What is in Kelvin's Head?

Sermon preached on Radio 4 for Feast of St Mungo

15/01/2019
He quite took me by surprise as I walked down the high street.

A friend of mine. Wearing a beanie hat and a beard. A sweatshirt and a casual jacket. But holding out his hand, on which was perched a robin.

I was absolutely sure it was someone I know. He looked just like him.

He was the spitting image of my friend. But larger than life. Quite a bit larger than life in fact.

His face filled the side of the end gable of one of Glasgow’s tenements.

It was a new mural that I hadn’t seen before. One of a number of striking images that have been appearing around the city centre.

I went on my way and later on phoned the friend whom I thought I had recognised in the mural.

He denied posing for it and said it was nothing to do with him at all though he did admit to having had several calls that week from people who thought it was him.

“But do you know who it is supposed to be?” he asked me.

I looked again at a picture I had taken of the mural on my mobile phone. For the first time I saw that there was a round circle behind the figure’s head in a slightly different colour to the rest of the background.

I realised it could be a halo.

And thinking about where it was, just down the High Street from the place where the city was founded, I managed to put two and two together. I realised it was Mungo and the robin in the mural was the one that he purportedly brought back to life as a child. It had belonged to Mungo’s uncle St Serf who had taken in him and his mother when they were on the run from her violent father.

Right there on the street was St Mungo. Looking just like a friend of mine.

At this time of year, Glasgow remembers its founder and its patron saint. The thirteenth of January is his feast day. And so we call him to mind with thanksgiving today and join our prayers with his, praying for the wellbeing of the city and giving thanks for the impact that he made upon those around him.

Whenever we remember Mungo’s feast day, there are two things that I always bring to mind which make me love him.

The first is his name and the second is the way he died – so different from the way many saints seem to meet their end.

I love the fact that 1400 years or so after he lived, we still know Kentigern by his pet name. And a name which tells us a great deal about him.
He received his affectionate name from his uncle. But it was the common people who popularised it and used it in remembering him.

Mungo doesn’t mean the loving one. It means the loved one.

The Christian faith isn’t about being good, it is about being loved.

Christians believe that the love we have for one another is just one of the many ways we have of experiencing the love of God, and I think I dare to tell people that they are loved because I know that I am utterly loved by God.

Mungo’s name reminds us that ….
- for all the legends of his mission – founding the city here and the diocese of St Asaph in Wales,
- for all the Christian work he did– setting up a mission centre in what we call Dumfriesshire and evangelising Galloway,
- for all the church politics he was involved in – establishing churches and monasteries all over the place
Notwithstanding all these things, he was remembered primarily with a nickname that tells us that love was at the centre of his life.

CHOIR + ORGAN

ANTHEM: Thy Perfect Love (Rutter)

Words: 15^th Century / Music: John Rutter

Text: Thy perfect love
Jesu, my love, my joy, my rest,
Thy perfect love close in my breast
That I thee love and never rest;
And make me love thee of all thinge best,
And wounde my heart in thy love free,
That I may reign in joy evermore with thee.

The gift of being able to receive the love that is offered to you on this earth is just as precious as the love that you offer to anyone else.

The other thing that I love about Mungo is the way he died.

Not for him the way of martyrdom. He didn’t die by the sword. He didn’t die in battle. He didn’t die being persecuted. There was no blood. There was no gore.

Mungo is said by those who told his legend to have died in his bath – surrounded by friends.

And that little detail of Mungo bathing may tell us something about his affinity with Roman custom. For the Romans had built baths round here during their occupation and Mungo was said to have visited Rome seven times.

Various miracles of his life are told in this city, as well as the story of the robin. Of a fire he miraculously rekindles with a hazel branch. Of the miraculous catch of a salmon in the Clyde with a wedding ring in its mouth that cleared the name of a falsely accused local queen.

But perhaps we should remember Mungo for greater miracles and ones we can share in – being loved and being a friend.

Mungo was a great traveller and clearly cultivated friendships with those whom he met. He was much loved by St David in Wales and his fame was such that St Columba came visiting.

When they met, it is said that they “hastened to unite in mutual embraces and holy kisses, and having fattened themselves first with a spiritual feast of divine words, they afterwards restored themselves with bodily food”.

It isn’t difficult to imagine them relaxing over food and conversation at the end of the day – their common task of building the church giving them an instant and enduring bond of friendship and affection.

When I want to relax at the end of a long day, I go to a local institution built in the same year that this cathedral was in 1871. It is a local Victorian swimming club. I swap the soaring arches, stained glass and Minton tiles of this building for the soaring arches, stained glass and Minton tiles of the Arlington Baths Club and relax in the heat of the Turkish bath and chatter with friends about the events of the day.

And when I’m there this week, I’ll spare a thought for Mungo, founder of this great city, taking to his bath with friends all around him.

And I’ll give thanks for the great twin miracles that seem to have been part of his life. The miracle of friendship and the miracle of being loved

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.

Reply
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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