A coincidence, a funeral and a tragedy

I celebrated the Eucharist at St James' Taff's Well this morning. We used the Church in Wales 1984 Prayer Book readings for Passion Sunday, which included the passage from 2 Corinthians 4 which begins  

"For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake." (2 Cor 4:5)

What a co-incidence! The first time I ever preached at St James, I was a student at St Michael's in 1968. This chapter was the second lesson at Evensong, and this was the text I quoted to begin my journey as a preacher. I enjoyed telling this to the congregation of nearly a dozen. I kept the sermon in my box of type-written texts for many years, until Clare was on a clearance mission prior to having loft insulation installed. I looked at some of my efforts, and found them rather embarrassing to read twenty odd years down the line. As by that time I'd started storing digital texts, I ditched all of them. But I do recall seeing the paper version of my first one, although not its content. Perhaps just as well. 

I returned home for lunch and was then picked up and delivered to St David's Ely to officiate at a funeral. One of West Cardiff's West Indian matriarchs had died, a grand lady from St Kitts, and the church was full, by her own daughter's reckoning, half of them were her descendents. She was buried in an American style casket, quite unusual for these parts in my experience. After the committal to a grave in Western Cemetery, a crew of mostly West Indian men got out their shovels and spades and filled in the grave in customary manner. As someone observed, the older rather than the younger men performed this ritual. I wondered why, but felt unable to ask.

News of the German Wings Airbus 320 crash with loss of 150 lives in the French Alps Maritime had just started to arrive before lunch. My funeral chauffeur used to be a commercial pilot, and so it was natural to discuss this en route. He agreed with media experts on how safe Airbuses are to fly, and how if need be, they can fly up to two hundred miles from altitude, gliding with little or no engine power by virtue of their design. In the absence of an explosion or decompression taking out the pilots, such a rapid descent would be hard to explain - unless it was a suicidal pilot act - he said grimly. This has happened in the past. Until 'black boxes' are retrieved and decoded, nothing can be known. It's going to be a worrying wait for thousands in the travel industry, as well as travellers. The whole world needs to know what happened, and given the problems to be faced in retrieving the wreckage, this may take some time. Meanwhile, all we can do is pray for the victims and those left behind.