Fifth Sunday of Easter

‘When you remove the risk, you remove the challenge.
When you remove the challenge, you wither on the vine.’
Alex Low

The gospel image takes us back to Isaiah 5:1-7 where God looks for good fruit (justice love and peace) but finds only wild grapes. In looking for justice, right relationship, God heard only the cries of people being exploited. For one to see and to respond calls for a ‘pruning’ that awakens us to reach out to the other and advocate on their behalf. Advocacy is difficult and may not seem successful or popular. This is not possible without the ‘pruning’ that wakes us up and calls us out of our comfort zones, that challenges our political and religious beliefs and even the way we read the scriptures or relate to others with respect or paternalism, control and domination.  

Fourth Sunday in Easter

Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, was a very harsh critic of her country because of its involvement with violence, oppression and injustice throughout the world. Out of love and loyalty, she was also very critical of the Church that often accommodated and compromised with worldly power which maintained and perpetuated injustice and oppression. Once she wrote, ‘I never expected much of the bishops. In all history, popes and bishops and abbots seem to have been blind and power-loving and greedy. I never expected leadership from them. It is the saints that keep appearing all through history who keep things going. What I do expect is the bread of life and down through the ages there is that continuity.’

On 15 April 2021, a week ahead of the US Biden Climate Summit, a number of Australian and Pacific organisations published an advertisement in the Australian Financial Review asking Australian PM Scott Morrison to #StepUp4thePacific by ensuring that our emissions plummet to well below half of their current levels this decade. 

Click here to read our advertisement as published in the Australian Financial Review on 15 April 2021.

Will you help amplify the impact of this ad by emailing Scott Morrison and asking him to take stronger climate action?

Use our template Email to PM to email the Hon. Scott Morrison MP and support our Pacific neighbours. You can have an even greater impact by writing to him in your own words and using #StepUp4ThePacific to post the advertisement and/or the link to this page on your social media pages.

The Pacific is running out of time and we need your help. Thank you for your support.