Thought for the Day, 5 January 2005

The Rev. Joel Edwards

I was wondering through my front lounge two days ago when I was stopped in my tracks by the final results of Radio 4 People's Lord competition. In case you missed it, Sir Bob Geldolf emerged as the winner with Inderjit Singh, editor of the Sikh Messenger as the runner-up.

Someone suggested that anybody who wanted to put someone else in the Lords must not like them very much. But I'm sure that was just envy!

I felt that there was something rather hopeful about the British public nominating an eminent leader of the Sikh community to the highest court in the land. For in a society anxious about racism and often ambivalent about faith, members of the British public were prepared to say something positive about both. Inderjit Singh is Asian and a Sikh - and he is also a good man with a great deal to offer. And the people wanted him in.

Hopeful, I would say.

But even more so, I was very taken by the Geldolf vote.

Hardly a Radio 4 icon twenty years ago, Sir Bob has emerged as one of the most formidable and articulate champions of the world's poor. He's come a long way from the Boomtown Rats, but he's still impatient with the status quo.

I doubt Sir Bob would audition as a saint. He has - shall we say - a `colourful vocabulary'. I heard him live some years ago at a Jubilee 2000 Campaign in Germany - an uncomfortable and formidable figure who cuts a rugged path through tidy bureaucracies which shackle and imprison the poor. A high profiler who speaks with genuine and uncompromising passion for the nobodies.

And as a Christian leader, Bob Geldolf makes me feel uncomfortable. For sometimes when I hear him, something of the Old Testament prophets resonates inside my head.

Speaking on God's behalf, the prophet Isaiah who had a habit of cutting to the chase had this to say about empty traditions which missed the point,

"The kind of fasting I want, calls you to free those who are wrongly imprisoned and to stop oppressing those who work for you. Treat them fairly and give them what they earn. I want you to share your food with the hungry and to welcome poor wanderers into your homes."

I'm uncomfortable because Geldolf champions this so well.

Among the many worthy names in the race to the Upper House, in their corporate mind, the Radio 4 audience embraced two very different men.

Perhaps we want them in the Lords because in their own way they speak in compelling terms about things we instinctively know to be right.