What is in Kelvin's Head?

Always the Inkeeper – a sermon for Christmas Day 2018

25/12/2018

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

I, was always the innkeeper.

I’m not sure how many times I was in a nativity. Nor am I sure how it happened. But somehow, I was always the innkeeper.

And the innkeeper doesn’t get the best of lines.

“I’m sorry, there is no room at the inn”

Of course, there’s no actual innkeeper in the Bible. Just that line which says that Mary laid him in a manger because there was no room in the inn.

From the lack of room in the inn there is presumed to be an innkeeper.

And the innkeeper must therefore turn the holy couple away. Not for them the comforts of the inn.

But how to play the innkeeper – stern and uncompromising as he shakes his head at the holy couple. Or kind and compassionate finding them a corner round the back with the animals because you can’t just let a woman give birth on the street?

I’m not sure that my knowledge of theatre was all that developed in those days but there was still clearly a choice to be made.

If you’ve only got one line, you’ve got to make it count.

I never got to play the part of Joseph – concerned, compassionate, gentle and strong.

I never got to play a shepherd shivering on the hillside nor a king come from the East to worship the Christchild.

I never got to spit like a camel or baa like a sheep. Nor was I to ever become any of the whole host of angels who came to sing peace to God’s people on earth.

I always knew that I’d have made a fabulous Gabriel, all sparkles and glitter, even if the world was not at that time ready for me to play the Blessed Virgin Mary.

But it was never to be.

I was always the innkeeper.

Carrying my lamp (I always had a lamp) it was my solemn duty to tell Mary and Joseph that there was no room for them in the inn.

So far as I can tell the inns of Great Western Road, do not seem to come with adjacent stables these days. The memory of the cow byers in the West End where animals were stabled after being brought into town for market lingers in the name of Byers Road. But generally speaking, for most of us the idea of a stable is a bit foreign.

But it was to such a place that the innkeeper showed the holy family and in such a place as that, the Lord of heaven and earth first laid his head, all wrapped in swaddling bands.

Perhaps the modern equivalent is a garage around the back.

I wonder whether those of you who played a part in nativity scenes in your youth have found the character that you played has played out in your later life. Is there still an angel in you – announcing news whenever there’s great news to tell? Are you still searching like one of the Magi? Are you someone who still looks after the sheep.?

I find myself wondering whether constantly saying “There is no room at the inn” in my childhood Christmases somehow contributed to wanting to preside over a congregation which is trying to be open, inclusive and welcoming and trying to say, yes, there’s always room for more around the crib at Christmas and around the altar where God is alive to us the rest of the year too.

Maybe I am rebelling against my old Christmas script. No more will I proclaim no room at the inn. There’s room for everyone here.

It may be because it was my part to play that I’ve tended to think that the church has neglected the innkeeper somewhat. There’s no carols about the innkeeper. No icons of the innkeeper. No relics of the innkeeper to visit. No shrine.

Once he has delivered his line in the nativity play, the innkeeper fades away.

Well, he fades away from view but somehow we each get the chance to play his part and not just at Christmas. Whom will we welcome? Who precisely will we make room for.

For there must be room for the wandering and the lost. There must be food for the hungry. There must be shelter for the homeless. There must be refuge for the refugee.

And the vocation of all of us innkeepers is to work out how to welcome just one more.

And the Christmas story is at its weakest if we locate it only in Bethlehem and only in a time long, long ago.

Like all the best stories it comes to life when we find ourselves acting the parts of the characters not simply in childhood but when we can see and influence the same drama as it plays out in our lives.

The Christmas story is not simply that God came once and laid his head in straw and that was that.

The Christmas story is that Glasgow is the holy city in which God is born. The Christmas story is that people still discover that same God in the most unexpected ones. The true Christmas story is that there’s always room for one more beloved child.

And the true Christmas story is not that God loved the world so much 2000 years ago that he came and for the blinking of a lifetime was part of it.

It is that God loves the world so much because God loves you.

And that love doesn’t happen then or there, but here and now.

God loves you, here and now.

This place is Bethlehem. And unto us a child is born.

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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