Once I would have thought that these things didn’t matter. Right now I think they matter very much.

A Note on Holy Week

During Holy Week, there will be readings from the Passion narratives from the gospels, as has been the custom for Christians throughout the centuries. These texts need to be read carefully and thoughtfully. The term ‘the Jews’ in the Passion readings applies to particular individuals and not to the whole Jewish people.

There is some debate amongst scholars as to how the words which have been translated as “the Jews” should now be translated. Some would translate them as “the Judeans”. Others would retain the traditional reading whilst acknowledging the harm that has been caused by the ways in which these words have been used.

Whichever translation is used for individual words in the Passion Reading, Christians need to be aware that Holy Week has historically been a time of increased antisemitism and of antagonism and violence towards Jewish people. This is a matter of repentance for Christians.

References in the scriptures and in the hymns and prayers to those who accused Christ or killed Christ are references to historical figures. These people do not represent the Jewish people or Judaism.

At a time of increased antisemitism in the world, some verses in the Scriptures may be better dealt with in thoughtful study and reflection rather than the drama of public liturgy.

Members of the Christian community are invited during this week to think of the times when we have turned against Christ and to reflect on the possibility that had we been present at the time, that perhaps we would have found ourselves to be amongst those who called for him to be crucified.

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

From time to time, every couple of years or so, someone decides that it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good cathedral, must be in want of a man.

Now, I am not in principle opposed to this idea. Though the practicalities of making such a thing happen have always eluded me.

“Ah” they say with some enthusiasm, “what apps are you on?” And they proceed to list a bewildering number of apps that I could download onto my phone in order to seal the deal.

I am not on any apps, I explain. I’ve never been convinced that they would work for me.

“Oh no!” they cry, “you need to be on an app. That’s how it works for everyone these days, even people like you.”

Reader, I have never been brave enough to enquire what, “people like you” actually means.

But we go through the whole pantomime again. They show me some app on their phone and get me to download one to mine. “Put a smile on your face” they say as they take my picture. A few dozen intrusive questions later and lo and behold, it is serving me up other people’s profiles.

And I look. And I am encouraged to swipe. Right for any possibles. Left for any impossibles.

And it tends to be left, left, left, left. And then I get fed up and very quickly delete the app and proclaim this will never work for me.

I heard an interesting statistic recently – it was that someone had measured one of the apps and the

average time that people took to reject someone was 3.2 seconds. On the other hand, if they were interested in someone they tended to linger for about two and a half minutes thinking about it before swiping right.

Let us turn our thoughts to our first reading this morning. Where we find the Lord our God in an interesting mood.

Saul the king has died. In the end, the project of making him the King of Israel hadn’t ended well. Samuel the prophet grieves the way it all ended, no doubt carrying the despair of the people with him.

Come on says the Lord. Put a smile on your face and let’s be going. You need to find a new man. A new man to anoint as King. And off they go to the home of Jesse the Bethlehemite to assess the possibilities.

And I’ve always thought that this passage is one of those in the bible that has inherent comedy written right into it. The whole process is genuinely funny.

Along comes the first candidate. He’s a maybe thinks Samuel but the Lord has better ideas. No, swipe left on that one he says. He’s not the one.

We’re looking for someone who is lovely on the inside remember, not just someone who looks good.

And along comes another son. No, says the Lord. I don’t fancy this one’s chances. And tells to swipe left and dismiss him.

And so it goes on. One after another, a parade of possibilities. But none cut the mustard.

But there’s just one left. The youngest. Who just happens to be ruddy and handsome and has beautiful eyes.

Hey ho, says the Lord and lingers, I’m sure of it for 2.5 minutes before telling Samuel that this one, this must be the one. And the choice is made.

What are the qualities that we look for in someone, either as a partner or as a leader.

It seems to me that that question of what we are looking for in our leaders is central to a series of overlapping crises that beset our modern life.

For what it is worth, I think we are capable of getting into incredible muddles when trying to choose religious leaders. But the kind of person and the kind of leadership we want in our common political life is simply something we no longer agree on.

I want someone with integrity, who tells the truth and who looks out for those who need to be looked out for. I want leaders who hear the call of peace more clearly than the siren voices who cry out for war and vengeance. I want those who govern and guide to be wise, knowledgeable and in it for the common good and not individual gain.

In both politics and religion I have met many such people. But I have come to the reluctant conclusion that those values are less shared universally than they have ever been in my lifetime.

And this is partly what has led us into a world where oligarchs and autocrats (religious and secular) hold sway. And war seems an inevitable consequence of broken systems and human greed.

As it happens, I am not a pacifist. I think that some things are worth fighting for. However, it is probably worth saying publicly that the most prominent war we hear of in these days seems to have neither legal basis nor any moral justification. It is war for war’s sake. A tool of chaos where no-one knows the long term consequences.

Those of us who life in democracies who wish for something different have much to think about and much of it will bring us no comfort.

Peace, it seems, must be built.

Decency must be argued for and cannot be assumed.

And I want leaders who talk about the wellbeing of all rather than the enrichment of the few.

I come to those views from a religious perspective. But I think I have common cause with many others.

My faith gives me hope in a time where hope seems scarce.

My faith gives me hope because my conviction is very deep that God cares not only for the few, nor even for the many but for all.

Notwithstanding the comic story that we read of God (through a strangely confident Samuel) rejecting one person after another until he got to the most handsome one… notwithstanding the exitance of that story. I believe without any doubt at all that everyone is included in the love of God, everyone deserves the

peace of God and everyone should expect nothing less than all the blessings of God.

For God swipes right on everyone. God choses each of us.

Whatever our profile looks like.

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

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As a priest, the presumption is generally made that I’m against it for religious reasons. Recent aggressive campaigning by those in favour of allowing doctors to help people to end their lives has been relentlessly dismissive of religious reasons for being against it. As though religious people have no consciences worth respecting, no bodies of their own, no pain and no right to be heard.

The truth is, though I am very obviously religious, I do not have any religious reasons for objecting to the proposed law in principle but the longer that I’ve spent time with those who are actually dying the more I find myself unable to support a change in the law. My concerns are not religious but practical.

For a long time I was fairly uncommitted in this debate. My tendency would be to think that the alleviation of pain was the ultimate goal for anyone at the end of life and to take the view that preventing pain might well be a justification for allowing someone to end their life early.

More recently though experience has suggested to me that the question is a good deal more complicated than that. And so I find that I’ve changed my mind. From being moderately supportive of a change in the law, I now find myself fully opposed to the new legislation.

I remember the day when I changed my mind very well too. I had been called to the deathbed of someone whom I did not know. Before I could get into the room with the dying person, their family met me in the corridor. They asked me whether I could help them as things were very difficult.

“We were just wondering whether you could ask the doctors to speed things up a bit.”

I replied that I couldn’t as the law wouldn’t allow such a thing. And I asked why. What was it? Did they need me to help them to speak to the doctors about trying to get some better pain regulation?

“No” came the answer, “No – the thing is we’ve a skiing holiday booked and we leave on Monday – we just need this to be over so we can get away”.

That was the moment that I realised that not everyone dies with people close to them who have their best interests at heart.

Those who are dying are some of the most vulnerable people in our society. They are losing their power to make independent choices. They are vulnerable to the attitudes of everyone they encounter. And almost everyone whom they encounter may have a financial or other interest not only in their death but in its timing.

Spending time with the dying, I’ve also realised that those at the end of life are particularly vulnerable to societal assumptions about being a burden and causing a fuss.

Increasingly, funeral directors are making good money from ghoulishly promoting Direct Cremations – the disposing of bodies without ceremony or the presence of loved ones. To do so, they repeat again and again in their advertising, suggests that it is better to face death without causing a fuss.

Yet everyone who grieves knows that death in itself is disruptive. Death and grief change lives. They are not to be dismissed. No amount of trying not to cause a fuss changes that.

It has all made me realise that when I die, I want everyone to know that I want plenty of fuss. Fuss is how we show one another that we love them.

The desire to cause others no fuss at all though is one of the greatest pressures that the dying feel.

If it were the case that all people had access to the finest palliative care at the end of their lives and were all surrounded by those who had their best interests at heart in institutions where there is no financial pressure on managers and medics then I might be able to get to a position where I might support the assisted dying proposals.

However, we don’t live or die in that world. And until then, the best way to assist people to die is by investing in those studying pain management, better funding hospitals and hospices and by listening to the stories of those who sit alongside those who are dying.

I’ve sat in those rooms many times.

All of us should be in the presence of those who love and care for us when we die. Not all of us will be. The law, as it stands, is the best way to protect the interests of all of us when we die. For these reasons, I hope that our parliamentarians have the courage to vote no when the final vote is taken on this bill. It is legislation that would fundamentally change the relationship between the individual and the state.

The principle of alleviating pain is a godly one but the reality is that the devil is in all manner of practical detail.

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• Good results for Nigel Farage following the English local elections in May. Terrible results for Conservative Party.

Exactly what happened. YES

• No progress towards the marriage of same-sex couples in the Church of England

Exactly what happened. Indeed, I think things may have gone into reverse. YES

• Turbulent year for WordPress, which powers about half of the internet.

The year began with Automattic dramatically cutting its contribution to development leading to stagnation in development and much acrimony. Subsequently restored. Deep divisions remain about Gutenberg. I’m claiming this as a YES.

• 2025 will be the hottest year on record.

Final figures yet to be calibrated but all reports indicate that this, unfortunately is a YES.

• No trade deal for UK with US. Increasing talk of re-aligning economy closer to EU.

Well, there was a trade deal in May called the Economic Prosperity Deal but it doesn’t seem to much and some of the basics have already been reversed. I suppose I have to be honest and say I didn’t get this quite right so it is a NO. But…

• Ceasefire in Russia-Ukraine war but no long term solution.

Hard to assess this one. No long term solution, certainly. There have been a series of ceasefires proposed but none seems really to have been fully implemented. Partial YES.

• “Assisted Dying” aka doctor assisted suicide becomes legal in at least one of the jurisdictions of the British Isles.

I have to put this down as a  NO  as it completed its parliamentary journey in the Isle of Man but hasn’t received Royal Assent yet, so not technically legal.

• Turbulent year for economy but stock market higher at end of year than beginning. (FTSE currently at 8,173)

Stock market at 9,931 today and there was quite a lot of volatility in the first part of the year. So this one is a YES.

• There will be fewer Commonwealth Realms (ie countries which share the monarchy) by the end of 2025 than there are now.

This one is a NO though there has been significant progress in that direction in Jamaica and moves that way in Grenada.

• Philip Mountstephen.

Well, I was pushing Philip Mounstephen’s name as he appeared to be the only senior bishop in the C of E who actually believed the [absurd] position of the C of E bishops on same-sex relationships. But it is a NO – nothing significant to report.

So – five and a half out of ten this year. Not as good as some years. A couple of near misses.

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The first time that I encountered ChatGPT was three years ago when I was staying in a seminary in the USA. It was a place dedicated to teaching theology and particularly to training Episcopal clergy.
The ChatGPT preview release was let loose on the world on 30 November 2022, so I must have discovered it very early on. AI has moved on significantly since then but at the time one could use it to render a piece of text in the voice of someone well-known. The entertainment at mealtimes was to give it a well-known piece of the Bible such as Psalm 23 and get it to rewrite the text in the voice of a well-known American politician.

The Lord is my shepherd — a truly incredible shepherd, by the way, the best. Nobody shepherds like He does!
I’m not going to want; I’ve got everything I need. Believe me!

This seemed very entertaining to the students though I suspect that the joke may not be quite so entertaining these days.

ChatGPT seemed an incredible plaything. A novelty. A curiosity. A wonderful new internet gewgaw.

Three years on and a lot of development later, AI has changed a lot even if people haven’t yet moved on quite so much and many are still using it primarily as a novelty. You can still ask ChatGPT to translate bits of the Bible into the voice of someone else. It still seems remarkable to many that a machine can write anything at all.

The primary thing that people think of when they think of text-based AI is still the creation of written material in response to some kind of prompt though there are vastly more interesting things that one can do with AI than you could back in the olden days of December 2022.

There have been a number of surveys released this year which focus on the use of AI by preachers and I thought that it might be interesting to mull over a few questions in order to think about the ethics of using AI in sermon generation.

The obvious question is perhaps the least interesting though I’m not 100% sure that it has a clear answer.

Is it ethical to preach a sermon generated by AI rather than something that you’ve thought up yourself?

I think many people might initially answer this question in the negative and be fairly sure that this isn’t OK. However, I find myself remembering being trained by clerics when I was first ordained and clearly remember being told – “If you find you don’t have a sermon of your own, then preach someone else’s”. In the intervening years, the internet has come of age and that has complicated this question. There are sites dedicated to providing sermons for particular Sundays. I sometimes read a few sermons by other people on a particular text before settling myself down to write one of my own. I suspect most people would think that was absolutely fine ethically – indeed it falls well within the learning and study that clerics are all supposed to pursue.

Would I lift an idea from someone else’s sermon?

Yes, absolutely.

You get to know the preachers who inspire you. I would pay particular tribute to the preaching of Fr Grant Gallup who, when he was alive preached audacious sermons. I think it is a positive good to catch hold of things that inspire you and let them inform your own thinking.

But would I lift a paragraph from someone else’s sermon?

No, I don’t think I would, though I have come across people who do. (And I’ve known people do it with things I’ve written).

I remember once assessing someone for a job and looking at some of the sermons that he had been preaching. Something didn’t seem quite right about them. A little clever googling revealed that he was simply lifting sermons wholesale from one particular preacher from the other side of the world and preaching them as though they were his own. “And that reminds me of something that happened to me this week…” falls a little flat when you know that the same thing happened word for word to someone else three years ago in the lectionary cycle.

I never outed him as stealing ideas from someone else. But there was no chance of him getting the job.

I’m not convinced that it is ethical to preach someone else’s words verbatim in a sermon.

AI raises whole new questions beyond that though.

It is more or less ethical to lift a paragraph from a sermon that no human being ever wrote?

I think that’s a complicated question and is made even more complicated for me by my knowing that some AI engines have been trained on my own sermons.

Indeed, one of my tests when looking at a new AI tool is sometimes to ask it to write a sermon in the voice and style of Kelvin Holdsworth on the Bible passages for a particular set of Bible readings. This test, which I have to acknowledge I’m rather pleased with myself for devising certainly sorts out the AI sheep from the AI goats.

I did it recently with one engine and it produced this paragraph:

“It reminds me of the week before my mother-in-law comes to visit. You know the drill. It doesn’t matter if the house is generally tidy; you go into a state of panic. You’re not just cleaning the surfaces; you’re clearing the cupboards and organising the spice rack. Why? Because you’re trying to create a perfect space for a very important guest. You want the place to look like your best self, a version of reality that lasts exactly as long as the visit.”

Now there’s no risk in my stealing anything from this at all. It doesn’t sound like my spoken style and anyone who has ever shared an office with me knows that tidiness isn’t necessarily next to provostness. The really exciting thing, I thought, was the appearance of a mother-in-law. I rather like the idea that in some alternative cyberspace I’m tidy, happily married and have a well-organised spice rack.

Here, in the real world alas, things are different.

However, I asked another AI engine to come up with a sermon in my style and the more I read, the more I realised that it had been trained on my own sermons, most of which have been freely available online for the last 25 years or so. Here’s a fragment that I asked it to generate for a sermon in my voice for Midnight Mass.

“And so we come here at midnight—a time for secrets, hushed voices, and the honest acknowledgement that the world is not always as we wish it to be. Midnight is truthful. It exposes our longings. It meets us without the polite veneer we put on during the day. Midnight Mass is the Church daring to say: God meets us in the dark.”

It isn’t better than me and the middle sentences are a bit vapid. But there’s an idea in there at the end that I could have come up with and could have preached. And maybe, who knows yet, maybe I will.

So it is ethical to preach a sermon that is generated from an AI engine that has been trained on one’s own voice?

That’s a really complicated question and worth a good deal of pondering. And it is a very different question from those facing authors who make a living from their work.

As I try to think about the ethics of where the words come from there will always be people who tell me that nothing ethical comes from AI because of the world’s resources of power and water that are consumed in their production. I get it. But people have frequently taken to social media to make that point to me without acknowledging the irony of doing so. We are living beyond our means environmentally in so many areas of life. Yes, AI contributes negatively to this. But I don’t think that fact is going to put it back in its box.

At the moment I’ve never read a sermon from an AI engine that I think is better than any that I could have written. However, I suspect that in a year’s time I won’t be able to make that claim.

So, is it AI generated sermons from me from now on?

No actually. But primarily because I enjoy the writing. Wrestling with the ideas, thinking about the scripture and pondering where the world is at gives me life and I suspect that ultimately those listening to sermons can tell whether there’s life and spirit in them. And being a preacher who does grapple with the text is part of who I think I am and part of what I think the church has formed me to do.

Are there easy ethical answers to AI related questions for preachers? I don’t think so. And I think that’s what makes those questions so very interesting.

Photo by cottonbro studio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/hand-of-a-person-and-a-bionic-hand-6153343/

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A long time ago, back in the mists of nearly twenty years ago, I started to think that it was important that there was a liturgical celebration of creation. I thought long and hard about it and decided that instead of celebrating that modern invention the Harvest Festival, we would celebrate Creation instead, rolling a sense of thanksgiving into that but praying too for the wellbeing of the created world.

That is the way that it has been for quite a while now. We usually keep it on the first Sunday in October, around the time of the Feast of St Francis. We even sometimes throw in an animal blessing service that weekend, despite the fact that Francis himself wouldn’t allow members of his order to keep pets.

As time has gone on, the climate crisis has become more obvious to more people and the churches have been looking for ways to think about creation. Thus the idea of Creationtide – a month long celebration of creation has started to be marked in different ways in different churches.

Now, I’m a bit of a cynic when it comes to churches declaring new seasons. When the Church of England and those who follow its mysterious ways decided that Kingdom Season was a thing, I wasn’t impressed. Similarly, when in the Scottish Episcopal Church, the bishops started talking about a Season of Christian Living or a Season of Discipleship I was more inclined to be a disinterested observer than an active participant. The biggest problem, it always seemed to me, with new Seasons in the Calendar was that the worldwide church hadn’t made its mind up.

And yes, I know that there are those who will think that it is odd that I thought we could move ahead with the marriages of same-sex couples or the ordination of priests who happen to be women without the enthusiastic agreement of the whole church but that we couldn’t have a new season without universal agreement but there we are. We all have our red lines.

The surprising thing about the Season of Creation though it that it is attracting considerable interest across different denominations. Churches of the Orthodox tradition, Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism are all pondering what it means to keep a season or a feast meditating on creation. Significant elements of the world church do seem, this time, to be on their way to creating a new season or feast.

I’d be happy with a feast rather than a season, but that’s not the principle point that I’m interested in right now.

The thing that bothers me more than anything about this isn’t the intention to mark Creation in the calendar. It is how we mark it and what we say about it.

In particular, it troubles me considerably that the language that we use to mark the feast might be contributing to damaging ways of thinking about the created order in the face of the climate crisis. Our words form our thoughts and I’m not convinced that declaring a Season of Creation without thinking hard about what words we will use is really going to help.

I struggle most with the notion that it is a positive thing for human beings to be seen as Stewards of Creation. This idea inhabits many modern liturgies.

We currently have the following as a prayer offered for experimental use during the Season of Creation.

God give you grace to be faithful stewards of Creation,
rejoicing that you are made in God’s image,
and seeking justice for those who do not share in the earth’s bounty,
and the blessing of God almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
be upon you, and remain with you always. Amen.

This is by no means unusual. The idea that we should become better stewards of creation comes at us in hymns and in prayers and, I suspect, in sermons preached around this time.

The trouble is, I think that human beings being stewards of creation is part of what has got us into the mess we are in globally.

It posits a God who has gone away, leaving creation to be managed (stewarded) by human beings.

Firstly I don’t think that God has gone away. And secondly, the trouble with a management model is that it imagines our role in creation to be primarily that of taming it, controlling it. It is as though we are here to turn creation into a park fit to live in.

That very idea of human beings being created themselves in order to manage the rest of creation seems to me to be deeply problematic. It puts human beings at the centre of the created order when all that we can see around us tells us that this is not so. Who stewarded the dinosaurs? Who stewards Alpha Centauri?

Placing ourselves at the centre of how we think about the world isn’t surprising. It may even, with a little side order of repentance be something that is forgivable. I think therefore I am very quickly turns into I think therefore I am right here at the centre of things and morphs into I think therefore I am in charge, all too easily.

Here in the Scottish Episcopal Church we’ve also been experimenting with the idea of being “priests to creation”.

…you formed humanity in your own image,
and entrusted us with the priesthood of your Creation.

It is a poetic image which comes from some serious theology but it is theology that predates the Climate Crisis.

And anyway, I have more of a sense that creation is a priest to me, mediating my relationship with God than that I am a priest to creation, somehow standing between the created order and divine love.

Creation is not ours to tame. The stewarding and priestly metaphors lead directly into a control mentality. And the outworkings of that are all too evident. At least one of the leaders of a political party in the UK came away from the Triumpian Banquet this week convinced that the best way forward was to extract all our oil and all our gas from the North Sea and use it. Note the possessive adjective used – our. In the face of the Climate Crisis, oil of ours might well take us closer to our destruction.

Deep inside, I think that most Christians know that Creation is not ours to tame.

There are currently many Christians coming on pilgrimage to Scotland. (When Jerusalem is closed, Iona is open). Many of them come via the church I serve either on their way to Iona or on their way back.

There is a sense when you talk to them that they have an instinctive urge to get to a place where human beings have not tamed the created order. As though God will speak to them there. I have many problems with that as I think that God is as present in the city as in the country and in the New World just as much as the Old. However, that sense of the goodness of creation being found in the wilderness is instinctive in the minds of many of the pilgrims that I meet.

Kierkegaard asked himself whether he should choose the monastery or the deer park – piety or pleasure. Our choice lies in whether we choose to see God in the crashing waves, the raging of the volcano and the struggle between the predator and their prey or whether we can only imagine God at work in some place where the wilderness has been tamed.

We may have been created for a garden and we may end up destined for a garden of delights, but here, out of Eden, we neither live in parkland nor are called to tame, pillage or plunder the world around us.

That notion of stewardship is trouble for it doesn’t allow us to think of ourselves as inherently creatures within creation. It always calls us to manage, interfere and control. It brings with it mentalities of harm.

Jesus has harsh words to say about stewards. They are seldom, in his thought world intrinsically good.

In Scotland, we use other vocabulary for stewards. Both in terms of managing highland estates or in terms of how we manage shared buildings in cities, the steward is called the factor. Factors are often disliked and often mistrusted. They are simply there to manage and steward property on behalf of others who are either absent or unable able to exercise the level of control that is needed to cope with property.

Such an image is a terrible one for how we think about creation.

Somehow we need language that stops us from thinking that human beings are in charge.

Should we pray, “God give you the grace to be faithful factors of Creation?”

Everyone who has ever had a factor will think we should not.

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• Are other faiths experiencing something similar – it wouldn’t particularly surprise me if that was true?
• If other faiths are experiencing it, which ones are experiencing it? Specifically, is the current yearning for something to live by bringing people more to organised forms of religion, which each have their systems, narratives and beliefs, rather than more do-it-yourself forms of faith which are more about picking what you need from a set of spiritual practices?
• Is this longterm, or is it just a flash in the post-pandemic pan? 
• I see this happening in urban liberal, liturgical churches. But that’s because I’m the Provost of St Mary’s Cathedral in Glasgow. Where else is it happening and what are the common themes?
• What new resources do we need to help people to find a Christian way of living in a world which seems so angry, violent and out of control?

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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.

You can leave a comment on this post here: Sermon preached on 17 August 2025. (But should it have a content warning?) This post appeared first on What is in Kelvin's Head?.

Oh, I can hear you yawning from here. But it really is important and this is a significant step forward.

“Issues” as it has come to be known became a touchstone for the Church of England. It was originally a statement from the Church of England Bishops about what they thought about sex and sexuality. It was never intended to become something that people had to agree with before they could be considered for ordination but it became so. Of course being the Church of England, people tried to make a distinction between agreeing with the document and agreeing to live in compliance with the document. Such corrosive thinking simply led people to tell lies and I’ve always thought that all Christians were agreed that telling lies was a bad thing that none of us should do.

Issues was horrendous back in the 1990s when it was introduced. It set different sexual standards for clergy and laity, it referred to gay people as homophiles, it stated that bisexual people were inherently unfaithful to partners, it seemed to condone conversion therapy and much more. It didn’t just use language that we now find outdated, it used language that was prejudicial at the time and deeply harmful to huge numbers of people. I was trying to become an ordinand when it was published. It was devastating.

It affected other parts of the Anglican Communion too. I know people who trained for ministry in Scotland who were told that living within the no-sex-for-the-homophiles boundaries of Issues was expected of them too. And many of us went to Selection Conferences for ministry that took place in the Church of England where the selectors were trained to expect potential ordinands to indicate that they would live within the boundaries of this document. For a while, we sent clergy from Scotland on Selection Conferences in England with a letter stating that this document didn’t apply in Scotland. But we were still using a system that was based entirely around discrimination against lesbian, gay and bisexual people. (I don’t think transgender people were addressed in the document).

My thoughts today are with those whose vocations were crushed by Issues. And those who managed to have vocations upheld but whose personal lives were damaged by it. Some people lived unhappy lives that might have been completely different. My particular thoughts tonight are of a wonderful priest I once worked with whose love never spoke its name. He loved another priest and remained closeted – living or seeming to be living within Issues because that is what his church expected of him. When he died, his obituary in the Church Times did not mention the love of his life. He was presumed to be living within the boundaries of Issues and he died being presumed to be living within it. It is a simple reality that some people were expected to lie in life and could not have truths told when they died. (And that meant others who were beloved by clergy sometimes went unacknowledged and were ignored at funerals). 

For the sake of him and hundreds of others whose lives have been harmed by this document both within and beyond the Church of England, I welcome the fact that Issues is now gone.

And now the next questions.

Will the Church of England stop selling Issues and presumably making money from the wretched document? It is still on sale on Amazon after all.

And more importantly for everyone.

• When will we hear apologies from church leaders for the harms that churches have done in relation to policies on human sexuality?
• How will UK churches communicate their repentance for previous harms done, to churches in other parts of the world which have enthusiastically endorsed such policies in response to their adoption here – particularly those churches which think of the Church of England as their mother church?
• What will compensation for the anti-gay policies of churches eventually look like?

You can leave a comment on this post here: “Issues” is no more This post appeared first on What is in Kelvin's Head?.