“The Kirk’s Gift to the Church”

Preached by John DeBevoise
At Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church
 On September 18, 2005

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, for the sake of the promise of life that is in Christ Jesus, To Timothy, my beloved child: Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.
I am grateful to God—whom I worship with a clear conscience, as my ancestors did—when I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day. Recalling your tears, I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy. I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that first lived in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you. For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.

II Timothy 1: 1-7

I am wearing a new stole today, and it’s called the clergy tartan. It was a gift to me from the McCammon family in memory of Carol’s husband, Bob McCammon, who never missed a St. Andrew’s Society gathering like this one, a Kirking of the Tartans. At least, insofar as I remember. I am grateful for it. It’s the clergy tartan. Clergy have their own tartan that we can wear now. And while wearing it may not be as brave as wearing a kilt to church, it is a step forward in courage for me, and I want to be sure you notice it.

I am also wearing, a little more bravely, a Wallace tartan tie underneath my robe. You know William Wallace, Braveheart, Mel Gibson. “Freedom!” That kind of thing. My wife says the tartan tie doesn’t match the clergy tartan, so I can’t wear the one next to the other.

We are celebrating today. We are celebrating our heritage. We often emphasize through things like the Apostles’ Creed, the things that bind us together in unity in the Christian church. Today, while we do lift up particular graces that are given to us in our families, in the most fundamental sense we are celebrating our common family heritage as well. As President Bob said, it is ultimately the fact that we are all part of God’s family. We are the children of God.

But it is important to celebrate the unique gifts that are given to us. The particular channel, or heritage, by which our faith has been communicated to us. In the particular branch of the Christian family that I serve, the Presbyterian church, a good portion of our faith heritage comes to us from the Christian church in Scotland. Indeed, the Presbyterian Church in Scotland is known as The Church of Scotland. The practice of the Kirking of the Tartans, as Bob alluded to, has roots that go back to a time when the wearing of the tartans was forbidden to the Scots. And the blessing of the families had to be done surreptitiously, sometimes upon the pain of death. Then the day came when they were able to bring their family crest, their tartans, into church out in full public view. And a great celebration it was!

In America, my own research (and there may be somebody who can refute me later in the week, and I look forward to that, but not as much as you do, probably)… my own research indicates that the Kirking of the Tartans in America was begun anew by Peter Marshall, that great Scots-American pastor, who served as Chaplain of the United States Senate, and prior to that as the pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. Peter Marshall thought that having a worship service like this, a worship service that celebrated the heritage of the Christian faith as it came through a particular channel, a particular means of grace, was a way of enabling Christians with pageantry, with joy, with celebration. To give thanks to God for the specific ways in which, in our own histories, God has been active. And it has brought us a heritage, particularly a heritage of faith.

I remember back around my first Kirking of the Tartans here, which would be about 1983, on a Saturday I was visiting Margaret Wilson’s father-in-law, Robert Wilson, who was in a care facility. He was quite elderly then. He was a Scot who had come to Tampa via Canada, and had been involved in banking and had retired here. Some of you may have known him. He was a real, a real Scots Presbyterian. I remember telling him about the service that was going to happen and how excited we were about the bagpipes and the drums and the tartans that would be there that day. He turned to me and he said, “If you really want to celebrate your Presbyterian heritage, you should visit them in their homes and examine them on the Catechism.” He was serious. Not as celebrative thought, but deep in our roots, as well, the point being that our heritage has a content. A substantive content, that is caught not only in the tartans but in the statements, the articulations of that heritage in things like the Scots Confession.

The Kirking of the Tartans is, in its best sense, I think, understood as the Blessing of the Families. In that way, all of us, whether we are on our father’s side French Huguenots from somewhere outside of Paris, or on our mother’s side Scots in the line of Merle Wallace Jones, my grandfather. Regardless of where our story began or finds its roots, our families have been a means of God’s blessing us by giving us a heritage. A tradition. And specifically a tradition of the faith. Because the truth is, the faith is not thought up by anyone in this room. It wasn’t our idea. We didn’t come up with it. It didn’t begin with us. Someone has shared it, and been a steward of it, and taken care of it, and shepherded it, across the centuries; and with the help of the Spirit’s guidance, have given their lives often, to ensure that it is passed on to us as a heritage here today. At the end of the service, when we say, “Raise the tartans!”, what I understand us to be saying is to raise your own heritage, the means whereby God has blessed you, that we might give thanks to God together, for God’s activity in our histories.

This heritage is transmitted, it is traditioned, it is transmitted to us. How has your heritage been transmitted to you? How has it been passed on to you? How is faith transmitted?

St. Paul writes Timothy here, and says to him that he remembers. He remembers how Timothy’s faith has been given to him. How his heritage has been passed on to him. And it looks to me like he is suggesting here, when he says, I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that first lived in your grandmother Lois, and then in your mother Eunice, and now in you, that he is suggesting that either that heritage is given through genetics or through personal modeling. And while we might want, at times, to claim it as just a matter of genetics, I don’t think that’s how we get it.

I had two great-uncles (or so the family story goes)…. Uncle Angus on my mother’s side (Merle Wallace Jones’ uncle), and Uncle John on my father’s side, the French Huguenot line. In their elderly years, they lived together in a house near the intersection of Azeele and MacDill. Actually it’s the Child Abuse Council office now, and they lived in a small house behind that, which my grandfather had built for those great-uncles back there. One of the things that they did, that they shared together in their own histories, is they raised chickens. One day, as the family story has it, they got into a dispute about a particular group of eggs in one of the nests. Whose hen had laid those eggs? To whom did those eggs belong? In their discussion about it, they got more heated until the discussion became strife. Then Uncle Angus said to Uncle John, “Well, we should settle this, then, as my ancestors did back in the old country.” Which is, to exchange blows. One gets a good slug at the other, and then the other gets a good slug back. You’ve seen this scene in “Braveheart”, haven’t you? Back and forth, back and forth, until one man is left standing. And the man left standing is the man who gets the eggs.

“Alright,” said Uncle John. “Alright. And I’ll let you go first, Angus.” So Angus hauled back and let go with a mighty blow that struck Great Uncle John in the nose, and backed him up a few steps. He tottered and he stumbled, but he didn’t fall. He came back and said, “Now, I’m still standing. Now, I’ll strike a blow at you, Angus.”

Uncle Angus said to him, “Aw, no, you can have the eggs. Never mind.”

I don’t think either one of them was genetically predisposed to Christian faith. Nor were they very good at modeling it, either.

Paul tells Timothy, your faith was given to you and your grandmother modeled it for you. And your mother modeled it for you. And that’s how you come to it. Christians, for umpteen generations, have been modeling being Christian to one another.

I don’t know that faith is given in exactly this same way to each of us. That is to say, people around us model it in different ways. Certain families may model it in one way. Some may have seen it lived out in a different way than another. But each of us, in some way, is given the Christian faith as a kind of a content which is precious to us, and which is again a means of God’s grace in our lives.

Paul is saying to Timothy here that faith is modeled. It was your heritage, and it was modeled for you by your mother and your grandmother, who are powerful influences in your life.

I like to talk to couples before we baptize their children about the role of parents on children. I share with them the story of looking across the dinner table in my own home, at our youngest daughter, when she wasn’t even quite yet two years old, and seeing her at the starting of the meal and taking her hands and folding them together like this. Before she knew what the word “God” meant, and before she knew even what she was doing, she knew that she was sitting with a family that did this, somehow, at the beginning of every meal. Well, what chance did she have? She has to grow up to be Christian that way, with that kind of indelible impression etched firmly on her mind.

And so it was, perhaps, with Timothy. Did he see Eunice and Lois do things like that while he was still so small, and so little, that they were making deep impressions. Deep patterns of piety on him. These are the habits of the heart.

But there are also other habits of the heart that we are given, that are means of transmitting the Christian faith to us. Things like Scripture reading. And the ministry of prayer. The practice of benevolent giving, which we often learn from those a generation before us. The courtesy of extending Christian hospitality as a part of one’s lifestyle. Giving yourself away in service. Someone has modeled this for you. You are not the first one to think this up and connect it with your Christian faith.  Sabbath observance. If you gather here today, someone has given you this as a pattern.

And this gives me a chance to tell my favorite Scots joke, which some of you have heard before (and so please forgive it, but laugh at the right place because it will cue the others). It’s the story of a Scots spinster who, on a Sabbath afternoon, was sitting on her porch reading the Bible. She saw the pastor walking by, the young pastor, with his bride. She cried out to them, “Pastor! Don’t you know that it is the Sabbath? And it’s not a good day, a right day, to be out taking a stroll?” The pastor replied back to her, “Yes, madam, but do you not remember how in the Scriptures, Jesus said to the Pharisees that David went into the temple and fed his troops on the Holy Day? And Jesus also let his disciples go into the field and gather grain on the Lord’s Sabbath?” She replied to him, “Aye. And I didn’t think much of it when he did it, either.”

Now that’s a deep pattern, isn’t it?

Someone has given you the faith by modeling it for you, and telling you about it, and it’s a part of your heritage. It’s the heritage that they give to you.

So Paul says to Timothy, Remember, Timothy…. And he is speaking to Timothy at a time when he’s particularly discouraged. He says to him, Remember. Remember this heritage that has been given you. Focus on it and rekindle it within yourself that it might help you in this tough time.

That’s what we are doing here today. We are remembering, in the hope and the trust that it will rekindle within us for another year the heritage of faith, the heritage that comes to us through God. And a major part of the way in which we do that remembering, that remembering of who we are and whose we are, is through celebration. Not the only way, but certainly a major part of the way that we do that remembering is in our celebrations.

Which raises the question, What do people see you celebrating? Nothing? Then are you saying to them that life is not good? That God is not good and that he has not created the world in such a way that there is not goodness, nothing to celebrate in it? And yet we stood and sang together, Psalm 100: “All people that on earth do dwell, lift up your voices in praise before God. Know that the Lord is God; it is He that has made us.” There is that to celebrate.

What do you celebrate, and what do people see you celebrating, as a sign to them of what is really valuable to you?

Here’s a poking question for you. Do you get as excited about the eighth grader who is close to you in your family system, sharing with you on a Friday afternoon her algebra score, as you do about a wide receiver that you’ve never met, that you don’t even know personally, scoring a touchdown on a Sunday afternoon in a game against the Lions?

Two thousand years later, and a tough opposition for the Christians is still the Lions, isn’t it. Who do people see you celebrating, and what do they see you celebrating, and what does it say to them about what is really valuable to you?

It’s the same thing with our grieving, I think. Whose grief do you share, as a way of sharing your connection with them. Whose burdens do you help to carry, as a sign that they are a part of your family? That’s why I think it is so good that we feel the kind of compassion we do for people in other states who are impacted by the hurricanes. Someone said to me that in Florida, we feel it because we know first-hand the threat of those storms. But that we feel that compassion for people we don’t know personally, is a sign that we understand that they are connected to us as a part of our national family. And in the same way, those who suffer in other countries, who go hungry at night, who stand in the midst of war and violence, they are a part of our family as well. Precisely because of what Bob said, because they are a part of the family of God.

So the psalm says, “All people that on earth do dwell.” A part of the way heritage is transmitted is through celebration. In the way we spend our money and our time and our energy. Because it designates what we find important. And because it points to our job. What is your source of joy? What do others see you lift up or point to as your source of joy?

Today we celebrate our heritage, and particularly our heritage of faith. Our heritage in history and in faith. We celebrate in the church that God is great and that God is good. And we celebrate that God has made that greatness and that goodness known to us through particular families. Through particular and specific histories which have been a means of God’s blessing us and claiming us with his grace. We celebrate and we remember. And as we do, you may hear the words of the apostle to his own disciple once again, I remind you of the faith that was in your mother and your grandmother before you. The faith which you should rekindle is a way of remembering whose you are.

©John T. DeBevoise 2005