What is in Kelvin's Head?

Sermon preached on 17 August 2025. (But should it have a content warning?)

22/08/2025

I wonder whether you have heard of a place called Edinburgh.

It is a place about 50 miles away from here.

And it is a wonderful diverse, international city…for at least three weeks a year.

Now the East of Scotland and the West of Scotland are different one from another.

Amongst other things, religion is different over there to over here.

I’ve always said that if you preach the same sermon in Edinburgh and Glasgow and say something funny, in Edinburgh you have to give a warning that there’s a joke coming up by saying, “And that reminds me of a joke…” and only then do they have permission to laugh.

In Glasgow however… [everyone knows the punchline before you get there]

Anyways, those three weeks are upon us when Edinburgh is en fete. And yesterday I took myself over for the final service of the Festival of the Sacred Arts that has been running for the last few weeks. I’d missed everything else but there was a special service to round it off in a church not unknown to me, being conducted by a former vice provost also not unknown to me with good music and scattered flower petals and our Blessed Lady Mary much to the fore. And I’d decided it was right up my street.

So, I looked up the details and decided to go along.

And something hit me between the eyes when I looked up the details on the Fringe Website.

It was a warning.

Alongside every show in the Fringe programme they publish warnings in case you might be upset about something.

Different shows have different warnings.

Warning: Offensive language.

Warning: Graphic nudity from the beginning.

Warning: Not suitable for under 18s.

And Choral Evensong at the end of Festival of Sacred Music bore a clear warning next to its listing.

I wonder if you could guess what the content warning was for Choral Evensong.

It said, “Warning: Audience Participation”.

Now, I think that it is really interesting and really quite funny that you have to warn people that there might be Audience Participation at a service of Choral Evensong.

I went along and sure enough, forewarned is forearmed. We were all indeed expected to belt out the hymns.

How ridiculous I thought, to give such a warning on a website…

Warning: Audience Participation.

Warning: Audience Participation.

Some through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight.

Well, that’s a bit more than belting out a few hymns.

Warning: Audience Participation.

Others were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword.

Audience participation.

Faith has always required audience participation.

And yes, probably does demand content warnings.

The great paeon to faith from the Epistle to the Hebrews that we’ve been reading over a couple of weeks is one of the great rhetorical passages of scripture.

We come, it declares, from a heritage of faith which has made demands. Which has included audience participation of the greatest and most profound kinds.

The heritage of Christianity should carry content warnings.

And health warnings.

And life warnings.

And yet that is the paradox.

Even knowing the risks of professing faith in God publicly, people have through centuries lived out their faith through persecution and tribulation.

For they have found within their faith something worth living and dying for.

The next bit of Hebrews that we get next week declares that we have come to the City of the Living God.

Let me give you a content warning.

To approach that City and to draw close to that Living God is to risk profound change.

The Christian faith neither promises that everything will be nice, nor that everything will be easy nor that everything in your life will be unchanged if you take it seriously.

Just the opposite.

Jesus is laying it on thick in the gospel today. He knew that people living out his message would cause division and not bring immediate unity.

And he speaks realistically about how that can feel within communities and families where faith is not shared.

What Christianity offers is change. Change for every one of us who takes it seriously. Change to the world around us. For yes, we hope to see a world transformed and transfigured and born anew.

We believe in ethical living acknowledging our that we are creatures made in the image of a loving God. And we believe in a Saviour, who taught us to try to be so kind, so peace-loving and so good that it would enrage a world that is hell bent on a quite different set of values and ethics. And we believe that God’s spirit inspires us to seek ever new ways of proclaiming the kingdom of justice and joy and our beloved saviour announced to the world.

And yes, we are a people who want others to join in. For this way of living we have found is good for us and good for the world around us.

If you are trying to put this altogether, and trying to work out what living as one of God’s friends is all about, then come and talk. And remember, we’re going to be running a Christian basics course sometime between now and Christmas where it will be possible to explore the extraordinary claims that the Christian faith makes.

Perhaps you are trying to work out for yourself a way of living the Christian faith.

Well, here’s a content warning for you. Audience participation isn’t optional. It is a requirement of being one of God’s beloved.

And the kinds of things that Christians have encouraged one another in since our Lord himself walked the earth don’t change much through the centuries.

Learning to worship together and catching a glimpse together of a God who lurks in this world longing to love us more.

Learning to pray together and learning to pray alone.

Learning to read scripture with all our God given gifts of intellect and holy common sense.

Learning to be generous and to recognise that time and money are gifts we have been given that are enriched and not diminished when we in turn give them away.

Learning to light candles in the darkness. And to see a scattered flower petal as being one square inch of this world where the whole of God’s glory shines.

Learning to be holy. Learning to love. Learning to be still. Learning to see that the world will only make sense when tyrants and megalomaniacs are toppled over and the lowly lifted up.

This is the way of life that Jesus invites us to participate in.

It is not without cost and it is not simply for spectators. It is certainly not for those who never want to join in.

And we who are Christians believe it is worth heaven and earth.

For Jesus in his love and compassion simply says this: “Who is with me in this journey? Who will walk in my way?”

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

AMEN.

Content Warning, Edinburgh Festival, Festival of Sacred Arts

40 responses to “Fact checking Sandi Toksvig”

Elizabeth Lloyd

05/08/2022

If this is what Archbishop Justin needed to say to preserve the Anglican Communion, is it worth preserving? It seems that it will be a very long time until there is unity on this, and all that time we are damaging and hurting our LGBTQI + siblings (some of them living in the global south), and our faithfulness to the loving and inclusive gospel we are called to share.

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David Coleman

05/08/2022

Thanks for using the visibility of the blog to clarify outcomes and more.

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Tom Bell

05/08/2022

The exact facts of Sandis arguments maybe up for debate but the sentiment is surely not. Any other business organisation that said, hopefully these words will move us towards inclusivity as if it some long distant unachievable goal would be taken to court and ripped apart for its blatant failures and unethical practices. The Anglican church apparently gets a pass on this because its a religion, what me and most of the rest of the secular world don’t understand is why this ever was and should continue to be the case. And the more you defend it the less relevant Christianty will become in a modern society.

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1. Kelvin
  
  05/08/2022
  
  Thanks for your comments, Tom. There isn’t anything that is “The Anglican Church” though, just a collection of churches around the world, held together more by bonds of affection than anything else. There is no rule book. There is no Anglican pope who can just decide things.
  
  I know that seems like a cop out, but it is the legal reality. There’s no The Anglican Church that can make decisions, no The Anglican Church that anyone can sue if it doesn’t like something and no The Anglican Church that can make homophobia disappear in every place around the world.
  
  The Scottish Episcopal Church, which I’m a member of is as inclusive as we can make it right now. I’m happy to perform the marriages of same-sex couples and they are generally fabulous. (Straight couples can marry too and also have fabulous weddings – we really are inclusive).
  
  We worked hard on making it so. It took a long time. I’m glad we put the effort in and did it.
  
  But I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want me to advocate for the same processes to happen in other parts of the Anglican Communion – ie in the other Anglican Churches around the world. I’m certainly not claiming they should get a pass. Far from it – I tend to be known for shouting for inclusion quite loudly.
  
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Alex Staton

05/08/2022

Hi Kelvin, I’ve seen a few folk giving the AB of C a bad press in light of Sandi Toksvig’s letter and have shared your blog in response. Like much of what you write, it’s well thought out and balanced. Sadly well thought out and balanced is in short supply these days and you end up upsetting everybody. From what I’ve seen of the AB of S, he strikes me as a good and honourable man doing with almost impossible task. One might be inclined to believe it justifies his fairly large salary. Either way, it’s too easy to kick the wrong people.

I had the great misfortune lately of encountering Lisa Nolland via an article she wrote for Christian Today. The gist seems to be that the gays are hell bent on subverting all that is godly and are riddled with disease. The rhetoric is frighteningly familiar. She dismissed reports higher suicide risk among young LGBT people as “a pretext”. Chilling. She seems to have some following although others I’ve spoken to accept she’s an extremist that latches onto some instance of supposed bad behaviour and tars everyone with the same brush. I can live with the fact that Christians may be opposed to SSM, say, but I really struggle with those that insist “gay Christian” is an oxymoron. For all their claims of orthodoxy, they’re actually denying the very core of the gospel, that we are saved by grace. What the thing has done is revealed how toxic the discussion in parts of the C of E has become. Frankly, you’d be hard pressed to find such extreme language in my own Free Church of Scotland; excepting David Robertson, of course, who is far from universally respected.

Graeme and I are now members in the C of S. The denomination’s recent decision to allow C of S ministers to perform SSMs is pretty earth shattering. It had been expected over the last couple of years but ten years ago it was all but inconceivable. It’s as if once the thing had gathered momentum, the outcome was inevitable. Of course many will be hoping the tiny steps taken at the synod could be the start of something. But only a fool would expect Anglicans in Uganda or Nigeria to embrace the more inclusive approach. Of course that’s Welby’s difficulty. He isn’t just primate of all England but the figure head for millions of Anglicans world wide. Insofar as it depends on him, he needs to preserve the unity of the church, even when disagreements are profound.

Here in Scotland, we have the national church, the SEC, Methodists, URC, Quakers, Unitarians and others performing or ready to perform SSM. Who would have thought it just a short while ago. That has to challenge the sometimes quite lazy assumption that Christians are against LGBT+ people. Some are, perhaps many are, but many are not. Is it too much to hope that after being excluded for such a long time, LGBT people will be drawn to church? But even then, we need to encourage unity. What we really want is a church where progressives, evangelicals, conservatives are all welcome. I suspect Justin Welby thinks that too. Perhaps AB of C is a poison chalice but as Christians surely we want to support him as best we can.

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Bernd

05/08/2022

always lovely to have someone – Sandy, Christian extraordinary – who hasn’t made the slightest contribution to “Church: now feels compelled to tell it off. Sigh

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Christopher Shell

06/08/2022

She has already decided which particular direction of travel counts as ‘moving on’. That is precisely what the discussion was supposed to be about. In arrogance, she thinks she can bypass the discussion without venturing an argument rather than an assertion, and in the meantime label all who disagree with her as regressive (rather than not subject to the vagaries of fashion, and having more robust principles undergirding their decisions).

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the Rev. Brynn Craffey

06/08/2022

I think the crux of the dispute here is this: is an “accurate description of reality” from the purported head of one of the largest Christian denominations in the world what is called for at this historic moment in time? Or, is taking a moral stand to protect the most vulnerable–namely, LGBTQ2S+ people in both the global north and south–what is called for? I think it’s clear which one Jesus would choose, and it’s not the one the archbishop did.

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The Rt Revd Dr Keith Riglin

07/08/2022

I’m here at Lambeth as a diocesan bishop in the Scottish Episcopal Church – what Kelvin has written is the case (what was actually said and done). Which is why the queer married bishops from the Episcopal Church in the USA were the first to stand and applaud +Justin. We are a Communion of churches not an international Church; there’s much more to do, but this week has been a significant step towards full inclusion of those of us who are LGBT.

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