As part of Methodism’s Bible Month, today we start exploring the Letter to the Philippians. The letter was essentially a thankyou letter that Paul and Timothy wrote for a financial gift that had been sent by the community that they had founded in the city on Paul’s second missionary journey. Clearly it was written centuries before it can have occurred to anyone that human activity might one day influence global weather patterns, but I still found it speaking powerfully to the situation we find ourselves in today.

That situation is bleak to say the least. We’ve already had the first year when the global average temperature has exceeded 1.5 degrees above its pre-industrial baseline and a recent study suggests that the warming rate is increasing rather than reducing.  The United Nations estimates that current national action plans will decrease greenhouse gas emissions by less than a quarter of what is required to keep long-term warming below 1.5 degrees. The latest report from Climate Action Tracker laments how little progress has been made in the last four years and predicts that current policies will lead to warming of 2.6 degrees by the end of the century.

These levels of warming are already leading to devastating effects on food and health systems. At present the effects are most serious amongst the world’s poorest communities and we in the west are relatively unaffected. As temperatures rise though, all of us will begin to suffer the direct effects of climate change.  The indirect effects are, perhaps, even more concerning as the worsening situation will force mass migration and lead to global political, economic and military instability which will have dire consequences for all of us.

Until recently, many Christians (and others) have been struggling with the question of what we can do to prevent (or even limit) dangerous global warming. We now have to face up to another, “How can we live meaningfully on a planet on which dangerous global warming is already occurring?” It is a particularly difficult question for ordinary people like us who already feel quite powerless to influence how the world is going and are likely to find ourselves even more susceptible to forces beyond our control in the coming years.

So how can reading a two-thousand-year-old letter help?

First, we have to try and re-read the letter without the benefit of hindsight. We know that Paul’s missionary journeys were ultimately successful in that the faith communities that he founded thrived and multiplied and that within three hundred years Christianity had become the official religion of the entire Roman Empire. What we sometimes forget is that the people who participated in this story did not, could not, know how the story was going to end. There were times during that story when those participants encountered situations during which the future looked bleak. When the most likely outcome was the failure of all that they had been working for.

The letter to the Philippians was written from prison. We aren’t told which prison, but there seems no particular reason to doubt the traditions that assume it was a prison in Rome. Earlier in his life Paul had been imprisoned numerous times on relatively trivial charges and had merely had to wait for release. This was different. In Rome he was imprisoned on more serious charges. He writes of execution as a possible outcome. He is not afraid of death, far from it, but he lives under the fear that his death will negate the work he has done in building up communities of Christians across the Eastern Mediterranean. In contemplating the possible failure of all that he had assumed was important in life, in feeling impotent in the face of forces way beyond his control which held sway over his life, he was facing a situation that has many parallels to that which we face today.

So how did he stay so positive.? The letter to the Philippians is one of the most positive books in the Bible. Despite being in prison facing the possibility of execution, despite being at the mercy of forces beyond his control, despite fearing that his life’s work had been in vain, he writes with such joy and thankfulness. To put it more colloquially, “What was he on?” and “Can we have some?”

Paul is motivated by a passion to share God’s love in whatever situation he found himself. When in prison, when the only people he has contact with are his warders, he relishes sharing God’s love with those warders. He boasts that the whole palace now knows that he, Paul, is in prison for Christ’s sake and is continuing to proclaim his message. He’s not, apparently, concerned with the bigger picture, with what is happening in the wider world, he’s focussed on what he is capable of doing in the situation in which he finds himself there and then. No one can prevent him from sharing God’s love and growing in Christ himself. It is this that sustains his joy and drives his thankfulness.

It’s an approach we can learn from. It is an approach we can adopt. We should not be blind to what is going on in the wider world, but our focus should be on what we can achieve in the more local context in which we find ourselves at any given time. Whatever is happening in the outside world there will always be opportunities within our own lives to spread God’s love and to allow our actions to speak to others of the living God who gives our lives purpose and joy. However, bad life might get in the future, , however impotent we might feel, there will always be opportunities for us to share God’s love with others and to lead lives that bring us closer to Christ. Our primary challenge, as Christians living in this ever more challenging world, is to identify what it is that we can do to share God’s love with the people we are closest to, and to go and share that love with them.

No-one can take that possibility away from us and for this we give joyful thanks.