What is in Kelvin's Head?

“If God shows up in the guise of a tyrant, no-one should wear his uniform” – Sermon 15 October 2023

17/10/2023

That was quite the wedding banquet…

So, there’s an Ox roast going on over there and the fatted calfs have been slaughtered and cooked. There doesn’t seem to be a vegetarian option at this wedding, but that’s the least of our worries at the moment. For the host has taken umbrage because not enough guests have turned up. Not only that, but the guests have seized the Big Man’s people and beaten them up and killed them. And so he sends in the heavies, destroys the murderers and burns the town down.

Now that’s quite a wedding.

Even for Glasgow, that’s quite a wedding.

This little story has been around for two thousand years and my guess is that it has never been particularly easy to hear read aloud and has never been particularly easy to preach on.

And in the version of the story that Matthew offers us, Jesus isn’t prepared to let it rest. He keeps adding bits that make it all the more difficult.

The king, the host of the wedding banquet sends out additional invitations. Go into the streets and invite everyone you see, he says. And the slaves go out and gather in everyone they could find, both the bad and the good.

And lots of preachers have seized on that moment in the story as a moment of grace. Everyone gets an invitation in the end! Hurrah! It must be about how inclusive and expansive the love of God is after all.

But Jesus goes on…

Someone turned up not wearing a wedding robe and the Big Man saw him and wasn’t mightily impressed. How do you get in looking like that? He says.

And he looks to his enforcers and says, “bind him hand and foot and put him oot!” And off he goes to be thrown into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

The sound of the gnashing of teeth is a terrible thing and I suspect that Jesus could foresee (or forehear) the sound of thousands of preachers for thousands of years, collectively gnashing their teeth at the prospect of interpreting this story.

That inclusive expansive benevolent host never appears in this story, does he?

So, what are we to make of it?

As I think about what I think about this parable this week, I’m reminded of a reaction I once had to a well known painting.

I was at an interview for something in Keble College, Oxford. And I popped into the chapel there, which is very fine. Now, that chapel contains the painting called the Light of the World by William Holman Hunt. It is a painting that a lot of you will be able to imagine. Jesus stands outside in the darkness knocking on a door that is behind a patch of briers and brambles. He wears a crown of thorns and wears a long silk robe and carries a lamp from which the light shines.

Now, I know that painting is an object of devotion to so many people – there’s queues to see it still. But I remember looking at this spooky depiction of Jesus and instantly thinking, well if Jesus comes knocking on my door in the night looking as weird and as creepy as that, then I know I’m never going to open the door from the inside. Indeed, I’d look for ways to keep him shut out.

The way we picture God matters. Matters enormously.

Going back to the parable, I think my problems start right at the beginning if we presume that the Big Man, the King is the same as the God whom we worship.

For I know I’m not much interested in a God who is involved in slavery. I’m not much interested in a God who engages in vengeance. I’m not much interested in a God who provokes acts of terror and burns down whole towns in his anger. I’m not much interested in a God who compels people to come to feast on the threat of violence if you don’t turn up. I’m not much interested in a God whom you have to dress up for. And I’m not much interested in a God who consigns people to hell.

And I find myself reaching for things to prop up against the door. I’m not letting that image of God anywhere near my spiritual life. I’d rather set up a barricade against him.

So, what do I make of it as I read it today.

Well, I recently spent nearly fifteen years of my life trying to get access to weddings for those who were told that they were not welcome at the feast. And perhaps it is that which sharpens the way I think about this little story today.

As I mull it over, it just doesn’t work for me to see the Big Man as God. The God I know doesn’t behave like this.

(Though the God that some people seem to think they know seems to do far too often).

Instead I find myself thinking of the ways in which religious communities try to get over the message to people that they are welcome at the feast of life.

For the experience of preparing a banquet and then no-one showing up is all too familiar in many parts of the church these days.

And the response of many Christians is grumpy. “We put on everything for you” they shout into the darkness and still no-one turns up.

But people don’t turn up to the feasts that religious people put on for perfectly good reasons. Religion (including our religion) has been responsible for acts of terror and violence. Religious people have lashed out through the centuries at those who are different and lashed out at those who are indifferent too.

God’s mission in the world is a mission of love but God hasn’t always had terribly good representatives on earth.

There are still plenty of people who instead of receiving the news that God’s love is expansive and generous and wonderful, have received the news either that they were never invited or that they wouldn’t fit in even if they did turn up.

Going back to the parable and taking another look, I find myself reading the story of the man who turned up not wearing the right robe as the story of an act of defiance.

When either God or the church gets dressed up in stories in tyrannical garb, we should not wear the uniform but resist.

We need to read the story of the man being thrown out into the darkness then in the context of Jesus’s other tales which seem to paint a picture of a God who is on the side of the victim, the God who weeps when the terrorist reaches for the gun, the God whose heart breaks when war seems inevitable, the God who is on the side of the oppressed. The God whose only response is to keep on loving much those who need love most.

There is nowhere we can go where God is not present.

There are different ways of understanding the place of darkness and exclusion. Some would imagine God consigning people to that place for all eternity. But there are other ways of imagining eternity open to us from scripture. Maybe hell is of this earth and is our own making. Certainly, some will be living it today.

The God I believe in wipes every tear from every eye, reconciles the seemingly unreconcilable and proclaims a kingdom of justice and joy. The invitation to the feast from such a God is an invitation of love not compulsion or violence.

Such a God is a God of peace and joy and love.

For such a God, I’ll open the door.

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
    
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    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.
      
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      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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