"Towards the end of last year, I met a clever, well-educated young man from Afghanistan who, through no plans of his own, found himself in Scotland. In chatting to him, I asked him what he knew of Scotland before he arrived here. Before I tell you his answer think back a few years. I am sure that until we heard of someone called Osama Bin Laden very few of us knew anything about Afghanistan even if we could spell it and find it on the map.

When I asked Saheed my question his answer was all that he knew about Scotland were two things – whisky and Robert Burns. He knew nothing of Scotland’s connection with penicillin or anaesthetics or engineering or TV or the telephone or, even, shortbread ………. but he knew about Robert Burns !

Most Scots, of course, have been brought up on Burns but what is it that makes this son of Scotland so admired around the world with people from Cairo to Calgary and Melbourne to Moscow and every corner of the globe gathering this weekend to toast his immortal memory ?

What is it that was so special about this man that more than 200 years after his death he has this world wide adulation ?

As my Afghani friend Saheed has proved Burns has become an internationally recognised symbol of Scotland. And that must have as much to do with us at home as with people overseas. Maybe it is that the history of Scots has been characterised by struggle and persecution and comradeship and nationalism and astonishing victories in the face of adversity – not least from the climate and landscape which is ours. These are things which are the warp and weft of Burns’ works – his compassionate identification of the struggles of ordinary people and his heartfelt cry for justice for them. These are things which ordinary people across the world can identify with and these are characteristics of his work which makes Burns so memorable.

This morning, Bob Callander has given us his beautiful recitation of To a mouse maybe one of Burns’ best known and best loved poems. Like most people here I’m sure, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know this poem, it was probably early in primary school that I learned it. I remember having this vivid picture in my wee boy’s head of him actually turning up the nest with his plough – a rare sight in the streets of Dennistoun in the 50s – and of actually speaking these beautiful words to the wee beastie. I did wonder why it didn’t run away !

Now that I’m far from being a wee boy I can maybe take a more adult view of the poem and I am very grateful to Bob for prompting me to study it closely this week and find so many jewels among its words and so many pointers to those things which make Burns so special not just as a poet but, like each of us, as a child of God.

In the poem Burns celebrates the bond of feeling between humanity and the animal world which also symbolises proper relations between human beings themselves. Feminists have seen the poor oppressed mouse like the wife of a small farmer turned out of her home or ‘nest’ by the arbitrary oppression of the landlord. Burns’ sympathetic feeling is not mere sentimentality but the key to moral insight and unity. Many people like me would say that God intends humanity to be social to all of his creation but without Burns’ moral insight this cannot happen. Burns’ insight points to a unity between mouse and man reflecting the creation of humanity and animals by a benevolent creator.

I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth born companion
An' fellow mortal!

The mouse is not only a metaphor for an oppressed fellow human being but also simply a mouse just as the wounded hare Burns sees limping by is a suffering creature in his poem written just a few years later –

Inhuman man ! curse on thy barb'rous art,
And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye!
May never pity soothe thee with a sigh,
Nor ever pleasure glad thy cruel heart!

Go live, poor wanderer of the wood and field,
The bitter little that of life remains:
No more that thickening brakes and verdant plains
To thee shall home, or food, or pastime yield.

Implicit in a divinely created order is a desire for a more harmonious relationship between the natural and the human worlds. That relationship, potential and actual, runs through Burns’ poetry in a way which can only be described as ecological. Burns’ radicalism, therefore, rooted as it was in religion makes him very much a son of the twenty-first century.

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't.

I recently attended a talk given by Ian Hamilton QC, one of those who liberated the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey on Christmas Eve 1950. Speaking of what he and his fellow patriots did he said It may have been illegal but it wasn’t wrong. [repeat] That’s a strange thing for a distinguished advocate to say and I doubt he would ever have got an acquittal with such a plea for one of his clients ! It may have been illegal but it wasn’t wrong. Isn’t that the essence of what Burns is saying to the mouse who might have stolen a few ears of corn out of all of the sheaves of the harvest ? A daimen icker in a thrave 'S a sma' request; The touchstone of right thinking is always right feeling, whatever judgement others may make, the bond is always one of compassion.

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's win's ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Shared feeling is part of a sacred union of all nature. Yet compassion is also a distinctly human capacity and responsibility since it is humanity that can look backwards and forwards in hope and fear. Catastrophe comes on the poor wee mouse as a bolt from the blue, but the special dignity of human beings lies in memory and foresight and freewill. The ability to love is a gift from God.

In that one poem as an example, we see Burns as very close to what the Church believes and teaches but, as is well known, he himself was not much loved by the Kirk of his day and the feeling was entirely mutual. The Kirk in Burns’ time was a very unsettled body, writhing with divisions and disturbances which were never really truly addressed until the Disruption of 1843, if indeed they were truly addressed then or even now.

One of Burns’ best known poems and one of the funniest is Holy Willie’s Prayer and I am grateful to our own Jimmy Hempstead in his new book for highlighting the similarity between Holy Willie and the Pharisee in St Luke’s gospel which Fraser Gillespie read for us this morning. There were of course well known aspects of Burns’ lifestyle which offended the code of discipline of the Kirk of his day but surely the artistry and humanity of the man allow us to see him now much more of a saint than a sinner.

His compassion for his fellow human being makes him the good Samaritan, the one who would go the extra mile, the one who would feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty, who would suffer with the sick and the poor and the hungry with all of whom he identified in his works. For some people 1^st July 1999 was a very special day when after nearly 300 years the Scottish Parliament reconvened, a day said Donald Dewar “anchored in our history”. Special as it was, I suspect that few of us can actually remember anything the Queen said, or the First Minister, or the Presiding Officer but I am sure that every one of us can remember the singing A man’s a man for a’ that Burns’ anthem of international equality and solidarity moulded by his fierce sense of justice and compassion."