‘Remembering Robert Burns’
Good morning…
…on Monday 25 January, when Scots and others around the world remember the poet Robert Burns, born this day in 1759. Most years I take part in the Burns Supper organised by the Officers Training Corps in St Andrews – this year I will miss reciting a couple of lines of Tam o’Shanter following a plate of haggis, neeps and tatties.
So in memory of Scotland’s National Bard I have dug out a sermon I gave in St Salvator’s Chapel on Sunday 25 January 2015, exploring Burns, religion and faith. You’re welcome to read on as a sort of toast to his immortal memory…
Jonah 3:1-10; Mark 1:14-20
Burns Breakfast
Is it not slightly strange to be celebrating Robert Burns in the chapel today? After all, people know he was a critic of the church, of the prevailing theology of his day, and lived a somewhat licentious life. Should we not leave the celebrating to the Burns Suppers? Clearly, I ask the question to answer it No, so let us see why, in my opinion, we are right this morning to have a Burns Breakfast.
True, he was a critic of the kirk (the Scots name for the Church, especially the Church of Scotland); in essence he was against bad religion wherever he found it. And in the kirk of his day he found plenty of bad religion. For one thing there was hypocrisy. Holy Willie’s Prayer explores the nature of a kirkman who sees wickedness everywhere he looks:
Lord, mind Gaw’n Hamilton’s deserts;
He drinks, an’ swears, an’ plays at cartes…
The speaker has fallen foul of the Presbytery of Ayr (the ruling body of ministers and elders in the district) and thinks them in the wrong:
Lord visit them, an’ dinna spare,
For their misdeeds.
As for a Mr Aiken of that Presbytery:
Lord, in Thy day o’ vengeance try him.
The speaker thinks he is good: a pillar o’ Thy temple. Yet this same Holy Willie reveals he has sinned with Meg, and there’s more:
Besides, I farther maun allow,
Wi’ Leezie’s lass, three times, I trow–
But Lord, that Friday I was fou,
When I cam near her;
Or else, Thou kens, Thy servant true
Wad never steer her.
“Fou” means drunk, so he’s saying if he’d been sober he wouldn’t have had sex with Leezie. Burns’ satire is biting: his speaker reveals himself as being a hypocrite, criticising others but absolving himself of the same sin, while also being mean-spirited to the object, or perhaps, victim of his lust.
Some of Jesus’ words come to mind: Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? (Matthew 7:3) I’ll come back to Holy Willie’s Prayer shortly.
Then there was Patronage: Burns greatly objected to the imposition of a minister on a congregation against their will by the wealthy and powerful of a parish.
Consume that high-place, Patronage,
From off thy holy hill.
And he was also against an inhuman formality to worship. The Cottar’s Saturday Night compares human family worship, such as Burns knew as a child growing up, with the dreary lifelessness of the Sunday service:
Compar’d with this, how poor Religion’s pride,
In all the pomp of method, and of art;
When men display to congregation wide
Devotion’s ev’ry grace, except the heart!
For Burns, the Christian faith should not exclude the heart, feeling, love – a far cry from the formal worship often found in church.
The Kirk Burns was brought up in was the Church of Scotland, founded by John Knox, imbued with the theology associated with John Calvin. And Burns was clearly against certain characteristic doctrines of Calvinism: particularly predestination. Holy Willie knows the doctrine well:
O Thou, what in the heavens does dwell,
What, as it pleases best Thysel’,
Sends ane to heaven an’ ten to hell,
A’ for thy glory,
And no for onie guid or ill
They’ve done afore Thee!
The problem, as Burns saw it, was that it led to people like Holy Willie to care nothing for how they lived because they were sure they were part of God’s elect, destined from all eternity to be saved. Indeed, Holy Willie argues that the fleshly lust which leads him to lift a lawless leg with Meg and Leezie’s lass is sent by God himself, to stop him getting too proud!
If sae, Thy han’ maun e’en be borne,
Until Thou lift it.
He wasn’t responsible for his lust – it was all God’s doing! And there’s no consequences for God’s chosen sample. Contrast this with the Apostle Paul’s rejection of such a self-serving view: Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! (Romans 6:15)
The Old Testament reading reveals that Holy Willie had his scriptural forbears. Jonah, sent by God to declare his judgment on Nineveh, is shocked and demoralised when Nineveh repents. For when they repented God forgave. This was not Jonah’s idea of God, and of his mission. How dare God forgive when their acts demanded vengeance. Humanity often feels that God is too gracious. And Holy Willie represents all those churchmen who long for God to destroy others without mercy – except for themselves.
Of course, Calvin’s doctrine is that some are predestined not to election to grace, but to damnation. Burns objects greatly to this: he makes fun of a preacher at a Holy Fair, Black Russell:
His piercin words, like Highlan’s swords,
Divide the joints and marrow:
His talk o’ Hell, where devils dwell,
Our vera “sauls does harrow”
Wi’ fright that day.
Burns also makes fun of the devil, and in so doing undercuts the Calvinist belief in double predestination:
An’ now auld Cloots, I ken ye’re thinkin,
A certain bardie’s rantin, drinkin,
Some luckless hour will send him linkin (meaning skipping)
To your black pit;
But faith! he’ll turn a corner jinkin,
An’ cheat you yet.
So much for the religion Burns was against. What did he believe in? Who was his God? Well, for one thing, the Creator. Burns as a ploughman lived and worked in the outdoors, and was deeply conscious of creation: producing lovely songs of rivers and braes, of rashes and roses, of yowes and knowes, gowans and heather, of mice and lice, of winter’s sleety dribble.
And part of creation is humanity:
the poet is the mouse’s poor, earth-born companion/An’ fellow-mortal.
And every human being is God’s creation:
Princes and lords are but the breath of kings,
“An honest man’s the noblest work of God.”
And God has made our hearts:
he knows each chord, its various tone.
And he has made us to love:
If Heaven a draught of heavenly pleasure spare–
One cordial in this melancholy vale,
Tis when a youthful, loving, modest pair
In other’s arms, breathe out the tender tale,
Beneath the milk-white thorn that scents the evening gale.
We should not be too coy about Burns’ celebration of love: he strongly believes that sex is natural, good, and more important than money or power. In Green grow the rashes, O, he celebrates the lasses (girls), and points out that the Bible’s exemplar of wisdom, Solomon, was the writer of erotic poems, in the Song of Songs:
The wisest man the warl’ e’er saw,
He dearly lov’d the lasses, O.
Indeed in his own life, he fell often in love, had many sexual relationships with women, and a number of children outside his marriage to Jean Armour. But he loved women also for their intelligence, wit, and religious feeling. One woman he loved, Agnes McElhose, wrote to him: unless a woman were qualified for the companion, the friend and the mistress, she would not do for you.
Burns’ God is clearly not a God who institutes distinctions between people – men and women, or rich and poor. Burns teases those in authority – the ministers, the lairds, the princes; he believed that all are God’s children, and all deserve an equal share of justice.
The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,
Is king o’ men for a’ that.
The story in Mark of Christ calling his disciples is echoed I think in Burns’ elevation of the common man: the first disciples were fishermen – honest men, in Burns’ way of speaking – yet people called to be the friends and followers of the Son of God.
And, very clearly, God is a forgiving God. He has made us, and made us human, and made us free to make mistakes:
Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;
Tho’ they may gang a kennin wrang, (meaning get something wrong)
To step aside is human…
And as we said to begin the service:
They never sought in vain that sought the Lord aright.
Given this understanding of God, what kind of religion does Burns promote? He certainly sided with the Moderate party in the church rather than the hard-line Calvinists, and believed that reason and feeling had an equal place in our faith. Such an approach led him to the fundamental view that God has created us to be happy, despite the hardships of life. And so, he believes that the good life is anchored in God:
When on Life we’re tempest-driv’n
A conscience but a canker–
A correspondence fix’d wi’ Heaven
Is sure a noble anchor.
Burns clearly believed in prayer – not self-justifying like Holy Willie, but sincere and humble – and we are using them today. One lovely prayer was written for a friend whose husband has died:
May He who gives the rain to pour,
And wings the blast to blaw,
Protect thee frae the driving show’r,
The bitter frost and snaw!
May He, the friend of Woe and Want,
Who heals life’s various stounds, (pains)
Protect and guard the mother plant,
And heal her cruel wounds!
In the place of religious fear, Burns prefers a religion of hope:
If it please Thee, Power above!
Still grant us, with such store,
The friend we trust, the fair we love–
And we desire no more.
And following his conviction that God has created humanity equal, he sees that issuing in a society of equality, of justice, of friendship: in words sung at the reconvening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999,
For a’ that, an a’ that,
It’s coming yet for a’ that,
That man to man, the world o’er,
Shall brithers be for a’ that.
Of course, Burns’ understanding of God and religion is not perfect: but today is not a day to carp, but to celebrate the man, his poetry, his song, his insight that God is a loving and forgiving Creator: that’s not a bad way to break our fast at the start of a day, or a semester.
Yours,
Donald.
Revd Dr Donald MacEwan
Chaplain