Sermon for the Kirkin’ o’ the Tartans
The Rev’d David Curry preached this sermon at the 13th annual Kirkin’ o’ the Tartan, held at The Covenanters’ Church, Grand Pré, on Sunday, 7 June.
“I am the vine, ye are the branches … abide in me”
My thanks to the organizers of this service of the Kirkin’ o’ the Tartans, to Barry & Flo MacDonald, Murdina McCrae and to Rev’d Robyn Brown-Hewitt for the privilege of being the preacher on this occasion in this historic edifice in the beautiful land of Grand Pré. The ironies of history, and what I can only call the humour of God’s Providence, are particularly striking.
That an Anglican Priest, particularly one who is devoted to the Jacobean and Caroline expressions of classical Anglicanism, and who is the Rector of a Parish associated with and Chaplain of a School founded by Charles Inglis, the First Bishop consecrated for an Anglican diocese overseas, should be invited to preach in a Kirk dedicated to the memory of the Covenanters, who were defined precisely by their opposition to Episcopacy, the Prayer Book, and all things English in general, and upon such an occasion as “the kirkin’ o’ the tartans”, which claims to be an 18th century Scottish tradition and ceremony related to the banning of the wearing of the tartans after the rout at Culloden in 1745 of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites (those who were devoted to the cause of the Stuarts against the protestant Hanoverians), but is actually a Scots-American tradition that began in Washington, D.C. in 1941 by the Presbyterian clergyman, Rev’d Peter Marshall, is either testimony to the colossal forgetting of our histories or testimony to Christian ecumenism and the deeper principles of the Gospel which truly define and unite us through our cultural identities. I think it is the latter but I hope that I haven’t begun by mentioning the unmentionables! Fortunately, I realize that I am standing at least ten feet above contradiction!
Our histories are the histories of displaced peoples. We are constantly reminded, it seems to me, about the multi-layered and interconnected aspects of the cultural landscape of the Maritimes, a land shaped by the comings and goings of various ‘come-from-aways’, ‘sent-aways’, ‘returning-back-from-aways’, ‘grab-and-run-aways’, not to mention the native aboriginal ‘never-been-aways’, but who have suffered, as a consequence, in the same sense of dislocation and displacement. The narrative of Ernest Buckler’s classic novel, The Mountain and the Valley, is framed by a hooked rug. It could just as easily be a tartan. In a way, the warp and woof of our historic identities is like the weave of a tartan, each line and colour capturing some feature or other of our heritage.