SERMON AT RE-DEDICATION EUCHARIST AT ST FAITH’S LANDPORT

12.00 NOON 3^rd OCTOBER 2006

Readings:  Romans 12:1-8 and Luke 17:11-19

It seems like yesterday – but it was only Holy Week last year – that I came here to preside at the Eucharist and everything was taken out of what was that Chapel over there, in order to make way for the re-ordering and re-working of St Faith’s.  Building-sites are something that I grew up with, as my father was an architect.  And I well remember all the uncertainty (and worry) that went into some of the work that he helped to design.  Will they be able to afford it?  Will the work begin – and end – on time?  Will the clients be happy, or are they going to cut-up rough because not everything is absolutely how they wanted it?  Church work was always that bit more tricky, because it involved people’s feelings: their attachment to things as they were, and their fears about what they’re going to be like.  And usually, when all the dust had settled, it was all right – it was just a question of how they all got there!  I don’t know if any of this rings bells with any of the concerns in the congregation today.  But I will be surprised if it didn’t.  But why has it all happened?  Why have we messed around with St Faith’s Church?  The answers are to be found in today’s two readings. 

First of all, St Paul tells us to present ourselves as a ‘living sacrifice’, and to be ‘transformed (transfigured)’ by the renewal of our minds’ (Romans 12:1-2).  Here we see how central worship is, the eucharist, the offering of our lives in union with Christ.  Some people ask me what on earth the eucharist, the Holy Communion, the Lord’s Supper, the liturgy, the mass, is really about.  Well, my time in hospital last autumn and winter has given me another way to answer that question.  There are occasionally times when I unlock the details of that scarring memory and I find that I can’t sleep.  I am lying there awake, very thankful to be alive, but re-living some of the horror of it all, especially when things went wrong.  Both tunes, the joyful and the painful, hit me together with a powerful force, so powerful in fact that it’s as if the events are happening again at this very moment.  I know that time will heal it all, but the memories will still remain.

The eucharist can be compared to that experience.  Every time we eat the bread and drink the cup, we unlock a very powerful and collective memory of the Christian community down the ages:  it is as if, when we recall the events of Christ’s life and death and resurrection we are unlocking a huge memory that is both painful and joyful, what might be described as a happy trauma with a real contemporary force which keeps the Church awake.  No wonder that the old Nordic word for the eucharist, still used in Scandinavia to this day is Nattvard – Nightwatch.  This is God’s way of waking us up to his message, which are called to live by the transforming and renewing of our minds, and of our discipleship, in the very different ways in which we are gifted, all of which are needed together, and not in isolation.

Which leads me to the second reason why all this has happened,  the Gospel reading, Luke 17:11-19.  Jesus is on his way from Galilee in the North, to Jerusalem in the South, and he has come to border terrain, no longer quite Galilee, where he was brought up, and not yet quite Samaria, which he would have been taught from an early age not to trust.  It’s a bit like going from Portsmouth to Havant and passing through Cosham!  Ten lepers appear, a disease regarded at the time as divine punishment, and they are all healed by Jesus: not immediately, but as they go on their way to the priests, as Jesus tells them, to perform certain agreed ritual actions.  But only one comes back to give thanks to Jesus, and he’s the Samaritan among them, the outcast. 

We are not very good at being thankful.  But this scene tells us in an equally powerful way how important it is that we live that faith, that we carry on the message of healing, that faith is open and vibrant to serve its local community – whoever they are, whatever they do, and whether or not they both to come back to give thanks.  We are not in this business of discipleship for our own egos, to feel affirmed, nor in order to be thanked.   If we are, then we might as well give up, because the ratio of one in ten is about right, and we mustn’t feel bitter or disappointed about it.  It’s tough, but it’s Christ-like, and it’s a witness we can live up to.  This is one of the reasons for what has been done to St Faith’s, to enable this community to carry on healing all those spiritual lepers who come here, and keep doing so in order to be faithful followers of Christ.

+ Kenneth Portsmouth