What is in Kelvin's Head?

  • Guest Post: Why I am an Episcopalian – Christine McIntosh

    In this Guest Post, Christine McIntosh reflects on why she is an Episcopalian. Chris lives in Dunoon, doon the watter from Glasgow and blogs at www.blethers.blogspot.com

    “Oh, so you’ve said goodbye to reason, then?” Maybe I had. At the age of 27 I had just informed my father that I was going to be confirmed in the Cathedral of The Isles – not, I add, because I thought my parents might want to be there, but to explain why I would not be celebrating my 28th birthday on the actual day. Nominally Presbyterian, but not having had any truck with church since the age of 10, I had encountered the beauty, the mystery and the music of the Piskie church on Cumbrae, where I had met the old Dean, George James Cosmo Douglas, while singing Evensong for a week with our quartet. When he died at the age of 84, we sang the Kontakion for the departed over his coffin – and that was it. I was clobbered. That’s what it felt like – an explosion of certainty, followed by consternation. Suddenly it was all true, this stuff I’d been singing and chanting, and I didn’t know what to do next. The only person I could discuss it with was dead. I was lost before I’d begun. (I ended up being prepared for confirmation by Iain MacKenzie, the Rector of Holy Trinity, Dunoon, and the rest is history – why else would I have moved there from Glasgow?)

    Now, all that reflects the emotional state of someone who has just lost a friend for the first time – for friends are different from family. I was at my first funeral, ever. I was singing wonderful music in a state of emptiness, in a numinous place. I reckon God took a chance while the barricades were down. But the manner of my conversion gives the clue to why I’m a Pisky rather than anything else. In that early experience, back in the late 60s and early 70s, I found the mysterious element that still makes belief possible – the silence that allows the other to take over, the refusal to pin things down and thereby diminish them. That is why, for all the joy of an exuberant Cursillo service or the happiness children can bring to a church, I still need time to be silent, space to avoid distraction.

    Music, then, and liturgy with all its poetic possibilities, and room for questioning and unknowing, and open-ness to change – these keep me the Piskie I became in 1973. And as my entire Piskie life has been lived in the Diocese of Argyll and The Isles, I’ll add one more thing. In Argyll, there is always a sense of life lived on the edge – the edge of Scotland, the edge of Europe, but also the edge of a precarious journey, a ridgewalk through faith with the winds of God blowing round my head. There is no room for complacency in the church I know and love. And that suits me just fine.

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8 responses to “More sermons”

  1. ryan Avatar
    ryan

    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?

    Reply
  2. kelvin Avatar
    kelvin

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

    Reply
  3. morag Avatar
    morag

    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

    Reply
  4. David |daveed| Avatar
    David |daveed|

    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.

    Reply
  5. kelvin Avatar
    kelvin

    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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  6. ryan Avatar
    ryan

    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?

    Reply
  7. kelvin Avatar
    kelvin

    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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  8. David |daveed| Avatar
    David |daveed|

    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.

    Reply

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