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The following reflection is on Matthew 20:1-16.

 

Is not this the fast that I choose:

to loose the bonds of injustice,

to undo the thongs of the yoke,

to let the oppressed go free,

and to break every yoke?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,

and bring the homeless poor into your house;

when you see the naked, to cover them,

and not to hide yourself from your own kin? - Isaiah 58:6-7

To understand Isaiah’s message about true and false fasting, let’s take a minute to remind ourselves of the role and intention of fasting in the context of our Christian faith. This is vital, as fasting is one of the spiritual disciplines in the Christian faith that is no longer practised universally.

It was one of the first days of the 11th assembly when I met an old Bossey friend. We had not seen each other for 24 years, although it felt we met yesterday. We shared memories of our Graduate School of Ecumenical Studies in Bossey in 1998 and remembered the names of our friends. We spoke about Bossey as a life-changing experience for both of us.

The highly anticipated, long awaited COP26 began 31 October. It has now been six years since the adoption of the Paris Agreement at COP21 and much remains to be implemented in order to fulfil the promises agreed to at that historic moment by the member states. We knew then that the road ahead would be challenging and that changing our systems would require a radical shift in policies and behaviours—but we were hopeful. 

When the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, was recently admitted to hospital with COVID-19, spending a few days in intensive care, a number of British politicians and journalists talked about how the virus was the great leveller. Everyone from street cleaners to world leaders could get the disease; no-one was immune, therefore, we must all follow the same social distancing guidelines. But as Iñigo Aymar of Oxfam has pointed out, COVID-19 is not so much the great leveller, but the great revealer.

While facing this new pandemic, it begs the question: Is it not just another disease, so why all this fuss? Are there not many other epidemics and pandemics that are killing more people?

This week we continue celebrating the foundation of the World Council of Churches at the Amsterdam Assembly in 1948. Since its founding 70 years ago, the WCC has held assemblies in Evanston, New Delhi, Uppsala, Nairobi, Vancouver, Canberra, Harare, Porto Alegre and Busan.

Water is a key resource both to provide drinking water and to generate food and energy for a growing world population. A fifth of the global population lives in regions affected by water stress - in regions where more water is used than can naturally be recharged.

These days everyone uses the words “change” or “transformation” yet they are used to describe very different things. The French president Emmanuel Macron speaks of the transformation of the French economy through the liberalisation of labour laws, and in his book “India Transformed” Rakesh Mohan describes the benefits achieved by 25 years of neo-liberalism. So what do church-related aid organisations like Action de Carême, Pain pour le prochain and Etre partenaires mean when they use the word “transition”? Is this concept really part of the Christian message?

I sometimes ask people if they know which is the first point in the Bible that Bethlehem gets a mention. And that normally offers them quite a challenge. People certainly move back from the New Testament into the Old – and come up with responses like, ‘the story of David’, or ‘the Book of Ruth’. Good thinking. But actually the first mention of Bethlehem in our Bibles (as they are now set out) occurs much earlier still.

With mega cities "mushrooming" all over the world, one must wonder how they can be supplied with enough, and healthy, food. Ideas range from an increased rural production to urban gardening and technically complex solutions like vertical indoor gardens. As Christians, we are called to side with people who live in poverty and who are marginalized. For me and my colleagues at Bread for the World, it is important to ask: What does all this mean for the rural population and for small scale farmers?

With the slogan "global.gerecht.gestalten" (shaping globalization fairly), a Church Alliance for the G20 Summit has been established in order to actively partake in the preparation of the G20 summit. We are committed to participate in peaceful activities before and during the summit in Northern Germany.

Never has humanity lived in a more connected, yet disconnected time! Connected by the endless notifications on our smartphones – alerting us to all the latest news and tidings in our social media, yet not connected deeply enough to respond substantially to people's suffering. Among the many tragedies are the human-made famines in South Sudan, Somalia, North-Eastern Nigeria and in Yemen.

Sometime between 486 and 465 BCE, the Bible tells us, a disagreement arose between a husband and wife on the way the wife should be presented at a banquet. The disagreement resulted in the wife losing her title of queen. The wife’s name was Queen Vashti, and her husband was King Ahasuerus of Persia. King Ahasuerus decided to find another wife. Esther, a disguised Israelite teenager, was chosen as the new queen.

A little girl, barely four years old, crawls underneath a barbed-wire fence at the Serbian-Hungarian border. Her face is straight as she glances ahead, irradiated by sunbeams; her fingers are cramped into the muddy soil. Hundreds of thousands refugees are on the move as I write these lines. A reality, which for so many in Europe these past years had remained remote, suddenly becomes close and subject of fierce controversies.

When God created men and all the creatures of the earth, he placed Adam in the Garden of Eden. God planted a garden eastward in Eden and he made it to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food (Genesis 2:8-9). This may be considered as the foundation on which all other paradigms on food justice can be based. After creating Adam and Eve God made provision for their feeding and sustenance.

The environmental crisis and climate change are part of a more general economic, socio-political and spiritual crisis. The topic of work plays a central role in this connection. "The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it,” declares the psalmist (Psalm 24:1). And again "You cause the grass to grow for the cattle, and plants for people to use; to bring forth food from the earth, and wine to gladden the human heart, oil to make the face shine, and bread to strengthen the human heart (...). People go out to their work and to their labour until the evening” (Psalm 104:14f. 23).

Christians in Argentina, Brazil, Australia and many other places in the southern hemisphere have been engaged in responding to the joint call by the World Council of Churches and the Roman Catholic Church to pray for Christian unity this week.
Lately I have been witnessing, mainly through social media, how groups from this part of the world are gathering to celebrate the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (WPCU). But I also see how production and use of these liturgical resources and prayers bring to light the importance of these most basic elements in our common search for Christian unity.