What is in Kelvin's Head?

Good Friday Sermon 2024 – It is finished

02/04/2024

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

I remember some years ago hearing someone speaking about what made people compatible.

I think that it was someone who was a statistician who was making quite a living by advising people who were designing dating apps on what questions to ask people which would give the greatest likelihood of a match working out.

And they reported that there were two questions which were way ahead of other questions in predicting people’s compatibility. And they were rather odd.

The first one was about how long you had ever lived abroad. His statistics seemed to show that couples were more likely to get together and last if their experience of living abroad was similar. Someone who had lived away from their own country for a year or so was surprisingly likely to find someone who had done the same thing attractive enough to form a relationship with them.

And the other indicator was a simple question but which is the focus of what I’m thinking about this afternoon.

It was – how much you liked horror films.

Somehow there was a greater possibility of compatibility amongst people who had a shared tolerance of horror movies.

Well, I don’t know whether I’m giving away all my secrets this afternoon, but I’ve lived abroad a few times for three months each.

And I can’t stand horror.

Put me in a room with a horror movie and all I can long for is for it to be over.

When will it be finished is the only thing I can think about.

Good Friday does not come to me easily.

Some people within the Christian faith believe very strongly that there is meaning in suffering. I tend towards the view that suffering means that meaning is stripped from life.

I don’t think that suffering and pain are righteous, holy, necessary or God willed.

No God I believe in could will the suffering of anyone.

And so there’s a lot of the theology around the cross and around Good Friday that I find rather hard to stomach.

Indeed, I find Good Friday rather hard to stomach.

The images from Scripture are horrific. The emotional abandonment of the end of the Maundy Thursday service I find considerably easier. Our Lord ends up alone, betrayed and with the crowd baying for his death. Clearly the popularity of the mob last Sunday when he entered Jerusalem turned rather quickly into something rather frightening. A reminder of how easily any of us can be swayed by the mentality of a mob.

But the abandonment and loneliness of the Saviour on the Thursday evokes pity in me.

The experience of today, I experience as horror. Stomach turning horror.

And it is hard to know what to do with it except for allow that horror to tell its truths to me.

For Christ is crucified when unjust systems condemn people to death for their beliefs.

Christ is crucified when war is seen as a pathway to peace.

Christ is crucified when children starve of hunger.

Christ is crucified when people are abused.

Christ is crucified when inequality triumphs and ruins human potential.

Christ is crucified when patriarchy has its all too familiar way.

I can see the crucifixion in all these things when human action and inaction cause suffering, pain and despair.

But I can see the experience of Christ on the cross too in things which don’t have human action behind them. Tragic heath conditions lead sometimes to unimaginable pain.

My fear of horror movies makes me want to look anywhere you see but look at the cross on Good Friday.

I’d rather relate to horror that I can explain or horror that I can pity than simply look at the horror that is played out on the crosses on the hill as Christ and the others crucified with him are put to death.

Some see his words, “It is finished” as marking some moment of triumph but I’ve never been able to hear them that way.

The absurdity of the death penalty wasn’t finished by this. It carried on killing and carries on killing in many part of the world still.

The tragedy of those who think that a sharp violent death surge can keep the people in order has its obvious echoes in many countries today.

The pity of an unsettled world where violence seems so often to have the upper hand seems to go on and on and on. That wasn’t finished by any of this.

I watch as civilian populations in Israel and Gaza have been weaponized over the last few months and I feel utter despair. The reality of apparent war crimes being carried out in Gaza is on screens we all carry in our pockets. The brutal cruelty of terrorist acts is played out in our time lines on every device we look at.

Who needs horror movies anyway these days?

But there I go taking my attention away again – seeing it all through the lens of what we see happening in the news. And what we forget is happening too – the things we don’t get to see in the news – forgotten wars, forgotten injustices.

The horror is in front of us today on Good Friday.

A young man strung up and all for what?

For telling us we were loved?

For sharing wise stories and pithy sayings to live by?

For not being the leader of the militant faction that so many hoped for?

What was the point in his death.

What is the point of the horror.

And what does he mean when he says it is finished?

Dear Lord Jesus on the cross, believe me when I look back at you and shake my head. It isn’t finished at all.

The horror movie goes on playing. The violence goes on being justified. The pain goes on being felt.

The horror is too awful to bear.

We make it more palatable with our silences and with our music this day. And we sit in a relatively safe and beautiful space to think about these things.

And here we abide, with the story of a crucifixion playing out in our inner souls.

And here we stay and here we think about the dear young saviour on the cross for whom it is now finished.

And here we stay and here we think about those places and those people whom we know for whom it is not.

Good Friday, it is finished, Sermon

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.

Reply
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.

Reply
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.

Reply
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!

Reply
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!

Reply
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?

Reply
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.

Reply