Welcome, fellow clergymen, to my monthly e-letter. You will see from the photograph that I’m writing from my kitchen rather than the palace chapel, because showing how modest and unassuming I am is so much more important than providing a spiritually uplifting setting to help everyone through these difficult times. And anyway, churches don’t matter any more (see below).
As usual I’ll start with the clue to this month’s ‘Guess what the ‘e’ in e-letter stands for’ quiz: it’s stretchy! We had many responses to last month’s quiz, ranging from ‘eternal’ (my goodness some of us are stuck in the past aren’t we!) to ‘even-more-meaningless-waffle’ (very witty from the Rector of St. Barts). The answer of course was ‘executive’. Congratulations to the winner, my good friend the Bishop of Chelmsford.
I’m particularly glad Stephen won as some of you have taken inexplicable offence to his very straightforward point that clergy members who have responded to hospital requests for more chaplains may not in fact work as chaplains because they are too silly to use PPE properly. Also because they are of more use buying groceries than administering the Sacrament of the Sick to Christian victims of coronavirus who are separated from their families and suffering a painful and terrifying death. To illustrate this, and at the risk of straying outside my field of expertise, I’m now going to talk about Jesus. When Jesus cleansed the leper after saying ‘I am willing’ (Matthew 8.3) what He actually meant was ‘I’m only doing this because there’s no Lidl round the corner from which I can buy him a packet of pasta’.
Talking of your need to be open to interpretations, when I wrote to you all to say your churches must be closed to you as well as to your parishioners, this was of course guidance, not instruction. Some of you have assumed an overly conservative definition of the word ‘must’. Perhaps you are forgetting that when God issued his Ten Commandments and said ‘You must not kill’, He didn’t mean killing was forbidden – that is an old-fashioned, dogmatic interpretation which will alienate all those who would like to be Christians and continue their mass-murdering lifestyles at the same time. What God meant, of course, was that killing sets a bad example to others and should therefore be avoided. And it’s the same with churches.
Jesus and God in one e-letter – see how this plague is perverting my priorities! But don’t worry – next month’s e-letter will be back to economics and expediency.
Yours ‘elastically’ (big clue there!)
Justin.
© C P Jenkinson 23/04/2020
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