Parliamentary Chaos: we could all do better - couldn't we?

Our hearts skip a beat, our excitement is almost uncontained, the sky is blue, the Members of the the UK Parliament are going to spend the day parleying.  

Whilst this is - as the name suggests - what they are supposed to do, their parleying is usually about what the Government of the day is doing or about to do.  Today they are, as far as we can tell, just parleying.

And, it so happens, our Church has a meeting to conduct business this very same evening.  There is a natural instinct for us all to feel we could to better than the current Members of Parliament are doing.  But can we be so sure.

1653.  Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell is trying to sort out Parliament, and the Bible and the Churches are figuring large in the Protector's consciousness.  They decide to go for a thoroughly Biblical 70 members - the same as the Jewish Sanhedrin.  (An irony here, for the Sanhedrin proved less than perfect in the light of Jesus the Messiah's encounters with them.)

Not enough, it proved: So 144 (12x12) was settled upon as a larger, thoroughly Biblical number.  Thence to the appointment.  A few were appointed more directly, but to this Nominated Assembly churches of various kinds - including baptist-type churches - were given the power to elect Members of Parliament from their ranks.

Such a godly, Biblical set up.  What could possibly go wrong? 

To be fair, starting in April, the Parliament achieved some notable benefits for the nation.  But then the religious arguments broke out.  The State Church shouldn't be the State Church, said some Baptist and Quaker types.  Yes it should, said the State Church types.  Doing to that Parliament what Brexit has done to this one it all descended into acrimonious chaos.  Cromwell sighed and dissolved the very Biblical Parliament.

Perhaps the clue is found by pondering the Gospels observation of the 12 disciples as they bickered and misunderstood their Lord.  Whatever we think of the current crop of politicians, to err is certainly human: it is not uniquely their problem.

Brexit and the folk on Thorney Island

Brexit has preoccupied another week of UK news, and it has taken (briefly) the horror of the New Zealand terrorist attack to dislodge it.  Brexit has proved and is proving a very thorny issue for the House of Commons.  Just round the corner is a street that perhaps makes that point:

Perhaps a Lord Thorney was a nobleman, or a mayor of Westminster or the owner of a big house in the street.  But no, this street is named after the island once nearby - Thorney Island.

The island was formed by the Tyburn River dividing as it entered the River Thames. It was surrounded by mud, almost fully flooded when the rivers overfilled and it was populated, we assume, by much wild, thorny vegetation.

Its inhospitable, isolated setting explains why it was chosen by the monks of the first millennium for their house and abbey.  The abbey was unsurprisingly called Thorney Abbey.  In relation to the East Minster in London, this abbey became known as West Minster and, as you know, the name has stuck.  A king added a Palace and then a Parliament arrived.

The monks, to put it mildly, would be surprised to find the Westminster of today.  Perhaps, though, they would not be surprised to find that all the collected wisdom of the 650 (actually 642 thanks to Sinn Fein abstentionists and the ever present spectre of death) souls who famously occupy the spot amounts to nothing much more than the thorns they cut down long ago.  The journey from prayer to palace to parliament to pandemonium is an invitation to complete the cycle back to prayer.

Mercy on the 134 bus

A few stops down the road from us one of London's latest knife attacks took place - on a bus.  The next day I sat on the same numbered bus and all of a sudden a 134 bus felt all bad.

The Curate's Egg is famously used to describe the part-good, part bad.

The wit derives from the curate awkwardly answering the Bishop that his bad egg is good in some parts.  Awed by the Clerical Eminence he is too timid to agree that it is all bad.  But a bad egg is, of course, just bad.

Life is a curate's egg of good and bad.  Only in the bad, such as on my 134 bus, it rarely feels that there's another chunk that is/was/will be good.  Only one organ may be diseased but the whole body seems bad;  only one neighbourhood gang is hostile, but the whole place feels unsafe; only one charge relating to one incident is made in court against you but you feel wholly criminal; only one relative is dangerously ill but the whole family lives under a cloud.  And so on. 

Psalm 23 does this in reverse. 

Goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. 

Part of life is goodness from God.  And the other part?  Well, others may call it badness, the wrong side of the street, a run of bad luck or the going getting tough.  But for the believer it is interpreted as the place of God's Mercy.  Was my bus ride no longer good?  Then it had become a place, for me, of mercy instead.  But no less divine.

Selling Baptist Life: Part 3. Making a Mockery

Having forked out £19 million for a very interesting old religious building, an upscale hotel franchise has to decide what to do with it.  One option is to ignore its history.  Another is to embrace it a little (Bunyan's pristine restored statue - see Part 1).  In the end though, whether we are standing by Noah's half-built ark, by Jeremiah prophesying in encircled Jerusalem or at the foot of the Son of God's cross at Golgotha the unchanging inclination of an unbelieving world is to resort to mockery.

Over the years my sense of humour, not least in churches, has irked some primpy souls so it is from such a personality that I write that the way the hotel has appropriated Biblical themes in the old Baptist House is not funny at all.

I'm OK with The Baptist Grill conjuring memories of several church interviews.  Or even that person who doesn't leave after church with the others but lurks, waiting for the pleasantries to be over so that they can deliver their unpleasantry!

But hereon you may like to refer to the hotel's website (click here), a venue 'Devoted to the Divine.'

'Chef Tony Fleming will preach the gospel for seasonal British ingredients'

'In an irony Oscar Wilde would have appreciated a place of piety has been transformed into a place of decadence'

'The business of L'Oscar is to put every temptation in front of its guests'

'The Baptist Bar: Succumb to Temptation . . . sip on a 'New Testament' cocktail.'

'Perfect for a late night pilgrimage'

All in all it shows up the problem of building religion into stone and not into souls.  For while those who served the Lord they loved in that place are largely gone into His nearer presence where they cannot be mocked, their building and heritage in stone has fallen victim to the mercilessness of a secular age.