What is in Kelvin's Head?

  • Ditching the sermon – a dialogue for Holy Innocents

    dialogue with bishop
    This morning I decided to ditch the sermon in favour of a dialogue with Bishop Gregor.

    It has been a difficult Christmas in Glasgow with a major tragedy in the centre of the city as people were doing their last minute Christmas shopping. Bishop Gregor was himself there in the square just after the incident involving the bin lorry. In this conversation he describes what he saw, what he was asked to do and how he responded.

    Together we reflected on how Christians find God.

    This happened in the context of the Sunday morning Sung Eucharist instead of a sermon. It seemed the right thing to move the Feast of the Holy Innocents back to this day, it having originally been scheduled to be celebrated here tomorrow morning.

    As I said at the beginning of the service, Jesus wasn’t born into a fairy story, nor into a Christmas card – he was born into  the real world and sometimes we need to think about what that really means.

    Here’s the video:

    Dialogue between Kelvin Holdsworth and Gregor Duncan in Glasgow on 28 December 2014 from Kelvin Holdsworth on Vimeo.

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20 responses to “Which bits of the Bible do you miss out?”

  1. Bro David Avatar
    Bro David

    I think that I’m with you Father K, there is a time and place for everything and a service where the problems of a problematic passage can’t be addressed easily is not the place to read it, lectionary be hanged.

    Reply
  2. Vogelbeere Avatar
    Vogelbeere

    My favourite bits of the Bible are the Song of Songs (which, in the medieval period, was interpreted by both Jews and Christians as an allegory of the soul’s relationship with God); the book of Ruth; the book of Esther; the story of David and Jonathan; Amos & Micah. Most of the New Testament leaves me completely cold, and some of it is actually offensive, especially the account of the silver-smiths of Ephesus, and the way that Paul appropriates pagan poetry in the marketplace of Athens.

    I think the solution to your problem is not to read the “difficult” bits without some sort of homily about a better way to understand them, and how to read the Bible in general as a collection of texts situated in a particular historical situation.

    Reply

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