I would like to begin with the stories of two people who have died in the last week. The first is Brother Roger of Taizé, who was murdered in front of a congregation of nearly 2,500 on Tuesday evening. He was a saintly man who founded the ecumenical community in Taizé, in France. After the Second World War, Taizé became a place of pilgrimage for people of many nations, mostly young people, looking for a place of peace and quiet reflection, a place of deep spirituality and calm. The music and liturgy of Taizé is beautiful and absorbing, and over the years, the number of people going to Taizé has increased to about 300,000 every year. Music in the style of Taize is used all over the world and our spiritual lives have been greatly enriched by it.

Brother Roger was stabbed to death by a woman from the congregation. She was a woman who had often disrupted church services with her screaming but this time she had bought a knife to stab Brother Roger, who was 90 years old. His death, and the horrible way he died has shocked Christian folk from all denominations. The Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury have been among the first to offer condolences to the Taize community. In cities throughout the world, commemorative services are being held. In Sydney, at 6pm on Wednesday, such a service will be held in St Mary's Cathedral. Literally millions of people will mourn for Brother Roger, a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith.

But there has been another death, closer to home. Valda, whom you may know yourself, died alone in her home, and her death was not confirmed until yesterday. I only knew her to pass the time of day. She would wander the streets and lanes of Enmore, with her clothes literally hanging off her, searching in the lanes, among the rubbish, for things she might find useful. She was one of the characters of Enmore, a person you might see often and never really notice. She never seemed sad - usually she had a smile on her face. You might say that she was harmless, an old woman who lived her life in her own way in poverty and dirt. Unlike Brother Roger, she is probably unknown outside this district, and it is almost certain that there will be no services in cathedrals to commemorate her life.

But I would like to think, to hope even, that Valda is as much part of the world's story of love and suffering as Brother Roger, or Moses the Prophet, whose life is recorded in the Bible. I have no doubt that God loves Valda or Brother Roger as much as you and me, even though Valda died a lonely death and Roger was cruelly murdered.

St Paul, writing to the church community in Corinth, urges them to see themselves as members of one body, different in faith, in life and in ministry, but all connected to each other by the grace and love of God. St Paul uses the image of a body, so that we can understand that just as each part of the body needs the other parts of the body in order to survive, so each individual person needs to live in relationship to every other individual to live and survive. It is when those relationships are damaged or not there that people die alone or lift their hands to kill each other.

This is the reason that the church exists, to teach and encourage people to find and to develop the relationships between them. The priest says, we who are many are one body in Christ because it is in the shared experience of taking and eating the bread and the wine which makes us one in the body and blood of Christ.

Jesus told us to do this so that we would remember him. This is a very important word. When we use the word dis-member, it means to tear apart. When we dismember a chicken to prepare it for a meal, we cut it in pieces, we cut its wings and legs off, we separate its members. In the same way, when humans act violently towards each other and separate one human being from another, it is Christ who is dismembered.

Our Eucharist is intended to bring us together again, to re-member. Today when we share communion we are re-membering Christ; that is, building the body of Christ. Of course it is God who does the building, it is God who makes us part of Christ's body, but we need to be willing for God to work with us. God can only invite us, we are free to accept or to refuse.

If we refuse this gracious invitation, if we stop coming to church, if we stop remembering Christ in the Eucharist, then we will forget that we are the body of Christ, we forget that we are members of his body, we drift away from fellowship, we drift away from membership of the church and Christ is dis-membered again. I say dismembered again because on the cross, Christ suffered the agony of being torn apart from God. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" he cried, "Why have you forgotten me?"

I believe that the church is a community which remembers; it remembers the love of God in Christ who was prepared to die for us; it remembers people like Valda as well as the people like us and like Brother Roger, and it patiently and lovingly builds community, inviting our neighbours to share in the body of Christ and to be made members of Christ.

This is why we celebrate the Eucharist, this is why we have a Wardens Dinner and Indian Food Festival and a Thai Christian Retreat. I see that our Fellowship and Growth groups are vital to our task as Church, and I intend to encourage them. I invite you to join me in what I believe is God's work for us.