What is in Kelvin's Head?

Prof Bill Fishman

23/12/2014

I’ve just returned from one funeral of someone (Michael Hare Duke) who inspired me when I was in my late twenties to hear of the death of another one.

I knew Prof William (always Bill) Fishman when I worked in the chaplaincy at Queen Mary and Westfield College – now just Queen Mary, University of London. He was one of those academics at whose fingertips knowledge sizzled.

As well as his formal academic duties he was unofficially the professor of the East End of London. He had been there through all the great upheavals of the 20th Century and no day was more burnt into his memory than the battle of Cable Street, which he witnessed at first hand in 1936 when he was 15. Cable Street was a street I walked down to get to church on a Sunday morning but it was a street that I walked down politically and emotionally with Bill every time I met him.

“It was a day when we all stood together, see. We all stood together against the blackshirts. I saw them – the Irish dockers and the Jews all linking arms to make sure they wouldn’t pass”.

Bill was passionate in his atheism but more passionate to describe himself as a Jewish atheist and even more passionate when lecturing people about what God wanted us to do to make the world a better place. He would come into the chaplaincy regularly when he was in college and march straight into the chapel and start muttering incantations.

It turned out that these were yiddish curses against the Tory government of the day from whom he believed most evil came. I remember the particular obscenity of the curse that he had devised in which he translated Virginia Bottomley’s name into Yiddish and back again into English. He said with a grin that his yiddish curses were more powerful than our domesticated Christian blessings.

But he was a blessing himself. Countless students learned of the great movements of modern history from someone who had witnessed them. Whether it was formal lectures or tours of Jack the Ripper’s London, Bill was eloquent, passionate, angry and fabulously funny all at the same time. The rise of UKIP must have horrified him. But he taught and inspired a generation who will fight them and win.

Bill didn’t have much time for a lot of religious leaders but he was never more at home than standing in chapel preaching, really preaching, against poverty, racism and fascism.

Bill didn’t believe in a far off heaven. He was proud of the struggle for an earthly heaven where all will be fed and housed.

And I’m proud to have known him.

4 responses to “To be an Episcopalian is not to be respectable”

Eamonn

23/08/2017

Superb take on this difficult story from Matthew, and the other stories of Jonathan Daniels and Robin Angus. Thank you.

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Philip Almond

23/08/2017

But Mark records Jesus as saying, ‘Permit first to be satisfied the children;for it is not good to take the bread of the children and to the dogs to throw[it]’. That word ‘first’ tells us that Jesus already knows that there will be a ‘second’, that his ministry will extend beyond the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

These words of Jesus also suggest that ‘I was not sent except to the lost sheep of [the] house of Israel’ refers to this phase of his ministry.

Also, if the following incidents were earlier in time than the incident of the healing of the woman’s daughter, your

‘In that moment, she seems to know his mission to save the whole world considerably better than he did. And she changes him. He thinks again’.

is disproved.

Luke’s account (chapter 4) of the visit to Nazareth, because Jesus’ reference to Naaman and the widow of Sidon suggest that he was aware that his mission, like that of Elijah and Elisha, would extend beyond the covenant people.
Matthew’s account (chapter 8) of the healing of the centurion’s servant, giving rise to Jesus’ ‘And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven. But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth’.
Jesus’ explanation (Matthew 13) of the parable of the tares of the field: the one sowing the good seed is the Son of man; the field is the world (my emphasis); the good seed are the sons of the kingdom; the tares are the sons of the evil one.

What are your reasons for being sure that these three events are later in time than the healing of the woman’s daughter?

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Martin Reynolds

23/08/2017

We do not live for the poor, we do not live with the poor, we do not identify with the poor.
We wear silk vestment adorn ourselves with elegant titles and eat at the best tables and are welcome in the highest corridors of power.

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Sarah Lawton

29/11/2017

Kelvin, thank you for your email today pointing back to this sermon. I appreciate your pointing to Jonathan Myrick Daniels, who was a friend of my parents. My mother always felt she had a part in his death, I think, because she was one of the organizers of the seminary group that responded to the Rev. Dr. King’s call for church leaders to go to Selma, and it was she who persuaded Jon to go. One of her last acts on this Earth was to help put his name on our Church’s calendar (first reading, General Convention 1991). But then, we are baptized into Christ and therefore each other, which is I think what you are saying in this sermon. That means we are implicated in the ills of this world but also share in Jon’s martyrdom. We live in the hope of resurrection but the way there is through the utter scandal of the cross. Jon in his latter months of life rejected theologies of complacency and also self-righteousness as he committed himself to a ministry of presence.

Martin Reynolds, there is no question our particular church tradition has some history with money and power. My own little congregation identifies strongly with the poor, the folks sleeping rough right outside our doors, and the immigrant families of our neighborhood. Our Sunday services can be a little chaotic as a consequence of the varieties of folks in various states of mind who come on a Sunday, but our spiritual life as a congregation is pretty good; it honestly feels like a gift to be there in the communion circle. We’re a longtime LGBT congregation, so I think it’s part of who we are to have economic diversity and also a rejection of traditional social masks. We’re also deeply rooted in prayer, which is how we got through worst of the AIDS years and all the funerals.

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