The disgraced former Tory cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken's time behind prison bars has produced a cautionary tale of rise and fall in politics. His recent book Pride and Perjury makes for compulsive reading as Aitken ruefully underscores the biblical warning given to all those orbiting effortlessly in politics, business and the public eye, confident their tracks of wrongdoing are covered: "be sure your sin will find you out" (Book of Numbers 32:23).
If Aitken's much-publicised repentance and faith in the redemptive power of Christ is from the heart, then he seems set to follow in the steps of his hero and mentor, Chuck Colson. The once disgraced and imprisoned Nixon administration's hatchet-man now presides over Prison Fellowship, an international organisation, very active in Ireland's jails, bringing the biblical message of transformation via spiritual rebirth. Colson himself was "born again" while under lock and key in the 1970s.
The scope of divine redemption in excavating renewed, refocused and purposeful lives out of the detritus of human failure is highlighted in tomorrow's epistle reading. St Paul wrote to believers in Ephesus while he was in prison and whatever other restrictions were imposed upon him, his prayer activity was unrestrained. The apostle launches his Letter to the Ephesians with a paean of praise that God has chosen a people for his very own, that in love he has adopted them into his family.
He gives thanks that the Ephesians, despised Gentiles for the most part, are included in this very privileged community but he then sidetracks into the wonder of God's plan of salvation. Paul is filled with astonishment at the grace that not only turns God's enemies into his friends but also reconciles them across the chasm of implacable cultural estrangements - Jew now sits comfortably next to Gentile in church in Ephesus.
Eventually Paul returns to his prayer and ends with matchless words of doxology: "Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen." (Ephesians 3: 14-21).
To Roy Keane be glory at Old Trafford, to Christy Moore be glory at The Point, to Tiger Woods be glory at St Andrew's - but to God be glory in the church. This is focused "in Christ Jesus" who is the embodiment of God's saving purpose. In medical parlance, the church is God's hospital where his Son Jesus Christ is the only doctor and so God gets all the glory for the hospital via those recovering wholeness under the surgery of his Son.
This totally appropriate ascription of glory to God is "throughout all generations, for ever and ever." Which is why to ascribe glory to Juan Manuel Fangio in his Maserati 250F at the Nurburgring or Frank Sinatra at Carnegie Hall is sufficient to make the point. They and all other momentarily dazzling meteors in the sky of history are gone, but God is like the sun. Generations rise and fall yet his glory is unfading.
Paul's doxology intrigues us with the potential he sees in prayer precisely because of God's limitless resources, for he is "able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine." All the more reason, therefore, for our prayers this weekend to latch on to the possibilities for divine rehabilitation among the great and the bad whose conspicuous sin has dumped them on history's scrapheap with Judgment Day still ahead of them. "As for you, you were dead in transgressions and sins . . . God, who is rich in mercy, has raised us up with Christ . . . for it is by grace you have been saved, through faith - and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God" writes Paul, tracing the humanly implausible career path of every committed Christian.
It would be just like God to take hold of one of those consigned in this weekend's newspapers to the outer reaches of damnation, to forgive, cleanse and restore them, and display them to an incredulous nation as a trophy of his grace. After all, our sin and shortcomings measured by God's standard were enough to exclude us from glory and yet grace found us. Any holier-than-thou-ism is totally unacceptable.
In an appropriate spirit of humility, however, there is the possibility for people who believe in prayer to name those discredited names in the presence of this great God, pleading their lives may become the workplace of his redeeming grace and bring him substantial glory. At the very least, Ireland in its present mood of disillusion would come to much more good than harm with a home-grown clutch of genuine "born agains" from the same stable as Chuck Colson and Jonathan Aitken.