Our Rector Writes......

You’re fired!   Words often heard in very many households throughout the country these days. According to the television ratings anyway!  Quite a number of conversations I have these days seem to include something of the  television programme, “The Apprentice”.   

And good television it is too.  Certainly in terms of drama and comedy.  No one, I guess, even in the heyday of the great sit-coms could have created a programme with so many bright young people coming up with so many stupid ideas. 

There always seems to be this great concern about the great decline in numbers attending church on Sundays.  Whilst this is a concern there seems to me to be an even greater one.  That concern is how as a society we have slipped from those values that Jesus asks of us, demanded of us.  Love one another was a significant part of his message, and it seems to me to be the very part of his message which we are slipping away from in our self-centred society.  The Apprentice just seems to reinforce it, holding up  the contrary ideals which we should aspire to.

As I was thinking about this I recalled something from my childhood, a salesman from my childhood years infact.  Victor was a salesman for Betterwear in the days when all its sales people were employed by them.  Victor covered a huge area and would visit our village about once twice a year.  In our house, and in many others around, the main item of sales was Mansion Polish….round tins of it which were used to polish everything from the pieces of furniture to the “lino” on the floor, and even on rare occasions football boots.  My mother was not a great fan of housework in general, and certainly not polishing in particular, and so she was always on the look out for one of the new remedies coming onto the market which would have the same effect as Mansion Polish but with half the effort.  The Betterwear catalogue always had some of these and she would begin to make an order with Victor for these “miracle” polishes.  Victor would then go through in detail the qualities of the product, and then at the end of his sales pitch he would end up with the statement that perhaps it would be better to stick with a tin of mansion Polish until the new product was better tried.  They rarely came back a second time, being replaced by something even more miraculous that its predecessor, but the sales of Mansion Polish continued unabated producing satisfied customers and on many occasions for Victor the honour of top sales people.  Now there was a good salesman, he knew what his customers wanted, they came first. 

Poor old Victor wouldn’t have made much of an impact on The Ap[prentice.  No matter he made a big impact upon many people and whilst doing his job well the very essence was caring for people.  I guess that is a story that would go down well with Jesus, too.  Come to think of it I guess Jesus wouldn’t have made much of an impact on the programme either, but, there again, I don’t think he would have wanted to.  His mind was set on something much higher, good in God’s eyes.  Perhaps that is what we should all be doing, focusing on what is important in God’s kingdom rather than the fleeting ways of the world.  You wont here the words “You’re fired” there.