LtoR Bishop Oscar, Keith Fenwick, Mama Agnes Mnung'a, 14 iii 2011
SAUSAGES AND GOOD ENGLISH CHEESE were on the menu today as Bishop Oscar and Mama Agnes joined our monthly TGIM Luncheon Club for an energetic group – with a good corporate appetite – who call themselves “the old codgers”. Needless to say, the sausages made my day! Simple things often do, they work, they just do. Months ago someone said “maybe the Bishop would like English sausages?” And it’s true. One of my neighbouring priests discovered our Diocesan Bishop Peter’s love for home-made marmalade, and keeps him supplied. I think that’s great, and Ken just shrugs his shoulders and simply says “it’s the least I can do”.
Simple things. “I’m going to take this idea home to my diocese. Thank you”. (“This” – in this case – being our Verger John Baker’s idea of setting up a – yes, very simple – luncheon club for some of the retired men of the parish and accepting the offers of others to help him make it happen).
Simple things like sharing my spectacles with a bishop I met last Friday who, by Monday, seems like a brother. Simple things like the quieter moments when he sings a hymn in Swahili and I sing in English – both to the same well-loved Anglican tune. Simple things like other quiet moments when the hearts of two pastors turn out to be preoccupied with lists of extraordinarily similar things – each knowing the necessary degree of loneliness that that sometimes brings. Simple things like the welling up of laughter: “I’ll tell the folk back home”, he said, “that this arm’s growth has been supported by lunch with Bramhall’s churchwardens; this side of my growing stomach by Bramhall MU; and this side by Bramhall sausages and mash, here, with you!”
Yesterday the bishop developed the psalmist’s metaphor of the warrior armed with bow and arrows. You know, if you or I lost a bow and arrows we could, if we set our minds to it, make a new set in half an hour. Simple. And effective. I wonder though whether we Bramhall folk might think arrows a little unsophisticated? Are we keener on the complicated? Bishop Oscar owns one purple shirt, doesn’t yet have a house, regularly leads worship in churches that can’t yet afford a roof, loves sausages and mash, encourages us to think again about bows and arrows … and a voice in the cloud above my head seems to be saying – as though it had winged its way across the skies of Tanzania, “KEEP it simple” …
