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Good morning. In an age when we can be tempted to take for granted the amazing things that medicine can do it’s sobering to remember that it’s not yet fifty years since the first heart transplant in this country, which happened on this day in1968.

Heart transplants are I suspect by no means routine bits of surgery even to this day. Back in 1968 they were absolutely at the outer limits of what was possible.

But, then as now, what is astonishing is not just the extraordinary idea that a human heart could be taken out and a new one installed – it’s the huge amount of other things that had to happen to make that possible.  Keeping someone alive while their heart was removed and replaced was a staggering achievement.  And, afterwards, managing them in such a way that their bodies didn’t reject their new heart was an equally huge challenge. 

And it still is.  Medical science may have moved on but transplants still depend on a vast range of interdependent technologies working together.

But there seems to me to be a broader point here.  We live in a world where an awful lot of the things we take for granted in our daily lives including the most basic necessities – food, power, transport – are only there because of a vast interdependent network of skills and technologies. 

The New Testament celebrates the fact that society as a whole functions that way - very like a human body – in which all the many parts make their own contributions to the well-being of the whole.  And whether we have a religious faith or not we have good reason to be conscious of and grateful for a world that sustains and nourishes us. 

Father God, we thank You for the thousands of people that we’ll never know but who will be working together to make it possible for us to live our lives today. Amen