What is in Kelvin's Head?

Sermon – preached on Valentine’s Day/Lent 1

14/02/2016

So. It is Valentine’s Day and the church bids us to go with Jesus into the desert.

Well, that’s the story of my love life. But what are we to think today? How are we to deal with this story of Jesus being tempted in the desert?

Jesus gets led in the desert, we are told. (And by whom are we told this odd story? – for there was no-one else there but him). And there he is tempted three times.

Firstly tempted to turn stones into bread for himself.

Secondly tempted to accept worldly power in exchange for worshipping the Tempter himself.

The third to doubt God and put himself at risk in doing so.

The other night I found myself at the theatre sitting next to someone who had a huge slogan written on his T Shirt and every time he leaned forwards I got to read it.

In huge gothic letters it said – “Worship Satan – Cuddle Kittens”.

I’m not entirely sure what the motivation is for wearing such a slogan. (Mind, I guess a lot of people can’t work out the motivation people have for wearing the badges I think up but they keep on selling all the same).

In our modern world, we have such complex issues of identity and personality that we are prepared to have words emblazoned onto our clothing or pinned to our lapels or tattooed right into our skin.

“Worship Satan – Cuddle Kittens” – though? What’s that all about.

I suppose it is a way of trivialising all that religion offers in terms of speaking honestly about the world in which we find ourselves.

Does it really matter whom we worship. I rather think it does.

Jesus seemed to think so too.

Well, so much for Jesus’s desert experience. What are the great temptations that the Great Tempter dangles in front of him as he wanders through the deserts of this world in the form of the body of Christ today – you and me.

I think there are maybe still three great temptations.

The first is to think that sexual sins are virtues and sexual virtues are sins.

The more I find I have to campaign for gay Christian couples to be able to get married in the light of day, the more I think that the rows over it are one of the great tricks of the Great Tempter today.

If we are all squabbling about something so gentle and good as letting God’s people get married within God’s eyes then for a whole generation, God’s people have given up the chance to speak sense to society where sexism still allows women to be treated as being of lesser worth than men – watch 30 women giggling about for one man’s attention on Take Me Out on the tellybox if you doubt it. The faster we sort ourselves out on same-sex marriage, the faster we can have something powerful to say about the inadequacies of sex and relationship education in the education system and the faster we can find something hopeful to say in the midst of the supercharged insanity of an online dating world where sex is only a click (or indeed 200 yards) away.

The second modern temptation is to think that the world revolves only around ourselves. If ever there was a Western Temptation it is this one. However, modern forms of communication don’t quite let us get away with that. When we see refugees on the news or see places where war is a present reality, we cannot escape facing the reality that the world doesn’t just consist of people like us and doesn’t happen to revolve around our experience. We can push the off button and fall to the Tempter’s tricks by thinking it all goes away when the screen goes blank – but God has put a conscience in each one of us for good reason – a conscience that we can train and nourish and feed and Lent isn’t a bad time to think about doing so.

The third is to think we are immortal.

On Wednesday evening, again and again, Cedric and I put ashes on people’s heads with some variation of the words: “Remember you are mortal, from dust you came and to dust you will return – turn away from sin and believe in the gospel”.

One forehead after another.

“Remember you are mortal, from dust you came and to dust you will return – turn away from sin and believe in the gospel”.

No doubt some find the repetition of those words rather morbid. They are not meant to be. They are a simple reality check. We are mortal and we don’t know what lies ahead.

A friend of mine uses those words as part of her prayers at night – repeating them again and again on a string of prayer beads.

“Remember you are mortal, from dust you came and to dust you will return – turn away from sin and believe in the gospel”.

What I didn’t know on Wednesday, as I worked my way through the rosary of foreheads with the same words was that someone whom I’ve worked with in the diocese would be dead by Friday night.

And when someone dies suddenly like that it is a shock.

The reality of Ash Wednesday is not to bring that shock to bear but to wake us up from wherever our spirits slumber and live life to the full. We know not what our tomorrows hold so we’d better make the best of today is what those words are all about.

Lent is for teaching us how to live, not how to die.

For some things are worth living well for.

And that take us back to Valentine, funnily enough.

Valentine, whose relics are said, oddly enough to rest in the Gorbals – in this great City of Love.

Not much is known about Valentine from contemporaneous stories. Instead, all we’ve got to go on are medieval myths – though we mustn’t be tempted by the Tempter to disregard such things for they so often contain the wisdom of the ages.

Valentine whom we know today as a providing for a great Retail Feast is commemorated as someone who didn’t just life for something, he died for it too.

One of the medieval sources suggests that Valentine’s great crime was helping Christians out and doing so in a particular way. He helped them to get married at a time when the authorities wouldn’t allow it.

All of a sudden, Valentine seems rather contemporary to me.

Having been arrested, he became something of a favourite pet to the emperor Claudius who was entertained by him. But only so much. When Valentine started trying to convert the emperor he ended up being martyred. Beaten by clubs and beheaded in Rome.

Maybe Lent and Valentine’s day tell us the same thing but in different ways.

Some things are worth living for. Worth living well for.

And some things are worth dying for too.

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

41 responses to “The Columba Declaration”

Edward Andrews

11/02/2016

As Anglicans get down to the important issue of the niceties of Theology, lets get into the broad brush situation.
The relationships between the Churches of the Celtic tradition and the Southern tradition have been fraught since the 7th Century (Whitby). Part of the whole question surrounding the war of Independence (and before with King David was teh independence of the Scottish Church.
The irony is that the present attempt is to bring the Churches of the united Kingdom together may well blow back on them. While the Kirk today doesn’t mean much in Scotland the most secular part of the UK I’m not convinsed that playing footise over Bishops is going to impress the older members – the ones who voted No.
The fact is that the Scottish Episcopal Church has the Anglican franchise in Scotland. It is an authentic Scottish Church (especially if you ignore the instances when it has gone to England for Episcopal ordination.) and to negotiate over its head about something so sensitive it at the best discourteous.
Those of the reformed tradition don’t get wound up by the antics of a few Episcopalians. We seek whatever degree of true unity is available to us, but do not see the need for uniformity. I spent some very pleasant years as a guest of the Scottish Episcopal Church when the climate of the Kirk became unattractive to me, and am grateful for the table fellowship which I received.
The site of two big boys presuming to set things up is not pleasing. For the information of those who want to get up tight about the real presence, that is what the reformed tradition believes, we are Calvinists not followers of Zwingli. I am not going to seek to discuss which Greer philosopher we get our understanding of existence from.

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Father David

12/02/2016

Father Ron: let us not forget that the great Arthur Michael Ramsey was born an ecumenical baby. His maternal Grandfather was Vicar of Horbling in Lincolnshire and his paternal Grandfather was a Congregationalist Minister. His Anglican Grandfather baptised him and when in adult years he visited Horbling parish church he was deeply moved when standing by the font – the place where this great man of God began his Christian pilgrim journey. However, as a child he worshipped with his family at the Congregationalist church in Cambridge. To the great benefit of the Church of England and the Anglican Communion – the kind of High Jinks that took place next door at Little St. Mary’s proved to be an attractive magnet and so the pull of Anglo-Catholicism brought to us a spiritual giant and a contender (in company with William Temple) for the title of the greatest Archbishop of Canterbury of the 20th century and a man who yearned and longed for Christian Unity.
Edward Andrews: Even as we all long and hope for the unity of all Christians your words are wise when you point to unity not uniformity.

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Keith Barber

12/02/2016

Cynic I may be, but my first response is to ask what is the hidden agenda. For I’m pretty certain there will be one, whether it’s about trying to create an ecclesiastical bulwark against disintegration of the UK or get ++Welby an ally or two in the aftermath of the huge and hostile reaction to the Anglican Primates’ decision to punish TEC (sorry Kelvin) for its moves towards inclusion of LGBT people.

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1. Jeremy Bates
  
  13/02/2016
  
  Or perhaps it’s like the Easter-calendar announcement–a convenient way of changing the subject, at Synod and elsewhere.
  
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Father Ron Smith

12/02/2016

Whatever the motivation for this ‘secret’ accord with the Church of Scotland; simple courtesy would require that the Church of England promoters consult with their Episcopally governed equivalent in Scotia.

Another point is this; do the Presbyerians realise that they may have signed up to the catholic premise of recognition of the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament of the Holy Communion? Are they happy with that?

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1. Edward Andrews
  
  12/02/2016
  
  Well actually the Presbyterians believe “Worthy receivers, outwardly partaking of the visible elements, in this sacrament, do then also, inwardly by faith, really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally but spiritually, receive and feed upon, Christ crucified, and all benefits of His death: the body and blood of Christ being then, not corporally or carnally, in, with, or under the bread and wine; yet, as really, but spiritually, present to the faith of believers in that ordinance, as the elements themselves are to their outward senses.” You will see the word real is there. Don’t know what the 39 articles say you believe.
  Those of us who are big on the real presence use the Platonic rather than the Aristotelian understanding of reality.
  
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  1. Father Ron Smith
    
    12/02/2016
    
    Not believers, then, in con-substantiation? Freely translated as bread and wine ‘together with’ the Body and Blood of Christ? Note, not the more literal trans-substantiation, which would nean the disappearance of the bread and wine. (although as some of my more scientific friends would say, this is a tautology.
    
    What all must agree on, though, is that some members of the Church of England, and many of its constituent partner Churches of the Anglican Communion, do have a problem with the ‘Real Presence’ – a reality that, for me, and I suspect most Anglican Catholics, means that the substance of the bread and wine consecrated at the Eucharist is truly “The Body and Blood of Christ” in accordance with the dominical instruction: “This IS my Body, my Blood” (Not, you will notice, “this REPRESENTS my Body, my Blood”). ‘A Sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’ – this saying sums it all up pretty well, I think
    
    Reply
    1. Kelvin
      
      12/02/2016
      
      I think it is time to draw the discussion about the real presence to a close on this comment thread. It is hardly the main point and I’ve never ever known a comment thread about transubstantiation to be constructive.
      
      Comments on the Columba Declaration welcome. Comments trying to explain what transubstantiation *really* means – not so much.
      
      Reply
      1. Edward Andrews
        
        12/02/2016
        
        Thank you Kelvin. As I see it the C of E has come poaching in your preserves. This is wrong and unhelpful. If there were going to be Anglican/Presbyterian dialogue the SEC should be the lead player. I have my own problems with the declaration as a Member of the Church of Scotland who seeks an end to the United Kingdom. However as a Catholic Christian I am in solidarity with my SEC brothers and sisters who have been left out of the loop. Both the Cof E synod and the Kirk’ General Assembly should reject the document, but I don’t suppose that they will.
Augur Pearce

16/02/2016

A contribution to the ‘establishment’ discussion: In my book the terms ‘establish’ and ‘Church of England’ both have more than one meaning. ‘Establish’, for example, can mean ‘set up, bring into existence’ (sense E1), or it can mean ‘endow, privilege’ (sense E2).

Most people who use it of the C of E use it in sense E2, and they understand the C of E (in what I might call sense C3) as an association with its own rules, distinct from the English nation but privileged by law in various ways (with some concomitant obligations).

In fact I think this describes the C of S position fairly well, but is quite wrong as regards the C of E. The C of E (I contend) is not distinct from the kingdom of England, it is that kingdom ‘wearing its spiritual hat’ (sense C1). England, as church, has various spiritual responsibilities to discharge, and in order to do so, it establishes (=creates; sense E1), by its law, a complex of specialist institutions, offices, rules, and assets which itself becomes known derivatively as the C of E (sense C2).

One clear example of how the C of E (in sense C1) and the C of S have been differently understood from very early times is found in comparing Richard Hooker’s well-known words ‘There is not any man of the Church of England, but the same man is also a member of the commonwealth, nor any man a member of the commonwealth which is not also of the Church of England…’ with the Church Act 1567, declaring those ‘quha outher gainsayis the word of the Evangell ressavit and apprevit as the heidis of the Confessioun of Faith professit in Parliament of befoir in the yeir of God 1560 … or that refusis the participatioun of the haly sacramentis as thay ar now ministrat, to be na memberis of the said Kirk within this realme now presently professit’.

The Church of England, in short, is simply England; the Church of Scotland is a privileged sectional group.

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1. Seph
  
  17/02/2016
  
  If this be so, it strikes me as uncomfortably caesaropapist. This may be one of the things that makes me uncomfortable when I am down south and find myself in a C of E church.
  
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