The Kirking of the Council

On Sunday I was at the Kirking of the Council. This colourful annual event, with a 400-year-old history, involves city councillors, officials and members of the community attending a service at the Old High Church in Inverness.

The event has been criticised in the past by those who argue that religious faith should be a purely private issue, divorced from public life. But in fact Sunday’s service was a very legitimate recognition by the Council that believers in God form a significant section of the community and a willingness to take Christians (and by implication the members of other faith communities) seriously.

The service gave Christians an opportunity to pray publicly for the councillors whose presence signified the Council’s appreciation of the role played by Christians in enriching the quality of life in Inverness.

To me, looking through the lens of faith, this bringing together of Church and Council was a reminder that elected members and officials are ultimately to be seen as a gift from God to us – fallible people like us all, but with a willingness to serve the community.

It also reminded me that Christians, and all people of faith, believe that nothing we do is hidden the God to whom each of us is accountable. Whatever our role in society – whoever elects us, or manages us, or works in partnership with us, whoever we serve or are answerable to our primary accountability in everything is to God.

And it reminded me that we are all equal in God’s sight. The pews on Sunday were packed with community leaders, folk with no highfalutin role, school kids, all of our lives a mixture of light and shadow, all of us equal in the presence of a God who cherishes us. And cherishes the whole community, especially those whose brokenness, failure and despair have pushed them to the edge, those who might have felt excluded by the pomp in Church Street on Sunday.

And our God-focussed presence there on Sunday reminded me that God’s help is available to each of us. Last week a colleague mentioned a book he was reading, with a startling title - Reading the Bible with the damned – a book about the power encountering the Bible has in the lives of those who judge themselves to be helpless, excluded, ‘damned.’

My colleague explained ‘They’d come across, say, the first verses in the Bible where God’s creative Spirit brings order out of chaos, and they’d ask “Can this God bring order out of my chaos?”’

The message of Christianity is that out of the chaos of dysfunctional lives, families, communities, God brings wholeness and healing. I believe God’s healing work carried out not simply through Christian and other faith groups but through everyday friendship and neighbourliness, and through Councils and charities and local agencies. The whisper of God is everywhere present, even when its source is not acknowledged.

The expectation of the National Secular Society that my faith should be excluded from my engagement in the community is untenable, since it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of faith.

If I am, say, a Christian, a Muslim or a Jew, my faith defines who I am. Underpinning my knowledge, experience, training, professionalism is a faith which can’t be restricted to part of my life but shapes all my living, all my decisions.

The Rev Peter Nimmo mentioned in her sermon the I have a dream speech by Martin Luther King, a man whose political vision was given substance and empowered by his underpinning faith.

As Christians, we have a dream which we believe is God’s dream. It is a dream of a society where all are equal, where each seeks the good of others, where all have what they need and no-one has too much, a society where individual difference and uniqueness is celebrated, where everyone can flourish, using their gifts for the common good, a grace-prompted society of justice, peace and love.

God’s dreams always come true, and Christians believe that this dream will be a reality in the fullness of time. For the moment, we throw everything we’ve got into realising the dream as fully as possible in our communities in partnership with all men and women of good will.

The sermon on Sunday was about Pontius Pilate, sitting in judgement on Jesus. Pilate believed Jesus was innocent: would he release him, or go the way of political expediency and compromise? There are times, whatever our community role when we face situations where we must either run with the dream, regardless of the personal cost, or fatally compromise.

I trust that we came out of church into the sunlight on Sunday morning with a renewed sense of commitment to work for the flourishing of everyone within our city.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 12th September 2013)