What is in Kelvin's Head?

Easter Day Sermon 2024 – It is started

02/04/2024
It comes in waves, grief does.

It is not a constant thing. And when you think that you are moving on another wave can hit you by surprise and leave you right back in the place you were trying to crawl out of.

A big part of my life over the last 18 months has been adjusting to a world in which two of my friends are no longer present. Unexpected deaths, relatively young. Lives cut short. Ministries in the church unfinished. And friends left behind.

I am a friend left behind.

And so I find as I approach the Easter story this year, that my eye is drawn very strongly to those who make their way to the tomb to anoint the body of the Lord. Those who were grieving.

The gospels tell of a number of people who make their way to the tomb in the first light of the day. Women first and foremost in their love. And in their grief.

What are they thinking as they make their way to the tomb? Well, I don’t just know what they are thinking, I can feel it.

Waves of grief, numbness and despair.

Grief comes in waves.

And in those depths, grief is a most bitter companion.

I will admit to not having always been myself when I have felt those waves of grief. I have not been the person I’d want to be.

And this year I have found myself not living in the kind of world that I want to live in either. There is much that leaves me grieving for a better world that we glimpsed and then saw snatched away.

The continuing Russian war directed against Ukraine has destabilised a Europe which seemed to have found the way of peace.

The ongoing horror in the Middle East has not simply destabilised the world, it has disturbed our minds and made peace – salaam and shalom feel agonisingly out of reach.

Warmongering, terrorism and the weaponizing of civilians leave me grieving for the world I had hoped for. For too many months, gross injustice in Gaza has been played out on our newscreens, For too many months kidnapped hostages have been away from all whom they love.

It is easy to feel that hope has been killed, and has been buried forever in a cold, stone-sealed tomb.

But comes the dawn and come the women to the tomb.

They come weeping. They return rejoicing.

The news that they proclaim on Easter Day is that death never has the last word. And hope triumphs when all seems lost.

Have we ever needed to hear the news of Easter more – that Jesus is risen from the grave, that despair doesn’t win, that green blades of growth rise from all that seemed buried and gone.

Grief comes in waves. But so does love.

And the waves of love that spread out from what those women shared in the first light of the first Easter Day changed their world, change our world and will go on changing the world as we spread it ever further.
- God has not forgotten the broken hearted.
- God has not forgotten the grief-stricken.
- God has not forgotten those for whom despair has become almost who they are.
That wave of God’s love did not begin on Easter Day, for it is as old as time, but Christ risen from the grave is when we witness its greatest triumph.

Love, hope and belief in new life are not optional extras for Christian people. They are the reason we are who we are and do what we do.

Despair and grief are real, even the bitter grief of hopes dashed. But the story of who we are doesn’t conclude by the side of a grave. Our story begins at an empty tomb.

Yes, the world is a mess.

But it has you and I in it and we know by the story that we preach and proclaim that new life is our inheritance and our hope. Things never have to remain the way they are.

This year will be a year of great change in this world. Momentous change. This is the year in which more people will vote in elections than have ever done since the democratic era began.

Every part of the world needs people in it who believe in a better world, a world where justice for the poor, integrity for those who govern and kindness for the troubled are the building blocks of the world we wish to see.

This year our election process in this country could well be a painful and hurtful time.

It demeans us all when an election is portrayed in the simplistic banality of a phrase such as stop the boats. Such language threatens those who need help most and diminishes us all. It is the language of the tomb. We need to move the conversation away from Stop the Boats towards Stop the Hatred. Xenophobia, fear of foreigners and naked racism are already dancing behind the words of too much electioneering.

But ultimately it will not win.

Good people believe in better things.

God’s people believe in better things.

Sometimes hope feels like something you have determinedly try to drag out of yourself. Sometimes though it bursts forth from no-where. A wave of love joy, hope and peace bursts unexpectedly from our inner tomb.

The promise of Easter is not that new life is possible it is the promise that it is inevitable.

And I believe it.

Christians believe in a better world than we already have. We believe in a world where the poor are fed, the lonely are comforted and the sound of war is heard no more in any land. We believe in salvation – the healing of the world.

The story that we are caught up in as Christian people on Easter Day is the story of salvation. And salvation is not the church bobbing around on the waves of this world plucking a few lucky souls to safety. Salvation is the great wave of God’s love that will sweep us all home.

Early this morning, we baptised people into this story, confident that they will bring new life into this world and confident that they will rise with Christ.

Early this morning we lit a fire and brought candlelight into this church to proclaim that gloom will not win. Light and glory will cast every shadow away.

Early this morning, Christ rose from the grave. Not only is death not the end but new life is real. The wave of God’s love has reached all the world. It has even reached us here. It has come to you.

I believe in things worth believing in.

New life for all. Love, joy and peace in abundance.

And I believe that Jesus Christ is risen from the grave. For if Christ were not risen from the grave then we would not be gathered here, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen
Easter Day sermon, waves

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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