2/10/22
Your weekly update from the Benwell & Scotswood Team
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Dates for your diary
Sat 15th Oct
Creative mission planning day
Services this week
Sun 9th Oct
9.45am - St John's Holy Communion
11am - Ven Bede, Hub Service (Parish eucharist)
4pm - St Margaret's evening worship
Sun 16th Oct
9.45am - St Margaret's Holy Communion
11am - Ven Bede, Hub Service (Parish eucharist)
News
Creative mission day - Sat 15 Oct at St James
You are invited to join us for a morning of creative thinking and mission planning!
We want this to be an imaginative and fun session when everyone in the church community gets to have their say.
This time we will focus especially on how we improve our welcome/hospitality and grow in faith in two particular areas: 1. children and youth, and 2. ethnic and cultural diversity.
Draft plan for the day:
9.30am - Bacon sandwiches/tea/coffee
10am - Prayer and worship
10.20am - creative discussion and planning sessions
12pm - break
12.45pm - Closing worship
Den Whitten
We are very sad to announce that Den Whitten passed away this last week.
His funeral will take place at St James, 11am on Tuesday 25th October. Please keep Pat and their family in your prayers at this time.
Worship Texts
Slideshow
The Collect
Almighty God,
you have made us for yourself,
and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you:
pour your love into our hearts and draw us to yourself,
and so bring us at last to your heavenly city
where we shall see you face to face;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Reading
2 Timothy 2.8–15 8 Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David—that is my gospel, 9for which I suffer hardship, even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But the word of God is not chained. 10Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, so that they may also obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory. 11The saying is sure: If we have died with him, we will also live with him; 12 if we endure, we will also reign with him; if we deny him, he will also deny us; 13 if we are faithless, he remains faithful— for he cannot deny himself. 14 Remind them of this, and warn them before God that they are to avoid wrangling over words, which does no good but only ruins those who are listening. 15Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth.
Gospel
Luke 17.11–19 11 On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. 12As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, 13they called out, saying, ‘Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!’ 14When he saw them, he said to them, ‘Go and show yourselves to the priests.’ And as they went, they were made clean. 15Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. 16He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. 17Then Jesus asked, ‘Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? 18Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?’ 19Then he said to him, ‘Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.’
Sermon
Revd David
In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit Amen
‘Your faith has made you well’.
Or in other translations ‘Your faith has saved you’
What is faith? Last week Dominic told us about the gospel reading where Jesus says if you had faith as little as a mustard seed you could say to a mulberry tree be planted in the sea and it would. This week we heard one of the gospel readings that Dominic mentioned, where Jesus commends someone for their faith. Ten lepers come to Jesus asking for healing. All of them are cleansed. One returns, praising God, throwing himself at Jesus feet and thanking him. This one is a foreigner, a Samaritan. Jesus tells him, Your faith has made you well. ‘Your faith has saved you’
It seems simple but, hold on, Jesus asks ‘were not all ten made clean where are the other nine?’ Well, most likely they had a hundred and one other things they wanted to be doing; the stigma and social exclusion they have lived with has gone. They can rejoin their families . They can rejoin life. In their excitement off they went.
So Jesus’ word to the one who gave thanks –‘your faith has made you well’. ‘Your faith has saved you’ Did that apply to the other nine? Did their faith make them well too? Did it save them? Clearly something was missing, or else Jesus wouldn’t have mentioned it.
True faith, is surely seen in this one man’s joyful acknowledgment of the work of God that overflows in praise and thanksgiving. Isn’t this the sign of transforming faith even more than his spotless skin. I want to finish today with a true story about someone with leprosy and his experience of faith and what it is to be saved, to be made well, but before I do, I need to say something about a remarkable man, called Dr Nagai Takashi.
I only learned about Dr Nagai in 2015 when I was visiting Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings. I ended up spending longer than I had intended in Nagasaki. I had a bicycle accident, broke both my arms and was in hospital for a month. The local Anglican church helped look after me, and the priest and his wife took me to visit the places that were special to Dr Nagai.
The site of the hospital where he worked, and where, when the bomb was dropped, many staff and patients were killed outright and many others including Dr Nagai severely injured. Urakami Cathedral where he was a worshipper and which was destroyed in the blast, now rebuilt but with graphic reminders of that day. Including the remains of one of the original bell towers still embedded in the ground.
This was the bell that Dr Nagai persuaded his fellow Christians, 8,000 of whom had perished in the bombing, to re hang on a frame in the ruins, and ring on Christmas day 1945, as a sign of hope and life. This was the inspiration for his book and subsequent film and popular Japanese song ‘The Bells of Nagasaki’ one of the first works to bring the reality of the bomb to the world.
We also visited the peace museum and among the disturbing photographs, artefacts and mementos of the bombing is the rosary belonging to Dr Nagai’s beloved wife Midori. Found by him in the ashes of their home along with her charred remains. The site of the small house he rebuilt and named ‘Nyokodo’ or ‘as yourself house’ and where he lived with his two small children, bed bound for his last years, writing and receiving visitors, before his death in 1951, is now a place of pilgrimage and remembrance.
Dr Nagai is sometime called ‘the saint of Nagasaki’ but he himself compared himself to the unworthy servant we heard of last week, or to the moon, just a lump of useless rock unless it reflects the light of the sun which is Christ.
We began with the leper who stayed back to give thanks, thanks for the wonderful blessing of healing and a new life Reflecting on the atomic bombing, Nagai came to see how even in this horror and evil God could be at work and how somehow the innocent victims were not abandoned but a part of God’s purpose, somehow a necessary part. Could one give thanks even for that? At an open air mass for the victims three months after the bombing with relatives of the dead holding 8,000 white crosses, Dr Nagai linked the sufferings of the victims with the Japanese surrender and the end of the war, an event that he felt providentially fell on the 15th August, the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.
His words, which upset some at the time, are still hard to hear but express his heart felt view,
‘Let us be thankful Nagasaki was chosen for the whole burnt sacrifice! Let us be thankful that through this sacrifice peace was granted to the world …’
His hope was that the world would heed the warning and that nuclear weapons would never again be used.
And the leper? Fr Paul Flynn an Australian priest who wrote a biography of Nagai tells this story. He was visiting a friend in hospital in Tokyo and mentioned to the matron that he was researching Dr Nagai’s life.
‘She dashed off, leaving me mystified, but soon returned waving a letter.”
After the war she had been working in a leper hospital, where patients often lost their sight, and one of her duties was reading to them. She found one of Nagai’s books and read it for them. She wrote to tell him how beautiful it was, ‘to see hot tears running from their sightless eyes’. The letter she waved was his reply. It contained a waka poem ‘that might have caused deep resentment had it come from someone else’
‘Leprosy taught them that Man’s priceless possession is his spirit’.
‘My blind friend Hihara-san thumped the low table we sat at on the tatami floor. “That’s right, that's right. I was an unthinking young man with a beautiful wife and daughter when I contracted leprosy. Society disowned me, ostracised me from my wife and daughter and banished me to a leper colony guarded by a moat. I despaired and attempted suicide. Yet here was Nagai, who had lost everything, was dying and was at peace with himself and the world. The matron kept reading us Nagai, and he began writing to us. He led me to Christ and the Faith that discovers everything in life is a gift and a grace, It’s now fifty years since I became a leper, and I can say: Thank God for my leprosy, and thank God for Nagai.’
Your faith has saved you.
Can we be more grateful for what we receive, the good certainly, and even the bad? Knowing God’s will is certainly to heal and save.
Amen
Intercessions
If you would like to add someone to the prayer list please email church@benwellscotswood.com
The name will stay on the list for 1 month unless requested to be long-term.
Prayers for others:
Christine, David, Philip, Neil and Steven
Elizabeth Taylor
Honar
Pat Whitten and family
Moe and Mary
Alison Campbell
John Taylor
Irene Foskett
John Nicholson
Alan Robson
Michelle Wilson
Joan Finley
George Snowden
Claire Mozaffari
Herbert Agbeko
Rest in Peace:
Den Whitten
Maureen Cardella
Baptisms
Oakleigh Jean Foster
Post Communion prayer
Lord, we pray that your grace
may always precede and follow us,
and make us continually to be given to all good works;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.