Sunday, November 16, 2025: "Endurance"
The First United Presbyterian Church
“Endurance”
Rev. Amy Morgan
November 16, 2025
Psalm 98
1 Sing to GOD a new song,
for GOD has done marvelous things.
2 With their right hand and holy arm
have they won the victory.
3 GOD has made known their victory;
their righteousness they have openly shown in
the sight of the nations.
4 GOD remembers their mercy and faithfulness to
the house of Israel,
and all the ends of the earth have seen the
victory of our God.
5 Shout with joy to GOD, all you lands;
lift up your voice, rejoice, and sing.
6 Sing to GOD with the harp,
with the harp and the voice of song.
7 With trumpets and the sound of the horn
shout with joy before the Ruler, GOD.
8 Let the sea make a noise and all that is in it,
the lands and those who dwell therein.
9 Let the rivers clap their hands,
and let the hills ring out with joy before GOD,
when GOD comes to judge the earth.
10 In righteousness shall GOD judge the world
and the peoples with equity.
Luke 21:5-19
When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”
They asked him, “Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?” And he said, “Beware that you are not led astray, for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them.
“When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified, for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.” Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes and in various places famines and plagues, and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.
“But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. This will give you an opportunity to testify. So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance, for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. You will be betrayed even by parents and siblings, by relatives and friends, and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.
The first plague hit when she was a child and wiped out three-quarters of her village. When she was a young adult, the tower of the cathedral collapsed, devastating the villagers and striking fear in their hearts of what it might portend. A few short months later, the pestilence struck again, this time taking her precious children.
The priests contended that God was punishing humanity for sins corporate and individual, sins intentional and unintentional, of commission and omission. God’s wrath was responsible for the unspeakable suffering that defined the lives of the people of 14th-century Norwich, England. The end was near.
But that is not what Julian believed.
Not one stone was left upon another. Famines and plagues swept through her home. Some even pointed to signs in the heavens. And Julian believed, “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”
This was not simple optimism. In fact, when Julian received this message from God during a near-fatal illness, she struggled to comprehend it. In the face of all the human suffering she had witnessed and endured, it seemed that God could have, should have, done something about it from the beginning, not allowed sin and suffering to infect the world in the first place. With so much evil, terror, and pain in the world, how could anything be well, much less all manner of things?
But her revelations from God continued for days. And as she listened to God, she discerned that humans experience grief and sorrow because of evils deeds and the terrible evils people suffer. But human minds cannot comprehend God’s wisdom, might, and goodness, which transcends and transforms evil and suffering through love and grace. God assured Julian, “’You shall see for yourself that all manner of things shall be well’, as if [God] said, ‘Pay attention to this now, faithfully and confidently, and at the end of time you will truly see it in the fullness of joy.’”
In other words, “All shall be well” does not mean that there will be no more toppling temples, misleading religious leaders, wars and insurrections, earthquakes and famines and plagues and portents and signs from heaven. It doesn’t mean we won’t experience personal illness and grief, persecution and oppression. It doesn’t mean all will be healthy, wealthy, and happy.
For Julian, “All shall be well,” spoken in the very depths of her physical and emotional suffering, at a time when she wished she could just succumb to illness and be with her loved ones on the other side of the veil, at a time when she had no hope for her or her society’s future, “All shall be well” meant that God’s love brings a wholeness, a goodness even, to all of life that enables us to endure, to gain our souls, to see God’s love in action in any circumstance.
This was Julian’s testimony, the words and wisdom given to her by God, in her time of trial.
The Christians reading Luke’s Gospel in the first century had experienced their own trials and had plenty to fear. The Gospel of Luke was probably written a short while after the great Temple in Jerusalem had been reduced to rubble and carted off in pieces to be paraded around the Roman Empire, making Jesus’s prediction sound pretty accurate. Emperor Nero’s persecution of Christians in Rome had resulted in thousands of deaths, again affirming Jesus’s foretelling of his followers’ oppression.
Jesus talks about these coming calamities, but his message is not about the wrath of God and wages of sin. His message is about hope, about testimony, about the good news of the gospel. In the midst of describing all these awful and terrifying things, all these things that do actually happen to his followers, Jesus essentially says, “all will be well.” Not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls. And, this will give you an opportunity to testify.
For Jesus, and for Julian, enduring hardship and suffering – whether from persecution, the evils of humanity, natural disasters, or tragic accidents – presents an opportunity. An opportunity to see God at work in the world, and an opportunity to tell others what you see.
Now, let me be clear here: this does not mean that God causes suffering so that we can see God at work and testify. It does not mean that we should welcome or desire suffering. And it absolutely does not mean that we should not grieve suffering or work to relieve it. Suffering is not God’s will for creation. And we are called to be co-workers with God to usher in the new creation where sin and evil have vanished, where mourning, crying, and pain have ceased.
What Jesus is saying is that when terrible things happen – and terrible things will happen – we can choose how we will respond. We can run after those claiming the end is near, listen to false prophets telling us who to blame, what great sin has caused this suffering. We can spend our lives huddling in terror, sleepless, constantly on guard, adding misery to the suffering that is already going on.
Or, we can trust that God is God.
And that’s a tough one. Because if we allow God to be God, that means we don’t get to pretend that we are God. We don’t get to pretend that we know what is best for the world, that we know how to avoid sin and end suffering, that we know how to make things right. We don’t get to pretend we can control outcomes that are not actually ours to control. We don’t get to understand why everything happens and logically explain and predict every cause and effect.
When Julian of Norwich was deathly ill, when she was depressed and grieving, she thought she had it all figured out. She thought she knew what God should have done to avoid all this suffering. And God said to her what Jesus said to his disciples: all shall be well.
If we can stop pretending that we are God, if we can trust God to be God, then we might glimpse, with our feeble human understanding, where God’s goodness is at work, even in the most horrible of circumstances. Then we might see where life is slowly emerging in the midst of death, where love is quietly conquering evil, where grace is gaining over shame, where a new creation is growing out of the rubble and wreckage of the old one.
Our world seems to be defined by fear. There are plenty of people telling us the end is near. The end of democracy. The end of global cooperation. The end of human decency. The end of humanity. The end of the planet. There are wars and insurrections, nation rising up against nation, natural disasters and famine and disease. There are even “portents and great signs from heaven,” if you want to interpret the recent displays of the Northern Lights in that way.
There are terrible things happening. And we are not God. We don’t get to decide which way the world spins on any given day and who will suffer and who will thrive. But we do get to decide how we will respond. We can add to our suffering with rage and resentment, shame and blame. We can add to our suffering with constant anxiety and suspicion.
Or, we can trust. We can trust God to be God. We can trust that, one way or another, in ways we can’t foresee or even possibly comprehend, “all will be well.”
This is not a call to apathy or relativism. This is not, “everything’s going to work out in the end, so we’re fine, everything’s fine.” Jesus’s affirmation that, “not a hair from your head will perish,” is also a call to action. A call to endurance. A call to testify.
And that’s what Julian did, in the form that was available to her as a woman in the Middle Ages. She dedicated her life to prayer, spiritual guidance and counseling, and testimony. Her anchorage was occupied and active for a century after her death. She wrote down her revelations, and compiled them, along with her many years of prayerful reflection on them, into a book, the first book ever written by a woman in the English language. And that book, that testimony, was shared all over the world.
There is a lot of talk these days about what makes a “real” Christian. There’s debate and argument and mutual condemnation aplenty. The Bible is a long book, and there are a lot of things it tells humans to do and a lot of things it tells us not to do. And I think we get the idea that if everybody just did the right things and didn’t do the wrong things, all would be well. So we yell from pulpits and podiums, news desks and social media posts, rallies and street protests, trying to convince one another to be “real” Christians and keep the world from coming to an end.
But what if being a “real” Christian simply meant letting God be God? Julian wrote that “faith is nothing else but a right understanding and trust of our being, that we are in God and God, whom we do not see, is in us.” In Amy Frykholm’s book on Julian of Norwich, she writes, “Faith, in other words, might be nothing else than letting God’s great work be done…in us.”
I’d like to close with a piece from a poem by Ann Lewin, inspired by Julian of Norwich. She writes:
The courage that says
all shall be well
doesn’t mean feeling no fear,
but facing it, trusting
God will not let go.
All shall be well
doesn’t deny present experience
but roots it deep
in the faithfulness of God,
whose will and gift is life.
To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.
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