What is in Kelvin's Head?

The sun comes up it’s a new day dawning

13/06/2015

At about 4.30 this morning I found myself awake, wide awake in my hotel room in Edinburgh. The sun was streaming into the room despite the curtains trying to block it out. And my first thought was words that we sang at morning prayer yesterday in the General Synod meeting.

The sun comes up, it’s a new day dawning.
It’s time to sing Your song again.
Whatever may pass, and whatever lies before me,
Let me be singing when the evening comes.

And I realised for the first time the impact of what happened during the synod meeting yesterday.

What we did was set out the pathway that we are on to be able to have the chance of allowing same-sex couples to be married in church.

I’m delighted, of course that we achieved that. No one would expect me to say anything else. But it was a day of much more than getting what I wanted – it was a day when those who disagree with me were kind and generous. People who were hurting were unfailingly godly and I see in them the love of Christ.

It was perhaps the first day I’ve spent at any synod when I couldn’t predict what would happen. There were many speeches that surprised me. Several folk whom I expected to speak against what I hoped for, spoke about their journey to a new understanding of sexuality. We witnessed one almost damascene conversion. And one of the most prominent people in the church came out as a settled married bisexual whom though now married to his wife had previously loved a man. And the thing was, that wasn’t the most talked about thing of the day. It was just something we learned that we didn’t already know.

At the end of the day, we made some strikingly clear decisions. We are moving towards removing the doctrinal definition of marriage from Canon Law that was placed there in 1980. This will then allow a move to enable the church to nominate those, and only those, who wish to celebrate marriages for same-sex couples to be able to do so. This may now happen in summer 2017.

It seems glacial to those of us who want change. It will seem terrifyingly fast to those who don’t.

But the glacier is moving. That is now undeniable. The vote to instruct the Faith and Order Board to prepare the new legislation was 110 in favour to 9 against.

Along the way we also decided not to go down the route of allowing Civil Partnerships to be registered in church. We’re going for marriage being possible for gay and lesbian couples.

Once upon a time I’d have leapt at the chance of getting Civil Partnerships in church. Now I hope for something immeasurably better.

There was drama yesterday at synod. There was passion and there was pain. But there was also love.

Within minutes of the vote being announced I saw someone predicting on a US website that three of our churches would leave the Scottish Episcopal Church over this and take 40% of our membership with them. It will be news for those churches that they represent that proportion of the membership of the SEC. Notwithstanding the strength of those particular churches they don’t represent anything near that percentage.

In any case, one of those churches which is near where I live is simply not of one mind about these things. The rector of another told us of the gay folk in his congregation and how clear it was that they were welcome to marriage preparation classes. The rectors of those churches tried to bring in the possibility of opening marriage to same-sex couples by a different route to the one we eventually chose. That was costly and generous of them all.

Today I awake to a new church. I believe what I believed yesterday morning – that it is the love of Christ that can hold Christians together much more effectively than a definition of marriage.

Yesterday though, I saw it happen.

For all Your goodness I’ll keep on singing,
Ten thousand reasons for my heart to find.
Bless the Lord, O my soul, O my soul,
Worship God’s holy name.
Sing like never before, O my soul.
I’ll worship Your holy name.

8 responses to “More sermons”

ryan

25/07/2008

Listened to one of the sermons (the wife for Isaac one) and it struck me that the one thing all proper episcopal preachers that I’ve heard have in common is an attractive voice. Is this taught at theological college, or are prospective ordinands vetted, Simon Cowell on X Factor style?

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kelvin

25/07/2008

You are too kind Ryan. And the idea that people at theological college should be taught anything to do with preaching is delightfully charming.

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morag

25/07/2008

just read the kingfisher sermon,you really do have a beautiful way with words and imagery.I believe God is with us every day.I was walking with my dog in Kelvingrove park the other night and in the pond standing quite still and majestic was a large heron.He looked magnificent but nobody else seemed to notice they just walked on by.God is definitely in my local park,Victoria.There is a sort of semi wild section of large yellow Peace roses there and their scent is truly heaven “scent”I love to sit theredrinking it in and have quiet thoughts with God.This web page you have is truly unique and it is wonderful to come across someone in the church who so obviously has a living ,loving relationship with God

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David |daveed|

26/07/2008

And the idea that people at theological college should be taught anything to do with preaching is delightfully charming.

May I beg to differ, at least for this side of the pond.

Both of the seminaries which I attended in the USA, had a department with professors dedicated to teaching homiletics & worship. At Perkins School of Theology, SMU, we took two required semesters, which included writing weekly sermons to be delivered in class for critique by both professors and classmates. Each semester we also had three sermons which were videotaped at staggered points in the class for us to be able to witness and have record of our own improvements.

I was even asked to preach one of my three in my native Spanish and was critiqued by the hispanic community, staff & students at Perkins.

Preaching and Worship are pretty standard fare at seminaries in the USA & Canada.

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kelvin

26/07/2008

My apologies, David. I’d forgotten that we had gone global.

I would say that I learned a lot about liturgy and worship during my training, much of it from other students. I don’t think there was much more than 15 minutes devoted to homiletics in all my training.

I think that the theory was that this would be done whilst on placements in congregations. Although one can learn a lot in such placements, I think that preaching is something that everyone can always learn to do a bit better and that the church should not be shy of trying to teach.

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ryan

26/07/2008

I’m always curious as to whether preachers write out a full script of a sermon, actor giving a reading style, or if there is an element of improvisation. A 60 minute sermon,at average speaking speed, works out at 6,000 words which is surely a lot to write out in full each week.And what happens if there are pastoral crises that prevent completing the writing of a sermon? Do you guys have a folder of back-up material for such occasions? Are you allowed to plagiarise or is that a big a vice as it is in academia?

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kelvin

26/07/2008

Thanks Ryan. Those are good questions.

First of all, no-one in their right mind preaches for 60 minutes in the UK, do they? I think you will find on listening to mine that you get about 12 minutes. I think that if you are a regular preacher and you can’t say what you want to say in St Mary’s in 15 minutes you’ve probably started to preach next week’s sermon a week early. My recent one about dating strategies was just over 10, and there was a lot packed in!

The readings that we use come round in a three year cycle so quite often one may have as a starting point what was said three years ago or six years ago. Using a common lectionary also means that a lot of people are preaching on the same thing at the same time and there are a lot of websites with emergency resources and other people’s ideas.

I’d say that most preachers use other people’s ideas. Often it is nice to acknowledge them. Since putting all mine online, I’d say that I use other people’s material much less. I do sometimes use things that I’ve used before and in other contexts. If it was worth saying once, it might be worth saying again. Again, however, putting it online makes that kind of thing more risky now. They might have heard the jokes before.

In a good week, I will have been thinking about the lectionary readings all through the week even through the pastoral events that come along. They feed into it somehow.

Lots of my influences come from people I encountered when I was reading Divinity at St Andrew’s University. At the time I learned a lot from a prominent feminist theologian and have since learnt the importance of the Liberation Theologians that people were trying to get me to appreciate. At the time, it bored me silly. Now it is the stuff of life.

They key is to develop a range of ways of reading the Bible. A repertoire of styles.

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David |daveed|

27/07/2008

Ryan, there are many styles, and we all have to find which of them is a best fit for us personally. I know a few who preach from the barest of notes on a 3 x 5 card. Others who read verbatim from a type written manuscript. I think the majority of us type a manuscript and refer to it, however, certainly not slavishly, leaving room to expand or alter “as the Spirit moves.”

The axiom I was taught by both John Holbert and Marjorie Procter-Smith was that if you preach more than 15 minutes, you do not know what you are talking about.

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