Travel the world

create your own visited countries map

This is a fun site - you customise it with the countries you have visited. I'm a definite European, with the exception of my one excursion onto the African continent.

Okay, I've calmed down now ...

... mainly due to the excellent thinking about the situation on today's posting on this blog.

http://emberdays.blogspot.com/

I'm still annoyed, but part of my annoyance is with myself and the ease with which I demonised the debate about which I heard a 15 second news report.

Lent might be a time to develop a more mature outlook.

Removing the speck and missing the beam

What a jolly communique from Dar-es-Salam. The congregated bishops in their collective wisdom have decided that there be a moratorium on the election and consecration of any more gay bishops (just as well it's not retrospective or half of the historic succession would have been barred!) and there be no more blessings of same-sex unions.

Now that we've disenfranchised all the gay people from expressing their faith in our churches, who's next? Shall we bar all who have been divorced? Let's shut out all who are separated. Why not get rid of those who are still single after, let's say, the age of 28. Surely if they were normal they'd be married by then and procreating according to the purposes revealed in Genesis.

Wait a minute! I've an even better idea. At a time when we're all beating our breasts and apologising for our historic actions over slavery, let's close the door to all those with a skin colour other than pink. After all, the church used to firmly declare that they had no souls anyway.

What a bunch of .....

I am seething at the news that 7 Anglican bishops have refused to take communion with the Presiding Bishop of ECUSA at the Anglican Conference in Tanzania. They seem to have forgotten just who it is that invites them to the Supper. It makes me ashamed to be part of the Anglican Communion. The sooner it falls apart, the better.

Lenten discipline of assassination

This morning I had a go at culling some of my books. I started on the Bibles on shelf seven of one of the two stacks of shelves in my study (each has 8 shelves), and twenty minutes later I was half-way along that same shelf and not a single volume had been discarded. Instead I had browsed, and read a section from a Ferrar Fenton 1906 translation of the Bible that was given to me many years ago in Brighton by two elderly ladies who were aunts of a friend of mine. Dolce and Nen were not church people, but they clearly thought that this book was something I should have, and they inscribed their gift on the front flyleaf.

I have numerous Bible translations, and this one by Ferrar Fenton is one I hardly ever pick up. Yet this morning I got engrossed in the tale from the First book of Kings of Solomon’s coming to power, and how he got rid of all those who were a danger to his throne. I hadn’t realised it before, but his right-hand man, Beniah-ben-Jhoiadah, was nothing less than a professional assassin. First of all he is sent to kill Adoniah, then he slays Joab as he clings to the altar in the Temple for sanctuary, and two years later, he is sent to dispatch Shemai, and thus, says the text “the kingship was secured to the hand of Solomon.”

We tend to have this image of Solomon as a ruler who governed with wisdom and tolerance, not only because we’re told that he prayed for the gift of wisdom, and the Lord granted it, but also because of the story of his judgement in the case of the two women who were arguing over the parentage of a baby. Maybe what we tend to forget is that the threat he uses to bring about the resolution of this case, the slicing of the baby in half, would not have had the desired result had he not had some reputation for being ruthless. Like all the rulers of his age, and since, when he came to power he carried out a cull of his enemies. Like Hitler with his “Night of the Long Knives” in June 1934 when he purged the SA of its leadership, Solomon systematically removed those who could raise rebellion against him.

My own attempt at a cull was a dismal failure. I have so many books and I need to thin them out, but every time I pick up one and look at it I think, “That may be useful, I’d better keep it”, no matter that I haven’t referred to it once in over 20 years of full-time ministry. I need to be more ruthless. Perhaps it should be my Lenten discipline to dispose of one book every day. That would get rid of 40 volumes, and it would be a start.