What is in Kelvin's Head?

The first thing that I tend to notice is that there seems to be more sweet things in the shops in Great Western Road than usual.

And then on the day itself it is obvious that there’s more people going about their business all dressed up for an occasion. Some of them are carrying food. A swish of coloured fabric or a brilliantly white robe. And then I see people going visiting family in the local tenements. It is obvious that there’s a celebration going on.

This week the Islamic festival of Eid al-Adha was going on. The Islamic calendar doesn’t keep time with the Gregorian Calendar that most of us use most of the time to organise our time.

The Feast arrives about 11 days earlier each year. And living here, I can always tell when the feasting is about to break out. You can feel it in the street.

Now it will be a very long time before we get this happening again, but the feast that is being celebrated by our Muslim friends is directly related to the worship of much of the Christian church today. Because the feast that was celebrated this week is based on one of the stories that comes up in the Lectionary today. And it will be another 33 years or so until these two things happen in the same week.

So, I’m paying attention to Abraham this morning. And to his son. In our tradition we remember him taking Isaac in response to believing that he heard a call to sacrifice his son.

The tradition in the Qur’an doesn’t mention the name of the son and Muslims generally presume the son to be Ishmael – the son of Abraham and Hagar the maidservant, whose birth we heard of just a few weeks ago.

But it is in essence the same story.

Abraham hears a call from God to sacrifice his son and sets off to do just that. And then just in time, God intervenes and calls off the sacrifice.

The straight-forward interpretation of the story that is found in Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions is that Abraham’s willingness to perform the sacrifice was enough. The son’s blood didn’t need to be spilt after all. Abraham’s willing submission to the will of God was enough.

Various retellings of the story have different details – particularly in the acquiescence or not of the son in the sacrifice scheme.

But none of those three traditions has been entirely content to leave this text to speak for itself. This is a story that has been argued and puzzled over for centuries. Indeed, perhaps that is its major purpose.

I knew a priest some years ago who had a painting of Abraham and Isaac in his study looking down at him as he prepared every sermon. It was a fine picture. An beautiful picture.

Until you noticed the glint of a knife in the father’s hand.

For me, I’m not convinced that simple and straightforward tellings of this story are enough. It is complex and disturbing and very puzzling indeed.

At first glance, it seems to be a very long way from our experience.

We have no contact with those who sacrifice their children at the whim of a capricious God, do we?

And yet, immediately I start to think of stories I’ve heard as a priest from troubled children about troubled parents.

On several occasions when I’ve been at Pride marches I’ve had people come up to me terribly upset at the violent sentiments that parents have expressed towards them in the name of religion.

“I told my dad last night. He told me to get out the house. He told me I was an abomination before the Lord. He told me he wanted me dead”.

People are prepared to sacrifice all the love in the world on the altar of misguided beliefs about what God wants in this world.

People sometimes think I go to Pride to have fun. Actually I go so that people have someone to tell those stories to. And I go to bear witness to a God who turns out not to want such sacrifices at all.

And therein lies my interpretation of this story.

I’m suspicious of the text and I’m deeply suspicious of the interpretation that the God I know would ever be the instigator of this violent psychodrama.

I’m suspicious of the text because people have tried to sanitise Abraham’s saga ever since it was written and passed on. Although the readings that we get about Abraham on Sundays present someone who is far from straightforward, they miss out stories that are even more problematic.

If we are all children of Abraham, we are all children of someone who twice passed his wife off as his sister and offered her to powerful men to save his own skin, someone who slept with the maid and then disposed of her when it didn’t suit him and someone who begins the very biblical tradition of fathers who have trouble dealing fairly with their sons.

And I am suspicious of the traditional supposedly straightforward interpretation of this story because it just doesn’t make any sense to me.

No God worth believing in wants children to be sacrificed and killed.

So for me, I think this story is worth telling and retelling through the ages as a paradigm for the idea that religion can change and bad practices that can only lead to death, destruction and loss should themselves be sacrificed.

For me this story stands out as marking a moment when the idea of God wanting a child sacrifice was seen for what it was – nonsense and violent nonsense at that.

There has been much change even in my lifetime in how decent religious people behave. This text is a blessing to those who embrace that journey.

Bad religion can be sacrificed.

Bad religion should be sacrificed.

Violence begets violence – it does not beget holiness.

The God whom I believe in loves us and bears us no ill will, wants no violence, demands no pain.

Live on earth is evolving.

Human life is evolving.

The life of the spirit – religious life on earth is also evolving. I’ve seen it change. We’ve been part of it changing.

And I believe that God is with us as we question these texts and worry over them and puzzle our way through them.

This text teaches me that God has only good things in store for us.

And that idea is well worth an annual party, in any street on this earth.

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

AMEN

A couple of weeks ago, I sat on the sand in the blazing sunshine on the West Coast of Scotland chatting to a friend. I was to come away from that conversation with a furiously sunburnt face but also with a snatch of conversation that I remember that was about singing.

My friend was telling me about the experience of living right beside the rocks and the beach for a couple of months. Swimming in the sea every day no matter what the temperature. And scrambling over the rocks to see what wildlife would pop up each day.

“Sometimes there’s seals” she said. “But not always”.

“You should try singing to them,” I said. “They always come if you start singing”.

“Really” she said,

“Yes”, I said, “but I think they prefer it if you sing in Gaelic”.

And I’ve seen it. If you sit on the rocks and sing then the seals get curious.

You should try singing to them. They always come if you start singing.

That’s the thing that I took away from this conversation.

Because when I thought about it, I realised that it was true not just for seals.

In our day, many churches and local faith communities are struggling, particularly since the pandemic. The experience of finding worship difficult for a period of time and the experience of having our music hushed for that time has left many communities more than a little precarious and vulnerable.

But here’s a prediction from me. When revival comes to the life of our churches, as surely it will eventually come, those places that are going to see growth and wellbeing in their worship will be recognised for their singing.

For it is almost impossible to recall any revival of church life – any period of growth and development in church history which has not had singing at its core.

When the people of God want to express themselves then they sing. And when we are looking to share our faith with others, perhaps we should try singing to them.

They always come if you start singing.

For months during the pandemic, we could only have one voice singing. And here in St Mary’s, we reached back into the church tradition for music that particularly worked for one voice and started to use Plainsong, some of the earliest of musical expressions to be written down.

Here’s some of the music that we’ve recovered in our worship and now use regularly here that we probably would not have rediscovered without that experience.  My colleague, Oliver Brewer-Lennon sings Cantate domino canticum novum – Sing to the  Lord a new song for the Lord has done marvellous things.

And as we hear these words, we remember that they speak of something more than just a simple song. The invitation from God is to sing new songs in our lives. To find new ways of being and make all things new.

OLIVER (singing – time 52 seconds)

Cantate Domino canticum novum: qui a mirabilia fecit Dominus

I suppose I can be very thankful that I’ve sung God’s praises in so many different ways.

On this music Sunday, I find myself thinking about them and being grateful for the vastness of human creativity when it comes to finding new ways to sing.

I remember singing in a cave-like chapel in the Egyptian desert with monks who sang the whole psalter – all the psalms every day and knew the whole thing by heart. Their prayer was kept going for hours and hours accompanied only by the jingle-jangle of a triangle and small hand cymbals.

I’ve sung with Christians in great crowds in a football stadium, inspired and held aloft as we sang by the hottest guitar licks in town.

And most often, I’ve sung in churches like this one with choir and organ leading the praises of the congregation and egging them on to greater and greater heights of praise.

And yet at the heart of it all, music is something of a mystery, a gift from God that isn’t easily tied down or explained.

I remember asking one of the musicians who is helping to animate our music this morning about a particular hymn tune that he loves. “Why is it so fantastic?” I asked him. And it was a tune that I know that lots of church musicians adore.

“That’s the funny thing” he said, “I’ve no idea. No-one knows. It is just fabulous to sing and makes the words soar”.

Music that makes the words soar is what we celebrate today, giving thanks to God for music that comforts, music that inspires and sometimes for music that challenges us too.

But above all on this music Sunday, I want to give thanks for music that makes the words soar.

Almost all the visions of heaven that we have in the bible suggest that music surrounds the God whom we worship.

For God seems to have given us an ability to hear significance in certain chords. Our emotions are all set a-tingle by a beautiful melody that might prompt tears of joy or tears of sorrow  or suddenly take us back to that time when someone told us they loved us.

When we sing in church, we are offering not just a gift of notes on the page or random noise to fill the silence. We are offering a gift of love to one who loved us first.

Music and love seem so very often to go together.

That association of music and love is what church music is about at its finest.

For God is love. Love that is real and strong. And God’s love has been proclaimed by people who have sung through the ages and will sing forevermore.