What is in Kelvin's Head?

Whose Spiritual Mantle Will You Inherit?

04/07/2019

Sermon preached on 30 June 2019

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

Just the other week I was chatting with someone who asked me where I had studied.

I told them that I had read Divinity at the University of St Andrews.

Straightaway, the question came back – “Oh, whilst you were there, did you have a Chariots of Fire moment on the beach?”

For those who don’t know, Chariots of Fire was a huge film in the 1980s. A story based around the 1924 Olympic Games, which famously opens with a group of runners running along the West Sands in St Andrews.

An iconic moment.

These are the fastest, fittest men in the world.

Easy to see how I could be mistaken for them running along a beach.

The film title, I think was inspired by that bit of Blake’s poem Jerusalem:

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

But originally, of course, it comes from the second book of Kings and the reading that we heard this morning.

Elijah and Elisha are preparing to part at the end of Elijah’s life. And as they continued walking and talking, a chariot of fire and horses of fire separated the two of them, and Elijah ascended in a whirlwind into heaven.

It is one of those biblical images that is so vivid but which probably works better on the radio rather than on the television. Better in the oral tradition than something that we might try to capture in a picture.

As the two prophets walk and talk they have their own chariot of fire moment.

The elder Elijah asks what he can do for Elisha and Elisha says he wants to inherit a double share of Elijah’s spirit.

Not a bad thing to hanker after I think.

As we reflect this morning, I’d like you to just hold Elijah and Elisha in your minds.

One of them will soon take over. Pick up the mantle and carry on.

And thinking about them I want to say something about leadership – spiritual leadership to be sure, but it is worth thinking about how leaders operate in general sometimes too.

It is no secret that this diocese has been struggling to find a new bishop. The second round of the election process has not resulted in an election and we are now moving to round three, where the other bishops become the electorate.

There is considerable angst about what kind of person we will get and whether or not they match up to what we want.

I think that leadership is particularly difficult in the modern age.

Someone said to me recently that they really want the bishops of the church to take a firm lead and say what they mean and implement procedures clearly and decisively.

The same person then went on to say that whenever the bishops have done this, they have made precisely the wrong decision and should have done nothing at all.

This is the paradox of leadership in our current age. People want firm leadership. However, everyone expects to have an opinion and expects that opinion to be adhered to and if it isn’t, oh how easy it is to vent one’s spleen online and oh how quickly rage ensues.

Who would be a leader in such circumstances?

And what qualities does a leader need?

It may be my particular involvement in the discernment process to try to find a new bishop for Glasgow and Galloway that makes me a little weary of the search. But I do know I’m getting tired of being asked what kind of bishop I want.

Indeed, I find it rather more inspiring to think about whose mantle we should be picking up. Whose spiritual inheritance should we be claiming, with the audacious demand that we inherit a double portion?

Those from the bibilical tradition? – Elijah who could call down fire from heaven, Peter (whose feast day falls this weekend) who managed to be forgiven for more than most people, Mary whose Magnificat still inspires us daily.

Those who have campaigned for justice for people of all races? – Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela

The Stonewall rioters and those who came after them demanding equality for LGBT people?

Or the new generation who have worked and are working to stem climate change like Greta Thunberg?

As we think about Elijah and Elisha walking and talking before Elijah is wheeked away to heaven, can we have a wee chariots of fire moment and think about what spiritual leadership looks like.

The biblical tradition seems to have a lot to say about those who can see what is coming over the horizon. Visionaries, prophets, bringers of change.

The uncomfortable saints who are easier to deal with in stained glass than in the flesh.

Leadership needs to look different in the modern age to the way it looked in the past. More collaborative. Less dictatorial. More about encouraging people to work together than forging out as a one person band. With a greater ability to listen and be seen to listen and consult than has ever been the case before.

We seem to have a bit of trouble moving to a new paradigm for leadership in all areas of life including the very troubled political sphere.

So it is worth thinking about where we each get our motivation and encouragement from. Who inspires us? Who motivates us? Who encourages us?

Answering those questions will probably take us some way in working out what kind of leadership will be effective either in the church or in the rest of life.

So as Elijah and Elisha walk and talk before the chariot of fire arrives, I simply ask you to think about that question today.

Whose mantle do you wish to pick up?

From whose spiritual tradition do you wish to inherit double?

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

Amen.

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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