Fierce Love

God holds this world
with fierce love.
Keeping his promise,
he sends Jesus into the world,
pours out the Holy Spirit,
and announces the good news:
sinners who repent and believe in Jesus
live anew as members of the family of God –
the firstfruits of a new creation.

-        Our World Belongs to God: A Contemporary Testimony, paragraph 5

I’ve had this part of Our World Belongs to God on my mind for a few weeks now, especially the first sentence: ‘God holds this world with fierce love.’ I think it came to mind when I was preaching from Ezekiel 34 and reading about shepherds, and how they are both tender and fierce.

A few weeks ago Peter came home from school with this picture.

He and his class were learning about Jesus’ baptism, and this is how he illustrated it, depicting Father, Son and Spirit. It’s hanging on our refrigerator and every time I see it, I smile. When I asked Peter about sharing it, he nodded yes and then said “It’s like the song Mom - you know - He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands!” Look at how God is holding the whole world, close to God’s heart.

And look at the joy on God’s face! God holds this world with fierce love and God delights in us – somehow, mysteriously, even as the pandemic reveals and magnifies our worst selves and our deepest divisions. We are held in love, and we make God smile. As Julian of Norwich, a Christian mystic, wrote: “God loved us before he made us; and his love has never diminished and never shall.” God is smitten with us, and God’s love for us does not change, no matter what’s happened to us, no matter what we’ve done. God holds us in fierce and joyful love.

The last part of the paragraph from Our World Belongs to God got me thinking this week – the part about being ‘the first fruits of a new creation.’ I tend to think of the new creation as something we are still waiting and longing for, not something we’re a part of. But we are, it’s beginning and already begun in us.

One of the lectionary readings for next Sunday is from Isaiah 61, with the promise: ‘They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor.’ Not only does God hold us in love and delight in us, God reveals God’s splendor in us. We are the first fruits of the new creation. Acorns that will be transformed into oaks of righteousness. The new thing that God is doing in the world, the new life that the Spirit brings, the restoration of all things, is beginning in us. And the place of transformation is of course, exactly where we are – at home, at work, in all of the details of our day to day lives and interactions with others. In our acts of love and faithfulness, in our daily repentance and trust in God, the new creation begins.