I should be sleeping. The clock is 01.56 AM, I am in the final days of the annual Church of Norway Church Synod, and the day which has just begun is a very important day. Outside it has just begun snowing, a chaotic white dance against the black night. I should be sleeping. Still, I can’t. My mind is occupied with tomorrow’s documents being presented in the plenary, among those the document on the Church of Norway’s Sustainable Reform. The Synod decided on that issue last year, determining a 10-year reform for the Church, so that it in 1017 have achieved being a visual and serious contributor on the public arena in the climate question, a lobbyist for a committing, effective and international climate agreement (in 2009, the new Kyoto) and demonstrate a conscious attitude towards the environment in all aspects of it running. The document we have been presented with, after one of the committees have been working on it, (the Synods members comes from the diocese councils, and are divided into 6 committees each working on 1-2 cases which are all debated in plenary sessions before they get approved by voting) is a good one. Commenting on the reform project, giving some important high lights. So then what is the problem? Why can’t I just go to sleep? Because I see no change. The reform has been running for a year, the initial year which obviously won’t store the greatest changes. Still, I do believe I had a choice that something would. Hah…I meant to write “hope that something would” in that last sentence, instead it turned out in “choice” which makes my point exactly. We are facing injustice, climate change with it’s victims, destruction of habitats, extinction of species and a visibly destroying belief of what materialistic elements that makes us of value. As a church we have Jesus and the Bible to combat all of those; the strong value of justice, the communion in which we take care of each other and give to those among us what is needed to live, the care for the creation, and a telling so strong of Jesus who says we cannot serve both God and Mammon, we do not need materialistic wealth to be something because we are always and always will be loved. We all know these things, they are common knowledge, nothing new. We also have one more thing in our church, apathy. It’s found in the rest of Norway as well, among the public. There are good initiatives among the politicians, and the civil society are also getting better. But the foundations remain the same, we solve things the same way. There is a need for the shaking of our foundation, but the apathy, a response to too much stress, hinders that. So we dwindle on the surface, doing things that are indeed visible and serious and enough to tell ourselves we are doing something. And we write to politicians, and tell them to commit. And work for that. Undoubtedly a good thing. Still I can’t sleep. And I know why. It’s the log. In my eye. No wonder I can’t sleep. No old way can get it out. Just a new one, by choice. And just with the help of Jesus and the Church. Until that new day when I choose to take it out, I will not sleep.
“How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye.”Luke 6,42
