I was once told that there was a time in the Church of Ireland when a clergyman got into a pulpit and you would expect to hear a southern accent. Even in my own time, there was a great deal of movement when Northerners would have to train in Dublin often with great wariness and a good deal of trepidation. But many ended up staying south and many southerners came north. You don’t need to be reminded that my immediate predecessor was the only northern vicar this parish has had in its history.

I think it’s a kind of ‘mission’ thing in the sense that you leave your comfort zone; you move away! I’m sure it’s partly because too many people know you far too well!! - Isn’t this just Paul whose mom and dad we know? It’s not unlike the

Situation we have in this passage, again from the Gospel of John, as last week, from the same chapter and it’s called the ‘Bread of Life Discourse’, when the Jews began to grumble about Jesus and said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven’?” How could someone they knew from birth, who threw stones and fished and made mischief as a youngster now claim to be this living bread which came down from heaven. Jesus went further than this; he identified this bread of life with his own body and blood, ‘This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world’. How could this ever be? ‘Who do you think you are? Who, indeed?

A home, when family go to bed, I often get the chance to watch stupid things on TV like, ‘QI’ or ‘Mock the Week’ or whatever (I always enjoy, ‘Have I got News for you?’), and I have noticed that none of the comedy shows gives Christianity or ‘religion’ per se, a look in at all! Christianity is completely dismissed as something irrelevant and something farcical.

I don’t know about you, but when you really look at the NT writings and perhaps especially John’s Gospel, as we were saying last week, it is so real and so fantastic and so wonderful, that it couldn’t not be true! Do you know what I mean? Are there too many negatives there? It’s a bit like the editor of Private Eye who said that I tried atheism and it just doesn’t work.

Who do you think you are, Jesus?

We come back to it time and time again, the wonderful quote from CS Lewis, “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice”. It is so fantastic and wonderful that it couldn’t not be true!

Our dear friend, Gladys Murphy, was 92 last Monday, 3^rd August. It’s always a joy to see her. Most of you would remember and have known Hubert, her husband. I have vivid memories of Hubert from practically the first day we moved here. But one of my abiding memories will be Hubert’s row of medals that he would proudly wear on Remembrance Sunday. They seemed to outshine and outdo everyone else’s.

I had Gladys and Hubert in my mind all week, and when the funeral of Harry Patchs featured on the news, it all seemed so real and so vivid. I’ve read Harry Patch’s story in ‘The Last fighting Tommy’, the only survivor of the trenches in the First World War. The First World War memories of the trenches have now passed from living history. Harry was 111 years old and his life had spanned six monarchs and twenty prime ministers.

I have reached the stage in life when family history is becoming more and more important. I don’t know if you remember, but a few years ago on a Remembrance Sunday when we had the British Legion here, I had tried to dig out my grandfather’s medals from World War One, but since I couldn’t find them on that occasion, I had to settle for two ‘containers’ that my grandfather had made out of two World War One shells. But I have since found his medals! Here they are – none for gallantry or anything else, but fairly standard British War Medal, 19140-1915 Star and the Victory Medal. He died out in Singapore in 1925, long after the war, and my other grandfather was famous for going to the Land of Opportunity in 1928, bringing his family, including my mother, through Ellis Island outside New York City, and then coming home again six years later!

I couldn’t possibly bore you with any more of my family history, it would drive you to distraction, but me, personally, it helps to answer the question ‘Who do you think you are?’

All of this, however, has passed in to history. The trenches of World War One are no longer ‘living history’, they went from our living memories when Harry Patch died on 25^th July.

The point is that with all this history, whether it is personal or not, is that it’s all gone! It has been committed to history books written in the past tense.

The only living history we can know now is what is written in the pages of the New Testament.

All of Jesus’ sayings are in the present tense; ‘I am the bread of life’. It isn’t the case that he once was the bread of life, but this has now passed in to history. Rather his claim was a claim of divinity, as all of his claims are. There’s no doubting or ambiguity about the words of the NT.

The words of the last verse are startling. Without doubt, this is a reference to the words of the sacrament – this is my body which is broken for you.

The teaching of John is that this new life, which is sufficient for this life and for the life to come, enters into a man with the elements of the bread and wine at the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. It is John’s belief that at the Lord’s Table the Christian receives what Ignatius called ‘the medicines of salvation’, the heavenly food which is sufficient for victorious living and victorious dying.

It is about taking Jesus Christ into our very being; to be a part of us as does the very food we eat and drink.

If that isn’t living history, I don’t know what is!