Of Castles and Cathedrals

1 Corinthians 12

January 20, 2013

As most of you know, I spent most of the past week in Scotland celebrating Martin’s 19^th year just in time by taking him to the land of my forebears and introducing him to their native drink. In truth, the whisky drinking was a very small part of the trip. We spent most of our time exploring old castles because, well, they’re castles!  

You can climb all over the ruins of these buildings that date back, many of them, more than 1,000 years. Of course, at a certain point, you either run out of steam for looking at castles or you begin to ponder something a bit bigger than the architecture. To be sure, the buildings themselves are interesting to look at, and they do lend themselves so very well to moody photographs.

Martin and I took more than 500 pictures, and right about now you are probably giving thanks that this sanctuary does not have a video screen! Do let me know if you want to look at castles!

Actually, I wish I could show you a couple of pictures because they are instructive. For example, in St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, the High Kirk of the Church of Scotland and the mother church of Presbyterianism, there’s a fine example of one of the common gestures of the Reformation: taking the pulpit from the front of a long sanctuary, placing it on one side wall in the center and turning all the seating to face that point. Whether or not it’s an example worth following in its specifics, on a general level it’s a great reminder that when the physical space gets in the way of how you feel called to worship then no matter the weight of history and tradition you change the space even if it already has centuries’ worth of tradition!

When the fascination with the rock piles wears thin you begin to listen for the echoes of lives and histories, and that’s where what risks being a travelogue turns toward being a sermon, or, at least, a meditation on life and faith and the word of God through the lens of castle and cathedral.

Last weekend, while y’all were worshipping here at the wee kirk, Martin and I were in St. Andrews. You may know St. Andrews for its role in the iconic opening scene of Chariots of Fire – the lads running along the beach to that famous score and then hopping over a couple of low fences to run across the green, green grass. Perhaps, you know it as the historic birthplace of the game of golf, and we did stroll along the home hole of the Old Course and looked across those very same low fences and that very same green, green grass in the wind and fog and rain and sleet and snow. I’ve never been any place where the old saw about the weather is more accurate: don’t like the weather in Scotland? Stick around 15 minutes; it’ll change.

Anyway. That much I knew. I did not know, however, that the castle and cathedral at St. Andrews played a significant role in the development of the Scottish kirk, and, therefore, in our own development as the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Turns out that a fellow by the name of George Wishart, who had studied under John Calvin and whose heart was aflame with the ideas of the Reformation – ran afoul of the cardinal and, alas, in the way of things in the mid 1500s, found the rest of himself aflame, too, right in the middle of the street outside the castle at St. Andrews on March 1, 1546.

A sign there today says that the spot on the street where Wishart was burned at the stake is marked with a GW, though I couldn’t locate it. In any case, John Knox had been moved greatly by Wishart’s teaching and when he heard about the fate of his friend he rushed to St. Andrews from Edinburgh to preach the message of the Reformed church. For his efforts, Knox was imprisoned as a galley slave aboard a French ship for more than a year.

Contrary to the cardinal’s hopes, the martyrdom of Wishart and the imprisonment of Knox did not dampen the spirit of reform but, instead, eventually spurred the Reformation onward in Scotland. Meanwhile, at the end of May that year, followers of Wishart and Knox finagled their way into the castle, murdered the cardinal and hung his body out a castle window.

Upon his release by the French, Knox was exiled to England then forced to leave there as well, which led him to Geneva where he studied under Calvin. He was finally able to return to Scotland around 1550, and spent the last two decades of his life defending the ideas of the Reformation and the Scottish kirk to whose founding he was central.

The intrigues of those final decades – especially Knox’s running feud with Mary Queen of Scotts – have filled more than a few volumes of Scottish history and echo still off the stones of castles and cathedrals from Edinburgh to Loch Leven, from Stirling to St. Andrews.

What has any of this to do with us, more than 3,500 miles and almost 500 years removed?

Well, some of the connections are obvious: the roots of our contemporary Presbyterian polity lie in Scottish soil and in the fertile ground of Knox’s theological imagination. The impulses toward democracy imbedded in our Book of Order – and, not coincidentally, in our nation’s Constitution – come straight out of Knox’s thinking about church and civil order. So it was not just for the sake of a Facebook status when I doffed my cap to the statue of Knox there in St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh where he preached some of his most fiery calls to Reform.

This morning, though, I’m mindful of a more subtle connection. On his deathbed, in 1572, Knox had his wife read to him Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth, which includes our passage for this morning:

“Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit. […] All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.”

It can certainly be misleading to read history through the lens of contemporary values, but as I read Paul’s words again and think about the story of Knox and all those Scottish kings and queens and reformers, I am struck again by just how hard it still seems to recognize that the same Spirit is the source of all good gifts that can be used for the common good. Oh, to be sure, their times were complex, and lacking a shared vision or understanding of the common good it may simply have been impossible to see the world differently than they did.

The cardinal of the cathedral of St. Andrews could not recognize that the same Spirit gave George Wichart and John Knox gifts that were so readily available for the common good. In the same way, Knox himself could not see the gifts in either the Roman Catholic church leaders or in Mary Queen of Scotts.

I wonder if, there on his death bed, hearing Paul’s words – and, especially the ones that come next about the gift of love – John Knox gave any consideration to the possibility that some of the people he had railed against might also have had great gifts for the common good.

More than that, though, as Martin and I climbed over the various castle and cathedral ruins, and strolled the ancient cobble stones of Edinburgh, I wondered what blindness we have to the gifts of the Spirit that other folks have? Moreover, what blinds us? What stands between us and a shared vision of the common good in all of the various spheres of our lives?

I certainly don’t pretend to have the answers to all of those questions, so I’ll leave them as questions and close us in prayer.  Mary Queen of Scots is reputed to have said, “I fear the prayers of John Knox more than all the assembled armies of Europe.” So let’s close with one of the prayers of John Knox. Whether or not his words ring much true for us, almost 500 years after they were prayed, they do stand as a reminder that the same God who gives us gifts for our own time is the God who hears our prayers in all times.

“But, O Lord, infinite in mercy, if thou shalt punish, make not consummation; but cut away the proud and luxuriant branches which bear not fruit, and preserve the commonwealths of such as give succour and harbour to thy contemned messengers, who long have suffered exile in the desert. And let thy kingdom shortly come, that sin may be ended, death devoured, thy enemies confounded; that we thy people, by thy majesty delivered, may obtain everlasting joy and felicity, through Jesus Christ our Saviour, to whom be all honour and praise, for ever.”

“Amen. Hasten Lord, and tarry not.”