Video for April 16th, 2026
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video.
Amid the geopolitical reality of the moment, I find it difficult to know where to start with this week’s video. Political actions and statements cause us a growing sense of exasperation. Did members of the American administration really say that? Some of the things circulating online beggar belief. Surely the church should say something! People say that to me all the time. I understand why. When you feel powerless in the face of international events or seismic shifts in public morality – as happened over the recent abortion debate in the House of Lords, perhaps a Bishop saying something might shift the needle a bit. To be fair, we bishops tend to say quite a lot about all sorts of things. Often, they are not reported. It isn’t fair to say, as my correspondents frequently do, that the church/ bishops aren’t commenting on current events.
However, I am wary about public statements. So many of the issues we face are much more complicated than can be dealt with in a few hundred words. Strident moralism frequently downplays the horrible choices people have to make or feels like victim blaming. Trite, simplistic answers to complex problems are best left to social media and then ignored. My concern is that without great care one just sounds like a bad politician. A critique levelled at Bishops in the House of Lords is that we can sound like left leaning generalists: critical but without any solutions. I would hope that episcopal public discourse goes beyond the, ‘the world isn’t very nice, and if we were just nicer to each other the world would be much nicer’! In case Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu or Mr Trump are listening, it is worth calling them to be more statesmanlike, not to be driven by revenge, nationalistic myths or the myth of redemptive violence, and to stop killing people, but I doubt they are (listening that is) – unless you’re the Pope! People would expect Christian leaders to say things like that. My primary concern, if I say anything in public, and I recognise I fail in this all the time, is that there is always an audit trail to Jesus.
When we look at the state of the world today, we are largely observing the symptoms of a problem, not the fundamental problem itself. The world is burning up because taken as a whole, human beings are greedy and insecure. We take more than we need to satisfy distorted views of what will make us happy. Nations acquire weapons because we are afraid of each other. Ever since the fall we have been cut off from the true source of life and we thus manufacture our own systems of security, emotional, physical and spiritual without reference to God. One of the factors that lies behind a renewed interest in spiritual things by younger people is that many have woken up from the secular dream of expressive individualism and found it has made them very sick indeed, with insecurity, mental illness and hopelessness off the charts. Suicide is the biggest cause of death amongst young men. If you were to go to the Doctors with worrying symptoms, you would hope they would send you for various tests to get to the root of the problem and then treat that. Paracetamol might have some effect on the headache but not on the brain tumour that caused it.
However desperate things become we can always speak hope into current events. This is far more profound than the vague hope that things will one day get better and get back to normal. Christian hope transcends circumstances. You can hold on to it in the most desperate circumstances because of what the resurrection reveals to us. In Jesus’ death and resurrection, we have definitive evidence that death has been defeated and that evil will not have the last word. Taken together, the combination of cross and resurrection show us a picture of divine action that even the most horrific circumstances can be turned to good. Paul expressed his lived experience of this reality in 2 Corinthians 6: 8. His ministry was marked by, “glory and dishonour, bad report and good report; genuine, yet regarded as imposters; known and yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten and not yet killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything”.
His hope in the ultimate triumph of God revealed in the resurrection gave him strength to endure, hope to pray, and confidence that prayers would be answered; that slowly the kingdom was coming, that God’s will was being done on earth as it was in heaven.
So, I might speak about complex, nuanced sin management that is modern geopolitics, but I’d rather point people to the source of life, hope and transformation: the resurrected Jesus. In the depths of the bad news it’s a genuine ray of light.
+Richard