What is in Kelvin's Head?

  • Passion Sunday Sermon

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

    I realised yesterday before I wrote this sermon that I have no idea what spikenard smells like.

    That it is basically an essential oil derived from the root of a plant related to Valerion which grows in the Himalayas was fairly easy to establish. But what does it smell like.

    And what does Christianity smell like, for that matter.

    This woman, Mary of Bethany appears in two significant places in the gospels and in both stories, smell is one of the most important features. Firstly she is there when Lazarus is raised from the grave – with the fear of the stench of his rotten body a distinctive and memorable part of the story. And now she pours her perfume on another body – a living body. For she anoints Jesus with her spikenard and wipes his feet with her hair. And her actions are in strong distinction from her sister who serves the meal.

    There are so many questions to ask of this gospel reading. Who was she? Why did she do what she did.

    And what does spikenard smell like? And why do we read this right now, on Passion Sunday when by tradition and habit our thoughts turn towards the cross.

    I decided yesterday afternoon that the most fundamental thing I needed to know was what spikenard smells like.

    (It is amazing what a preacher is prepared to do in order to put off actually writing the sermon).

    I came to the conclusion that the West End was the perfect place to buy spikenard – if you can’t buy it round here, where can you buy it.

    Well, an hour trudging around in rain soon proved to me that it is probably pretty hard to come by anywhere. Health Food shopkeepers shook their heads. Herbalists gazed at me with regret. Even the woman in the esoteric crystal shop up on Queen Margaret Drive admitted to her sadness that spikenard was not something she could help me with. (And she seemed to have answers to problems I’d never even thought of).

    I came wearily home. And I turned to the internet. And quickly I found some information. I managed to get a description. I found it on an aromatherapy website, so as any of the many medics in the congregation will affirm, it must be 100% true.

    It said… (more…)

18 responses to “General Assembly on sex and singleness”

  1. Kennedy Avatar
    Kennedy

    DCampbell writes:
    Wow, Kennedy – I hadn’t realised there was so much or so many people to it, but surely it is not beyond us to have some kind of webcast of the more important sections of the proceedings

    Webcasting from Palmerston Place presents a number of challenges:

    resourcing the camera crew, vision mixer and director (kit and people) and integration with the projection system to carry any slides and visuals
    looking at the lighting to allow good pictures but without interfering with the projection system (which suffers from light spill from the windows already)
    Network and machine infrastructure in the building to capture and code the video.
    Dedicated bandwidth (with Quality of Service) to transfer the video and audio stream out to a distribution server. (We currently piggyback on Palmerston Place’s own internet connection).

    An alternative would be an audio stream with a general shot webcam updating every 30 – 60 secs but again would probably need a dedicated connection to the net to ensure that there was no breakup.

    This is not a litany of reasons for not doing things – it’s just a realistic assessment of the resource requirements.

    Kennedy

    Reply
  2. Kennedy Avatar
    Kennedy

    Or another thought-

    We start having Synod on the Th/Fr/Sa after the Assembly on the Mound and share the costs of the setup.

    Reply
  3. Kennedy Avatar
    Kennedy

    No, I suppose a general ‘piskie tag would work just as well, but I’m with Kimberly and would prefer #piskie

    Reply
  4. kelvin Avatar
    kelvin

    My only problem with piskie is that in some parts of the UK a “piskie” is one of the little people, and not necessarily a nice one.

    See for example:
    http://www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/england/cornwall/folklore/the-piskies-of-cornwall.html

    “Some people saw them as the souls of pagans who could not transcend to heaven, and they were also seen as the remnants of pagan gods, banished with the coming of Christianity. In tradition they are doomed to shrink in size until they disappear. “

    Reply
  5. Elizabeth Avatar
    Elizabeth

    Maybe it’s just me, but I have always found the potential confusion between pisky and piskie immensely pleasing (by ‘always’ I mean, since I discovered the term – not too many years ago!). It’s one of the (many) reasons I’m pleased to be on the pisky/ie side of the pond.

    Reply
  6. David Campbell Avatar
    David Campbell

    Thanks Kelvin – all this stuff is quite amazing really – especially Kennedy’s informative and knowledgeable material about what is actually needed. I agree about the Primus’s charge being essential, but if live streaming (if that is what it is called) is too intensive an operation in all kinds of ways for an admittedly small audience, why not do a twice daily edited digest of each day’s business like the one the Revd Dougkas Aitken does for the CofS?

    Reply
  7. Kelvin Avatar
    Kelvin

    Rob Warren already does do digests in audio format – video may well be the next step, though it is quite a big step to take.

    Reply
  8. Kennedy Avatar
    Kennedy

    The video update that Douglas Aitken does is a copy of his audio update with appropriate video material behind it ie you don’t get any actuality from the chamber.

    We would still need editing and coding time before the video could be uploaded to an external server.

    Reply

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