Fair Trade Fortnight Sermon — 10 May 2015

Introduction
The question I want to pose today is this: how do we show love?

This Sunday falls in the middle of Fair Trade Fortnight which gives us an opportunity to reflect on what it means as Christians to live in a world where some of us have all of our material needs met, while others exist in grinding poverty. Specifically, Fair Trade fortnight invites us to consider our relationship with those people.

Reading #1 Acts 10: 44–48
44 While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit came down on all those who were listening to his message. 45 The Jewish believers who had come from Joppa with Peter were amazed that God had poured out his gift of the Holy Spirit on the Gentiles also. 46 For they heard them speaking in strange tongues and praising God’s greatness. Peter spoke up: 47 “These people have received the Holy Spirit, just as we also did. Can anyone, then, stop them from being baptized with water?” 48 So he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they asked him to stay with them for a few days.

Our first reading from Acts is a good starting point for us to consider our relationship with others, particularly ‘other people’ those unseen, unknown and elsewhere. Perhaps including those people who produce the goods we consume.

In the reading, the Holy Spirit comes down upon a group of Gentiles Peter is meeting with in Caesarea. Earlier in the chapter Peter had received a vision in which God suggests that the barriers between clean and unclean people, such a dominant feature of Jewish cultural practice at the time, would not hold in the face of God’s will. Peter realises that “God treats everyone on the same basis” and in our reading goes on to Baptise the group.

That notion that “God treats everyone on the same basis” was a radical one then, and still challenges us today, for if God treats us all on the same basis, then what does that mean for us as individuals, as a church, or as a community in a contemporary society in which there are many and often growing inequalities? If we expect that God will provide for our needs, that he will ‘give us this day our daily bread’, then should it not be the case that other people, as much children of God as we are, should also be treated on the same basis and have those needs met?

Reading #2
1 John 5: 1–6
5 Whoever believes that Jesus is the Messiah is a child of God; and whoever loves a father loves his child also. 2 This is how we know that we love God’s children: it is by loving God and obeying his commands. 3 For our love for God means that we obey his commands. And his commands are not too hard for us, 4 because every child of God is able to defeat the world. And we win the victory over the world by means of our faith. 5 Who can defeat the world? Only the person who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.
6 Jesus Christ is the one who came with the water of his baptism and the blood of his death. He came not only with the water, but with both the water and the blood. And the Spirit himself testifies that this is true, because the Spirit is truth.

Our second reading from First John builds on the theme. John’s first letter is partly a response to teachings in the early Christian community that suggested that the physical world was evil, that Christ therefore could not have really been a physical human being, and that salvation came through withdrawing from the world and care for other people — that salvation was solely about the person’s own relationship with God. John is addressing these teachings, considered heretical, and offering a different way forward.

This closing off from the world, or concern just for ones own self, or perhaps just one’s own family, friends, or faith group, is something we all will have observed. In political literature this is known as ‘amoral familism’ — having love and care for a small group of people around you, but putting a fence up around that group.

In his advice to the community in our reading however, John points out the indivisibility of love for God and love for one another. In the leadup to our reading is the famous passage “For he cannot love God whom he has not seen, if he does not love his brother, who he has seen” — and then in the passage itself we are told that we defeat the challenges of the physical world not by withdrawing from it, but through love — and if one is to follow the example of the apostles, through actions.

What does it mean to love?

What then does it mean for us to love?

It’s relatively easy for us to understand what it means to love at the personal level. Love for our partners, children, friends, and even within this community is something that we know how to practice. But the gospel doesn’t just call us to love those immediately around us, it calls us to love all people.

What does loving one another as a community mean? How do we express love within our country, let alone towards people on the other side of the world? It can’t be through personal interactions for the most part, but I believe that we can find ways to establish loving, respectful, just relationships with people who are more distant.

Fairtrade is one way in which we can attempt to weave such concepts into our economic relationships with one another. American theologian Jim Wallis writes about this extensively in his books Gods Politics in which he identifies the need for our economic decisions as people, communities, and nations, to have a moral basis — a basis that for us as Christians must be founded upon Gods love, as revealed in scripture. He reasons that our economic decisions are one of the chief determinants of whether God’s justice is grown or quashed in our world. For example, he talks about national budgets as ‘moral documents’ due to their impact on the wellbeing of God’s people.

Scripture certainly seems to support this. Christ regularly speaks of his concern for the poor (many more time than for example, issues of sexuality, which the church has a tendency to consume itself over); Mary sings for justice in the Magnificat, the laws of the early Jewish community saw wealth (in theory anyway) levelled every 50 years as part of Jubillee, and early Christian communities shared what they had so that none went without.

The central objective of Fairtrade is to restore justice and love into the relationships between developed world consumers (us) and developing world producers. If the products we enjoy in relative comfort here in New Zealand rely upon low cost production that leaves developing world communities in poverty, if they rely upon child labour, if they rely upon exploitative value chains — then our relationship, our love for others, is surely compromised.

To address these issues of just relationship Fairtrade ensures that the price that is paid to developing world produces is not simply at the whim of volative commodity markets, but that it is set at a fair and sustainable level, above the going market rate — a level that allows people and communities not just to subsist, but to develop and better achieve their human potential. In addition, Fair trade recognises that producers live within communities of their own, and pays a special dividend to invest in community infrastructure such as schools, health centres, wells, or technology to enhance production.

How does this work in practice? An example is the chocolate that we purchase through the Fair Trade system here at St Peters. This chocolate is produced in Ghana by the Kuapa Kokoo collective (meaning ‘good cocoa farmer).

(Text below from Fair Trade website):
Kuapa Kokoo was founded in 1993 following the liberalisation of the cocoa market in Ghana, and became Fairtrade Certified in 1996. By setting up their own company, Kuapa Kokoo farmer members have been able to trade directly with the state-run cocoa board which controls all cocoa exports. It is the only farmer-owned organisation among the private companies granted government licences to trade cocoa.
Kuapa Kokoo is an umbrella cooperative. Farmers are members of village societies which sell their cocoa through the trading arm of Kuapa Kokoo to the government cocoa board. Members are predominantly smallholders living in remote parts of the country. The average farm is four hectares with around three hectares under cocoa, which accounts for virtually 100% of the farmers’ cash income.
Kuapa Kokoo is able to improve the lives of its members by ensuring reliable and prompt payment. It does this thanks to its own system of community elected Recorders who are responsibe for keeping the weighing scales accurate, testing cocoa quality, and paying correctly and on time. Kuapa Kokoo also provides training, a credit loan scheme and access to market information, as well as funding community projects from the Fairtrade Premium generated from Fairtrade sales.
The participation of women is actively promoted by Kuapa Kokoo. Women are represented on the regional and national Management Committees. Seminars and workshops have also been introduced to help women develop leadership skills and diversify their income generating opportunities such as soap making using the potash produced from burnt cocoa husks.
Kuapa Kokoo represents almost 50,000 small-scale cocoa growers meaning that there is a significant impact on the wellbeing of a large number of people and communities.
Some of the Fairtrade Premium funded projects for the Kuapa Kokoo collective over the last 14 years have included:
• Training programmes in management and leadership skills and hiring two agricultural officers.
• The building and completion of four schools, two day-care centres and two mobile cinemas.
• The purchase of scales and machines for cracking palm kernels. These machines reduce farmers’ workload, give them greater control over the production process and allow them to increase their revenue by adding value to their product.
• The creation of a credit union to provide members with access to credit and banking services.
• The development of alternative income generating schemes, such as tie-dye textiles, soap making, corn milling and snail farming for the local and export markets.
• The acquisition of mobile health clinics to provide members with healthcare services and HIV/AIDS workshops.

Reading #3
John 15: 9–17
9 I love you just as the Father loves me; remain in my love. 10 If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love.
11 “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My commandment is this: love one another, just as I love you. 13 The greatest love you can have for your friends is to give your life for them. 14 And you are my friends if you do what I command you. 15 I do not call you servants any longer, because servants do not know what their master is doing. Instead, I call you friends, because I have told you everything I heard from my Father. 16 You did not choose me; I chose you and appointed you to go and bear much fruit, the kind of fruit that endures. And so the Father will give you whatever you ask of him in my name. 17 This, then, is what I command you: love one another.

So there is strong evidence that the principles and practice of fair trade make a real difference to the lives people, that it is a way of us lovingly treating our fellow men as women as equals in God’s light. Our third reading confirms the imperative to love one another, laying down that great commandment “love one another just as I love you”. It also carries on the metaphor of the vine that we examined last week. In this image, Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches, and if we live our lives through him, we bear fruit.

The reading again tells us to go and bear much fruit, the fruit that endures. Metaphors of course are open to many interpretations, but to me there is a clear direction here that one of the main fruits we can bear is love for one another. Whatsmore, the bearing of fruit is not a passive thing. It requires work, tending, intent, action. Think back to the second reading where Simon Peter takes decisive action — travelling the known world, visiting dangerous places, questioning deep cultural beliefs, taking the good news to strangers.

In the context of just and loving economic relationships with others, Fair trade is one of the simple ways we can bear fruit and show our love. By making a decision to buy fair trade we are entering into more loving, ethical relationships with others, and also helping them to bear fruit within their communities.

Our journey at St Peters
Here at St Peters we began our Fair Trade journey about 8 years ago when Jenny and John and the Vestry supported an initiative to make St Peters a Fair Trade community by stocking the kitchen with Fair Trade goods, providing a once monthly stall for parishioners, and educating ourselves about Fair Trade and global justice issues.

If we are continue our active approach to bearing fruit, what further steps can we take?

• Of course we can continue to purchase Fair Trade goods at the monthly stall, and through the Fair Trade retail system. We have already contributed tens of thousands of dollars into a more just economic relationship with producers through stall sales here at St Peters.
• We can continue to educate ourselves on Fair Trade and other global issues — watching, reading, listening, thinking.
• We can think about our other purchasing decisions. What is the impact of what we buy, are there more ethical choices — perhaps to buy something that we now has been produces with integrity, or perhaps not to buy at all
• Reflecting on how we establish loving relationships in our community and our country, through just economic structures. A question I would ask is this: if we accept the moral basis for Fair Trade and believe that it is only fair for developing world producers to be paid enough to live sustainably on, then where do we stand on the issue of the Living Wage here in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The principle at stake is very similar.
• And of course we can continue to prayerfully reflect on these issues.

Why Fairtrade is important to me

Fairtrade is important to me because fundamentally I believe that everything we have comes from God, it is all a gift — not something we have earned. How can it be right or just that it is shared so inequitably? Fair Trade is one simple, practical way in which we can help to build more loving relationships with people in our world, and tilt the scales towards justice.

Just as Simon Peter took action to treat God’s people as equals we can take action too. That is what Fair trade is all about.

Let’s close in prayer — this prayer (found on the internet) is based on Proverbs 13:23:

Lord God,
In the fields of the poor
Even when abundant fruits ripen,
Injustice sweeps them away,
And families hunger.
Help us to share
The fruits of Your bounty
So that all Your family may benefit
From Your gracious gifts.

Amen.