Many of you will be familiar with Julian of Norwich. In May 1373 she received a series of sixteen visions which she recorded in her book, “Revelations of Divine Love.” It is the first known book written by a woman in English. There are two editions, the short one she wrote very soon after her visions, and a longer version she wrote later with her reflections about what she saw.

Her understanding from all her visions is that God is totally and completely love. She writes:
 “Then [God] showed me a small thing, the size of a hazelnut, nestled in the palm of my hand. It was round as a ball. I looked at it with the eyes of my understanding and thought, What can this be? And the answer came to me: It is all that is created. I was amazed that it could continue to exist. It seemed to me to be so little that it was on the verge of dissolving into nothingness. And then these words entered my understanding: It lasts, and will last forever, because God loves it. Everything that is has its being through the love of God.”[1]

It lasts, and will last forever, because God loves it. Everything that is has its being through the love of God.

Today’s gospel reading is about the lengths we will go for something that is precious to us; the shepherd who searches for one lost sheep and the woman who searches for her missing coin and gets her friends together to celebrate when she finds it. Jesus tells these stories to show the Pharisees that God will go to great lengths for one individual sinner and rejoices to be reunited with them.

These parables of God’s love reminded me of Julian’s vision of the hazelnut because they both have the same sense of preciousness. The missing sheep is precious, the missing coin is precious, you and I are precious, and Creation is precious.

The universe is coming into being because of the love of God. Julian said, “It lasts, and will last forever, because God loves it. Everything that is has its being through the love of God.”  We might expand on that a little to say “Everything that is has its being through the essential nature of God.” Because the essential nature of God is Love and Creativity. God cannot NOT love and God cannot NOT create. That is simply who God is.

Creation lasts, and will last forever, because God loves it. Everything that is has its being through the love of God.

Julian lived at a time of plague and famine and was sought after as a counselor for those in distress[2], yet her writings are just what their title says, “Revelations of Divine Love.” She assures us that everything is alright when looked at through the eyes of God’s love. You are probably familiar with her most famous saying, ‘all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’

Julian’s visions made her an optimist. The same cannot be said for Jeremiah who gave us our first reading today. We will be hearing from him in the next two weeks as well. Jeremiah’s prophetic ministry covered a tumultuous forty years at the end of the 7th and beginning of the 6th centuries before Christ. He was not a popular prophet as he proclaimed that the nation of Judah would suffer famine, foreign conquest, plunder, and captivity in a land of strangers. He was not popular, but he was right.

Reading the short selection from Jeremiah this morning made me think of Gaza. ‘I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger.’  (Jer 4:26) When I see pictures of the destruction and the suffering of the people of Gaza, and the West Bank, it makes me weep. And the destruction of the environment. As Jeremiah said,” I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light…I looked, and lo… all the birds of the air had fled.”

So here we have a paradox.

Julian tells us that ‘Creation lasts, and will last forever, because God loves it. Everything that is has its being through the love of God.’ Jeremiah tells us, ‘the earth shall mourn, and the heavens above grow black’ because of people’s sin and the Lord’s fierce anger.

How are we to reconcile these two very different visions of God?

Some people say that the God of the Old Testament is different from the God of the New Testament.

Since Jesus was an educated Jew and the only Scriptures he had were what we now call the Old Testament, I don’t think we can justify just writing off the God of the Hebrew Scriptures. I do think that Jesus taught us to see God very differently. Perhaps Jeremiah was right in seeing the disaster that was headed their way but not so right in declaring that it was due to God’s anger.

Maybe God wasn’t angry but it was the natural outcome of the political situation of the day and the choices that the people made. Just as in Julian’s time famine and plague were the realities of drought and the failure of public health practices due to ignorance.

Maybe God doesn’t want suffering, but suffering happens. And much avoidable suffering happens because of human behavior. We have free will. Not total free will. Our free will is constrained by the circumstances in which we find ourselves. And suffering can happen because of the decisions we make, and suffering can be alleviated by the decisions we make. Decisions we make as individuals, decisions we make as groups, decisions we make as nations. Suffering can be made or alleviated by individual decisions and by decisions made at State and federal levels.

The suffering in Gaza comes as a result of decisions that humans have made over the centuries, some good, some not-so-good and some downright evil. God is present in the suffering and God is working every moment to help humanity make better decisions and to bring the best possible outcome out of every situation. But God’s love allows us to go on using our free will even when we make a mess of it, even when we sin, even when we cause suffering.

God is still creating this ever-expanding universe. And so are we. But God is always creating it in love. Our motives are rarely so pure.

Yet it is our calling, people of God. We are called to expand the reign of God. We are called not just to bask in the amazing love of God shown to us by the shepherd who came and found us, but to live that love in every moment, share that love every which way we can.

Many of Julian’s visions were rather gory images of the crucified Jesus with a lot of blood. Jesus’ death was not pretty, but in that amazing event, God brought together immense love and immense suffering. This is the central mystery of our faith; that God’s love and human suffering were joined together on the cross and then God brought resurrection life out of the midst of it.

None of us understand it. We have glimpses. Julian’s visions were glimpses. Glimpses which led her to say:

God is all that is good. God has created all that is made. God loves all that he has created. And so anyone who, in loving God, loves all his fellow creatures loves all that is. All those who are on the spiritual path contain the whole of creation, and the Creator. That is because God is inside us, and inside God is everything. And so whoever loves God loves all that is.

the Rev. Dr. Caroline Hall
 


[1] Translation by Mirabai Starr, ‘Julain of Norwich; the Showings’

[2] https://julianofnorwich.org/pages/who-is-julian-of-norwich

For most of my life I have been a vegetarian. Today I also eat fish because my body needs extra protein without many carbs. My mother was vegetarian all her life but brought us kids up to be meat eaters. My own journey with vegetables began in the early 70s when I realized that meat is an inefficient way of getting protein. It takes about seven pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef[1]  and about 35% of the world’s grain harvest is used to raise livestock. That could be used to feed humans.

So back in the early 70s I discovered that if those of us in affluent countries ate 10% less meat and the grain saved was redistributed there would be no starvation. That was a big motivator for me. I hate being hungry, and I don’t want anyone else, human or non-human to ever experience hunger. I read the books that were trending at the time – Small is Beautiful, Diet for a Small Planet, and later Voluntary Simplicity – I am sure that quite a few of you read those same books. And so I became a committed vegetarian. I also started shopping in thrift stores – that was trendy too.

But what I didn’t know back then was that other aspects of the way I lived were having just as dire an effect on the planet as my food. I had no idea that the gas I used to drive my little car was affecting the environment. I had no idea that fresh water was scarce. I did not know that fossil fuels and big agriculture were filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and methane and that they would make the planet heat up and lead to massive fires, rising sea levels and bigger life-threatening storms.

Today I have a much more complete understanding of the way my lifestyle impacts other people and other beings. And I don’t like it. It is inconvenient, and it is uncomfortable. I don’t want to read the articles about climate change. I don’t want to continue to attempt to reduce waste, cut my carbon footprint, eat locally and live simply so others may simply live.

But that’s what Jesus taught. Love your neighbor as yourself.

All the things I want for myself, a safe and peaceful society, a comfortable home, clean water, clean air, plenty of delicious food and yes, flush toilets, all of those things Jesus tells me to want for my neighbor too. And not just the neighbor I can see but the one in Haiti or Sudan or Gaza.

And the more of the world’s resources that I use, the less there is for them.

Since the early 70s when I was learning about diet and the planet, the amount of the world’s resources that people use each day has more than tripled.[2] We are using more than there is to use. And according to the United Nations, those of us who are lucky enough to live in affluent countries are using ten times as many of the earth’s resources than those who live in low-income places.

In today’s gospel, Jesus talks about the cost of discipleship. He is being followed by large crowds, but he knows that many of the people following him are there for the novelty of it. They have been caught up in the excitement of the crowd. And so he discourages them by pointing out just how difficult it is to truly be his disciple. The path of discipleship is not one for most people because it calls for sacrifice, it calls us to love God and our neighbors even when it’s not convenient or fashionable.

Becoming a disciple of Jesus means letting go of the things that get in the way of a simple, deep walk with God. For the people of the time that meant leaving their families with their traditional ways and joining this new movement, this new tribe, the Jesus Movement. Today joining the Jesus Movement means finding a new depth of love as we seek to love as God loves, unconditionally and uncompromisingly.

Back in 1971, astronaut Edgar Mitchell looked out the window of Apollo 14, as he was returning from the moon. He looked out of the window at the space, stars, and planet from which he had come and suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, and harmonious. He writes, “I also realized that the Earth is a gem in the cosmos, a place to revere and care for. We are here not by accident, but on a journey of awakening that is as magnificent as the universe that holds us. We have a profound responsibility to care for the Earth, which is our craft on a voyage of both outer and inner discovery.”

We have a profound responsibility to care for the Earth. The Earth is our neighbor. Care for God’s creation is not an optional extra but a deeply important part of our calling as the people of God.

And caring for the earth as well as caring for our human and non-human neighbors means counting the cost of our own lifestyle. What is the cost of driving my car – not just in gas and insurance, but the cost to the planet? What is the true cost of the inexpensive clothes we buy? What is the true cost of the food I eat and the food I throw away? And what about the packaging – the plastic and the styrofoam that cannot be recycled? And here’s a tough one for me – what about the true cost of coffee?

Coffee is one of the causes of deforestation as more and more land is cleared for coffee production. And the coffee industry is plagued by human rights abuses and water pollution. That’s all before we consider the carbon footprint, oh and the paper cup I drink it in which can’t be recycled either.

Voluntary simplicity is part of the path that Jesus trod, and it is the path to which we are called.

Jesus words are hard, “none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions." We might paraphrase it as “none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your stuff."

Stuff takes time and energy to care for. I had a dear friend who was more than a little crazy. In her later years she filled her house with stuff that she bought from thrift stores or picked up by the side of the street or found in dumpsters. And she spent her days moving her stuff from one place to another, packing it in boxes and then unpacking the boxes to see what was in them. For me that’s a picture of how our stuff can consume our time and our energy, taking our focus away from loving God and our neighbor.

This month we join Christians around the world as we celebrate the Season of Creation. This season is an opportunity for us to consider deeply the effect that our lives have on the planet, to consider changing habits which use the worlds resources and to start getting rid of all the stuff which prevents us fully following Jesus the Christ.

Because, like John Lennon, the Christ invites us to imagine.

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world
 
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will live as one

the Rev. Dr. Caroline Hall
 
 
 


[1] https://www.beyondmeat.com/en-US/whats-new/is-meat-production-an-efficient-use-of-resources#

[2] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/rich-countries-use-six-times-more-resources-generate-10-times