What is in Kelvin's Head?

Sermon – Reading the Signs of the Times

24/08/2019

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

One of the nicest things that I’ve been at this week was the annual dinner that the Shia Muslim community put on to celebrate Eid-al-adha. The festival of the sacrifice.

Islam has the same story that Christians and Jews share, remembering Abraham being asked to sacrifice his son, only for God to provide a sheep to be sacrificed at the last minute. The only difference being that our Muslim friends speak of the son saved from being sacrificed as Ishmael – the son the Arab people believe themselves to be descended from. Christians and Jews tell the story about Isaac – the one they believe themselves to be descended from. Same story. Different son.

The feast of the sacrifice is the biggest festival in the Islamic year and coincides with the days when the largest crowds are completing the hajj pilgrimage in Mecca.

Christians don’t keep any festival over that story. It crops up in the lectionary but by and large we don’t particularly celebrate it.

In Islam it is a day for celebration. For sharing food with those who have less than you do and for partying.

And in Scotland, the Shia community has developed its own tradition of having a banquet for Eid and this week I was invited.

Now, I always say yes when the Shias invite me to a party as I know that there will be all kinds of interesting people there.

One of the interesting paradoxes of life is that though the ecumenical movement is in the doldrums, one of the places where I get to meet Christians from other Christian traditions is when Muslims invite us all together for food.

And thus I found myself enjoying a very good curry and sitting next to someone who runs a Roman Catholic agency dedicated to eliminating poverty across the world and someone else working on ecological concerns and theology.

It was fascinating to hear them talk to one another. And frightening too.

The first people to suffer from Climate Change are the first people to suffer every time something happens to the world – the poor, the needy, the hungry.

At the dinner table, these two people had much in common to talk about.

I found myself asking one of them what theological ideas he was working on at the moment when thinking about ecological theology.

He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Well all we have to do these days is reach for the apocalyptic – that’s what describes the world we live in now”

And that sense of reaching for the apocalyptic has stayed with me all week and stays with me as I read this morning’s gospel.

There’s more than a hint of the apocalyptic about it.

Firstly the claim from Jesus himself that he will pit father against son and daughter against mother and all the rest.

I see Christ as a peacemaker but he didn’t see himself like that.

Reading this text after two divisive referendums and paying even a passing glance at social media, we can see all kinds of people who once got on, at odds with one another. How common it has become to see people as being set against one another.

He also said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain’; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat’; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?

Our world is full of people who do not know how to interpret the present time.

None of us I suspect quite know how we have ended up in the world of 2019. I am amongst those who didn’t expect to see racism and antisemitism rising, acceptance of same-sex couples stalling and xenophobia becoming a major political narrative.

I just don’t know whether there were signs of the times. I do just know that I didn’t read them correctly.

And I do just know that the signs of the times when it comes to the climate are there for all to see.

“When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain’; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat’

We don’t need to be told that clouds mean rain here in the West of Scotland. But somehow we do need to comprehend that it isn’t climate change we are talking about but climate disaster.

Some faith communities have been talking about this for far longer than we have. There are thinkers in the orthodox churches who are way ahead theologically than we are.

It is looking increasingly likely that next year there will be a big climate conference in Glasgow. World leaders will (ironically) fly in from across the globe. Experts and policy makers will gather to try to find next steps in tackling the climate emergency.

If that takes place here, the churches and all people who care must be ready to speak out in the name of God for those whose voices so often go unheard – the poor of the world who need good news.

The signs of the times are all around us.

I spent Tuesday evening celebrating the feast of the sacrifice with Muslim friends.

A sense of sacrifice is inherent to protecting our world – being prepared to do without in order to save the very world in which we live.

If we are prepared to find a new ethic and a new economics of sustainability and care then God will bless us.

If we are prepared to sacrifice the very bounty and goodness of the earth for our own gain, then we face peril. And the apocalyptic won’t simply be something we reach for in order to predict what will happen next.

I believes that God loves this world and that God loves you. I believe that God loves the world and God loves me. And I believe that God’s love for the world will be expressed through both action and compassion.

The duty that Christians have in a world as perilous as this one has become is to frame our questions not by how we will benefit from the answers that we find but how our answers will benefit the poor.

God’s love is especially for the poor. And we are called to express that very same love in action.

That reading from Hebrews that we heard this morning was a great song of praise to those who have kept the faith through generations. Faith in a God of love who calls us to love.

A great cloud of witnesses – that no matter what, Christians have gone on expressing the love of God through whatever terrors faced each day.

Antisemitism. Xenophobia. Selfishness. The Climate Emergency.

We are one with the Great Cloud of Witnesses who proclaimed the love of God in their generation and acted on it.

And we will keep the faith.

God’s love is real.

And requires us to act in our day.

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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