"Pursue peace with everyone, and holiness — without it no one will see the Lord." + Hebrews 12:14
Here are some recent highlights:
When we handed these books out to our congregation, this is part of the note we included inside each one:
This might seem at first
to be a peculiar Advent devotional.
But saints often are peculiar people
who stand out in a particular time and place.
In fact, the times when saints shine
the most are times of darkness.
They give glimpses of Jesus’ Light,
which darkness cannot overcome.
Advent begins in the dark.
And we, as part of Jesus’ Church,
are called to live as Advent people
who anticipate Jesus’ coming
into our darkness today to overcome it.
Ultimately, our hope rests in the God of Advent
who drew near to us in Jesus’ first coming
and will come again
to take away the darkness forever
and be our eternal Light. That hope is what saints have embodied
as our sisters and brothers across time,
ethnicities, Christian traditions,
nationalities, and more.
As we step into this next year,
our prayer is that we will shine
all the more with the holy light
of Christ in us and through us.
And we pray that we
“being rooted and firmly established in love,
may be able to comprehend with all the saints
what is the length and width,
height and depth of God’s love.”
After all, “the Father has enabled us
to share in the saints’ inheritance in the light.
He has rescued us from the domain of darkness and
transferred us into the Kingdom
of the Son He loves.”
This post features an excerpt from Our Church Speaks so that you might also walk some of this journey with us with reflection, prayer, and anticipation for how the Light of the world might shine in your life during this season.
Julian of Norwich Theologian
When the world was crumbling and death was all around, a faithful English woman named Julian reminded Jesus' Church of the simple truth that God was loving and good and that "All shall be well." She lived in Norwich, England, during some of the darkest days of European history. In her lifetime, the deadliest pandemic in history, the Black Death, killed over 60 percent of the European population, somewhere between 75 million and 200 million people throughout Eurasia and Africa. In Julian's town of Norwich, half the city was killed by the plague, which persisted for most of Julian's life.
Julian fell ill at age thirty and experienced a series of visions so profound that she devoted the remainder of her life to contemplating them. She recorded these visions and contemplations in a book titled Revelations of Divine Love.
Understandably, during a period of so much death and societal collapse, much of the Church was consumed with fear and dread, assuming that the plague was the result of God's wrath and a sign of imminent end of the world. This makes Julian's writings all the more remarkable for her tender depictions of God and her confidence in His love care.
"By His might and will, He saves us and keeps us for love's sake," Julian wrote in her Revelations. "We will not be overcome by our enemy."
In this time of terror and global chaos, the Lord moved Julian to observe a simple, small hazelnut as a microcosm of all of creation. "And He showed me ..., a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, on the palm of my hand, round like a ball." Julian wrote. "I looked at it thoughtfully and wondered, 'What is this?' And the answer came, 'It is all that is made.' I marveled that it continued to exist ... it was so small. And again my mind supplied the answer, 'It exists, both now and forever, because God loves it.' In short, everything owes its existence to the love of God ... God made it ... God loves it ... God sustains it."
Julian's writings
of comfort and confidence
in her loving God
are the earliest known
English-language writings
by a female author.
She lived in a small room on the side of the Norwich cathedral, keeping only a cat for company. She devoted her life to prayer and meditation and discipled those who sought her counsel, wisdom, and strength.
Scripture
"Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love." + 1 John 4:8
Meditation: Superabundance
God creates because He loves. He loves creating and He loves that which He has created. As priest / chef Robert Farrar Capon wrote,
That, you know, is why the world exists at all. It remains outside the cosmic garbage can of nothingness, not because it is such a solemn necessity that nobody can get rid of it, but because it is the orange peel hung on God's chandelier, the wishbone in His kitchen closet. He likes it; therefore, it stays.
This kind of loving pleasure
we might call superabundance —
an excess of love that overflows all containers. Chris Watkins explains,
Neither we nor the universe are necessary. We may be important, precious, glorious even, but preciously and gloriously unnecessary ... In a theological register we might refer to it as grace, and we encounter this grace not first in redemption but in creation. It is through grace that the Christian is born again, but it is also through grace that the universe is born in the first place.
This is not only the best way to understand the motives of God in bringing all of existence into being, but also the best way to understand the incarnation, life, passion, death, resurrection, ascension, and reign of Jesus. This is also the best way to understand the promises for Jesus' Church at the end of the book of Revelation. The same superabundance of love that created the world ex nihilo also brought about the redemption of the world and will bring the world to its consummation.
For this reason,
Julian of Norwich was quite correct
when she observed, All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."
If perceiving God's love for the world transformed Julian's experience of the monstrous tragedy of the Black Death, how might your perception of God's love transform your experience of your life right now?
Prayer
O God, of Your goodness, give me Yourself, for You are enough for me. I can ask for nothing less that is completely to Your honor, and if I do ask anything less, I shall always be in want. Only in You I have all. Amen.
pgs. 91-93
Additional Advent Resources:
Many blessings of peace and presence,
Rev. Mike “Sully” Sullivan
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