What is in Kelvin's Head?

Christmas Sermon 2022

25/12/2022

This is the sermon that I preached at Midnight Mass in St Mary’s Cathedral in Glasgow for 2022.

This was reported in the Herald here: https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/23213007.glasgow-clergyman-hits-rwanda-policy-christmas-service/

And in the Daily Record here: https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/scots-church-leader-brands-tory-28812715

Why is it always night?

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

She said, “I don’t get it. Why is it always night?”

“What?” I said.

We were just yards from Times Square buzzing with people. A space that never gets dark, lit perpetually by vast garish advertising slogans bidding all the world to come and buy.

But in the church there was dimmed lighting and the whiff of incense and a dark blue ceiling with stars painted overhead. I felt right at home but they were the only stars to be seen for miles around.

The service was about to begin.

“I just don’t get it” my friend said, gesturing upwards with her eyes. “Why is it so common to have stars painted over the altar? Why is it always night in so many churches?”

One of the things that unites so many of the readings that we have at this time of the year is that something seems to be going on in the sky. Whether it is the shepherds experiencing angels glorifying God in the highest or the Magi from the East following a star, one of the ways that the biblical writers tell that something was up is that all the characters have their eyes on the heavens. Even John’s beloved prologue, our gospel tonight, devoid of ox and ass, stable and inn and all the characters of the nativity is insistent that the light has come. And the light shone in the darkness and the darkness has never
put it out.

Now Christmas is a time of magic and mystery and of gift giving. And so I bestow upon you all right now, the ability to travel through time and space and witness the progress of a weary couple making their way to Bethlehem. A donkey carries one of them.

They are familiar to us all. We know exactly who they are.

But as darkness falls, though they’ve each heard the whispers of angels, they don’t know just how their story is going to unfold.

Darkness falls quickly in the Middle East. It can suddenly become cold.

As they look up they undoubtedly see stars above their heads. With no electric light around, the sky would have been darker. The stars would have been more spectacular.

A starlit sky is the backdrop to how we imagine Bethlehem.

It isn’t just churches that have stars painted on their ceilings. Sometimes you find them in synagogues and mosques and even on the ceilings of Turkish baths.

In so many places, the night sky is painted to show us the very holy of holies.

The stars are above us here. And why not? For this is the place in which we celebrate that God enters the world – Christ born in flesh and blood. And this is the place where we enter into that same drama as Christ is born to us also in bread and wine.

Why not celebrate that drama here? Or in any of the churches of the world. For though Christ was born but once in a borrowed room in Bethlehem, that same Christ is born thousands upon thousands and
thousands of times as Christ is born in our hearts as we draw near to God and God draws near to us.

The stars mark the holy of holies – even stars that have a rocket painted amongst them as ours have.

And this birth is always celebrated at night. But this birth means that it is always daytime in God’s world. The night will never overwhelm the light of day.

No matter the depth of the darkness, the light has come. No matter how hard we find it to find hope and love and laughter, God’s love has shone into this world. No matter the extent of human misery and meanness, God’s tenderness towards the world radiates from that manger through time and space and circumstance and is utterly, utterly real.

The true light, which enlightens everyone, has come into the world.

In the depths of this winter, there is much that could make us feel miserable. I find it difficult to believe that government policy on asylum could be even worse than it was a year ago. And yet… the current proposals to send asylum seekers to Rwanda for “processing” and settlement remind me just how sinful human beings can be.

The Rwanda asylum policy may be legal but it is immoral

But faith isn’t about how bad things are. It really does celebrate how good God is.

The birth that we celebrate teaches us that there is always hope, always the possibility of change. God changes the whole cosmos by coming at night to Bethlehem. And as religious people I think we are called to collaborate with a God who doesn’t ever seem to give up on this world or write it off. There is always hope.

Now, I just gave you the power to swoop backwards and forwards though time and see things fresh and new.

Come with me as I leave the church with its starry ceiling and walk back out through Times Square and along Forty Second Street finding my way home through the city that never sleeps.

At every road junction in midtown Manhattan at the moment, a religious group has put up stickers on the back of the traffic lights that you see as you stand on the sidewalk waiting to cross the traffic. They
simply say, “Messiah has come”.

Now, they are not put there by a Christian group. They are put there by a very small group which claims to have found a Messiah who has lived within our lifetimes.

I remember that this night not because I think that they were right. But because those stickers made me think about what any of us should do if we suddenly discovered that we knew where the Messiah had was to be found.

For that is our claim tonight. In this birth in Bethlehem, we believe the Messiah has come. Not the kind of Messiah anyone expected. We find tonight a Messiah who is vulnerable. A Messiah who is defenceless. A
Messiah who gurgles.

If we believe in this babe, what shall we do? The light of heaven shines on our faces as we gaze at the saviour of the world in the Christmas Crib.

Christmas shows us that God can do anything.

And we are made in the image and likeness of God.

The love God has for us has been given to us to share.

Stars are above us. Shepherds and animals and a puzzled, exhausted pair of parents are beside us.

Anything is possible now. For the Word has became flesh and lived among us.

What has come into being in him is life, and the life is the light of all people.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never overcome it.

Amen

Midnight Mass, Rwanda

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.

Reply