Freiburg (dpa / lsw) – The Catholic Archbishop Stephan Burger has called on people not to lose heart despite the current crises. According to the speech manuscript, Burger said in his sermon on Sunday on the occasion of Christmas Day that there is a central message of hope in the Christmas story. The “mystery of innocent love that only a newborn human child gives us” is the moment in which one can experience for oneself what it means to be a child of God, he said on the occasion of Christmas Day.
Burger went on to say that this insight offers the chance to reshape life. Carried in this love, it becomes possible to leave mistrust and suspicion behind, to put disturbing and hurtful experiences on the back burner. “It becomes possible to grant forgiveness to those who have owed us. It becomes possible to ask forgiveness from others.”
The Evangelical Bishop of Württemberg, Ernst-Wilhelm Gohl, called on the powerful of this world to reconsider their role. According to the previously distributed speech manuscript in the Stuttgart collegiate church, Gohl said: “Because then, as now, the powerful appear to us as those who own tanks or have assets of hundreds of billions of dollars – or both.” Colossians does not call for overthrow. He simply classifies the powerful one floor below. “Why? Because even the rulers who apparently carry out their acts of violence unhindered will die one day. And the same applies to the billionaires as applies to all of us: The top shirt has no pockets.”
