What is in Kelvin's Head?

Easter Sermon 2021

03/04/2021

Lent has been long enough.

This Lent particularly has been long enough.

Just over a year ago we locked down in the middle of Lent. And it feels as though that existence has been going on in one form or another ever since.

Most people have embraced the need for the lockdown lives that we have been living. And this itself is a miracle that we should not ignore.

Collective altruistic action on such a mass scale to protect life and human flourishing is a miracle of no small stature.

But Lent has still been long enough.

We have known discipline in our lives from last year’s Lent to this year’s Lent like never before.

And Lent has been long enough.

One of the ways that I’ve learned to keep holy week is to look for resonances of the Passion stories around me in life today.

Back on the streets of Jerusalem, one of the stories of holy week that always troubles me is that it is the same crowd that cries hosanna in the streets that goes on to cry crucify.

This year it is the same society that clapped for carers in the streets that has been unable to agree decent pay and conditions for those whom they once applauded.

Lent has been long enough.

Back in Jerusalem it is an out of town African – Simon of Cyrene who carries the weight of the cross on Good Friday and then disappears from view.

In our own times, black and ethnic minority people in our land have carried the weight of the corona pandemic in far more disproportionate numbers than they should have done. And that fact seems to be disappearing from view.

It is no help for a government report to claim there is no structural racism in society when black and ethnic minority folk have been dying in greater numbers than everyone else.

Indeed, that kind of claim is what structural racism looks like and sounds like.

Lent has been long enough.

Back in a garden close to Calvary a stone is rolled in front of a tomb by a group far too small to have been the only mourners at Jesus’s funeral.

And dear God, have we known the tomb this year? And how we have known the pain of being banished from the sides of those whom we love, as they have lived, and died and been buried.

Lent has been long enough.

But Lent, in our tradition, doesn’t go on forever.

It comes to an abrupt end with startling news – that Jesus Christ is risen from the grave. Death is not the end. All that we ever assumed is turned on its head.

Jesus is alive. And with us. And nothing will ever be the same again.

The discovery of the resurrection on that first Easter day was hard to comprehend. It is hard to comprehend now.

Yet for two thousand years, Christians have proclaimed that death does not have the last word, that all that rots the human Spirit is defeated, that new life is our heritage and our hope.

New life is the new normal.

The Easter proclamation means – and has always meant, that the old normal wasn’t working. Something new – so very new is here.

And yes, you can feel and know that it is real it in our own times too.

The resurrection is proclaimed in the kindness of strangers – and there has been much of that this year.

The resurrection is proclaimed in those searching for a new and sustainable way of living on this earth.

The resurrection is proclaimed when those fighting for justice taste its sweetness.

The new normal is faith and hope and joy and love.

And it is all, yes all that we need in our lives today.

I see it when the flowers bloom from an earth that was frozen and hard and cold.

I hear it in the song of the robin and the wren.

I feel it as love, wherever love is found.

Jesus is risen from the grave. The old has passed. Lent has been long enough.

New life – the new normal is here.

A year ago, I thought that as a congregation we were in serious trouble. How could we survive being locked down and closed?

As a congregation we thrive on meeting new people every year and sharing with them the open, inclusive, welcoming love of God that we proclaim in this place.

I thought we would be facing serious decline because no-one would be turning up in lockdown.

In fact, people have continued to turn up – online for some, in person for others.

And there are people worshipping both online and in church this Easter who simply were not around last year.

This is what I want to say to anyone who is discovering Jesus for the first time.

Christians don’t always get things right. We bumble along, just like the first disciples, misunderstanding God, betraying the new life that we hope to live into and make a mess of all kinds of things.

But we have met, in Jesus Christ, someone who has changed us and whose message matters so much more than that.

God loved us enough to want to join in with all the mess and dirt of our world. In the person of Jesus, we get to know God with a human face.

He shared all our sufferings and sorrows whilst he was with us on earth.

All the reality of human struggle and human pain.

And he is risen from the grave.

From beyond the tomb, he calls us to live as new people. People for whom life is the new normal, love is the new normal. Joy, goodness and peace are the new normal.

And nothing will ever be the same again.

You want to know whether all this is true?

Well, if Christ were not risen from the grave, we would not be gathered here.

Especially this year.

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.

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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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