Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Official Report 783KB pdf

---

Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is the Rev Dr Martin Scott, who is the council secretary of the ministries council at the Church of Scotland.

Anniversaries can be a blessing or a bane. How often, I wonder, have you forgotten a special anniversary—a family birthday or, worse still, a wedding anniversary? You can feel the terror welling up at the very possibility. That is because they are important markers in life and times when we remember, reflect and often celebrate.

This is a week to remember two key figures. Yesterday was Martin Luther King day and Friday is our own Burns day. I want to keep those anniversaries, because both men point us beyond mere sentimentality to principles for living.

King was unshakeable in his confidence that human beings are created equal in the sight of God. He engaged in a lifelong struggle for recognition of that most basic principle, and he did so throughout with a commitment to non-violence. Ironically, violence sought to silence his message, failing to learn the lessons of history. King’s assassination meant that the dream spread all the quicker through the women and men who picked up the threads to weave a multi-coloured, multi-ethnic future. The struggle for genuine equality continues, but the roots are well established, as the celebration of a day to recall King’s work indicates.

Burns was a complex figure. No doubt he had shadow sides, but he loved and celebrated life. He also had both a healthy disrespect for false piety and a fierce sense of human equality—qualities that are worth remembering in a Scotland that is gaining confidence in its identity. The ability with a few words to deflate pomposity and expose hypocrisy is matched in Burns by extraordinary expressions of tenderness, love and loyalty. It is no chance thing that so many of his well-turned phrases have entered into common usage; rather, it is due to the integrity of their imagery, which captures real life and experience. Though it is couched in a non-inclusive language that is reflective of its era, there is no more deeply moving expression of human dignity and worth than “A Man’s a Man for a’ That”.

Both those figures help me, as a Kirk minister, to recall another: Jesus of Nazareth. Like King, Jesus was assassinated for his non-violent resistance to inequality, his celebration of life in all its fullness and his caring for the poor. Like Burns, Jesus died young but left a legacy of words that have influenced the world, exposing hypocrisy and raising human dignity. Theirs are lives worth recalling and anniversaries worth marking by us as individuals and as a nation.