What's in Kelvin's Head

Last night the LGBT group at St Mary’s had an open evening and a film show.

When +Gene Robinson was here 18 months ago, he pressed several copies of a DVD into my hand before he leftt. It was the film For The Bible Tells Me So [DVD] [2007] which he had been giving away to those who had been invited to the Lambeth Conference. Its a very well made film about the ways in which churches deal with with scripture have an impact on families with gay members. One of those families is the Robinsons (ie featuring Gene’s parents) but there are four or five other families featured too.

Its a good watch, and I’ve a couple of copies in the office. If anyone in the congregation wants to borrow one of them, do let me know.

Here is what I said this morning:

The readings that we have had this morning are the readings set for the day – the sixth Sunday after Epiphany. Most of the time, the readings that we use in St Mary’s are the same as the readings that many of our friends use in other local and indeed far distant churches. But not this week. This week, there is an option. You can either do the readings for the day or chose a special set for the Sunday before Lent.

I tend to have an opinion on this, which is that Lent is long enough already without adding an extra week counting down to Easter. Indeed, the idea of a week which celebrates the coming of a season which itself celebrates the coming of another seems to me to be putting the cart before the horse.

Seasons of the Sundays before Lent are an abomination before the Lord, at least in my head and we don’t do them.
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So it was down to Troon on Friday night for Tom Montgomery’s installation as Rector of St Ninian’s Church there.

I have to say that St Ninian’s was looking absolutely beautiful for the evening. A gorgeous swag of flowers was behind the altar just over the heads of the clergy and there were beautiful candles in all the windows. Anne Tomlinson preached, introducing two new possible symbols of ministry (headphones, symbolic of listening and a microphone, symbolic of proclamation). Fr Bishop-Elect Gregor celebrated and in the name of the Primus installed the new rector, and Tom himself looked radiant and happy throughout.

It was a lovely evening all round. Prayers and blessings upon Tom and St Ninian’s and their future life together.

It was good to have folk from all over Scotland (and beyond) at St Mary's this morning for a special festival service for the Mothers' Union. Bishop David was there to preach and to commission Hilary Moran as the new Provincial President, The Rev Scott Robertson was there to commission some new officers for this diocese, and we had our Bishop Elect, the Very Rev Gregor Duncan too. Add to that the luminaries of the MU and folk from branches near and far and you have all the ingredients for a very good festival service.

If you want to see what Bishop David said in his sermon, take a look at this video.

I’ve been contacted by someone in the URC asking whether I’ll promote one of their current campaigns. (This comes after I came out in favour of one of the points in the recent agreement between Episcopalians, Methodists and United Reformed Church people).

Its this Robin Hood Tax. I’m happy to point people towards it.

The United Reformed Church has given its support to the campaign for a ‘Robin Hood Tax’ (Financial Transaction Tax), launched today. You will no doubt have seen articles in the press and other media reports. We encourage you to read the news item on the URC website (www.urc.org.uk) and go to www.robinhoodtax.org.uk for full details.

The idea is this: The Robin Hood Tax is a tiny tax on bankers that would raise billions to tackle poverty and climate change, at home and abroad. By taking an average of 0.05% from speculative banking transactions, hundreds of billions of pounds would be raised every year.

The only thing is, I can’t quite make up my mind whether I feel supportive about it or not. It seems like such a good idea when you first think about it, but I’ve got a lingering doubt that it is not a campaign that is achievable and I just can’t work out whether it is desirable. If it were implemented peacemeal, would it mean financial institutions moving to countries which did not impose the tax? If it did, the negative effect on domestic poverty could be profound. I presume that the robin hood tax would make my pension pot smaller, though I don’t think this is highlighted on the campaign website.

What do other people think? Is this so obvious, its a wonder it hasn’t been implemented before? Or alternatively, does this proposal hide something that we should fear?

I’d have thought that I would have lost the capacity to be shocked in the debates within the Anglican Communion.

Not so though. I was quite shocked by the ethical reasoning that Rowan Williams was using this afternoon in his speech to the the General Synod of the Church of England.

Fullness of freedom for each of us is in contributing to the sanctification of the neighbour.  It is never simply a matter of balancing liberties, but of going to another level of thinking about liberty.  And the ‘purity’ of the body of Christ is not to be thought of apart from this work.  It is not to put unity above integrity, but to see that unity in this active and sometimes critical sense is how we attain to Christian integrity.  The challenges of our local and global Anglican crises have to do with how this shapes our councils and decision-making.  It is not a simple plea for the sacrifice of the minority to the majority.  But it does mean repeatedly asking how the liberty secured for me or for those like me will actively serve the sanctification of the rest.

Sometimes that may entail restraint – as I believe it does and should in the context of the Communion – though that restraint is empty and even oppressive if it then refuses to engage with those who have accepted restraint for the sake of fellowship.  The Covenant specifically encourages and envisages protracted engagement and scrutiny and listening in situations of tension, and that is one of the things that makes it, in my view, worth supporting.

I don’t understand how the archbishop can believe gay Anglicans to be free to feel, do or act towards anyone else when he, the Archbishop advocates that gay people choose between ministry or human intimacy. That is what the official policy of his church is. What rights does he have to impose restraint?

I don’t believe that the unity he says can lead to integrity can be gained by conformity to this.

And yes, I’m still shocked at his ethical thinking.

I’ve added AKMA’s sermon from yesterday to the preaching page. You can also see it over on his blog where the text is available too.

Whilst I was listening to the sermon, images from a novel started to leap around in my brain. It took me a moment or two to think which one it was but eventually I pinned it down. It was Jame’s Baldwin’s brilliant novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain which I’ve not read in years. Time to pull it off the shelf again. The bit I was thinking of was  the bit where the young protagonist finds himself hitting the floor on a Sunday, struck by an overwhelming sense of the holy. I think Baldwin describes something highly complex in that section – compromised surrender, I think it is. Utterly brilliant, anyway. One for church book groups everywhere.

Did I tell you about the Church History Social last Saturday evening? I don’t think I did.

What’s that you say – you don’t understand what a Church History Social is. Well, let me tell you,  it was the most entertaining way to spend a Saturday evening and a roaring success. The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were laid out for our entertainment by Roger Edwards who has been doing a good deal of research in this area. In between times, we ate a seventeenth century repast of wine and nibbles and Frikki and Christine Walker entertained us to some music associated with the congregation, including a lovely Schubert Lied which was a setting of words by one of my predecessors.

It has been said before that Episcopacy collapsed in Glasgow, but Roger is in the business of showing that far from collapsing, there were hundreds of Episcopalians in this town after the Glorious Revolution.

So it was that we heard about someone being made a bishop in secret to protect him from the mob, an early example of cross-dressing in the congregation as one of the clergy captured at Sherriffmiur swapped clothes with his wife to escape from Stirling castle, times of persecution when  only a few piskies could meet together, a church where the priest had taken an oath of allegiance to the Hanovarians but the congregation hadn’t, the origins of Old St Paul’s claim to be Jacobite and of course the congregation’s successful supply to Bonnie Prince Charlie of a paramour.

Roger’s method was ingenious. He told the story and at key moments, called out members of the audience to come and stand to represent characters in the tale. Everyone called out had an emblem to wear – priest’s bands for the clergy, a frilly pinny for a servant maid, even frillier jabots for the chaps and a lovely purple sash held with a shiny clasp for Bonnie Prince Charlie himself.

Guess who got to be Bonnie Prince C?

My thanks to everyone who voted for this blog in the ScotBlogs awards. Apparently, I came in the top 10 in the readers nominations. (Where in the top 10, I don’t know). However, the competition was constructed around readers votes and the votes of a panel. It seems a bit like the Episcopal election – you have to come out on top in two different houses to get anywhere. So, lots of readers voted for me but apparently none of the panelists did. I did come away with an highly honourable mention on the Readers’ Choice page.

Thanks to all who voted, and thanks to Duncan Steven who organised it. I’m gateful as ever to all those who read, those who take up conversation across other blogs and above all to those who comment and make the whole business of keeping this blog so interesting. I’ve not been doing this for quite as long as AKMA (I started in 2003, he was at it more than a year before I was). Its still something I enjoy and it is you my dear readers and interlocutors who make it all worth while.

Hey, can you help spread the word that Inspires Online has launched? Its the new newsletter from the Scottish Episcopal Church.

The first edition was distributed by e-mail earlier today. If you want to receive a copy, then you need to sign up at http://www.inspires.org.uk/subscribe

If you’ve subscribed already and don’t seem to have a copy, check your spam filters.

Can you pass that news on to anyone whom you think would like to know?

Many thanks