What is in Kelvin's Head?

Dedication Sunday Sermon – Responding to Antisemitism

28/10/2018

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

Religion changes over time.

How to run a congregation changes over time.

The things that you need to do change over time.

As I flicked through the readings for this morning, I found myself thinking first about Jacob dreaming of a ladder and the angels of God ascending and descending up and down it.

And I found myself wondering why Jacob didn’t seem to dream about whether the angels of God had successfully completed their Working At Height and Using a Ladder Safely training.

That may not have been what Jacob dreamed about, but it is the kind of thing that can appear in the dreams of someone leading a congregation these days, of that, I can assure you.

And then I read of him taking up the stone that he had been resting his head against and setting it up for a pillar and pouring oil on it.

And I found myself thinking, well Jacob, sunshine, you are not going to get away with that without writing to the Dean of the Diocese and filling in a Canon 35 application and finding out whether or not the congregation mind exactly where you’ve put the pillar.

Canon 35 being the stuff not of Jacob’s dream but of property conveners’ nightmares.

And then Jesus in the gospel is asked to tell them plainly whether or not he is the Messiah and he says, “I have told you but you do not believe because you do not belong to my sheep”.

And I find myself wondering whether the Lord of Heaven and Earth was very cleverly prophesying the GDPR regulations which ensure that we don’t send emails to anyone who doesn’t want them.

It seems to me very likely that he was.

Things change.

Religion changes.

We’ve changed.

As a congregation, we’ve changed a very great deal.

Another thing occurs to me as we read the story of Jacob’s ladder and that it a foundational story not simply for Christians celebrating their own identity in a Feast of Dedication.

This is a Jewish story. The idea that you can set up somewhere to worship wherever you wander being foundational to being Jewish.

This week I went to a conversation about anti-Semitism organised by the local branch of the Council for Christians and Jews.

I listened to Jewish people from this city speaking of being frightened to live here. I heard talk of people thinking of leaving Glasgow and leaving this country because hatred of their community and identity, is growing again.

I have a number of complex responses to this.

Firstly, to affirm that the hatred (or even the suspicion) of Jewish people is always and forever wrong. There are no political or religious excuses. In a time where objective truth is under threat, let us be known as a people who know right from wrong and can say whenever we encounter prejudice that it is wrong, no matter on whose lips it is uttered.

Secondly, to try not to make assumptions that anti-Semitism) is what other people do whilst we are free of it..

It is always easy to blame others for the ills of society. The person accused of sending bombs to people on the American political left this week was exposed on many occasions to rallies where cruel words carved out a space where violence might seem legitimate. And it is right to call that out.

And the vile attack on a Jewish synagogue yesterday was the worst and most violent expression of the oldest prejudice. And I condemn it as it will be condemned in pulpits around the world today.

But the truth is, there are people in this city who are frightened of being Jewish. Frightened not just of thugs putting bricks through their windows or someone turning up with a gun on the Sabbath but are frightened of the way Christians (that’s us) think and speak and preach. Frightened of our discourse about Israel. Frightened about the way we use Scripture, which, let’s face it is not wholly ours. For words shape the space wherein actions can occur.

And that situation must call us to reflect about who we are and where all of that begins.

And thirdly, my response to religiou people feeling frightened in this city (and this will take us back to our Dedication Festival) is to remember that to some extent we’ve been there.

It happens to be the case that we’ve needed police protection and been guarded whilst we worship on several occasions recently. Going back into our past history there were times when even the civil authorities were not on our side and we had much to fear not just from mob violence but from civil society itself.

That is part of our story. People used to be frightened to be Episcopalians in Glasgow. (And for good reasons). We were turfed out of the Medieval Cathedral by men with pikes. We worshipped here and there in this city in varying states of fear.

A wandering Aramean was our father. We share solidarity with all who are afraid to worship freely.

We share in celebration with all who celebrate. And we weep with all those who weep.

Today we happen to be celebrating those who kept the faith through hard times and ended up coming to this place to put down foundations and build.

Today we celebrate those who caught a vision they believed in and contributed to making it happen.

Today we celebrate not just that we are still here but that we are flourishing and alive and having fun being the people of God who worship in this way at this time.

As we do so let us pray and work for the same safety and confidence for all God’s children.

Things have changed for us.

Our usual mode these days is not fear but joy. That’s what we do here.

We’ve kept the faith, hung unto hope and we share the joy of being who we are supposed to be.

Religion changes. This congregation has changed. All kinds of things change for the people of God as their story unfolds.

But the love of God changes never. And isn’t part of our story – it is our story.

As we keep dedication Sunday today, I ask you to give thanks for those who have made what we have here today possible. Those who have taught the faith, kept the faith and yes, funded the provided for the sharing of faith with us.

As we celebrate our story, we proclaim the simple truth as we’ve done before and will continue to do – whoever you are, God loves you. God loves you more than all the reasons you can come up with why God’s might not love you.

Loves you yesterday, today and forever.

Amen.

anti-semitism, antisemitism, CCJ, Christian, Jewish

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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