What is in Kelvin's Head?

Sermon preached on 9 December 2018 – People Look East!

09/12/2018

[Apologies for the poor audio in the video this week]

“People Look East!” the prophet Baruch commanded in our first reading. And he wasn’t talking about Edinburgh.

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

“Arise, O Jerusalem, stand upon the height;
look towards the east” says Baruch, echoed rather brilliantly in the Advent Carol that the choir will be singing at communion this morning.

People look East. But what is so special about the East?

The truth is, at different times and in different places, people seem to allow tradition to hang on various points of the compass.

When I was a newly ordained priest, I worked in our cathedral in Perth and in those days, you proclaimed the gospel in a particular way.

We make much of the fact that the gospel is proclaimed right amongst the people here. The idea is that the gospel book is brought right amongst people as we remember that Jesus himself came amongst us and shared our tears and laughter and humanity whilst sharing the stories and chatter and love of heaven with us.

God’s coming amongst us is enacted ever time we raise the gospel book and carry it amongst the people and read it there.

Oh, but not when I was a curate in Perth. Yes, sure enough we processed the gospel to the middle of the church and everyone turned and looked at it. But whoever was reading it took a curious right turn when they got there and very definitely proclaimed it in a certain direction.

The gospel in Perth was proclaimed to the North – a lingering liturgical tradition that was common in Scotland and the Nordic countries at some times. You proclaimed the gospel to the North because it was the North that needed it. The place where all the cold came from and in so many northern myths, where all the ghosts and Ghoulies came from.

In some parts of Scandinavia they don’t have windows on the North side of a church in order to keep the cold and the Ghoulies firmly at bay.

So every time I read the gospel in my curacy, I did that right turn, and proclaimed the gospel to the North.

It was a rather picturesque liturgical tradition, even if it did seem to make is appear that the devil lived in Pitlochry.

Just a few months before going to Perth, I found myself in the desert in Egypt, exploring the spirituality of the desert fathers – monks who still live there.

(It is amazing the amount of effort and creativity Scottish ordinands at that time were putting into not being in Edinburgh where they were supposed to be training for ordination, but that’s another story).

Anyway, I was in the desert and the most extraordinary storm blew up. A sandstorm you could see coming towards you right across the horizon.

And it brought terror not only to those I was staying with in the Wadi Natrun monasteries but terror on the streets of Cairo. Was it the ferocity of the storm that caused the terror? Well, partly – it was the kind of storm you might wait 50 years for and hugely destructive.

But the terror was caused by its direction. The tradition in that part of the world is that Armageddon, the war that ends all things will come from the South. And that storm came very much from the South.

People look East, Baruch says.

Arise, O Jerusalem, stand upon the height;
look towards the east,

and see your children gathered from west and east
at the word of the Holy One,
rejoicing that God has remembered them.

So who is Baruch and what’s this all about.

My suspicion is that not that many people would be able to easily find the book of Baruch, never mind be able to say much about who Baruch was.

Well, we know Baruch’s words already. He was Jeremiah’s scribe, disciple, devotee and some have even speculated bidie-in.

He travelled with Jeremiah into exile and it was he who preserved the prophet’s words and popularised them.

So the Book of Baruch – obviously his own prophetic writings, right?

Well, not so fast. If only early religious writings worked like that.

No – the book of Baruch is named after him. Someone not so much passing themselves off as him as taking up his tradition.

So even though these words are not by Baruch himself, they are by someone wanting us to remember him and Jeremiah being carted off into exile.

Exile in Babylon.

Yes, exile in the East.

Whoever bids us to look to the east is reminding us of those who were carted off to Babylon.

But is it the remembrance of lament? No.

Is it the remembrance of bitterness? No.

Is it the remembrance of hatred and despair? A thousand times no.

Arise, O Jerusalem, stand upon the height;
look towards the east,
and see your children gathered from west and east
at the word of the Holy One,
rejoicing that God has remembered them.
For they went out from you on foot,
led away by their enemies;
but God will bring them back to you,
carried in glory, as on a royal throne.

People look East says the Book of Baruch – and see those of the East and of West united in joy.

And in that joy, this new Baruch remembers all the prophesies of justice from Isaiah that a royal way be made by levelling the ground for all people. High places made plain, valleys lifted up and all the people of God treated as royalty.

It is the same memory that the Baptist has in the gospel. The valleys being filled and the hills be made low and all flesh seeing salvation.

The Baptist proposes a baptism of repentance surely necessary.

Baruch proposes what seems like a baptism of joy. Also necessary.

The baptism of repentance necessary because things are not right yet and we must commit to turn our lives around in order to turn this world back to rights.

And being baptised by, drenched by, suffused by joy because the Lord will never forget his exiled people.

No matter how far we feel from a place of justice and peace and integrity and honesty and goodness and plenty, the Lord calls us back to that place.

And we return to that singing. And full of joy.

For God will lead us with joy, in the light of his glory, with the mercy and righteousness and love that come from him.

From the north and from the south, from the east and from the west, we are called to abide together in the kingdom where love is the rule and love the ruler.

Behold. Behold. In these advent days, know that the kingdom of justice and peace and love and joy is coming soon.

With a human face.

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.

Reply