            Guilsborough Evensong:  6.00 pm Sunday 4[th] July 2010
                                       
We watched a DVD last night of a Woody Allen film called " Manhattan".  It was made in 1979, one of the earlier of his almost 40 films .  it was a story about two friend's complicated  relationship with two girls, and struck me as very like one of those Oscar Wilde plays where almost every line in the dialogue is a witticism.   I've Woody Allen for his witty and thought provoking aphorisms.  Such as 
" You can live to be a hundred if you give up the things that make you want to be a hundred" 
"Some guy hit my car and I told him  " Be fruitful and multiply"  -  but not in those words. "
" It seems the world was divided into good and bad people.  The good ones slept better, while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more." 
All good fun.  But here is one of his gloomier tongue in cheek pronouncements that I thought we might consider for a moment this evening:
" More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads.  One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction.   Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. " 
We are going, I sense, through one of those periods of national breast beating.   The economic situation is awful; the conflicts abroad that we are involved in are getting nowhere and it's hard to see an exit strategy; terrorism is on the rise, the Russians are spying on us more than ever, it seems; our prisons are overflowing; our football team is inept; our tennis players failed to win the men's singles for the 76th year running.  BP is destroying the Gulf of Mexico and for that Britain is getting the blame  etc etc. etc. 
As we all know the newspapers love the gloomy headlines and there were I counted at least half a dozen in the Sunday newspaper I read this morning, ranging from MPs expenses scandals, via jobs at risk to  the failings of the NHS. 
Then I went to the Hollowell Steam Rally, that ever growing event that started as the Church Fete at St. James's Church over 20 years ago and has been supporting charities and good causes, including on occasions this church, ever since.  There was a huge, noisy, turnout of families enjoying themselves in the balmy weather and colourful characters of all kinds.   How many of the thousands there were aware, I wondered, that their entrance money and the profits of the beer and tea tents, as well as the raffle and the auction, were all being allocated to those charities and good causes.    I would guess that the vast majority did know, and I would not be surprised if  -  other things being equal i.e. good weather and the need to entertain the children not too many other distractions -  they supported the Rally for that very reason.
Though many may have  had no detailed knowledge, the punters in Hollowell this weekend were actually supporting the Christian virtues that have underpinned this country for 1500 years.   
I feel that we can be proud that this country has done more than most, perhaps more than any other, to develop the spirit of charitable giving and spread it worldwide.  It's a tradition based on Christ's teaching. 
The obligation to perform acts of charity is one we learn both by revelation from the Bible and by reason.  In the Gospels, as we all know, Christ taught us : "thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself"; "as you would that men should do to you, do you also to them in like manner"; and particularly there is the vivid description in St. Mathew's Gospel  of the separation of the good from the bad, the sheep from the goats, at the Final Judgment.  
Jesus in that passage describes the King as saying to those on his right  " For I was an hungered and ye gave me meat,; I was thirsty and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger and ye took me in. "    But when they demurred and said they had not had the opportunity to do that,  He pointed out   " Verily I say unto you in as much as ye have done it to unto one of the least of these my brethren , ye have done it to me. "   And he is, equally, emphatically dismissive of those on his left who have not done that.  
But reason, too, tells us that we ought to love our neighbours, since they are children of God; since they are our brothers, members of the same human family; and since they have the same nature, dignity, destiny, and needs as ourselves. 
And Christ taught us that this love, or charity, should be both internal and external. The internal wishes the neighbour well, and rejoices in his good fortune; the latter comprises all those actions by which any of the needs of the neighbour are supplied. 
Here in this country we have become pretty good at supplying them.   For we founded a whole series of charitable enterprises devoted to supplying needs to the least of our brethren.  And they were founded by Christians, of course: William Wilberforce and his friends started the Anti-Slavery Society,  William Booth the Salvations Army,  the Irishman Thomas Barnardo in 1867 opened his homes for Ragged Children. 
 In 1870, he opened his first home for boys in Stepney.
One evening, an 11-year old boy, John Somers was turned away because the shelter was full. He was found dead two days
later from malnutrition and exposure and from then on the Barnardo homes bore the
sign 'No Destitute Child Ever Refused Admission."   
Barnardo was following in a tradition of child care started by Thomas Coram a hundred years earlier when he founded a hospital for children at Spitalfields in London and attracted the attention of the great and the good  to his cause.  William Hogarth sold some of his drawings to raise money, and Handel regularly performed the Messiah to do the same. 
Then there is George Williams a 23 year old draper who founded the YMCA in 1844, an organisation that now boasts, I discovered, 43 million members around the world. I remember how a Japanese friend of mine, with no English, travelled alone to this country for the first time just to see the house where Williams was born. 
And there are a host of other organisations such as the Scout & Guide Movement, Amnesty International, the Cheshire Homes, Meals on Wheels. And if I may be a bit personal there is Frank Buttle, a one time solicitor and later Anglican clergyman who founded his own trust with Pound1 miion he had raised, which became operational in 1953. This is  now the largest UK charity providing grant aid solely to individual children and young people in need. Without the help of that Trust I don't think I would be here today. 
The names of Coram, George Williams, Baden Powell, Barnardo, Wilberforce, Leonard Cheshire and Buttle will, I hope, live on for as  long as charity motivates the human spirit.   But some there be who have no Wikipedia memorial  -  and they are the vast majority  -  without whom the spirit of charity however well led could not continue.  I am thinking, for example, of the St. John volunteer on the touchline at a Cobblers football match on a bleak winter's day, or the dishwashers  -  I like the French word plongeurs  -  sweating away in the tea tent at Hollowell Steam.  And of course there will many people in this church tonight who do their bit one way or another for Christian charity in all sorts of ways.  
So despite the gloom that sometimes surrounds our national affairs, and our lack of ephemeral national achievement I hope that this weekend's successful Steam Rally, made possible by the work of many volunteers,  will inspire us all to go on playing our charitable part with renewed vigour -  and as Woody Allen might put it  by passing that spirit on to those who will come after us  -  be fruitful and multiply.       



