Trinity 13

The verse Romans 12:5 “Thus we, being many, are one body in Christ, and accordingly one part of one another.” Well, that is what I came up with as I contemplated the verse. I think it foreshadowed the difficulty of my topic today.

This week the news has been saturated with the deaths of two young schoolgirls, Jessica and Holly. This even drove me to thinking about broken bodies, and the body of the church, which this verse intimates.

Let me begin my rambling by considering how we normally understand this verse. “We are all joined to each other as different parts of one body,” as another translation has it. In the body of Christ we each have a function – for those who like impressive Greek words it is praxiV – we each do something; in other words, each of us has a practical ability which affects those around us. This doing, when we analyse this functioning, is practical in the common weal (as one of our prayers points out as the duty of the Queen and the government). We are each dependent on one another for our well being within the State and in the Church. It is this observation which led me to consider Jessica and Holly as my focus today. If we are all conjoined as one organism, the organic whole of the cosmos, then when we lose any part, the whole must be afflicted. The question is this: Does the loss cause disfigurement or a radical change? The organism must account for the absence of the part that has been removed.

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This is a very real problem, as those who have lost their beloved know. “How are we to go on?” so many cry in their grief. “Why, oh why!, must I go on alone?” others exclaim in their anguish. “When will there be justice in this world?” the parents of children groan in the depths of their despair.

This is not just about Jessica and Holly. These reflections bring me to think about all the deaths throughout the year, of young mothers, of young people just starting out together, of elderly couples who lose the partner of decades, even the homeless stranger. The instances are innumerable; they are unique to every person. The grief a young girl feels about the death of her twenty-year-old husband is no less devastating than that of the man whose wife of sixty years had died after a long illness.

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Let me approach this subject in another way. Let us consider our own bodies. What would happen if I were to lose my hearing?

This is not something beyond our imaginations. Many of us gathered in this church this morning have less hearing than when we were twenty years old. I know that I do not hear everything all the time. But what if even that were gone? What would my condition be? I would be not what I was; I would have to make changes in the way I behaved. I would have to start reading lips, I would have to carry a pencil and lots of paper to find out what people wanted me to know. I would have to behave very differently, wouldn’t I?

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I would have to redefine myself. What would change? My self-esteem? My way of life? My confidence? What else?

I am afraid I am raising more questions than I am answering. All of this arises from Paul’s letter this morning which encourages us to think about the body and the practical abilities of its parts. All of this arises because Paul wants us to be as one collective body, each of us a part of the whole, and one with each other.

And so what happens when Holly and Jessica are taken from our midst? — Many are affected dramatically. Many have made a pilgrimage to the shrine of their disappearance in Cambridgeshire, much as many made the journey to London to place flowers at the doorway of Princess Diana’s home when she died. Any death is this loss of a part of the body-of-the-world, that whole in which we live. Death creates a void which must be filled. Death demand that our world must be reconfigured. That is the task facing the parents of Jessica and Holly, indeed all of us in the aftermath of this tragedy.

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We can all see what happens in the wider world, but can we see what happens in the Church when there is a loss? I think we have done so here in this community with the loss of many who have contributed to the well-being of the church. Life does go on, but so very differently. The church has taken on a new shape, and we remember those who have died in prayer and in story.

But have we ever re-evaluated the body ecclesiastic when one of our number just never comes to church? Someone just does not come to church, that is all. We make no more nor less of it than that. We do not mount the great search as for a Jessica and Holly. Rather, we meekly accept it and let things go. It seems there has been a conscious decision to stay at home to wash the car (or do something else). But I say to you, when those activities take precedence over the worship of God (however inadequate such a rite in church may be), the question we must ask ourselves, “Why does God not call to them through ourselves?” I  ask of myself, because I stand here in this pulpit and in the garb of the church, “Has the word I have spoken driven them away?” Shall we undertake a manhunt to bring all the lost members home to our hearts in the church?

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“Members one of another.” That is what Paul says. This is something active, not just a passive association. The problem is not just one for the church to contemplate. The problem is manifest in the world when a child is murdered. Paul’s words are accusing us as we are part of the world in which ten-year-old girls can be murdered.

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How do we reconfigure the life of the whole when people are no longer there? This is the task of healing the broken body,  the world out of which Holly and Jessica have been torn. It is also something we must address as the Church, for there is such a fragmentation both inside and outside of the Church.

Let us take another example to clarify this. We have all heard of people who have lost a limb. Some cope very well, they adjust their life to what they are able to do now. Others, however, are unable to handle their loss. Some, indeed, have experience of a phantom limb with all the dysfunction that implies. Others never acknowledge that the limb is gone and fall over when they try to use that missing limb. Yet others are incapacitated completely by the missing limb; they lose all capacity and function. This shows us that there are positive and negative ways of coping with the loss. We all know that, but what do we do as a church when we lose that limb, that part of ourselves, when Mr Jones takes to washing his car of a Sunday morning rather than spending this hour with us. An isolated limb is not part of the body, a limb lying on the driveway means that somewhere there is a torso missing something, perhaps even bleeding to death.

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So it must be for the parents of Jessica and Holly. They must be more than devastated. I cannot imagine their emotions as they wait to bury their children. I cannot imagine their anguish at the loss of the flesh of their flesh, the blood of their blood. We must pray for them and any who face the loss of loved ones.

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We must pray for the parents of Jessica and Holly, that their lost limbs will be remembered with affection and that their practical ability will show itself positively in the world.

We must pray that the weakness of him who died for us will show us the way to live with loss, even the loss of so precious a limb which we were a part of as it was a part of us.

AMEN

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