Category Archives: Christianity

Christianity, Religion, Society

God’s love is unchanging

Failure is an opportunity to serve

John 18:15-27; 21:1-19

THE deflating knowledge that we’ve blown it can paralyse any further action. If it involved letting others down, we can’t face seeing them again. We feel awful. Peter must have shared that experience after he denied Jesus.

Jesus’ treatment of him is deeply encouraging. He doesn’t simply offer forgiveness (it is implicit) but does something far better. First, he comes to Peter in a familiar way: on the lake, where Peter is. What had first convinced Peter of Jesus’ divinity? A miraculous catch of fish (Luke 5:1-11). So, Jesus says, in effect, ‘Peter, I’m still the same, and I’m still with you.’

And then Jesus re-commissions him, the triple charge surely being a deliberate reference to Peter’s threefold denial: the restitution was complete, the slate was wiped clean. He was forgiven, he could begin again, and he had a ministry to fulfil.

Having failed himself, he could ‘feed the lambs’ – the new believers who would join the church – with greater sensitivity. Peter, who comes over as quite hard, thoughtless and insensitive, wouldn’t be quite the same again after this; he would be more compassionate.

Christians fail like Peter because they are human. Jesus’ example shows that we cannot hold their confessed sins against them. Compassion, forgiveness and restoration are to be complete, not partial. We are to have short memories for failings and long memories for achievements – not the other way round.

God’s love is unchanging, so we can be reassured that failure in serving Christ does not mean the end of our service for Christ.

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Christianity, Climate Change, Environment, Government, Society

Pope Francis’s new climate-change doctrine and encyclical…

CLIMATE CHANGE

For more than a year, Pope Francis and his close advisors have been preparing an environmental stewardship document called Laudato Si. The text focuses on the effects of climate change on human life.

The document has been issued in the form of an encyclical, one of the most formal statements the pope can make about Catholic doctrine, and it’s the first of his papacy. Last spring, he released another piece of writing on the topic of poverty, but it was a slightly less formal document called an apostolic exhortation.

This, however, is the first instance in which the environment has been the topic of an encyclical. No pontiff has ever issued a statement (about the environment) on this level. John Paul may have put it into a World Day of Peace message, but a World Day of Peace message is down the rung on the ladder of the hierarchy of Catholic documents. Benedict, too, gave a number of homilies and speeches on it, but never at this level.

In the document, the pope makes a strong case that humans are at fault for the degradation of the environment. ‘Numerous scientific studies indicate that the major part of global warming in recent decades is due to the high concentration of greenhouse gas … emitted above all because of human activity,’ he writes. His thinking on the environment connects with other major themes of his papacy, including care for the poor and the importance of human life. In the document, he writes that the heaviest impacts of climate change ‘will probably fall in the coming decades on developing countries. Many poor people live in areas particularly affected by phenomena related to heating, and their livelihoods strongly depend on natural reserves and so-called ecosystem services, such as agriculture, fisheries, and forestry.’ The effects on immigrants and refugees are also discussed: changing environmental conditions force them into a position of economic uncertainty in which livelihoods can’t be sustained, he says.

We should know that this encyclical is not a love letter to Greenpeace or any other environmental lobby group. Whilst Francis is embracing the idea of environmental stewardship, he’s doing so as a Catholic theologian, not a liberal activist. In America, the pope’s encyclical is being discussed in terms of U.S. politics, where a significant minority of most Republican voters and legislators deny the existence of climate change. Rick Santorum, a Catholic and former U.S. senator and presidential candidate, advised the pope to ‘leave science to the scientists and focus on what we’re good at, which is theology and morality.’

Francis links his call for environmental stewardship to the Book of Genesis, and he repeatedly couches environmental degradation in theological language. ‘That human beings destroy the biological diversity in God’s creation; that human beings compromise the integrity of the earth and contribute to climate change, stripping the earth of its natural forests or destroying its wetlands; that human beings pollute the water, soil, air; all these are sins,’ he says.

American Catholics may be a sizeable group, but they form a small contingent on the whole of Francis’s church. There are 1.2 billion Roman Catholics in the world, and nearly 40 percent of them live in South America. Sub-Saharan Africa is another area of rapid growth for the Church; demographers expect the number of Christians in the region to double by 2050 to nearly 1.1 billion, although some of those will be Protestants. Considering that Latin America and Africa are Francis’s two biggest ‘constituencies,’ it’s no wonder that the environment is a point of pressing concern for the global Church. Climate change affects those who are poor and live in developing countries much more intensely than those who live in the developed world. In coming out against climate change, Francis is continuing the theme and focus of his entire papacy – speaking for the world’s poor.

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Christianity, Religion, Society

Christianity and its perpetual state of fear…

EASTER 2015

CHRISTIANS of whatever persuasion come to Easter in a spirit of renewal and joy – the holiest period in the Christian calendar. Despite the march of secularism throughout society, faith in the resurrection of Christ still sustains millions of people across the world.

It is worth noting, contrary to the received wisdom, that some Anglican dioceses have recently seen attendances rising – and not simply as a result of immigration, which is often used as being the key factor in preventing the Church in Britain from collapse.

But as we come to the celebration of Easter the elation has undoubtedly been overshadowed by the knowledge that Christians around the world face persecution for their beliefs. They are not alone in that, of course. The brutal and bloody conflict between Shia and Sunni Muslims across Syria and Iraq is driven by fundamentalist religious ideology; Hindu minority groups ranging from Pakistan to Yemen face harassment for reasons of religion too. Anti-Semitism is also on the rise.

Nevertheless, recent atrocities have thrown the threat to Christians into sharp relief. The appalling slaughter of Christian students on a campus in north-eastern Kenya by the Islamist al-Shabaab militia is the latest outrage by that group, which was also responsible for the slaughter of dozens of people in the Nairobi shopping centre massacre of 2013.

In Nigeria, brutal savagery by the extremist group Boko Haram left Christians in the country’s north afraid to worship in public. The recent beheading of a group of Coptic Christians by Islamic State on a Libyan beach brought these heinous acts to Europe’s doorstep. Last month, churches in Lahore were bombed. Mosul, a place of Christian worship for some 1,600 years, is one of several cities in Iraq from which entire communities have been driven out.

‘Turning the other cheek’ is not easy in the face of such brutal adversity. Religious hate all too often begets more persecution in return. But people of all faiths and none must ultimately live and co-exist on a single planet. Is it not better to do so peaceably than in a state of perpetual conflict?

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