What is in Kelvin's Head?

Sermon preached on 8 November 2015

08/11/2015

We stood at the top of the top of the hill looking down the Clyde looking past Bowling and on towards Dumbarton.

No ships. No boats. The slight eeriness of the empty estuary.

“And that’s where the fire was” she said. “The VE day fire”. And over there – behind the house, that must be where the shelter was.

Earlier this year, I had taken her on a bit of a nostalgia trip. We went back to Clydebank where she grew up and had a look around the house in which her family had lived. It is still there, something which seems remarkable in itself.

“That must be where the shelter was”. Something about that statement made me start to do the sums in my head to work out how old she was. “But you were only a baby”, I said. You’d been evacuated anyway.

“No I hadn’t” she said. “I was there. I was in the shelter all night. I was in the shelter and mum, your grandmother held me all night as the bombs were falling. Oh yes, I was there. I was only evacuated to Kilmarnock after that, when the town couldn’t be lived in.”

I have always been aware that every congregation that I have ever worked in has had people in it who had first-hand experience of war – both recent and in the past. However, I’d somehow never managed to clock the fact that my mother had been there when the bombs were falling. Quite how I’ve made it to nearly 50 without knowing that, I don’t know. But sometimes stories about war come back long after the event and it isn’t unusual I guess to simply not talk about what had happened.

“Well, who else was there then?” I asked. (more…)

7 responses to “The Archbishop, the gays and their sins”

fakepete

25/02/2015

Nicely put, he seems to feel entitled to freedom from criticism. It’s a censorious attitude that I thought the CoE put behind it when most of us learned to laugh at the Life of Brian and it is contradicted by the church’s own call to participation in democracy.

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Andrew

25/02/2015

The poor old Arch. He really is an old school establishment man who cant really understand where the deference has gone. The Green Report, the other Reports on the ‘future’ of the Church of England and the ‘Conversations’ all speak of a deeply controlling man who is deeply frustrated that there is no control to be had any more. When the split comes he will probably want to make what is left into a more confessional and defined group (the evangelicals have always wanted that) but I suspect the Church that will emerge will be more liberal than he likes even if it is outwardly more evangelical and enthusiast than the Church of England has been for a very long time

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1. fakepete
  
  27/02/2015
  
  @Andrew I’d switch that around. Justin Welby is someone who does not show deference to what has in Western society become The New Orthodoxy (definitions on a postcard please), this is why he provokes such puzzlement, and thus consternation and anger.
  
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2. Daniel Berry, NYC
  
  03/03/2015
  
  Andrew, I don’t see how that can be, really: he hasn’t the pedigree to be “an old school establishment man.” He’s a late vocation who had been a high-power figure in the corporate world–meaning he’s undoubtedly accustomed to having the last word.
  
  As to his attitudes toward gay people, I’m disgusted with him and the many others who accept the natural sciences’ contradiction of bible, but just can’t bring themselves to the same place with the behavioral and social sciences, and even with medicine itself–ignoring along the way that homosexuality is found in upward of 450 animal species besides our own. Otherwise they seem perfectly comfortable with dispensing with the savagery found in much of “holy scripture.”
  
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Dharma Nicodemus Cuthbert

26/02/2015

I love the line “who am I to judge them for their sins, if they have sins” makes us seem angelic compared to those who have children. Only one problem we, according to the bible commit sin just by being together. Does this mean that he is disagreeing with orthodoxy, and we are not sinning by being together.
God bless all and may his words of love bring more, troubled, souls to him.

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1. JCF
  
  28/02/2015
  
  “Only one problem we, according to the bible commit sin just by being together.”
  
  I *think* you meant “according to false translations/interpretations of the bible…” (or should have meant).
  
  “Being together”: can we call sex, “sex”? If not, why not? [And can we call marital sex (same- or opposite-sex) “marital sex”?]
  
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Daniel Berry, NYC

03/03/2015

best line for me:

You say that stuff and you are going to get people observing that there’s a lot more archbishops who claim that gay people are their friends than gay people who claim archbishops are their friends.

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