What is in Kelvin's Head?

Sermon – preached on Valentine’s Day/Lent 1

14/02/2016

So. It is Valentine’s Day and the church bids us to go with Jesus into the desert.

Well, that’s the story of my love life. But what are we to think today? How are we to deal with this story of Jesus being tempted in the desert?

Jesus gets led in the desert, we are told. (And by whom are we told this odd story? – for there was no-one else there but him). And there he is tempted three times.

Firstly tempted to turn stones into bread for himself.

Secondly tempted to accept worldly power in exchange for worshipping the Tempter himself.

The third to doubt God and put himself at risk in doing so.

The other night I found myself at the theatre sitting next to someone who had a huge slogan written on his T Shirt and every time he leaned forwards I got to read it.

In huge gothic letters it said – “Worship Satan – Cuddle Kittens”.

I’m not entirely sure what the motivation is for wearing such a slogan. (Mind, I guess a lot of people can’t work out the motivation people have for wearing the badges I think up but they keep on selling all the same).

In our modern world, we have such complex issues of identity and personality that we are prepared to have words emblazoned onto our clothing or pinned to our lapels or tattooed right into our skin.

“Worship Satan – Cuddle Kittens” – though? What’s that all about.

I suppose it is a way of trivialising all that religion offers in terms of speaking honestly about the world in which we find ourselves.

Does it really matter whom we worship. I rather think it does.

Jesus seemed to think so too.

Well, so much for Jesus’s desert experience. What are the great temptations that the Great Tempter dangles in front of him as he wanders through the deserts of this world in the form of the body of Christ today – you and me.

I think there are maybe still three great temptations.

The first is to think that sexual sins are virtues and sexual virtues are sins.

The more I find I have to campaign for gay Christian couples to be able to get married in the light of day, the more I think that the rows over it are one of the great tricks of the Great Tempter today.

If we are all squabbling about something so gentle and good as letting God’s people get married within God’s eyes then for a whole generation, God’s people have given up the chance to speak sense to society where sexism still allows women to be treated as being of lesser worth than men – watch 30 women giggling about for one man’s attention on Take Me Out on the tellybox if you doubt it. The faster we sort ourselves out on same-sex marriage, the faster we can have something powerful to say about the inadequacies of sex and relationship education in the education system and the faster we can find something hopeful to say in the midst of the supercharged insanity of an online dating world where sex is only a click (or indeed 200 yards) away.

The second modern temptation is to think that the world revolves only around ourselves. If ever there was a Western Temptation it is this one. However, modern forms of communication don’t quite let us get away with that. When we see refugees on the news or see places where war is a present reality, we cannot escape facing the reality that the world doesn’t just consist of people like us and doesn’t happen to revolve around our experience. We can push the off button and fall to the Tempter’s tricks by thinking it all goes away when the screen goes blank – but God has put a conscience in each one of us for good reason – a conscience that we can train and nourish and feed and Lent isn’t a bad time to think about doing so.

The third is to think we are immortal.

On Wednesday evening, again and again, Cedric and I put ashes on people’s heads with some variation of the words: “Remember you are mortal, from dust you came and to dust you will return – turn away from sin and believe in the gospel”.

One forehead after another.

“Remember you are mortal, from dust you came and to dust you will return – turn away from sin and believe in the gospel”.

No doubt some find the repetition of those words rather morbid. They are not meant to be. They are a simple reality check. We are mortal and we don’t know what lies ahead.

A friend of mine uses those words as part of her prayers at night – repeating them again and again on a string of prayer beads.

“Remember you are mortal, from dust you came and to dust you will return – turn away from sin and believe in the gospel”.

What I didn’t know on Wednesday, as I worked my way through the rosary of foreheads with the same words was that someone whom I’ve worked with in the diocese would be dead by Friday night.

And when someone dies suddenly like that it is a shock.

The reality of Ash Wednesday is not to bring that shock to bear but to wake us up from wherever our spirits slumber and live life to the full. We know not what our tomorrows hold so we’d better make the best of today is what those words are all about.

Lent is for teaching us how to live, not how to die.

For some things are worth living well for.

And that take us back to Valentine, funnily enough.

Valentine, whose relics are said, oddly enough to rest in the Gorbals – in this great City of Love.

Not much is known about Valentine from contemporaneous stories. Instead, all we’ve got to go on are medieval myths – though we mustn’t be tempted by the Tempter to disregard such things for they so often contain the wisdom of the ages.

Valentine whom we know today as a providing for a great Retail Feast is commemorated as someone who didn’t just life for something, he died for it too.

One of the medieval sources suggests that Valentine’s great crime was helping Christians out and doing so in a particular way. He helped them to get married at a time when the authorities wouldn’t allow it.

All of a sudden, Valentine seems rather contemporary to me.

Having been arrested, he became something of a favourite pet to the emperor Claudius who was entertained by him. But only so much. When Valentine started trying to convert the emperor he ended up being martyred. Beaten by clubs and beheaded in Rome.

Maybe Lent and Valentine’s day tell us the same thing but in different ways.

Some things are worth living for. Worth living well for.

And some things are worth dying for too.

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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