Fr. Aidan’s sermon 15-06-2003: Feast of the Holy Trinity.

The Trinity, the greatest mystery of our faith, but without being too irreverent, sometimes we feel - 'so what! What’s it got to do with us and living?'

We begin every prayer with the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, we baptise with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It’s the heart of everything. In Genesis it says in the second account of creation ‘in the image of God I created them. Male and female I created them’.

God is a family where there are three persons; individuals if you like, completely and gloriously different but united completely together and that’s what a good family should be; where everyone is completely and gloriously different. We are all individuals, but a bond of unbreakable love unites us and that’s the image He calls us to live out in our world, where everyone is gloriously and individually different, where all nations are gloriously and individually different, but where we live in a sense of justice and harmony and love, where each person is equally valued.

This is Trade Justice week for the Trade Justice Movement and this is it’s logo. You see how the scales are tipped in the families of the world in favour of the rich? What the Trade Justice Movement is trying to do is to redress the balance to lift the scales so that there is a bit more balance. So I want to talk to you about the Trade Justice Movement.

Cinderella. It’s a great pantomime isn’t it? It’s a great story. She always wins our sympathy; because the two ugly sisters have got everything; they are spoilt; they are ugly; they can go to the ball; they want to marry the prince and they can move with in the best circles. Cinders is scrubbing; cleaning the floor; not allowed to go to the ball; not allowed the same food; she is the servant, the slave of the family.

She is an image of our world and our sympathies should be with the Cinderellas of our world. I always feel inadequate (I'm sure we all do) thinking about world justice because economics and trade bemuse my little mind; I cannot grasp them properly. But there are one or two things I would like to tell you. One is that the Trade Justice Movement points out that £1.3 billion a day is taken off the poor countries of the world. That is 14 times more than we give them in aid. You are always very generous, whenever we appeal for CAFOD, we have to do that and we have to appeal for the poor in small ways, but all the time it is an impossible struggle because the rules of trade in the world are imbalanced. They are balanced in favour of the rich.

Every 2 years the World Trade Organisation meets to look at the rules of world trade and to adjust them. They are meeting in Cancun in Mexico in September. CAFOD, Christian Aid, Oxfam, lots of the agencies in our country have united together to focus on that meeting. What they want to do is to make all the 659 MPs in our country aware that we think that changing of World Trade rules in favour of the poor is important. Not just important, but that we cannot live in a world like this, that God calls us to live in a different world. It’s not the image of a family.

Our Bishops have said that World Trade rules must be changed to benefit the poorest. If there is a global market, there must be a global solidarity. We are called as followers of Christ to change our world and the initial focus is the meeting in September. Why? And what on earth can we do about it? We can target our MPs; there is a lobby arranged for the 27th and 28th June (they must have known it was Lytham Club Day) and because its Lytham Club Day, I think Michael Jack has agreed to meet people from 6pm to 7pm in one of those wonderful and new domes in St Anne’s square. He is going to be available then so we can go and lobby him on that Friday night between 6 and 7 o’clock. Most MPs will be on our side. Its not a question of fighting against them, it’s a question of putting our point of view across and saying this is really important for us.

From my own experience of the injustice of Trade Justice rules: I have been to Brazil quite a bit and in Brazil they have a lovely drink called Guarana (named after the Guarana Indians) and it’s a drink you can’t get anywhere else except in Brazil (although you possibly can by now). It’s a good drink, like lemonade, their type of lemonade but its under threat from Coca Cola because even though in Brazil it’s a big company and it’s a big organisation, Coca Cola can swamp them and can undersell them and that for me is a very powerful example of how a good firm, a good product is in danger from the multi-nationals. That’s going on all around the world.

Another example I was reading about recently is in Mozambique which has suffered terribly from civil war. People are in dire poverty there and the poor farmers there are trying to produce enough food for themselves. There’s fertility there! When its not flooded, the ground is very fertile, so they can produce vegetables and the wife can sell them in the local market. But she goes to the local market and it’s swamped with goods from South Africa, which are produced much cheaper so she cannot sell hers at a living wage, at a living price.

Another example that I mentioned before is how coffee has fallen in price (if you go to Booths you wouldn’t know of it). The bottom has dropped out of the coffee market! The people who produce it are getting next to nothing. We have to pay just as much here as we ever have for coffee and this is all about World Trade rules the injustice of them. How they are loaded in favour of the rich and we want to redress this balance.

So what can we do? First of all we can pray. We have the power of Christ, we have the gift of the Holy Spirit, and we can do anything. So we can pray. We can write to our MP and write from our hearts. Write to your MP asking them to write to Tony Blair or Patricia Hewitt (that’s the Trade Minister) asking them (they are going to be our representatives at Cancun in Mexico) asking them to plead for the poor countries of the world, to change the rules in their favour. You can just do that. If you want an example I have printed out, typed out letters to Michael Jack which CAFOD has sent us. There are 150 of them there. If you want, take one of those and read it and use that. You don’t need to use all of it, but it distils what we are asking them to do. Just write something , it is effective, it is very effective. So pray, write; go to the lobby in St Anne’s Square on 27th June between 6 and 7. Go and meet Michael Jack. Talk to people, you know, have conversations in the pub, in the office, whatever. When you meet friends talk to them about it, if you get one convert saying,

"this isn’t fair we must change it,"

then that’s good. So there are things we can do! But the most important thing is to realise that the source of it is the feast we are celebrating today. We are celebrating the joy of being made in the image of God. A family of people made in God’s image throughout the world who are called to live and mirror forth the love and unity of the Trinity.

©Kitabu Web Design