Sunday Sermon 12 April 2026
Sunday Sermon for 12 April 2026 - Rev. Doug Gay
So this Sunday has a special name – technically its called Low Sunday – because last week was High Sunday, was in fact the Highest Sunday of the whole Christian year - so in one sense, the only way is down – but in fact we are still in a high season of the church’s life - We didn’t sing or say Alleluia for 6 weeks in Lent – now we will say or sing it every week in this season of Easter – as we said last week, after the sorrow of Good Friday our hearts are tuned for joy – even while we remember that we are always called to weep with those who weep! We sing the Alleluia for one another when some of us cannot sing it themselves.
But it would be more accurate to say that in these weeks, the only way is not down but out – having announced and proclaimed the good news of Easter last week, these weeks of Easter are extrovert weeks - a time when we reflect not only on how we live in the light of that good news but on how it spreads out into the world. Last year we did a series around this time on what the Church of Scotland and many other churches call the 5 Marks of Mission. You can find a list of these on our website but let me give you a brief reminder of what they are, before we go on to look at John 20 and how Easter moves the church out into the world.
Mark One is To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom.
Mark Two is To teach, baptise and nurture new believers.
Mark Three is To respond to human need by loving service.
Mark Four is To transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and pursue peace and reconciliation.
Mark Five is To work to safeguard the integrity of creation, and sustain and renew the life of the earth.
Now no statement of what the church’s mission is will ever be perfect or cover everything – but I think there is a lot to like about this one – I think it helps us in our understanding of what our mission is here at KH.
It is part of our calling as the Church to think deeply and to feel deeply about the world in which we are asked to bear witness to the gospel – that’s what we see Jesus doing, what we see Paul doing – it’s the prophetic task of the church, that we are called to know the times we are living in and as the writer of the book Revelation, John of Patmos said, to listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.
The great Christian thinker and writer G.K. Chesterton once said that at least five times in the past thousand years it looked like Christianity was going to the dogs, but each time it was the dog that died. We in Scotland, in Europe, in the West have been living through such a time.
There’s a poem by one of our greatest Scottish writers Liz Lochead – its called The Offering – I only ever spoke to her once and she told me her dad was Session Clerk of his local Kirk – but in this poem she wrote ‘never in a month of Sundays would you go back..’ she talks about ‘the small hard feeling of the offering in the mitten’ – the implication is that Church was a place of confinement – a place where you had small hard feelings – and if you were a young woman growing up in the sixties in Scotland like her and you wanted to live creatively and boldly and passionately – how could you, why would you go back to Church?
And as a minister of the Kirk I hear her indictment – but I also resist it – I resist it both because I believe churches can change and learn and be renewed – but also because my experience of the church has been different enough to that to give me hope. Many of us are here because our experience of church has not just been one of small hard feelings – even if there have been too many of those – it has also been of big feelings, life affirming feelings, times of listening and singing and meeting, of going to the waters of baptism, coming to the Lord’s Table, of watching the light break through those windows, of meeting the risen Jesus through the Holy Spirit working within us. This is a space in which we have been awakened to the beauty and the mystery of God, in which we have been called and captured by the story of Jesus, in which we have been moved by the Holy Spirit – it’s a space in which we have been called to justice, a space in which we have been able to hold grief, to bring our anger and pain to God, a space in which we have prayed for others, prayed for the world, a space in which we have confessed our sins and felt the burden of guilt and shame taken from us by God’s mercy.
Although more of the Boomers held on, many Gen Xers like me walked away from Church as did many millennials – but there are some signs that people from all of those generations are questioning their choices.
They are questioning them because the world that people thought they could build in the 60s is not the world that came – as Joni Mitchell said in one of her later songs – ‘they won’t give peace a chance, that was just a dream some of us had’.
The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor wrote, prophetically I think, about something that happens when societies secularise, when religion becomes weak – what happens he said is that the spotlight then turns on other stories, other belief systems – because the big questions never go away – whether its our search for how to make meaning and find meaning in the face of evil and suffering, or its the feelings awakened in us when we experience beauty and joy – and when the spotlight turns on secular humanisms, on a world in which we have to make ourselves, make our own morality and our own identity, make our own hope and our own meaning – those new stories can seem very thin and very inadequate if they become all we have to live by. In the face of the intractability of human evil and human suffering – people need something more and many of them are looking for something more.
When we think in 2026 about sharing the good news of the kingdom of God – I’m very aware that we are calling people to believe in God in a scientific age, an age in which our whole population receives basic scientific education.
It has been fascinating to follow the journey of Artemis into space this week – it has caught the imagination of the world – the images it has brought back are stunning and compelling – but my sense has been that they hit differently now than the first such images did 50 years ago. What NASA and its partners have done is breathtaking – I am in awe of the science and the skill and the tech which has made this possible – as the Psalmist says, we humans are almost like gods, almost like angels – but there is also something humbling about the vastness of what we have looked out into – something which makes us feel very small. Second time around, we are still dazzled, but perhaps we are less naïve.
There have been times when the Church has had problems with science – but there is also a whole story which is sometimes not told about how the rise of science in the West was actually helped and boosted by worldview of Christianity and by the Protestant Reformation. Islam was already fuelling innovation and advances in mathematics, but the reformers were enthusiasts for science – John Calvin was passionate about the value of astronomy and medicine and the study of the natural world – The reformers enthusiasm for science was grounded in their belief in God as creator of all that is – the material reality of creation was, they believed, sustained by the spiritual reality of God – the laws of nature reflect God’s consistency, but they do not restrict God’s creativity – Because of their trust in God’s consistency and God’s ordering of creation, scientists can investigate and explore the universe, they can make good hypotheses and confident predictions – they can guide a manned spacecraft on a journey around the Moon and be waiting within a few hundred metres for it when it splashes down. And this is because God is above and beyond and behind the universe – just as it remains dependent on God’s power it remains open to God’s creativity. C.S Lewis once said, “If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn.”
Our claim in the Church is not that we believe less than science, but that we believe in more. We believe in evolution but we also believe in creation. We believe in the material world, but we also believe there is a spiritual character and dimension and purpose to life If we are wise we will think hard about what our technical brilliance is doing to us and our children – because artificial intelligence is no substitute for moral or spiritual intelligence.
As we proclaim the gospel in our time – there are huge questions to wrestle with about how we make sense of our lives – and as Christians we are not in denial about that – we can say to all the generations, Boomers and Xers and Millennials and Gen Z’s – bring all of your questions, bring all of your challenges – because we as a Church have been wrestling with these for two thousand years and we believe this is a good place to wrestle with them. This is a place where we say with St Anselm, I believe in order to understand.
It’s also a place where you will find the story of Thomas – which is a hugely important story for us as we seek to tell the world the good news of the kingdom. So many of us identify with him, we feel for him – Thomas the guy who missed Easter – who knows where he was a week before this – he had a doctor’s appointment or he had to stay home for an Amazon delivery – but he meets the disciples and they are bursting to tell him the good news – we’ve seen the Lord! But it’s too much for him, it’s too big a stretch. And lots of people sympathise with Thomas. Maybe you do this morning. All these other people seem to get Easter – but it seems to have passed you by. Maybe you felt it once – maybe you believed it once – but not any more – so many questions - Jesus seems to have left the building.
And what is so moving about today’s gospel – what is so loving and so gracious – is that Jesus comes back for him – for the guy who missed Easter – for the guy who can’t find his way to faith – Jesus comes back for him. And maybe that’s you? It’s certainly many folk in our society – maybe they were baptised or raised in church – but somehow it came to seem incredible and so they checked out – they drifted away – they went off to explore the world and try to see how it worked out living as if there was no God…
Today we heard about Jesus coming back for those people, coming back for you if that’s you – coming back to invite them, to invite you to faith – and we also heard him blessing us – the ones who don’t get to see, but who do get to still find life in his name.
The wonderful South African theologian of mission David Bosch had a phrase I really like – he spoke about ‘mission in bold humility’ – we are bold because we believe that we can find life in Christ – our lives can be fuller when we allow ourselves to consider the whole page they are drawn on – but we are humble because we will always have questions and doubts – we will always mess up, we will always struggle to understand.
This morning we ask God once again to mark us as a congregation who can share the good news of the kingdom with our parish and our city – and we thank God for Jesus, who comes back for us – who comes to the strugglers and the stumblers and the doubters, who comes and says – Believe in me, Find life in me. Find forgiveness in me. Receive my life into your life. It’s you I came back for. It’s you I came back to bless.
And for that we say Amen and Alleluia - May it be so for us this morning – Alleluia and Amen!