What is in Kelvin's Head?

If you meet a God who is racist. Call it out.

25/08/2023

Content Warning. This gospel reading contains scenes which some viewers might find disturbing.

Content Warning. Viewer discretion is advised.

Content Warning. This exegesis contains strong language which some listeners may find offensive.

Content Warning. The language used in this interpretation of the gospel contains expressions which were in common use at the time which may sound derogatory and disrespectful to modern ears.

Content Warning. The kind of language that can be heard in today’s gospel remains in use today. And it remains just as offensive as it always was.

Those of us who watch the television or listen to the radio in this country are probably all accustomed to hearing what are called content warnings.

You sometimes get them at the theatre these days too, pasted up on the doors before you go in.

This morning’s gospel probably needs a content warning to go with it when we read it these days.

But maybe it always did.

And maybe that’s the point of it.

I have to be honest. Matthew’s gospel is my least favourite of the four canonical gospels. I always have to take a deep breath when we start the liturgical year in which we read mostly gospel readings from Matthew’s gospel. For Matthew’s world always seems so much more clear cut than the world in which I live. Everything is black and white. It is all about the sheep and the goats, the wheat and the weeds, the wise and the foolish, the saved and the damned.

And I find all this rather tiresome. “What about the goats!” I want to cry. What about the weeds? Are they not God’s beloved flowers too.

And if forced to choose between spending the night at a party with the five wise virgins or the five foolish ones, well, I might not chose to go to the party that Matthew wants me to choose to go to.

But just now and again, something that Matthew writes slaps me across my presumptions and makes me take notice. The Beatitudes and the rest of the sermon on the Mount make it worth putting up with a whole lot of parables I find myself not liking. And then… and then there’s this.

First Jesus says that righteousness isn’t about what goes into a person but about what comes out of a person.

Someone is defiled not by what they scoff but how they scoff at others.

Matthew paints this picture of Jesus caring much more about what people say than about the way in which they are keeping certain religious laws.

And in a careless way, I want to cheer him on.

Yes! Go Jesus. Disturb the righteous. Bring down the mighty. Talk about people’s motives. You got it from your mother! Yay for Jesus.

And then right after telling us that Jesus cared more about what came out of people’s mouths than what went in, Matthew has Jesus saying something that is downright offensive with unignorably racist undertones.

And it is that which makes me love Matthew. The sheer theatre of this is astonishing.

Shock tactics – that’s what keeps you on your toes.

Shock tactics from a master storyteller who will not simply let us get away with simplistic interpretations about what his gospel is all about.

Even our English translators find this a bit much to translate honestly.

Someone asks him for help. She’s a foreigner.

He says.

“It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs”.

But that’s not really adequate. That word dogs is a diminutive in the Greek.

Glaswegian might help us here.

“It’s nae fair to take the bairns’ food and throw it to the wee dugs”

Or even better, “It isnae fair to take the bairns’ food and gi it to the wee bitches”.

There is a glaring nastiness about Jesus’s words that I think are unmistakable.

Sometimes I’ve wondered whether there was a twinkle in his eyes and a snort in her response but I’m far from sure of that.

It seems to me that he did say something that was offensive then and would be offensive now and was called out on it.

This foreign women firstly cries out to the Son of God that she is in need. Then she cries out that she’s not accepting his answer and not accepting no for an answer either.

She’s not going to let racism have the last word.

And I think the gospel suddenly becomes fascinating and compelling as a result.

What you expect to happen doesn’t?

We don’t know her name but she is magnificent.

She is one of those deprived of a name by history. But one of those who cry out “Not in my name” when she encounters something which is offensive to her ears.

And I love her for it.

There was a very popular book a few years ago called “if you see Buddha on the road, kill him”. The basic idea was that you didn’t need someone to enlighten you – you had it in yourself to provide all the enlightenment you would ever need. The idea was that you didn’t need a guru to be enlightened.

I don’t entirely hold by that. I’ve found it necessary sometimes to learn from others.

But this woman makes me think of a similar kind of sentiment.

If you meet a God who is racist. Call it out.

If you are told about a God who is homophobic or sexist or bigoted in any way, don’t rest. Resist.

And if you encounter a God who doesn’t seem to care about the poor and the needy and the dispossessed… then fight him.

Wrestle with him as Jacob of old wrestled with God the whole night through.

Don’t be surprised if you come away limping, but don’t think you won’t win.

Content warning – Love wins in the end.

Love always wins in the end. In the face of this woman’s cheek, Jesus himself seems to suddenly understand his mission to the world in new ways. More expansive, generous, comprehensive, extensive, wide-ranging and unreserved.

Content warning. It isn’t just Jesus who can see a whole new vision of loving the world. We are the body of Christ so, so can we.

Content warning, it isn’t just the Canaanite woman who can insist that she too is made in the image and likeness of God. That description applies to everyone here-present. And everyone who has ever lived. And everyone who ever will.

Content warning. The goodness of God’s love is for everyone.

Content warning. The goodness of God’s love is for you.

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.

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.

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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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