12/23/2024
A Christmas Message from Bishop Logue.
“In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.” The Gospel of Luke tells us of the message an angel of the Lord brought to shepherds in fields outside Bethlehem, “I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.”
The shepherds’ world is transformed in a moment as they become witnesses to the event that changed human history. They found the one who the universe could not contain wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. If God would enter into creation, not in power, but in the weakness of a baby, born not in a palace, but in a cave used as a stable, the way of the world was being turned upside down. They knew this in their bones as, if angels were bringing the Good News to common people like them, meant God’s view of creation is very different from how humans see it.
This Advent, I have been journeying toward the manger reflecting on how our worldviews shape everything we see and know, yet this all encompassing way of perceiving that frames our understanding of the world and our place in it can change quite quickly.
For Julian of Norwich, this happened on the night of May 8, 1373. The 30-year Julian was on her deathbed, having already received last rites when she experienced visions in which God’s love for humanity was made clear to her through the person of Jesus. She wrote, “he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.”
Julian saw the smallness of all creation when compared to infinite space and eternal time from the view of the Holy Trinity that is both in and through all creation and beyond, transcending the created cosmos. Julian of Norwich’s vision offered a compelling image. More than half a millennium later, humankind would experience a change in our literal worldview when we travelled into space and what we saw when we looked back to home was so similar to the hazelnut-sized sphere in the hand of a medieval mystic.
The first humans to leave earth’s atmosphere hurtled around the moon ten times in a tiny metal capsule before returning safely to solid earth. During the historic flight, the three-person crew of Apollo 8 spoke to more than a billion people on earth in a live broadcast on Christmas Eve 1968. Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell said, “The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth.”
During their flight, Astronaut Bill Anders joined Jim Lovell in being inspired by what he saw. The third person on the crew, Commander Frank Boorman, was not experiencing that feeling of awe. He said of looking on the moon passing so close below them, “My own impression is that it’s a vast, lonely, forbidding type existence…It certainly would not appear to be a very inviting place to live or work.”
Everything changed for Commander Boorman in a moment. A recording from the Apollo 8 Command Module captures the event that flooded him with awe. On their fourth orbit as he caught sight of this fragile earth, our island home, from a very different viewpoint as the planet looked like it rose over the austere landscape of the moon. He said, “Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty?!”
Anders found the camera loaded with color film and quickly captured the view in a photo called Earthrise. Everything any human had ever known could be seen in what looked to all like a blue marble hovering over the bleak lunar landscape and otherwise alone the vast emptiness of space. That startlingly new perspective, seeing earth from space, made all of human existence appear smaller, more fragile, than ever before.
1968 had been a year of political unrest and social upheaval. Similarly, Julian experienced the Hundred Years’ War continuing through her whole life and the Black Death robbing Norwich of nearly half its souls in just three years. In reflecting on Jesus’ presence with her in the shadow of death Julian wrote a passage that speaks to every age,
“If there be anywhere on earth [where] a lover of God is always kept safe from falling, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in the same precious love. Between God and the soul there is no between. He did not say, You will never have a rough passage, you will never be over-strained, you will never feel uncomfortable, but he did say You will never be overcome.”
While we see the immense vastness of the universe which God transcends in the vision of the hazelnut and the photo of the earthrise, we also glimpse the immanence, the amazing nearness of God in the shepherds on the hillside and the conviction in Julian’s statement, “Between God and the soul, there is no between.”
We see in the Gospels, Jesus’ exasperation as he watched people clinging to and fighting over things that did not matter. The stuff we have or lack in this life will come and go, but you, your immortal soul, matters so much to the King of Creation that God does not stand back as a righteous judge, but enters into our fallen world to redeem us.
Long before we could take in the world in one glance from space, the Holy Spirit gave Julian a vision of a hazelnut that she understood God had made, God loves, and God keeps. As vast as our world is, nothing in it is distant from God, even the seemingly insignificant shepherds on the hillside were known and loved by God. Despite the immensity of the hosts of galaxies we have glimpsed in space, between God and the soul, there is no between. Immanuel, the God who is always with us and will never forsake us told his first followers, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
The view of earth captured rising over the brutal lunar landscape, reveals that everything you have known exists on a blue marble in the infinite eternity of spacetime, that is like a hazelnut in Julian’s hand. Yet, despite the seeming insignificance of this little thing, God made it, loves it, and keeps it, so we anchor our hope on God’s eternal faithfulness, for between God and the soul, there is no between. At Christmas, we hear each year of the coming of Immanuel, God with us, and we know in Jesus that God knows you fully, loves you wholeheartedly, and wants better for you. Accepting and living into that love, changes everything.
May the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make the light of his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.
Amen.
