The world is a scary place sometimes but the world also is a wonderful place and these two poles—beauty and fear—exist simultaneously all the time. Around the world hurricanes and earthquakes and acts of savagery are going on twenty-four-seven. But in my backyard there seems to be a convention of cottontail bunnies hopping around in my newly refurbished lawn. They’re eating something I suppose, but it sure looks like they’re playing to me. Last night while I was cooking dinner I was watching them out the window and it was both the manifestation of all of the childhood books about bunnies I ever read and way better than anything on television. It was odd I thought, that as I finished cooking and was wiping up the counter they seemed to finish eating and hop away. That made me wonder whether they had been watching me! Maybe I was the entertainment for their dinnertime! (Unfortunately, their brown coloring against the garden colors at dusk makes it almost impossible to get a good picture of them.)
This week there is a cluster of scripture appointed that includes God’s instructions to Moses for the first Passover, a psalm of praise that moves rapidly from praising God with dance and song and timbrel and harp to rejoicing in justice—beauty and fear all in one, as it were. Paul’s letter to the Romans explains the relationship between law and love, in which we are instructed to move from reliance on law to salvation in embracing love. Matthew’s Gospel has instructions for adjudicating disagreements in the church. This passage has a curious clause that I never noticed before (or, rather, I never paid attention to before), where Jesus says those who refuse to reform should “be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” Of course, that is a dichotomy isn’t it? Because Gentiles were not part of the Jewish community of Jesus’ followers and tax collectors were the hated agents of the occupying Roman government. But, didn’t Jesus sit down to eat with tax collectors and heal Gentiles on the road? Even the reviled, even those who persecute us, even those who refuse to repent, must be embraced in our love, it seems to say. Those are tough instructions in any generation.
There is a lot of detail in scripture and too many people are too hung up on that. The texts in the Bible contain the revelation of God’s action in the world. They are not sets of instructions, nor are they like a cookbook or a rule book. Rather, the revelation in each case must be teased out through interpretation, and that interpretation cannot be done once for ever but rather must continually be reembraced, revisited, realized by each generation of believer in each new context.
The critical point that emerges is that God is love, and we, born of God, also are to be love, and that for love to thrive there must be justice. The precondition for God’s love is justice. The two go hand in hand. The God of love is also the God of justice, just as the psalmist sang.
And so this week we have (again) confusing Federal court adjudications about marriage equality, one circuit declaring two state bans on equality unconstitutional (and we must stop saying they are bans on “gay” marriage—they are bans on equality in marriage), another Federal court declaring they are reasonable. Even the courts that declare these laws unconstitutional then “stay” their decisions meaning the result is continuing injustice. Marriage equality, it seems, is still a tough slog in the US. The world is a dichotomous place.
Our God, who is love, demands justice for all of God’s creation. It is in justice that love can thrive. But remember that Jesus teaches us to embrace even those who insist on injustice, tough guidance but real, because it is only in love and respect that justice can be found. In other words, keep the faith.
Proper 18 (Exodus 12:1-14; Psalm 149; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20)
©2014 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.
Dimensions of Reality: glbt Christian spirituality 