What is in Kelvin's Head?

Remembering and Forgetting

19/11/2021

A sermon preached on 14 November 2021

We live in precedented times.

Oh yes, I know what everyone has been saying for the best part of the last two years. They’ve been saying that we live in unprecedented times.

Times we could never have imagined.

Times we could never have foreseen.

Times that were different to every time before them.

Yes, said, every newspaper and media outlet. These are unprecedented times.

But we only think that these times are unprecedented because in order to cope and survive, our species has developed ways of forgetting things alongside ways of remembering them.

I think I may already have spoken from the pulpit about the dinner that I had just before lockdown when someone connected to the debate about how to address the climate crisis said to me, “We’ve just got to turn to the apocalyptic passages in the bible – it is the apocalypse that makes most sense now”.

The gospel reading today has more than a whiff of the apocalypse about it.

Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places, there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.

It is easy to get carried away with this kind of thing. Easy to see that it predicts our own panic, our own fears, our own sense of desperation.

In my wanderings through different religious experiences before I found the practice of faith that I now have, I met the apocalyptic in several places. And prophets too sometimes – prophets of doom who could see the signs of the end times all around. And thought that bad things happened to remind people to turn to God because God is cross.

And some of them would take it far too far, trying to use all kinds on nonsense to predict the precise time and date on which the world would come to an end and Christ would return to save the saved and damn the damned.

Many of them were harmless despite their gloom. Some were trouble though.

And as I’ve grown older, I’ve learned that there’s more to be learned about God by seeing the good things in life as reasons to turn to God in thankfulness rather than seeing the bad things in life as reasons to conjure up a God wants to harm us.

God never desires our harm. Not for a moment.

We are God’s beloved. Not the object of God’s anger.

Beloved in times of war. Beloved in times of plague. Beloved in times of famine.

Beloved when we need most to be beloved.

When bad things happen they remind me now that God is good. And God loves us in the places where we are afraid most of all.

When we turn to the apocalyptic in the bible for our readings – and a lot of them come to us in the lectionary over the next few weeks, it is important to remember that we are not reading fortune cookies. These are not predictions of what’s coming next.

You can read the apocalyptic in scripture as a foretelling of your own fears if you like. But a more authentic way to read it, I think, is to read it more as an outpouring of how it felt to be the writer in desperate times. It may give us compassion for those who were desperate. It may give us compassion for those who are desperate now.

And the love of God puts down deep roots in compassionate soil.

The apocalyptic fascinates us because the human psyche finds it easy to forget where people have gone before. That’s why we sometimes need explicit calls to remember.

It feels as though our time is particularly barbaric, particularly cruel, particularly insidious.

And yet reading the apocalyptic can maybe remind us that it has often felt that way. Maybe that it has always felt that way.

Modern newsgathering and social media have particular ways of amplifying the horrors of the current age. The apocalypse comes to us in newsprint and on our phones in bite sized tweets daily, hourly, by the second.

And yet, a human being is less likely to die in battle than at any time in recorded history. Thank God.

And yet, modern science makes facing this pandemic utterly unlike facing any before. Thank God.

And yet, we have means of communicating with one another that have given us companionship and connection that we could never have dreamt of before – even allowing us to worship like this today. Thank God.

Apocalyptic writing is a tool for us not a statement of fact.

It is, and probably always was, both a statement of fear and a call to action.

When we hear wars and rumours of wars – we are called to peace.

When we hear of earthquakes and natural disasters – we are called to exercise compassion.

When we hear of destruction and devastation just around the corner – Climate Change is our most present example of a dawning apocalypse – we are called to change our ways and make change happen on a global scale. Called to love this planet. Called to exercise redeeming love.

These things are attributes of God. Peace. Compassion. Redeeming love.

We are made in the image and likeness of God. These things are hard-wired. We have them within. And we can let them roam free in this world.

The apocalyptic writing that we hear in today’s gospel and the apocalyptic writing that we see in today’s newspapers are, each alike, calls to join in God’s mission.

Peace. Compassion. Redeeming love.

For all people. For every place on earth. Forever.

Amen

5 responses to “Tanzania”

Raspberry Rabbit

31/01/2007

A bit picky, yes. Idris will no doubt correct them when he’s there.

Reply
Simon Sarmiento

01/02/2007

Umm. So Northern Ireland is part of Britain is it?
Four churches in the UK maybe.

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kelvin

01/02/2007

Well Simon, you are correct in your assumption that I was thinking of the Church of Ireland in Northern Ireland, rather than perhaps the Church of Rockall.

People who are being picky deserve to be picked up for slack talk. However, speaking as I do from the Second City of Empire, I hide behind this quote on the website for Number 10 Downing Street:

http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page823.asp

“The United Kingdom is made up of four countries: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Its full name is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Great Britain, however, comprises only England, Scotland and Wales. Great Britain is the largest island of the British Isles. Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic form the second largest island.

The UK is just under 1,000 km long from the south coast of England to the extreme north of Scotland, and is 500 km across at its widest point. It shares a single land border with the Irish Republic. Despite its relatively small size the UK boasts incredibly varied and often very beautiful scenery.

The Isle of Man and the Channel Islands are not part of the United Kingdom. They are largely self-governing with their own legislative assemblies and systems of law. But the British Government is responsible for their defence and international relations.

On this site the term ‘Britain’ is used informally to mean the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.”

I’d also refer interested parties to the Wikipedia page on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Isles_naming_dispute

I offer this topic as a free gift to Bishop David.

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Bishop David

03/02/2007

As you would expect, I am all knotted up on this one. I am a citizen of Ireland – or the Irish Republic – or the Republic of Ireland. Nor Eire – or, as many of my parishioners in Portadown would have called it [never having moved on from 1922], the ‘Free State’. Meanwhile President Mary MacAleese is often termed President of Ireland which seems to me to be as notable a piece of ‘overlooking’ as when Ian Paisley refers to the ‘people of Ulster’ [which means some of the Protestant/Unionist population of Northern Ireland] and Gerry Adams refers to the ‘Irish People’ [which means not the Protestant/Unionist population of Northern Ireland]. I like Wiki’s rather coy description of Ireland as ‘currently split’ – meaning just the most recent 85 years. Which in the context of thousands of years of British misrule in Ireland is but a blink. And finally one comes to the interesting use of the term ‘mainland’ …

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steg

04/02/2007

Must admit when I saw you were writing about primates in Tanzania I thought your blog was going to be about ape conservation………………….

In my experience people from outwith the UK confuse Britain and England a lot. And they have a point. Do you always refer to the Netherlands or sometimes to Holland even when you are refering to the non Holland bits of the Netherlands? And how do you think that makes the Friesian’s feel? And so on.

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