What is in Kelvin's Head?

  • Sermon for Dedication Sunday 2014

    26 October 2014 – Dedication Sunday from Kelvin Holdsworth on Vimeo.

    You have come to something that cannot be touched – in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

    I suppose I should give the full verse of the text that I want to preach on this morning. The verse I’ve chosen comes from the letter to the Hebrews and the portion that Wolfgang read to us a few moments ago.

    You have not come to something* that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them.

    I suppose it takes a certain kind of preacher to dare to preach on the verse that refers to a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them.

    But I guess I’m that kind of preacher anyway.

    But I really want to leap off from that first phrase – You have come to something that cannot be touched.

    For today we are celebrating our Dedication Sunday – a day when we step outside the usual cycle of Sunday readings and set aside some time to give thanks for what we have around us.

    And I’m being deliberately ambiguous about that – for I give thanks not simply for the building around us but for the building that is the saints of God in this place who are all around us as we worship together each week.

    St Mary’s the building can certainly be touched. Indeed if you touch it in some places a bit of it will flake off which you can take home for a souvenir. But today I think we are doing a bit more than giving thanks for lumps of sandstone.

    For you have come to something that cannot be touched. You have come instead to Mount Zion – the city of God itself.

    By the time the Epistle to the Hebrews was written people were gathering together in groups to worship Jesus Christ. The idea of the weekly gathering to worship was already established amongst the Jewish people and adopted by those who found God through their experience of Jesus. But it was important to remind them even at the beginning that they had come to something that could not be touched.

    I remember asking one of you a while ago what it was that he thought bound everyone at St Mary’s together. He thought for a moment and said, (more…)

66 responses to “Sermon Preached on 9 October 2011”

  1. kelvin Avatar
    kelvin

    Now, I think we are in danger of moving away from commenting on the sermon that was posted above.

    Further comments that are focused on that sermon are welcome. I think that I will exercise my perogative and choose not to host any further debates on this thread unless they pertain directly to the orginal post.

    Several comments from those of differing opinions have been gently hushed.

    Reply
  2. Alan McManus Avatar
    Alan McManus

    I remember hearing you preach this sermon, Kelvin, and being surprised at your take on it. Mine, I now realise (thanks for the research, Rosemary), came from Augustine (via my RC school chaplain, now happily married, whose constant theme was the love of God for us). It’s difficult to revise views learned while young as the evidence we accepted as children is not always acceptable to our adult minds – if we chose to review it. So I sympathise both with my coreligionist and with our Cromwellian interlocutor, despite their abrasive tone and the fun we can have with bowels and prostrates: they appear both to speak the truth as they see it. But so does everyone else commenting – and some (like Jaye) read the Hebrew scriptures in the original. I like the interpretation put forward by Kenny and Agatha and just because it was a convenient one for Augustine doesn’t mean it has to lack truth. So I turned to the Greek for backup and the first word that struck me was Ἀρίστων (ariston) which has connotations of excellence and survives in ‘aristocrat’. This king calls his ‘banquet’ (Jerusalem Bible) literally ‘my excellence’ – and he’s obviously gone all out. So none of the big wigs turn up and he goes all inclusive and gets the good and the bad in. Then throws a hissy fit about the dress code. He sounds A LOT like me when I’m directing. Then I noticed there’s a lot of play on IN and OUT (even ‘crossroads’ is διεξόδους – diexodous – way out ways?) and the final words are a pun on κλητοί (kletoi – named/ invited) and ἐκλεκτοί (eklektoi – called/ chosen).
    Now I suspect that shackling a quest hand and foot and shoving him out the door into outer darkness (the Greek word for darkness is the Classical root of ‘Scotland’!) may have put a rather gloomy outlook on the evening’s festivities. Could that be the point? It’s sandwiched between the parable of the wicked husbandmen that has the son of vineyard owner exit sharply and the trap Jesus escapes about taxes.
    With all this about ‘who’s in who’s out?’ and ‘which side of the coin are you on?’ can we take this passage with a pinch of Paul (and Augustine, and Cromwell) and say ‘our righteousness is as filthy rags before the Lord’? So the point is not how we are named/ that we are invited but that the church (ekklesia) we are chosen and called to be is not one of domineering control freaks throwing hissy fits because the excellence of their table arrangements has been spoilt by someone not following rubrics. Or by (ditto) because their nice ideas about biology (JS, once you mention ‘purpose’, no biologist will take you seriously) have been spoilt by people in love. St Mary’s is a great liturgical feast indeed. Everyone goes all out for excellence. Yet I’ve seen the oddest-dressed people doing the oddest things (me late, again, in my glad rags included) welcomed. The RC Church in Scotland, of whose hierarchy I am deeply deeply ashamed, would do well to stop whitewashing sepulchers and start calling the clergy and laity in their charge to inclusive love.

    Reply
    1. Alan McManus Avatar
      Alan McManus

      That should be άριστον, guest, εκλεκτοί. Transliteration is correct, it was the cut and paste that was slapdash. Fortunately my phone does Greek (no pun intended) but it doesn’t do breathings.

      Reply

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