What is in Kelvin's Head?

Midnight Mass Sermon 2015

25/12/2015

So where did you learn the Christmas story? Where did you first hear about the baby in the manger?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since a sermon that one of my colleagues preached earlier this year in which he suggested that in fact more people know about the story of Bethlehem from the film “The Life of Brian” than those who know it from the bible.

This is a particular achievement here in the City of Glasgow as the Life of Brian was banned from cinema screens for 30 years.

I remember when I first heard about this 30 year ban asking someone who had lived here then about it.

He claimed to have seen the film when it was first released. “But how did you see it when it was banned in Glasgow,” I asked.

“Oh,” he said, “you had to travel to see it. You had to go to the fleshpots on the edge of the city… places like Bearsden”.

Anyway, I’m sure that it is true that a lot of people do know about the nativity story from a film which was all about a neighbouring boy, Brian, being mistaken for Jesus.

Say anything about the coming of the Messiah amongst a certain generation and you are likely to get the response, “Oh, he’s not the Messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy”. And that applies to talk about Jesus as the Messiah. Or any Messiah. Or even a performance of Handel’s Messiah.

It was a film that was promoted with the tagline: “A motion picture destined to offend nearly two thirds of the civilized world. And severely annoy the other third.”

Yet the judgement of the self-righteous has mellowed somewhat over the years since it was first on show in cinemas all over the world (except in Glasgow). Time has scattered the proud and the haughty in the imagination of their hearts

This year there was a theological conference on the Life of Brian with an collection of worthies rightly realising that the film was a satire on those who get the wrong end of the stick about religion not particularly a satire on those who do love the Lord.

And yet there’s still plenty who do get the wrong end of the stick when it comes to understanding what religion is all about. People still often think religion is there to stop people having fun when the very opposite is true. And it is the birth, not so much the death of the beloved child of God who allows us always to look on the bright side of life.

For the birth of the Christ Child marks a moment when the world could never be the same again. A moment when all the angels sang and all of heaven danced for joy.

For the birth of the child tells us that God has come into the world and is interested in what it means to be like us.

Rather than Brian being confused for someone divine, someone divine became one of us. God got all muddled up with being human. So much so that words themselves were not enough to speak of what had happened.

For the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us.

Words were never going to be enough. Only life was enough.

And so God came amongst us in the form of a child.

Tonight we celebrate that birth and in doing so we celebrate that life. We celebrate that God loves us in the dark times. That’s why we always mark this moment at midnight I think – when the world is darkest we celebrate that light will always win out. But this moment also marks a time when we know that God loves us when things are going well too.

That’s the point. God came to earth – came to live one of our lives here on earth and knows, profoundly knows what it is like to be here.

Knows hurts and sadnesses. Knows joys and delights.

And the truth we proclaim here is that God’s coming into the world means that God knows you too.

Knows you and loves you. Whoever you are and whatever you think of yourself – you are utterly and most profoundly loved. Christmas means that that’s fundamentally who you are – someone who is loved completely.

When we sing out carols at Christmas we are collectively sharing our joy that God became one of us. And the stories tell us that we are only adding our voices to a heavenly choir that sings at the birth of the babe. Announcing it to shepherds on the hills. Disturbing the sleep of Magi even yet on their way to worship. It is a birth that upsets the tyrant and yet comforts the poor and the lonely. A birth that meant that the world would never be the same again

And all this focussed on the image of a child in a manger. A new-born child who does not yet speak or teach. Does not yet heal or preach or raise the dead.

Just a babe in a manger who represents the enormous truth that you are completely loved.

I have no idea what kind of boy he grew up to be. Scripture is mostly silent on his childhood apart from one incident when he seems to have run off from his parents. But I do know that he’s not just a very naughty boy. This one actually is the Messiah. And he loves you very much indeed.

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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