If St Paul's day be fair and clear...

Despite being cursed with a hopelessly dated interior, I’ve always considered St. Paul’s Cathedral as having a great deal of potential. Granted, the dreadful pipe organ desperately needs replacing with a nice modern electronic unit: would you believe that during my last visit the tour guide actually admitted their monstrosity doesn’t even have a bossa nova button!!!! And how their webmaster can keep a straight face while claiming “Music is integral to the worshipping and educational life of the cathedral” when there’s no plinth upon which three young people and an overweight and highly suspect older one can lead the congregation by strumming on badly tuned guitars is utterly beyond me.

Even so, there’s absolutely nothing about St. Paul’s interior design which couldn’t be fixed with a little drywall from Home Depot. Rip out all the fussy woodwork and boring memorials, lift everyone’s mood with some cheery and colorful synthetic carpet, and before you can say “I know someone who’ll do the work cheap if we pay cash” the place would become a really practical ministry space in which Christians could quibble over the minutiae of Galatians or Colossians unhindered by pesky unbelievers foolishly seeking a sense of the numinous via Christopher Wren’s architecture.

Yet as those of you who sinfully use the internet for more than just studying my homilies and visiting my informative and entertaining advertisers are probably aware, St. Paul’s has recently been in the news for reasons entirely unconnected with the outmoded decor. Rather than a problem with undesirable furnishings, the Dean and his Clergy are facing something much more trivial: undesirable people. And do you know, My Beloved Sinners, the reason why these godless liberal apostates don’t know what to when confronted by an instance of people they don’t like daring to lower the tone of their precious Church property and surrounds? I’ll tell you: because they don’t know Scripture!!!!!!

Every Bible-believing Conservative knows that the Gospels aren’t exactly the most useful part of God's Word, but when it comes to dealing with people loitering around one’s Church, King James left us not just one, but four indisputable accounts of how Jesus handled things. My personal favorite is in John 2:13-16: here Jesus not only sent them packing without so much as a tract explaining that clinical depression is caused by sin, but He even made a whip and gave them a good thrashing on their way out. You can call me old-fashioned, but this worked back in Jesus’ time and, more importantly, works for me today – do you think any trick-or-treating kiddies so much as dared to ring the Rectory doorbell this week? (Although a group of local mothers concerned about Bishop Quinine taking turns to stand on the pavement outside and warn any unsuspecting little ones to keep away may also have played a small part).

Indeed: if the Prelates Knowles and Chartres knew the first thing about Biblical Ministry they’d be outside whipping their unwanted guests until the ingrates either fled in terror or repented of their incapacity to appreciate the importance of global merchant banking when it comes to proclaiming the Kingdom of Heaven. After which their Graces would undoubtedly contact me for help contemporizing their tired old building – did I mention that I can get them a good price on some really lovely and only marginally toxic partitioning?

I’m Father Christian and I teach the Bible.