What is in Kelvin's Head?

Love means love – a sermon for Midnight Mass 2018

25/12/2018

It was the middle of the night. It was dark – the night black as pitch beyond the cold bright lights which shone in our faces. And it was surprisingly cold.

Crossing the border should have been easy.

But they made us all get off the train and queue up to have our passports stamped.

September 2018 and I was trying to leave the EU.

Not for long mind. Just a week’s holiday in Istanbul and to get there, a bit of an adventure on a night train across the border.

Which led me to be standing there in the middle of the night whilst a guard checked my passport and then my visa. And then gestured me to one side.

“In there” he said gruffly.

And I found myself in a small room with a guard wearing no uniform or identification badge being interrogated, in the middle of the night.

A small room. My passport taken away. My visa taken away. All my belongings on the train which was due to move off at any moment. And here, I was being interrogated in the middle of the night.

This is not a particularly unusual thing for some members of this congregation who have come from places of danger to live in relative safety in this country. But a new experience for me.

A few questions about where I was going, where I was staying. Who I would be meeting. When would I be leaving.

Then he asked to see my phone.

“Open up!” he barked. “Let me see pictures”.

And so he went through the last 2 and half years of photographs on my phone. Pics I’d taken of friends and all the photographs of me that facebook had saved to my phone.

“What this?” he roared. “What these”.

It was pictures of me dressed head to toe in gold. Or green. Or purple. Or red. Standing here. Celebrating. Preaching.

“What you do!”

“Well, I’m a priest”

“We don’t need no priests in our country. We don’t need no preachers here!”

And I said, “…..

Well, let’s leave what I said for another time and fast forward.

Fast forward a couple of days and I find myself standing in an old church in a seldom visited quarter of Istanbul.

Around me are pictures. Mosaics. Frescos. Gold and glitz. And the frescos tell familiar stories.

An elaborate one shows a bunch of tax collectors turning up in Nazareth and telling a young woman that she and her man need to go off and be registered in their home town.

Another one next to it shows a familiar story – the same young woman clearly expecting a child riding a donkey led towards Bethlehem by Joseph – gentle, patient and maybe worried about what they will find when they get there.

Picture after picture. Mosaic after mosaic. Fresco after fresco.

Each one preaching forth the story that we are familiar with and which draws each of us here tonight for some reason or another.

The story of the One who gave up heaven and took up residence on earth.

The story of the Lord of eternity coming among us and accepting for a short lifetime all the constraints of time and place, pain and particularity.

The story of one who comes to share the story of heaven by sharing the stories of earth.

And as I stood and gazed at the glorious pictures all around me I realised that plenty of preachers had been there before me. Some of them no doubt preaching sermons and some preaching all I ever want to be able to say with nothing but pigment and paintbrush.

For God comes into this world tonight. And we bear witness to the birth at midnight. In a world which needs the light of the world to shine.

But back to that challenge at the border on another dark, cold night.

What about that suggestion that there’s no need for preachers.

I beg to differ.

This world needs more preachers. Needs you to be preachers.

This world needs those who will hear the song of the angels singing peace on earth and preach it to the nations.

This world needs those who will see the refugee family fleeing from Bethlehem and who will preach to the Herods of our own day who seek to build a hostile environment instead of proclaiming what is forever just – that those who flee for their life as refugees should be always welcome.

The world needs those who will see the tenderness of our blessed Lady towards our blessed Lord – the child in the manger and who will preach the beauty and the passion and the commitment of that love to every soul who is vulnerable. Preach not just with paintpot and pigment but with politics and passion too.

We are living through strange times in this land.

We are living out the inane reality of the absurd declaration that Brexit means Brexit.

There is far more to be said than that.

For our Blessed Lady – no mean preacher herself told us, there are the humble and the meek to exalt and those of us who love this child in the manger have a job to do making sure that those as vulnerable as he was are kept in mind through whatever political uproar occupies us.

There are those who are hungry who need to be filled. And filled by those who take their place at the manger in adoration, who are inspired to set others free with imaginations set alight by what they find in the crib.

And there are inane tyrants to be mocked. For God will bring down the mighty from their seat and it is our privilege and joy to delight in their fall.

Brexit may mean Brexit. Whatever that means.

Leave may mean leave. Even though no-one seems able to define what that looks like in a way that we will all agree on.

But this night we celebrate something altogether more profound and the antidote to the inanity that we find all around us.

God comes into the world not to show us that leave means leave but to tell us once and for all that love means love.

Love means love.

Laid in a manger.

Here for you and here for me.

Love for you and love for me.

And the world does need preachers from every tribe and tongue to share this good news:

Love is come into the world. Love enough for everyone.

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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