Sermon for the Kirkin’ o’ the Tartans
admin | 8 June 2009The 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.
This afternoon we celebrate the heritage of the Scots through the laying up of the tartans in this Covenanters’ Church. “The net of memory,” Buckler remarks, “has a mesh all its own. Events the size of lives slip through it and are lost; yet it can catch and hold the merest fragments of occasion.” Perhaps, just perhaps, that is the challenge of these occasions; namely, to weave together all the threads of memory into a tartan where all the ironies of history and culture are not forgotten but remembered and celebrated.
What does this have to do with ‘the Gift of the Good Land’ and with our reading from St. John’s Gospel? Underlying the kirking of the tartans is, I think, a strong biblical motif and sensibility. It has to do with the land. The land wherever we are placed is the good land that God has given to us. And for what end or purpose? This is one of our contemporary questions. Is the land just there for our use and purpose? For us to manipulate and exploit and, ultimately, destroy? Is it just dead stuff, subject to the vanities and the vagaries of human presumption and control? The religious and biblical view of Judaism, Christianity and Islam alike is to say, no. It is God’s land, a land for God and for the honouring of God in the land by our respectful use of the land.
In a way, the gathering up of the clans and the tartans of the clans into the Church is symbolic of an entire theology of the land which has its beginnings in the Pentateuch and which reaches a kind of completion in this Scripture text. “I am the vine,” Jesus says, “ye are the branches … Abide in me.” What does it mean? That the land where we are is where God is to be named and honoured and where we have our greater abiding with God himself, the land of the Trinity, as it were. The world in which we find ourselves is, emphatically, God’s world. It exists for his will and purpose. And our humanity, too, finds its end and purpose in God. Not just in some ‘pie-in-the-sky/by-and-by’ kind of way, as if heaven were but a vain hope and religion merely “the opiate of the masses,” as someone who was once famous once famously said. No. Through prayer and praise, in word and sacrament, in service and sacrifice, we participate in the divine life now in the places where we are.
To remember that the land is the good land given by God is the counter and corrective both to our presumption and arrogance and to our fearfulness and fatalisms about the environment. The good land is, in a wonderful biblical image, “the land which the Lord your God gives you, a land flowing with milk and honey.” The image of the land flowing with milk and honey reoccurs many times in the Old Testament. But it has its origin, not simply in the covenantal promise to Abraham of the promised land, but in the story of God’s revelation of himself to Moses in the Burning Bush. “I am who I am,” God says to Moses, identifying himself both in terms of the particularity of the family of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and in terms of the self-disclosure of the divine name, “I am who I am.” Deliverance and salvation are interwoven with the theme of Divine Revelation and identity. “I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey”(Ex.3.8). “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I am has sent me to you … [to] bring you … to a land flowing with milk and honey” (Ex.3.17).
Somehow the land which God gives you is connected to God’s own self-revelation. And this is the point which has its further expression in John’s Gospel in what is known as the last of the so-called ‘I am’ sayings where Jesus establishes a strong sense of identification with the God of the burning bush, “I am who I am,” while also establishing a series of powerful metaphors for our relation and identity with him. The various ‘I am’ sayings – “I am the Bread of Life”, “I am the Light”, “I am the door”, “I am the Good Shepherd”, “I am the Resurrection and the Life”, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”– all culminate in this remarkable image of cultivation, “I am the vine, ye are the branches … abide in me.” It is an image that connects us to the land and to God.
There are times when it is not hard for those in the valley to think that this is, indeed, “the land flowing with milk and honey”. In the bleak mid-winter, however, it may be another matter. Then, we may well incline to Edmund Burke’s dismissive comment about “Nova Scarcity”! And yet, the biblical point has really nothing to do with the physical characteristics of each place, geographically and agriculturally. It has altogether to do with where God in his providence has been pleased to place you. There you are to make his name to be glorious. To be sure, all our fears and worries notwithstanding, the spring is glorious; glorious, I would suggest in its praise of God which belongs to our task and privilege. The vocation of our humanity, as George Herbert puts it, in a phrase with which the Covenanters would surely agree, is to be “the secretaries of God’s praise” through our worship and in our lives. “You never love the world aright until you love it in God,” as another poet suggests (Thomas Traherne).
The American poet and philosopher of the environment, Wendell Berry, in his book, The Gift of Good Land, challenges us about our perspectives and assumptions about the land. He recalls us to what is really a kind of biblical understanding, particularly in the face of our technocratic exuberances and anxieties, reminding us that “to have a lot of power should not make it impossible to use only a little” and that we need to learn again “to accept and live within limits; to resist changes that are merely novel or fashionable; to resist greed and pride; to resist the temptation to ‘solve’ problems by ignoring them; accepting them as ’trade-offs’ or bequeathing them to posterity.” “A good solution,” for our present dilemmas, he argues, “must be in harmony with good character, cultural value, and moral law.” It all stems from the realization that this is God’s land and we are his people called to his service in the cultures and places that belong to who we are and through which we lay claim to our spiritual identity and truth with God.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism asks, “What is the chief end of man?” The answer, of course, “is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” We are to do that in the land where we are placed and through the cultures that belong to our histories in the good land, the land which is God’s gift to us. It is, it seems to me, the ancient biblical sensibility expressed in the old (or not so old!) prayer for the blessing of the Tartans.
O Lord, Thou hast promised that in all places where Thou recordest Thine Holy Name, Thou wilt meet with Thy servants, and bless them; fulfill now Thy Promise, and make us joyful in our prayer, so that our Worship, being offered in the name of Thy Son, Jesus Christ, and by the guidance of Thy Holy Spirit, may be acceptable unto You, and profitable unto ourselves. Bless, we pray, these Tartans – that they may be unto us and unto all people a token of the faith of our Fathers; and a sign of our service unto You. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
“I am the vine, ye are the branches … abide in me”
(Revd) David Curry
Trinity Sunday, June 7th, 2009
‘Kirkin’ O’ the Tartans’, Covenanters’ Church, Grand Pré