What is in Kelvin's Head?

Christmas Day 2014 – Sermon

25/12/2014

Come with me to Bethlehem. Come and see the babe in the manger. Come and worship and adore the Lord of Heaven and Earth with the shepherds at the manger.

But don’t come with me to Bethlehem of Judea. Not yet anyway.

Come with me instead in your mind to the city of Venice where I had part of my main holiday this year.

I stepped off the train and walked out of the station and gasped at the scene in front of me. The grand canale, the vaporetto water busses. The astonishing modern Canalettoesque scene. A city completely without roads and cars.

And I quickly got used to it and started to enjoy finding my way about down the little alleys and along the byways along the canals.

Now, some of you will have been to Venice yourself. You’ll know that walking about can be a bit of a struggle.

It is crowded and busy. The pathways are narrow and crowded. And it is insanely pretty so you just want to stop and gaze at everything.

And everyone is feeling the heat and everyone needs to pause for breath sometimes.

And one of the hazards are the bridges that you have to use to get over the canels. Every hundred and fifty yards or so you go up steps and over the bridge and down steps.

And that adds to the weariness.

And this year there is an added hazard on the bridges of Venice. Not just people sitting on their suitcases having an ice-cream and getting in everyone’s way. Not just people stopping to admire the view. No, there’s something new.

Someone has come up with one of those bright ideas which seems like such a good idea until you see it in practise.

Someone has come up with a pole a couple of feet long, upon which you can mount your phone or camera to allow you to take photographs of yourself with a background view behind you.

And there’s nothing so pretty as the Venetian canals and so people stand on those bridges waving these dangerous sticks about trying to get the perfect picture of themselves, a canal and the whole of St Mark’s Basilica in the frame of a small smartphone.

Yes – this is the year of the selfie and tourist spots like Venice are falling victim to the selfie pole menace. For sometimes you could barely get across a bridge without being poked or prodded by one of these infernal poles.

Well, Venice is lovely. I completely fell in love with it. But oh, it can hard work.

And so it was one day I found myself going along the alleyways in the heat, up and down the bridges and through the crowds. And I was hot and tired. And I needed a rest.

Well the only thing to do in Venice when you need a rest is to slip into a church. Cool marble and shade from the sun was what I needed and so I pushed open the door of one of the many churches and found my way inside.

And immediately I realised that I was in one of the churches that has significant pieces of art. I was hot and bothered so I don’t remember whether it was a San Maggiore or a San Benedissimus or what it was. And I’d seen so much art that I’d long since stopped being able to remember which was a Giotto and which was a Tintoretto.

But I knew what was featured in the large painting in this particular church. It was at once completely familiar.

The adoration of the shepherds in Bethlehem.

Instantly recognisable. Somehow the image of the poor shepherds worshipping at the manger had appealed to some Venetian dignitary with enough money to commission art big enough to fill a wall.

And in the picture were the holy family – Joseph, Mary and the babe.

And in front of the picture, with their backs turned away, looking towards me was another family. Guiseppe, Maria and a rather hot and bothered babe.

And the parents stood there in front of the great piece of art smiling.

The family stood there grinning but with their backs to the great painting.

For as they stood, the father was holding one of those selfie poles to ensure that they could get a picture of what mattered to them that day.

There they were. This modern hot and bothered family putting themselves into the scene with the holy and beloved family. Putting themselves into Bethlehem.

Come with me to Bethlehem.

Come with me to Bethlehem and put yourself in the scene.

For if the shepherds are invited then so are you.

The invitation to the shepherds are a clue that God was setting up an open, inclusive and welcoming stable.

For shepherds were not smart but scruffy. They were not respectable but rapscallions. They were not gentry but general riff raff.

But the word came to the shepherds that something was going on. God had come into their neck of the woods and they had better pick themselves up and rush down and see what it was all about. The invitation to the shepherds implies that anyone is welcome.

Come with me to Bethlehem and put yourself into the scene. For you are invited too.

You are invited to know that God has come into your world.

You are invited to know that God has come close to you.

You are invited to know that God is near to you.

And in Glasgow this week we need to know that God is near us, that God loves us and that God is right beside us – no matter what.

All those selfie photographs in Venice and no doubt every other tourist spot speak of the desire to put ourselves into the picture.

But we are already made in the image and likeness of God.

A God who chose to put his own self into the picture; who opted to enter into our frame of reference.

God came into the world long ago so that I could tell you right now that God is here in this city today.

For the word of God in scripture, for the word of God in Glasgow, for the word of God within us.

Thanks be to God.

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