Drum says Liberalism is to Blame for Everything

In a shocking sermon that included lightning bolts running through his body, and ended in tragedy, the increasingly bizarre Bishop of Drum Castle, sometimes known as "Bangthe", told his cathedral congregation that modernist theological liberalism was to blame for everything, including even the setting up of Guantanamo Bay for the interrogation of the world's remaining Christians.

Bishop New Testament Wrong told his weary congregants (it's a long way up to the Cathedral) that when he was born in a stable three wise Modernist Lecturers told him that Incarnation itself was "a category mistake", and when he was but a child at school he battled against the evil forces that came about after the Enlightenment, when he was firmly told by teachers that the incarnation was "just a myth, in the simplistic sense of a story some people find helpful but most people know isn't true."

Nevertheless, despite all this long history of child abuse, but since helped by his suggestive friend, the Drum Castle hermit Newtich, the Bishop of Drum could now proclaim that the current evil is to get God off the public square, the market place, the council offices and the cathedral. This too had to be resisted.

Making the flesh creep with his words, he said the word made flesh was quite enough to keep God in the library, the museums, the art galleries and the doctors' surgeries.

He said how he had picked this idea up from some wisdom teeth content in the carol service, in that when he started singing his mouth began to ache, and understood that for others their ears began to ache. He said:

If you look very deeply deeply into the text like I do, then it can suggest all manner of things, and so I select from it what I and the hermit Newtich want, and then use it to bash the Enlightenment, the theological modernists and the Government. You see, a lifetime of looking at this and shaking off my absusers clearly brings out the deep Jewish meaning that I can claim means something in Christianity, a religion Jesus never intended to start unless I can ask my hermit Newtich how we can swivel things around to mean what they never did.

The Bishop of Drum, tapping his fingers, asked:

Can you not hear that noise in my ear? Well Word, Wisdom, Law, Temple; and the fifth one is the Spirit, he said, quoting from a time when these concepts meant anything in particular. And so it came to John, not any old John or the John, and certainly not what Americans understand by the John, and we shall deal with them later, but the John who says: 'The Word became flesh and tickled us'.

At this point he was hit by a blue flash of lighting, vertically down to his body situated in the pulpit. He carried on as if nothing had happened, saying that he was sick and tired of all these weak theological liberals and others who had caused the drumming in his ears and added:

We live today amid the flotsam and jetsam of the failed liberal project – the deregulation of sex giving us AIDS and a nation of confused young people and lonely old people, the deregulation of power giving us atom bombs, Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Darfur and the Congo, and the deregulation of money giving us loadsamoney one minute and market meltdown the next...

He went on (and on), still drumming his fingers:

Aye, we used to live like Catherine Cookson round 'ere, when the Church was alongside people when they were hurting most, as the farmers were last year and as many small businesses, and some large ones too, are doing right now, and so that's what we want, back to the Establishment and more social discipline, people with their handcarts saying hello to each other, passing on the cobbled street up to this Cathedral, bringing their lovely home made Christmas trinkets, where a vote for Disestablishment would be a vote against Incarnation, a vote against Christmas. And just as turkeys do not vote for Christmas, we do vote for Christmas, Incarnation and therefore Establishment, and not this liberal and Modernist and Enlightenment nonsense that has so affected me in my upbringing and which these Americans must pay for, if only I was Archbishop...

He said, as now blue light flashes hit him repeatedly, that he would have people, including himself, in chains, which drew murmurs of agreement, but no the people still want their freedom:

even if it’s the freedom to go to Hell in a Hedge Fund, we resist the message of Incarnation, of God being around the place, and we invent excuses to say it’s a bad idea all round, lest the fire consume us or the cloud confuse us and we have to admit we don’t know who we are or why we’re doing things the way we are...

At this point people noticed that there was smoke coming out of the bishop's ears, as his fingers drummed on the pulpit and his eyes started to swirl. Congregants started crying as they recognised the damage done to him by the child abuse of theological liberalism and the demons he had been fighting ever since, culminating in this increasingly crazy Christmas sermon.

The bishop then started spinning around and suddenly lifted off, and was last seen heading up into the north east tower and vanishing in a puff of smoke. The lightning bolts ceased, and no one could hear the drumming of his fingers any more.

A spokesperson said:

We feel so privileged. It proves against all the sceptics, modernists, liberals and the rest, that he did have a truly miraculous birth, but was destined to suffer child abuse by these academics he tried to equal, but has since relieved us all by vanishing like that and that we may never hear such material again.

Others described this event as one of the best miracles they had ever seen, that the flesh had become words and now silence. "It makes a lot of sense," said one, who added he had asked the Bishop of Carlisle to pray for rain as a way of getting rid of homosexuality.

Three days later, however, the Bishop of Drum Castle re-emerged in a transformed body as The Master, taking on the Archbishop of Anglicanism as The Doctor, the reduced and caged Archbishop relying on his chaplain going around the Anglican Communion so that everyone repeated 'Rowan' over and over again into the satellite surveillance system, seeing The Doctor rise up from the cage and defeat The Master, who died rather than spend a life in chains boxed up in the later brickwork of Drum Castle Cathedral. Thus the Easter story was told again, thanks to Doctor Who, an entertaining programme firmly in the public square and reaching millions - unlike the Churches.