What is in Kelvin's Head?

Christmas Sermon 2013

25/12/2013

[UPDATE: The Herald newspaper covered this sermon as a front page story here:
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/clergyman-calls-for-human-rights-focus-at-2014-games.23039023]

Here’s what I said in my Christmas Sermon this year.

It has become something of a commonplace that Christmas, at least in the life of the shops and the media starts all too early. Even at the end of September, the trees were being dusted down and the fairy lights for shop windows tested. The piles of mince-pies were arriving in the supermarket, all clearly marked with a best-before date of Halloween or before.

My local newsagent seemed to have done pretty well at resisting this kind of thing. I was pleased to see when I went in for a paper during the first week in Advent that they were only then getting out a new box of chocolate confectionary which was all wrapped in shiny paper. These delicacies were in a bright gold box which was placed right under my nose as I stood there on Advent Sunday. And clearly on the box was marked the slogan: “Cadbury’s Crème Eggs – your number 1 Easter Treat”.

Somehow the world seems to have become a bit muddled by when the Son of God appears.

And then the same week at the start of December I was driving down to the farthest end of the Diocese for a special service in Stranraer. I could only pick up one radio station in the car and it was one of the local stations down that way.

Come along, the announcer entreated me, come along to the shopping centre for our specially sponsored competition. Come and sing a seasonal song and see if you can win. Come down today. Maybe you will be crowned winner; the winner of our X-mas Factor Competition.

And as I was driving along I could hear myself start to splutter and exclaim. “It isn’t Xmas, it’s Christmas, I shouted at the poor unsuspecting radio announcer who was thankfully unable to hear a world.

And I drove on realising that I had suddenly become all my grandparents rolled into one. All I lacked was a walking stick to attack the radio with.

But now, the day has arrived. The Lord of Heaven and Earth has come and is wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

And it is our joy and delight to worship him today.

There is no question now. We can sing our carols with gusto. We can enjoy the feast. Food will be eaten, wine will be drunk, presents and cards exchanged and all for the sake of a child. Born in a manger. Born a long time ago.

There is such goodness there lying in that manger. For there lies joy and challenge, peace and promise, blessing and love – all wrapped in the swaddling of all our hopes and dreams and expectations.

God is come into our world.

And there’s the thing.

When the world starts to celebrate the birth in September or October or November, it isn’t entirely wrong.

For though we rejoice in the coming of the child today, the news we celebrate now is that God is in this world. Always here. At home here. An inhabitant with us of this spinning, turning world.

We celebrate today the incarnation but that is just the theological name, spruced up in its Sunday best for the truth that we celebrate every week which is that God lurks in this world.

Here in this place we preach weekly of a God who is here. A God who knows us, share our joys and shares our sorrows and loves us to distraction, come what may.

What we celebrate at Christmas is not merely that God came into the world and gurgled in a Bethlehem cowshed but that God is here in Glasgow and in every place on this earth all ready to be encountered anew. For God is only a glimpse, a breath, a prayer away.

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God. In heaven, an unknown factor. But not forever, for the Word took shape and came amongst us to show, to tell, to proclaim the good news that God is with us in everything and that with God, all that is ill can be transformed.

Today, all eyes are on the manger. The city of Bethlehem is the place on all our lips. And Bethlehem is one of the cities that is twinned with this city, the city of Glasgow.

In the year that is to come, the city in which we live will become for a brief time the place that everyone is talking about. The City of Glasgow is the place where many eyes will be looking as we host the Commonwealth Games.

And we must not shirk from naming that which is ill. For all is not well in the Commonwealth. Sadly, driven by the legacy of British colonialism, several Commonwealth countries should be held to account when they come to us. After all, it will not merely be sports people who are here but their political leaders.

With Sri Lanka unable to face questions about war crimes; with Uganda and India even in these last few days attempting to turn the clock back for those who are gay, with human rights abuses across Commonwealth countries too numerous to mention, There must not simply be silence when so much of the English speaking world comes to sport and play. In these last weeks we have been reminded by the celebrations of Nelson Mandela’s life that ordinary people can bring about massive change for the better.

For all that is ill can be transformed. For God is with us, already here now, working in us in this world.

We celebrate the birth of a baby – a real live baby with lips and hands and tiny feet. And in doing so, we celebrate the fact that God’s lips and hands and feet are now those of our own bodies. God incarnate not simply in this world but God incarnate right here in our own lives.

Here in this church, we know that God is here. In fact, we know that God is here, there and everywhere. For God lurks in this world wishing and hoping and praying that we will join the conspiracy of those who seek to put the world to rights and bring in the kingdom of justice and joy that all people of goodwill ache to see.

When I was driving down in Galloway earlier in the year, in the silence, having slammed the radio off, I had enough peace in the car to hear the truth of the announcer who spoke of the Xmas Factor.

Now, of course, I know that the X is the Greek letter Chi – the first letter of the world Christ. I know that the X abbreviation has been used since Christians first celebrated the birth of their Saviour.

Here in this church today, I tell you that the Xmas Factor is here. The unknown God is born and has a name. The God who was once unknown, the Logos, the X-factor – has now been born. That God has a name, for God is found in Jesus – the wonderful counsellor, the mighty God, the prince of peace, and is here and lies in the manger.

For the God Factor is here.

The God Factor is everywhere.

The God Factor has come into this world.

And God blesses you this day as you come to this place to worship.

In the name of God, Father, Son of Righteousness, Holy Spirit.

Amen

Christmas, Commonwealth Games, gay rights, In the beginning was the word, India, Sri Lanka, Uganda

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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