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Good morning. Ban Ki-moon, the eighth Secretary General of the United Nations, has written: ‘One of my earliest memories is walking up a muddy road into the mountains. It was raining. Behind me, my village was burning. When there was school, it was under a tree. Then the United Nations came. They fed me, my family, my community.’

The adoption of the charter of the United Nations in 1945 is remembered today, United Nations Day. Unlike Ban Ki-moon, few of us may have had a direct experience of the work of the United Nations, either in peacekeeping or humanitarian aid, and perhaps, like me, you were unaware that today is the anniversary of its founding.

The second Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjold, was well aware of the failings and shortcomings of the organisation, as well as its noble aims following the devastation of the second world war. He also pin-pointed the way it could be viewed as a distant and irrelevant force to those who have had no personal need for it. He wrote:

‘Everything will be all right - you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.’

Owning that deep connection with the very best aims of the United Nations might be compared to the apostle Paul’s encouragement to the Philippian believers: ‘whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable…think about these things.’

Living God, we think of all who uphold the aims of the United Nations, and pray they may be safe, encouraged and inspired today. Amen.