[Christian Aid] On Sunday March 8, Christian Aid’s 70th anniversary will be marked on Radio 4’s Sunday Worship with a sermon given by the charity’s Chair, Dr Rowan Williams.
The service will come from Emmanuel Church, Didsbury, Greater Manchester, and focus on the response of the churches to the suffering caused by the Second Wold War, which led to the foundation of Christian Aid and a number of other relief agencies.
In his sermon Dr Williams will reflect on the manner in which Jews, as well as Roma, people with disabilities and those whose sexuality was deemed unacceptable, were relegated by the Nazis to the category of sub-human.
“They saw the results of generations of lazy prejudice and contempt transformed into mass murder,” Dr Williams will say.
He will add that the response from people in the UK to the suffering abroad was more than just charity. “They didn’t just see a lot of poor suffering victims who needed help from prosperous and generous people. They saw men, women and children who needed above all to have their dignity recognised when everything had been working against it.
“When we talk of men and women being made in God’s image, we don’t just mean that men and women have a few things in common with God. Perhaps it helps to think of the image we see when we look into a mirror. It’s there because we’re there, looking at it. And so when God makes human beings ‘in his image’, he looks at us and we look back, that’s when the secret becomes clear: he asks us to mirror him, to reflect the way he acts and the way he sees.”
It was the vision of helping the poor and forgotten to “take their proper place again as partners in the great work of humanising the world and guaranteeing the well-being of all,” Dr Williams will say, that inspired the setting up of agencies such as Christian Aid, Oxfam, the Ecumenical Refugee Commission and the Roman Catholic agency Sword of the Spirit.
Dr Williams will conclude with advice to: “Pause, to let go of the anxieties and obsessions and fears; look at the faces of God’s children, God’s images; listen to the voice calling you to set God’s children free. Then cross over to the new creation, the Kingdom of God that belongs to the poor.”
The service will be led by Rev Dr Kirsty Thorpe, Minister of Wilmslow United Reformed