What is in Kelvin's Head?

A man had two sons…

30/03/2025

This sermon was preached on the fourth Sunday in Lent – 30 March 2025. I’ve not preached very often on the parable of the Prodigal Son as we usually baptise on this Sunday. As I post it, I tip my biretta towards the wonderful Amy-Jill Levine whom I have encountered teaching on this parable. She always gets me thinking…

Once upon a time, many years ago…

It was a dark and stormy night…

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away…

You wouldn’t believe what happened that day, which seemed like a day just like any other…

They are clichés. Tropes. Repetitive pattens. And they tell us to listen up. There’s a story about to begin.

These are some of the ways in which stories begin in the English language. I suspect that there will be people here who will know how stories begin in other languages too.

And to Jesus’s listeners, he would have immediately grabbed their attention with his opening line. It was obvious that a story was about to be told.

“There was a man who had two sons…”

It is a classic start to a middle eastern story. My guess is that most of those listening to him when he first told the story would have immediately tuned in to the story with a connection to the many times in the Hebrew scriptures that there are stories about older and younger siblings. Cain and Abel. Isaac and Ishmael, Esau and Jacob, Leah and Rachel. Joseph and his coterie of many brothers, and Aaron and Miriam and their younger brother Moses. Those are the more famous ones but there are others. Manasseh and Epraim, Serah and Perez, Adonijah and Solomon.

And the more you know about those stories, there’s something that you would automatically presume if you heard a story that begins begins – “A man had two sons…”

If you heard a story that began like that then you knew, pretty much from the beginning that the good guy in the story, the one who is going to come out on top is going to be the younger brother.

Scripture is riddled with stories in which the unexpected sibling is the good guy.

Those first hearers might have been brought up a little short.

For the younger son doesn’t seem to me to ever turn out to be the good guy in the story at all.

There is an interpretation of this story which sees him sinking deep into a sinful life and then repenting and going back and being forgiven. And we are served up this story in Lent, when repentance and forgiveness are what we focus on. But the longer I’ve read this story the less I’m convinced that the boy actually does much repenting at all.

If ever I’ve got something difficult to say, I’ll rehearse a little speech in my head first and that’s what the dissolute boy does here. His problem is that he’s hungry and his little speech seems to me to be a rather conniving way to get his father to feed him.

Some people see the prodigal as a model of repentance. But I’m not convinced.

Even the words that he does get out of his mouth. “I have sinned against heaven and before you…” are more of a formula than an apology. (And they echo the words of a decidedly unrepentant Pharoah to Moses in the Exodus story that all Jesus’s hearers would have known well).

So I see the prodigal as being dissolute and a rather too clever for his own good.

If you betted on him turning out to be the good guy, your bet might not be feeling terribly safe at this point in the story.

And you know what?

The father loves him anyway.

The father just loves him and shows that love in ways that were obviously offensive to the boy’s rather prim older brother. And the father loved him despite even that.

His father adored him. And loved him. And welcomed him home.

And for me, I think that is what is at the heart of this story. The prodigal isn’t welcomed back as a redeemed sinner. He’s welcomed back home.

Stories of finding a welcome where one doesn’t deserve it or expect it are stories with the gospel hard wired into them.

This is a congregation made up quite significantly of people who might not have expected to find a place here. Lots of us come from different religious traditions. Some of us come from no religious tradition. Some of us have lived our lives bowing to ideologies that rub up uneasily against the teachings of Christianity. Some of us have bowed to the false gods of wealth and materialism. Some of us have bent the knee to the gods of power and control. Incel culture, much talked about at the moment, is a part of that. (And I know that some of us have been bound up in that world at times in our lives).

Do these things need repentance? Yes of course they do. We can only be whole when we put things right.

But you know, God loves us anyway. Whatever the state of our souls, whatever the extent of our sincerity, whatever is going on inside, God already loves us anyway.

That is the glorious scandal that those who explore spirituality eventually come to discover. There are many who teach that God’s love is a matter of justice and that that God needs to be appeased for our wrongdoing if we are ever to find our way to heaven.

I don’t see it that way. I think God loves us anyway. The sun goes on shining. God goes on loving.

Scooping us up with a warm embrace when we least deserve it. Welcoming us home.

But of course the story doesn’t end there.

I’m not sure that we know the end of the story.

The story of the prodigal begins with an obvious storyteller’s trope. But it doesn’t end like that.

If Jesus said, “And they all lived happily ever after” we’d know he was done.

And we would know how things turned out between the older and the younger brothers.

Did the father’s profligate generosity teach the elder brother how to live and forgive? And did the prodigal himself turn his life around for good?

Jesus doesn’t give us easy answers and leaves the story unfinished.

And I think he’s asking, “How would you end the tale?”

How would you end the story?

In the name of the ever-loving Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Fathers, God, love, Prodigal Son, storytelling

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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