The Fifth Sunday of Easter - for the Congregations of St James' East Malling and Holy Trinity Larkfield

The Fifth Sunday of Easter - for the congregations of St James' East Malling and Holy Trinity Larkfield Into the heart of our Easter celebrations comes a week which is set aside each year for us to consider our response to the plea to help some of the poorest in the world. Christian Aid Week begins this Sunday, an annual event across the United Kingdom, in many places in past years, though not this year because of the prevailing circumstances, a door-to-door fundraising drive to do something, however small, to help cope with some of the world's need. There will, of course, be no red collection envelopes placed this year through doors and collected a few days later, and what Christian Aid usually raises will be vastly reduced. In the last couple of weeks people up and down this country have again shown their generosity, through the BBC's Big Night Live, in raising more than 27 million pounds for people in the UK who need our support now more than ever, an amount matched by the Government, and Colonel Tom's efforts even exceeded that in helping to raise a staggering £31 million for the NHS, but for Christian Aid there will probably be a fraction of the £9m usually raised in this coming week. Here is a challenge for every Christian, not least as we face the Question which St John in his letter (1 John 3, 17) posed: "How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?" In these weeks of Easter, when we have heard again the gospel accounts of Jesus’ appearing to his friends after his resurrection, we might reflect on that story of the journey to Emmaus, when Jesus came to two of his friends but was unrecognised: so often we also fail to recognise Him in the poor, the deprived, the suffering and the hungry. “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison and did not help you?” He will reply, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” (Matthew 25, 37-40) It was in 1966 that I moved from my first curacy in Friern Barnet in the London diocese to my second in Chingford in the diocese of Chelmsford. It was there, of course, that I met and married Pam. It was in that same year, 1966, that a Conference of the World Council of Churches was held in Geneva: speaking at the Conference, the Roman Catholic economist Barbara Ward said something which had a profound affect on me at the time, and is something which more than 50 years later we still need to take to heart – the words have stayed with me through the years: ‘At the moment when we can incinerate this planet we have also been given the means to feed the human race and lift it up. If this is not the apocalyptic moment, for which in some sense we as Christians are supposed to look, I just don’t know how much more apocalyptic you want us to be. And that being the case, can we not decide that as far as politics is concerned, we are not ever again going to be content with the half truths and the half promises, but our political action is going to create a community of citizens in the world which can act in this field? Christians straddle the whole spectrum of rich nations, and therefore Christians are a lobby, or can be a lobby, of incomprehensible importance in this field. If we don’t do it, when we come to see God ultimately, he will say: ‘did you feed them, did you give them to drink, did you clothe them, did you shelter them?’ If we say: "Sorry, Lord, but we did give 0.3 of our gross national product", I don’t think it will be enough.’ Well, it’s now 0.7% – but I don’t think that will be enough either. But not only did I meet Pam in Chingford but I also embraced Christian Aid for the first time. With two friends from neighbouring churches, Methodist and Baptist, for Christian Aid has always been an ecumenical activity, we jointly organised activities for Christian Aid Week – door to door collections, public meetings, and discussion and study groups. In my activities for Christian Aid at that time there was one encounter which particularly moved me: it was meeting a leading minister of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand and of the worldwide ecumenical movement with whom, incidentally, I shared a birthday. Alan Brash moved to London from New Zealand in the 1960s when he was appointed director of Christian Aid for the British Council of Churches: we invited him to speak in Chingford, and among his stories from around the world he told us that he had just returned from one part of Africa where he had witnessed the bodies of babies and young children being pulled from the sewers of the city where they had been thrown by their mothers to save them a worse death from starvation – and they were mothers who loved their children no less than we love ours. It was one of a number of stories which compelled me and my ecumenical friends to work for a justice, dignity and eQuality which are still largely absent from today’s world, where millions are dying from hunger. Alan died in 2002 at the age of 89, and the obituary which the Church in New Zealand wrote for him is a call to each one of us: A concern for justice for all people; a conviction that the Church should never forget that it is called to serve the poor of the world; an unwavering commitment to pacifism and the search for peace; and a life-long commitment to ecumenism and the unity of the Church were the hallmarks of Alan Brash's life. He saw these as challenges that should confront all who confess to follow Jesus Christ and he was absolute and fearless in his resolve to walk in that way. In that obituary is a message and a challenge for us all – justice for all, serving the world's poor, searching for peace, and to do it ecumenically. With our benefice now including the Methodist Church at Larkfield and the Larkfield Community Church meeting each week at Lunsford Primary School, we have the opportunity to do just that! Millions in today’s world are dying from starvation. The National Lottery makes millionaires each week. Chief Executives of large Companies take home more than a million pounds each year – and so do top-flight footballers on vastly inflated salaries. I don’t begrudge the rich their wealth – many have worked very hard for it, and much of it is a Question of supply and demand. I want no part with the politics of envy, but we talk of ‘millions’ with very little concept of how great a figure that is. It is not yet a million days since Christ died – we’ve got to wait another 700 years to reach that figure: it is an enormous sum, almost beyond the understanding of many of us. Yet millions, literally millions, in fact 1.4 billion – that’s one thousand four hundred million – in today’s world are dying, literally dying, of starvation. They are those who don’t know when the next meal is coming, or if the next meal is coming. Let me try to describe the number to you in a picture. If you were to line up in a Queue all those in today’s world who are dying of hunger, and the Queue started at your front door, then it would go round the world for its 25,000 miles and land up at your back door as well. And then that Queue of starving people would go round the world again, not 5 nor 10 nor 20 times, but 25 times: so that if you got into your car, and you drove along that Queue of starving people, passing someone who was hungry every 2 feet of the way, and if you drove for 500 miles each day, it would take you 3½ years to get to the end of the queue. That is the measure of starvation in today’s world, and it is that which Christian Aid – together, of course, with other aid agencies – seeks in some small way to alleviate. The vast majority of it, of course, has to be done by governments – and yet there are still some who campaign for our government’s 0.7% to be reduced. The director General of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation has written: ‘One person’s hunger and want is every person’s hunger and want. One person’s freedom from want is neither a secure nor a true freedom until all people are free from hunger and want’. It is also a Question of priority. Millions dying from starvation, and yet last year in this country we blew up a hundred million pounds in fireworks, £2.3 million of it on New Year's Eve in London. On Independence day in America a billion pounds will be spent in the same way. Millions dying from starvation, and yet a million pounds each week is spent by the NHS on fat- fighting drugs to control Britain's obesity, with doctors writing 3,200 prescriptions each day for slimming pills.

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