What is in Kelvin's Head?

  • It’s Time and It’s Today!

    Huge excitement today as the Equal Marriage bill comes to the Scottish Parliament for a final vote.

    I’ve been involved in this campaign pretty much from the beginning, speaking at Pride, marching, organising, listening, distributing materials, writing, cajoling, chatting on TV and Radio, preaching and generally getting people to think about it.

    A hugely proud day for Scotland and a campaign and a movement that I’ll never forget.

    One of the things that a lot of people won’t know is that many of the original signatures on the petition that kicked all this off came from students on campus at the University of Glasgow and many of them were gathered by members of the LGBT group at St Mary’s.

    Well, the campaign is just about over. It’s time and it’s today!

One response to “Eid, Pride and Abraham’s Sacrifice”

  1. Tim Avatar
    Tim

    As one who grew up(?) in churches leaning toward the view “it’s a tough story for a tough world, how else would God be just?” in varying degrees, I agree the face-value-narrative understanding of the story is repellant.

    One thing stood out for the first time during Sunday’s reading: the plurality in Abraham’s line – “…and we will return to you”. I’ve been idly wondering about that since.
    It doesn’t make the story wholly acceptable as Abraham still ploughs on ever closer.
    But if one’s goal is to find a “by faith, Abraham” in there, better to say it’s the prior confidence that things will somehow work out well (which I thought was how Hebrews was trying to define it), than to locate the commendable quality in violence (which, by rabbiting on about resurrection, Hebrews does).

    In the absence of other clear & wholly mitigating contexts in which to place the story, certainly it’s simplest, easiest and probably best to file it under “that’s how they saw God back then” and move swiftly on.

    Oofft.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Previous Posts

  • Epiphany sermon 2007

    Today is the Epiphany – the day we remember visitors from the East coming to worship Jesus, and bringing with them their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. The temptation, when preaching in the West of Scotland is to dwell on the idea of people coming from the East and tell jokes about people from…

  • Thomas Becket

    Let us pause for a moment to remember Thomas Becket on his feast day. The thing that he is remembered for is his death in Canterbury Cathedral – struck down by knights who believed that they were carrying out the orders of Henry II of England. His cult spread through Europe and I remember discovering…

  • Post Christmas

    A big thank you to everyone who helped get things ready for Christmas. The cathedral looked stunning, the choir sang magnificently throughout and everything that was supposed to happen did happen. Like others (Gadgetvicar and +David amongst them), I can report that numbers were up. Indeed, they were up significantly for all the services over…

  • Midnight Mass Sermon

    Most years at around this time, the same story appears in the press. A couple of years ago, I had a call 2 days before Christmas. It was a Sunday paper ringing to “just ask a couple of questions”. They were apparently ringing round a load of ordained people and asking them whether they believed…