Easter 4 Year C (Christian Aid Sunday)

This morning is Christian Aid Sunday, as you will have seen from the envelope with your service sheet. So what does your donation do? What difference can we make? Why, other than perhaps for historic reasons would you support Christian Aid rather than another aid charity?

We believe in life before death. That’s the strapline that Christian Aid adopted in the 1990s and it’s still used. Christian Aid is primarily interested in resourcing individuals and their communities to live better, to become more self-sufficient and to move towards sustainability. Their ambitions are less about emergency relief – although that is, of course, something they’re involved with, and more about changing the outlook for individuals and their communities.

My understanding is that Christian Aid is asking us to think about how we support more vulnerable people to live better, to aspire to reaching their own full potential, to living their best lives despite whatever challenging circumstances they face.

We believe in life before death. This morning’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles tells us about Tabitha or Dorcas, who has died. But this story, unlike many we read in Scripture, focusses on how she lived, rather than how she died. Dorcas was known for her generosity and her skill. She made things for other people and, we’re shown how important she had become within her community. She actively supported her family and her friends by recognising, honing and using the gifts she had.

It’s easy to read this as another resurrection story, the raising of Dorcas, but that’s not where I want to focus today. I want to remind us that Peter was called because of how she had lived, the difference that she had made to other people’s lives. There must have been many deaths within that community, each one sad in itself, but this is about someone whose life had impacted significantly and therefore was singled out. Maya Angelou once wrote that people don’t remember what you said or what you did, but they do remember how you made them feel. And that, I think, is what was important about Dorcas. She made people feel good about themselves.

When Peter arrived, the women didn’t tell him what Dorcas had done for them, they showed him. We don’t know anything more about Dorcas, but I would like to imagine that she had shared her skills; that she had taught others how to make tunics and other garments that were comfortable and well made. I imagine that somewhere along the line she was an educator. And one of the things we have learned is that education is key to helping people to resource themselves, key to making a fundamental difference.

Now we’re not all gifted in the way that Dorcas was, but we are all in a position to offer small acts of generosity to the people around us. There are many ways in which each one of us can have a positive impact within our community. And there are ways that we can share our gifts and skills, passing them on to future generations. In a place like this Cathedral that can often happen in quite subtle ways that we may not even notice. We learn something about how to live because we are the beneficiaries of the ways that other people live.

Today though, we’re being asked to think bigger and wider than just our immediate community. Christian Aid is concerned with a global community – and so should we be. A couple of weeks ago I was talking about the scars we carry and the ways that we avoid acknowledging those scars. It seems to me that the really important work of Christian Aid is to draw our attention to the global scars that we would rather avoid. The scars of poverty and injustice; the permanent scarring of our earth as a result of climate change; the scarring of whole populations whose lives are dominated by conflict. How much easier it is to turn our faces the other way. To block out the news that is challenging to hear. To narrow our focus onto that which feels manageable. And we are being asked to take ourselves out of that space and to make ourselves uncomfortable. To recognise that the ways that we live, the choices we make, have a global impact.

This year’s material from Christian Aid highlights the situations for two women in Guatemala whose crops are failing as a result of the climate emergency along with the impact of multi-national business. They and their families are at risk of malnutrition, not because the land couldn’t support them, at least with some adaptation to what they grow, but because their ground has been irrevocably changed and, at the same time, the water that is available has been diverted into large scale agricultural enterprises that export to richer parts of the world. The traditional crops that were grown by small farmers are failing. The massive crops of palm oil that are grown on an industrial scale contribute to that situation. And the blunt truth for us is that we also contribute to that situation.

We are counted amongst the consumers who create demand for the palm oil and out of season fruits that enable the multi-nationals to flourish in Central America. We are counted amongst those who inadvertently make it almost impossible for some of the indigenous tribes in Guatemala to live in their traditional ways. Their lands and their lives are scarred and, if we can, we look away.

Let’s turn back to Dorcas. To the new life that she was offered as a result of Peter’s intervention. Those women in Guatemala are being offered new life through interventions that are supported by Christian Aid. They are being offered new ways to live the life they have; to live that life well; to live in ways that supports their families and their wider communities. To share their skills; to educate those who will come after them. That’s the real difference that an agency like Christian Aid can make. It’s not just responding to the immediate crisis. It is looking for ways to future proof. Ways to make a longer-term difference, not just for those who are living now but also for those who will live on those lands in the future.

And we can make an impact. Obviously by giving money, if we are able, in order to support the work. But also in being mindful about how we live our lives. Being mindful of the choices we make, of the impact of our economic and lifestyle choices on women and their families in places we will probably never visit.

If we want to be counted amongst those who believe in life before death, we have a responsibility. To ourselves; to our community; to the indigenous people of Guatemala; to the global community and to our planet. A commitment to life before death demands that we think not just about how other people might live, but about how we live. It demands that we actively seek to make things different, to recognise the ways that we contribute to the creation of new scars, both here and in other parts of the world. And to begin to think about the changes we might make, changes that may be small for us but which have the potential to be massive for others.

The women in Guatemala have fewer choices than we do. They are being supported by Christian Aid to make wiser choices. We could choose to make a commitment to also making wiser choices.