Christ Church

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.

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“No-one has ever seen God. The only-begotten Son who is in the
bosom of the Father; he has made him known”

We meet together in the glory of the revealed God, the glory of the Trinity. All our beginnings and all our endings have their place of meeting in the Trinity. It is, we may say, the one thing essential. No Trinity, no Christianity. “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’, except by the Holy Ghost” (1 Cor.12.3). To say “Jesus is Lord” is to make a Trinitarian statement.

Essential Christianity is Trinitarian. What do I mean? That the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to Christian identity, corporately and individually. You are baptized in the Name of the Trinity, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. At Holy Communion, we participate in nothing less than the Son’s Thanksgiving to the Father in the Spirit. Our liturgy is full of the Trinity. And yet, we have the greatest difficulty about the essentials of the Christian Faith. The doctrine of the Trinity is what gives coherence and meaning to the things which are to be believed, the credenda, the things which we say in the Creed, first of all, and then the things which follow from them which belong to the moral and political order of the Church’s life and which shape the agenda, the things that are to be done in our practical lives. Essential things shape action without being reduced to particular issues and agendas.

The problem for the Anglican Communion lies in this confusion.  You see, there are endless numbers of things about which we might have quite legitimate but different opinions. About those things there can be no insistence, no coercion. They cannot be made the essential things of our Anglican and Christian identity. The doctrine of the Trinity, on the other hand, is essential. It is one of the non-negotiables of the Christian Faith. The result of the most intense reflection upon the Scriptures and human experience imaginable, it is at the heart of the consensus fidelium, the consensus of the faith, which we receive. It is not ours to re-invent, re-image or re-define. It is the mystery into which we can only enter and discover the rich fullness of its power and truth.

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“There came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind … and there appeared unto them cloven tongues, like as of fire”

These are wonderful words which capture the Pentecostal experience. More importantly, they are wonderful words which carry us into the mystery of Pentecost itself and into its meaning. They are about something more, though surely not less, than what the experience suggests. The language here is that of metaphor in the form of simile, a sound “as of a rushing mighty wind,” things that appear and are seen, “cloven tongues, like as of fire.” Pentecost, is seems, is all theatre, son et lumière, sound and light. But what a show, what a spectacle!

The language is powerful and instructive. The Holy Spirit, of course, is not wind and fire. Plenty of that about, of course; Synod is over but a provincial election is still underway! And, of course, you may say, there are the usual Rector’s ramblings! All wind, no doubt.

Yet, wind and fire are signs that point us to the presence and truth of the spiritual reality of God. The most elusive things of the natural world, wind and fire, tangible and yet not so tangible – after all, who can see the wind, who can touch the fire? – are used to signify to us the transcendent reality of God precisely in the moment of God’s intimate engagement with our humanity.

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