What is in Kelvin's Head?

Easter Sermon 2016

27/03/2016

I never know whether he will rise.

Plenty of people who know better than me tell me not to be so stupid.

Of course he will rise they say – it is Easter.

But there’s a part of me which is never entirely convinced.

Before we get to Easter Day you see, I’m just not that sure.

Indeed, I’m not even sure that I want him to.

After the kind of holy week we keep here, you could be forgiven for hoping for a quiet weekend. And it is remarkable the number of people I know who, even knowing what I do for a living ask, “So, what are you doing for Easter?”

We live the whole drama here. From processing with our protest palms last Sunday to the betrayal of Christ in the garden on Thursday; from the cries to hosanna to the cries of crucify; from the lush intimacy of the last supper to seeing him stripped naked and led to a cross.

I end up exhausted.

By late on Good Friday, that day when the light of the world goes out, I find that somewhere in the back of my mind I’m wondering whether or not it wouldn’t be better this time if he would just stay dead.

Such is the reality of Holy Week to me.

And we didn’t need to look far to find the cross this Holy Week either. In the news from Brussels we saw innocent people attacked and targeted. We saw people killed. We saw an attack on the hopes and dreams of all who wish for an integrated peaceful world.

People’s hopes were crucified.

People’s dreams were being tortured by wicked men.

It is easy to believe that Christ will never rise from the dead.

And on the streets of this city, two horrific murders.

All too easy to believe that there will be no resurrection.

Yet disappointment, bitterness, sadness and betrayal are the very ground in which the seed of faith flourishes.

Earlier this year, I had to attend the funeral of someone I knew who had died very suddenly and unexpectedly.

I found myself going to a funeral in Clydebank Crem as a mourner rather than someone taking the funeral.

Now, I’ve been there so many times.. I’ve stood at the front of that building leading services plenty of times. But I never realised that above my head when I stand there, there is a window.

Well, there’s what used to be a window. It is a stained glass window and it is one of those that needs to be illuminated by an electric light, like those on the north side of our cathedral.

This one is left unilluminated.

Crems these days tend to be rather ambiguous religious places. Spiritual but not religious is, after all, becoming the dominant religion if people are asked to tick boxes.

I sat at this funeral, which was for someone who didn’t seem to have had an explicit faith of their own and as I sat there I saw this window that had always been hidden from me when I’d been stood at the front.

It was all dark glass. Dark shapes that didn’t seem to make sense.

And then as the service went on my mind started to see the way the glass was shaped and seeing the outlines of the pains I could suddenly see that it was a representation of a resurrected Christ, wearing a crown of glory and by his feet the word – “I am the resurrection and the life”. Though the glass was still dark it was as though a light had come on. “I am the resurrection and the life”.

Even when we don’t at first see it; even when we’d prefer him to stay dead and quiet and buried, the risen Christ is already dancing down the road ahead of us.

In the first light of dawn I came to this church and the bishop kindled a fire from which we lit the paschal candle.

And a fire was kindled in my heart that burned away the cynicism that made me wonder whether I’d prefer him to remain in the tomb.

For fires need to be kindled.

Candles of hope need to be lit right now.

The light needs to be shared.

As the light was passed around here in the first light of Easter Day, I remembered that the light of Christ will conquer any darkness.

The faith that we proclaim here is simple

We believe death is ultimately beaten.

That means that tyranny will not win.

That means that terrorism will not win.

That means that prejudice will not win either.

For love wins in the end.

We Christians have a candle of hope to share this Easter day will people of goodwill all over the world, those of faith and those who have none. Every one of us is called by current events to make the light shine. Every one of us is called to bring hope and justice and joy and peace to the world.

In this city, I think we have a message to proclaim at this time.

A Muslim man in this city was killed this week soon after wishing Christians (that’s us) a happy Easter.

Let the news go out that the wickedness of such a murder will not define us as Glaswegians. Such wickedness has no place in our city.

Death will not have the last word. Let the love of God warm every heart in this city, Muslim and Christian Glaswegians alike. And let that love show forth in new ways, that this city may flourish.

Warmed by the Easter fire, I know that Christ is risen.

Risen and working through attempts to tackle poverty.

Risen and working as prejudice against gay people gets less and less respectable each year.

Risen and working through the urgency of new interfaith initiatives.

Risen and working in lives set alight in this and other places with the love of God.

Risen and working because there’s no other way to live than believing that love wins in the end.

For if Christ were not risen, we would not be gathered here, 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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