Isle of White Law Service
St Thomas's, Newport
4th October 2004
Readings: Is. 12
Mk. 7: 24 – 37
I can’t remember when I first became aware of the Isle of Wight but I can assure you that it was before I had heard of Portsmouth. It may have been my Danish mother alerting me to the fact that there were just one or two islands off the British coast, though not nearly as many as across the North Sea. (I had to get that bit in!) Then I later discovered interesting place names, like the quarry of Quarr, and Ryde (rith), meaning ‘the place by the small stream’ (Monktonmead Brook) – and there is a Ryde in similar circumstances on the island of Lolland, south of Copenhagen, where some of my forebears formed a kind of clerical mafia in the nineteenth century. These place names – and others like them - tell the story of a mixture of Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Normans, all the different people who have influenced life on the Island across the centuries. Then there are the interesting sub-plots, like Charles 1’s imprisonment in Carisbrooke Castle, as well as the survival of the Island’s own dialect down to within living memory. Islands have their own way of absorbing, or not absorbing, outsiders, and their own way of re-writing popular history to justify such absorptions when these become inevitable. There is, too, the endearing declaration ‘I’m an Islander’, which can mean lots of things, from ‘I’m not going to change’ to ‘shut your mouth’. The trouble is, many other people use that ploy elsewhere. I had a churchwarden in Lincolnshire who used to say, ‘I’m only a simple Yorkshireman’, which meant that he believed he could do and say what he liked, how he liked, and when he liked, regardless of the consequences.
But for the Island to keep surviving, as it manifestly does, what we nowadays call ‘networking’ is at a premium. I’m told the Island population is the same as Waterlooville, and half that of Portsmouth, but people here know what’s going on far more quickly, and more effectively, than in those mainland communities. I recall visiting the Island when I first became Bishop and blessing a baby in St. Mary’s Hospital, and then meeting the grandmother somewhere else later that afternoon. Of course all our institutions have inbuilt merits, as well as the demerits of those merits. I keep watching the success- stories of new initiatives coming here, commending themselves to the community not on exclusively economic grounds (though that helps), but because people have become slowly inspired and motivated. The current High Sheriffs’ Island Success of the Month’ initiative is a way of stating boldly that small new projects (not just big ones) matter, and matter a great deal. The really satisfying aspect of public life is the way that people can be given personal encouragement at what the cliché calls ‘the grass roots level’ – because that is where the action really is.
So the Law Service gathers the Island’s great and good, and perhaps (since there is a bishop and some clergy here) the bad and the ugly as well. Beneath the colour and the processions, and the sense of doing something that is in all essentials the same as has been the case for many years (the personalities change, but some of the outfits don’t), we are nonetheless quite fragile people, trying to make sense of an uncertain, anxious world, in which it is all too easy to try to tell people what to be afraid of, and then who to blame for it. We get the local leadership we vote for, and we read the newspapers we pay for. We travel across to England, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes reluctantly, with that corporate memory that tells you every single quirk of every single ferry, catamaran, hovercraft, in all weathers, and at every time of year. And here at St. Thomas’s, Newport, we are on a site where people have prayed in all kinds of circumstances, alone, or in groups, or in crowds; in tears, in joy, or in fear – and they have don so for centuries. It is a place that stands for truths that cannot be ignored, a Parish Church whose ministry is to be recognised and not taken for granted.
The preacher’s task in this kind of setting is not to try to remove the masks that we sometimes wear as a coping-mechanism, but simply to point out that they are there. These masks, or facades, become apparent most frequently when we ourselves are under pressure – as I myself know from some of the reactions I observe in myself when faced with something new or unexpected. Foreign terrain may begin in the geographical sense the moment the ferry arrives at the mainland, but there is still much foreign terrain that we have yet to experience right under our noses here on the Island.
In this morning’s second reading, Jesus is on foreign terrain, in both senses of the word, because he is outside his own people, and because the challenges he faces and the people he meets are new. He has moved away from his native Galilee, up to the north-west, to Tyre, where a local woman insists he would heal her daughter from a deep disturbance of some kind. There follows that wonderful dialogue where if ever one needed proof that Jesus had a sense of humour, here it is, complete with a reference to scraps being given to dogs (as a lover of those animals I find it hard to stomach how anti-dog the Bible really is!). And the mother, having prodded Jesus out of his posturing about not wanting to deal with outsiders, goes home to find her daughter healed. That episode over, Jesus starts back towards Galilee, and comes across an outsider by race, who is even more of an ‘outsider’ because he can neither hear nor speak, a deaf mute in those days was someone almost totally dependent on others to live anything beginning to approach a normal existence.
These two healings say something challenging about judging and judgement, for the Jews of Jesus’ day would have reacted negatively to the claims of that anonymous woman from Tyre, anxious about her sick daughter; and as for the handicapped man, he just would not have got a look-in. Judging well often involves setting aside our archipelago of prejudices: and sometimes those which are most obvious to others are those to which we ourselves are most blind. Thank God that we live in a society where we are in some sense accountable to each other. But the two healings also say something profound about the character of real community: that we tend to recoil from those who are deeply disturbed, and those who can neither hear nor speak. In fact, to ignore them is to turn ourselves into people who are profoundly diminished. For me, the character of real community is about not trying to pre-define it too closely on our own terms, but to see it as lacking some of the arbitrary boundaries usually based on nothing more than habit, that I like to impose on the life I lead – like realising that the young men in the souvenir shop on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh whom I met a few weeks ago were all Sikhs, or trying to tune in to Lowland Scots dialect in the newspaper shop in North Berwick the next day.
Today’s celebration is about the need for real community – which we do well to ponder carefully, and to view in a way that reflects our own proper estimation of ourselves: realistic, generous, and humble about our merits - as well as our demerits. I can never be a true corkhead, but I was given Honorary status a few years ago! The Island is indeed a great place to be - and it has a real genius for both grasping opportunities and tackling its many problems: but it takes the Christlike virtues of realism, generosity and humility to do so.
+ Kenneth Portsmouth
