Sermons
from St Faith's
Fred Nye:
Christian Aid Week 2007
I guess the greatest barrier to faith is, and has always been, the
problem of pain. How can a good God stand idly by when so many of his
creatures suffer intolerable burdens of disease, destitution and
misery? And for us Christians at Eastertide there is an even more
poignant question: what has Our Lord’s death and resurrection actually
achieved? Have human beings gained in love for each other as a result?
Looking at our world, at Auschwitz and Cambodia and Rwanda and Iraq and
Darfur there doesn’t seem to be much evidence, does there? ‘Two
thousand years of saying Mass, and all we have is poisoned gas’.
During this Christian Aid week we have to try to come to terms with
these questions. What is the point of trying to share the burdens of
our neighbours in the developing world? Will sacrifices on our part
really do anything for them? Can a few well meaning and soft-hearted
Christians change the world, or human nature?
I would like to suggest that for Jesus’s first followers, and for the
early Church, this sort of question would have been empty and
meaningless. During Our Lord’s ministry, miracles happened: lepers were
cleansed, the blind received their sight, sinners were forgiven,
outcasts accepted and the hungry fed, – there wasn’t the slightest
doubt that Jesus could change things. And the early Christians
continued these great acts of God both within and outside the growing
Church, acting (as they put it) in the name of Jesus. So what’s gone
wrong? Were those early Christians a bunch of deluded, miracle-happy
enthusiasts? Or have we got it wrong – are we the ones who are deluded
and disillusioned?
Christianity should be a powerful, liberating and incarnational force
for good in the world. That it so often falls short is glaringly
obvious – but why should this be? There are I think three main reasons.
First, we have lost faith in ourselves. The world is indeed a complex
and frightening place. It is a very tempting option to stay at home,
and not to ‘go there’ - both literally and metaphorically. It’s
very tempting not to get involved in the mess and degradation of the
world’s poverty and cruelty. I could easily both shock you and sicken
you this morning by spelling out the full horrors of so-called ‘life’
in the slums of Freetown, or by cataloguing the unspeakable atrocities
of the Civil War in Sierra Leone which led to such abject misery. But
rather I want to tell you about the commitment and courage of a group
of 11 schoolteachers from Sefton, who visited Sierra Leone recently
under the auspices of the Waterloo Partnership. Some young, some not so
young, they mostly had no previous experience of a poor country or its
hardships – and they went out with not a little trepidation and
foreboding. But despite all the degradation and the poverty:- once they
had met, talked to, and understood the teachers and pupils of Waterloo
Sierra Leone, they became totally inspired by the courage and good will
they encountered there. Most of those teachers can’t wait to visit
Sierra Leone again, and one or two have booked their flights already.
If they were not so before, they have become effective ambassadors for
the cause of World Development.
Of course it’s not possible for all of us to have the overseas
experience of those teachers But we can, all of us, find out more
about how our poorer brothers and sisters are forced to live, we can
share with them some of the good things we enjoy, and we can become
ambassadors on their behalf. Made ‘a little lower than the angels’ we
are called by God to be fully human and never less than human. We need
more faith in ourselves.
And we need to have faith in those whom we serve overseas. I am always
disheartened by the commonest excuse for not giving to the Christian
Aid appeal ‘there’s so much corruption over there, you don’t know where
the money is going’. Of course, crooked and unscrupulous political
leaders in any country have always been able to misappropriate public
funds - and the poorer the country the easier this is. But more
telling is the criticism that poor people themselves can misuse
resources. And this is where we need to borrow some of Our Lord’s
forgiveness, compassion and understanding of the human condition. We
must understand that in conditions of abject poverty what motivates
people is the need to survive. To a mother trying to feed her starving
child, school paper and a pencil have more value when they are sold for
the next meal than when they are used in education for a future which
may never happen. The world is in a mess, and we and our poorer
neighbours are caught up in that mess. We cannot always pretend that
our sort of rules must apply to everybody, or that we can only give so
long as we count every penny of the cost. I do not remember Our
Lord involving himself in that sort of calculation.
And there is perhaps one other matter on which our faith falls short.
Those early Christians realised that without the human presence of
their Master among them they were vulnerable to doubt, fear, prejudice
and conflict. And so it is with us. Left solely to our own devices, we
quickly become the victims of indecision, caution, misunderstanding and
internal strife. Without Our Lord’s guidance, without his love and his
values we will achieve little, either here or overseas. Could it be
that we have lost that intimate relationship with the Spirit of God so
richly enjoyed by the early church? Have we forgotten that God-given
inspiration which reaches out to the best that lies within each one of
us , and to which that godward inner self yearns to respond? We only
have to love a very little in order to respond to the world’s needs, we
only need to respond a very little to receive the reward and
inspiration of God’s Holy Spirit:- who can and does do great things,
very great things.
Faced with the tragedy and intractability of the world’s problems we
need to be of good courage. To respond generously and effectively we
need faith in ourselves, faith in those whom we try to serve, and faith
in the Sprit of God who has the power to change everything. And as a
prayer, and particularly as a prayer for Christian Aid week, we would
do well to use those unforgettable words from Wesley’s hymn – ‘O thou
who camest from above, the fire celestial to impart, kindle a flame of
sacred love on the mean altar of my heart’.
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