The Liberator

Sermon for 8th February 2009 (Isaiah 40: 21-31; Mark 1: 29-39)

A certain lady always talked about her job at home, and her young daughter always listened with great interest. So she thought it would be a treat for her daughter to spend a day with her at the office. Since she wanted it to be a surprise, she didn't tell her child where they were going; she just said that it would be fun. Although usually a bit shy, the girl seemed excited at first, to meet each colleague that her mother introduced to her. On the way home, however, she seemed somewhat down. "Didn't you have a nice time?" asked her mother. "Well, it was okay." she responded. "But I thought it would be more like a circus." Confused, her mother asked, "Whatever do you mean?" She said, "Well, you said you work with a bunch of clowns, and I never got to see them!"

Work in this country is, mostly, reasonably well paid and the conditions are, on the whole reasonably safe and good, even if it’s not often a circus. Next week Fairtrade fortnight begins. It’s a reminder to us that for many people across the world, work is not good or well paid and in some cases is, literally, slavery, and a reminder that we can do something about that - each one of us.

St Luke’s church council voted recently voted to apply for ‘Fair-Trade’ status. That was not new for us; we have used fairtrade coffee for years and now sometimes biscuits after church. Through sermons and discussions we’ve encouraged other people to use Fairtrade goods, like bananas, Divine chocolate, Percol or Cafedirect coffee and tea, Traidcraft goods, even clothes, although these tend to be the smaller stores or Christian groups selling from Christian bookshops or even off market stalls.

Why bother? Does it matter? What’s the reality of the problem? The things we buy in Tesco, Asda, Lidl, Sainsbury’s, we would like to think are goods made by people who get a fair wage for doing them. Sometimes that is true. Kenco coffee, for instance, is not officially Faitrade but do have a very caring attitude to their employees and do pay relatively good wages. Starbucks and the café we use on days off in Lichfield uses Fairtrade coffee. All of that only happens because of the Fair Trade movement and things like Fair Trade fortnight acting as reminders to us all, including big businesses.

Sadly, many firms are not that caring and will use the cheapest produicts possible; have you ever wondered how some of the things we but are incredibly cheap… and keep on getting cheaper?. They are cheap and the supermarket, or clothes, or shoestores are taking 40% of the cost as their own profit, the seller to the supermarket another 10% and so on. The amount that goes to the person if often 1% or less of what it costs us. What that means is that in this world one in eight have not enough to live on, 40% of the world live less than £2 a day, one billion have no access to safe brinking water, 100 million will never even get the chance to start school let alone finish it, 35, 000 children a day die. For instance the toys we buy are mostly made in China where workers work 12 hour days earning 10p an hour in horrible and dangerous conditions.

Worse still is the active and real slave trade. More than a hundred years ago slavery was abolished. Yet around the world today the best estimates are that there something like 27 million slaves. The chocolates we tuck into over our school or coffee breaks was probably in part made by slaves. Desperately poor African families are drawn to apply for jobs in a different country, move there and then are either paid less than the cost of the rent for the horrible workers houses or are actually imprisoned by greedy men who just want to get rich. Even in our own country we can’t be certain that people are being paid fair wages or a safe; think of the Morecambe Bay winkle pickers; a Vicar there says more will die there. Sweatshops produce cheap clothes amongst immigrant workers in cramped, badly lit, normally dangerous conditions where the workers are islaoted from the world around them.

How would Jesus respond? Todays’ reading was just one of the many, many examples we know of when Jesus saw a need. In this case it was a man suffering from leprosy, a disease that still maims people hooribly for life and kills some. Then, there was no cure and no care. If you were a leper not only did you have the disease, you were seen as cursed by God and so were rejected by society and ‘damned’ by God. Jesus came to show us what God thinks. Jesus did not reject him, or ignore him or push him away. He went to him; he treated him like a full human being, talking to him as an equal, maybe for the first time in years, and then he set him free. Jesus gave him a chance to start again, with a whole, clean body and accepted in society. That is what Jesus wants us to do. He wants us to give people who earn less than two pounds a day a chance to earn a decent wage, to be able to send their children to school, to see their children grow up, to be able to live safely just as we do.

How? One way is to buy fair-trade goods. The families who sell the products can get a life. They will not get rich, but they will not have to be desperately poor. They and their children are less likely to become slaves. They won’t have to grow drugs or chop down rain forests to do all this. Fairtrade fortnight is a reminder to us all that everyone deserves a fair wage for what they make. What we buy sets people free or risks making them prisoners and slaves. Jesus asks us to choose.