as often as not, I’m looking up at him. David in Stained Glass. High and mighty. Bearded and wise. Colourful. Powerful. Present.

He’s a familiarly figure to me. As I recite God’s praises using words that he himself wrote, I have him directly in view, God bless him.

King. Poet. Warrior. And downright naughty but do utterly beloved rogue.

He’s a complex character. Though peaceful in stained glass. He is portrayed playing the lyre he made music with as a younger man in order to calm King Saul’s insane rages.

He concentrates on his lyre. Making music. As I look at him I wonder who he makes music for now. For Saul? For Michal his first love. For Jonathan his great love? For Bathsheba his great…. Well, what was it? Was it love? I’m not so sure.

And as he makes his music up there in stained glass I fancy him hearing us reciting his psalms down below.

As I gaze up and him, I imagine him gazing down at me.

But as I look in his direction, I see him dropping the lyre and transported. Transported out of the stained glass and standing on a balcony on a rooftop.

And he’s not looking down at me, he’s looking down at someone else entirely. Yes. Bathsheba on her own roof taking what she suspects is a private bath.

And we’ll leave him there for a moment. Gazing. Desiring. Lusting after another man’s wife.

And we’ll think about her.

It suddenly occurred to me on Friday that though I’m relatively used to seeing David depicted in stained glass, it is at least interesting that we don’t have a corresponding picture of her. She’s a significant figure in her own right in the events that were to follow today’s story.

Is it, I wondered, that we are prepared to forgive him in our collective memory and put him in stained glass simply because he is a man. She, the floosy, not so much.

I’m not sure.

Anyway, on Friday morning, I decided to take a look around the known world for Bathsheba and see if I could work out what she looked like. Now, google has an image search these days. You put in a search term and instead of giving you links, it gives you pictures.

So, into the search box, I typed Bathsheba’s name and pressed the button and immediately was taken aback by what I saw.

Immediately, I encountered the flesh.

Picture after picture of a rather voluptuous figure.

Breasts bare. Rising from baths, fountains, bathing ponds.

Curiously, she seemed rather pale and western looking. I fancy that her peely wally skin wouldn’t survive terribly long on the beach at Saltcoats, never mind on the rooftops of Jerusalem.

But the overwhelming impression was the sheer amount of bare flesh.

And somewhere in most of the pictures, King David casting a sly eye over what was on offer to him in the heat of the day.

My mind boggled at the ogling. It was as though google had suddenly become booble.

And I realised in an instant that we are very used to reading the story of Bathsheba from King David’s point of view.

We are used to reading the story of Bathsheba from King Patriarchy’s point of view. Where women are to be goggled at and ogled at. And owned and taken and possessed.

As I looked at all these medieval manuscripts and more recent paintings containing all these naked Bathshebas I realised that I was seeing transmission of the male gaze through time.

So many monks in scriptoriums painting saucy Bathsheba in the margins and passing the books down from one to another through the ages. What fantasies she must have conjured up just from reading the story.

And remember we had a story a couple of weeks ago of David leaping about in the dance and losing his clothes. But guess what, there are far more bare Bathshebas in the manuscripts and far, far fewer naked Davids.

Women and men are not equal in our tradition.

And once you see such inequality you can start to make the tradition change. (Because that’s what traditions do – they change surprisingly often when people want them to).

I’ve often said that that by a long way, the greatest change that the Scottish Episcopal Church has made in relation to marriage was to produce a liturgy a few years ago where the two participants were equals. A man and a woman getting married in our modern tradition are married as equals and it is a huge lurch away not only from biblical tradition and Victorian traditions of human relationships with which I sometimes think we are obsessed.

This morning’s gospel was the story of the feeding of the five thousand. Well, I think it was the story of the feeding of the five thousand and one. Or five thousand and two. Or five thousand and three.

For what it is trying to tell us is that there is always room for another at the picnic.

(And that’s a metaphor for heaven by the way).

As we re-read the stories of old, we need to read them from different perspectives and I want you to try to read the story from Bathsheba’s point of view this morning.

Manipulated by a powerful man who then murdered her husband in order to take control of her. And then ogled through the ages by churchmen who should have known better.

We must listen to her, for women are trafficked seemingly more and more. Too many are treated as things rather than people because they don’t measure up to the false expectations of patriarchy. Those with power in their hands still refuse to help us build a world based on fairness and human dignity for everyone.

So, I invite you to think again about Bathsheba. Let her prompt your prayers this week. There’s room for her at the heavenly picnic. And it is time her experience is listened to.

And in case you were wondering, there’s room for you too.

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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