Crafty Love

Love both is, and is not, what you think.

I know, you love your mother. You love your lifemate in a way that is different from how you love your mother but every bit as powerful. You love lots of people, lots of things, lots of life, and that is the plentiful experience of love all of us have. When the words of Jesus tell us we must love our neighbor as ourself, this is what we think of.

This is one part of what is so difficult about it, isn’t it? “You mean that *$@%! over there, you want me to ‘love’ that?” See what I mean?

And that’s only one part of the conundrum. What about those moments when it is almost impossible to maintain your equilibrium? The other day I was driving my husband around to various appointments, we were having a good and loving day, it seems so often that the longer we are together the more we treasure those little moments. It was sunny and warm and we had gathered ingredients for a cookout on the patio, savoring what we know are probably the last warm evenings of the season. And as I drove along a sound started beeping and a red light flashed and the funny box in the middle of the dashboard started scrolling some gibberish—something was wrong with the car. I remember feeling frightened, flushed as endorphins flooded through me, worried, frustrated … and it was very, very difficult to focus on how much love we were sharing.

I stopped loving and gave myself over to anxiety; well, until we got to a service station—have you noticed how most “gas” stations are not “service” stations?—and found out what was off and got it fixed. When we got home I had to lie down, so stressed out was I from all of that anxiety.

There are a million examples, eh? Someone cuts you off on the highway and you are furious. (hmmm, maybe I’ve been driving too much lately). You order something delivered and the clever delivery person puts it in the dirt under the front porch where you can’t get to it. You go to the store and marvel at the beautiful produce and then a fellow shopper shoves you aside to pick over everything. I could go on and on. The point is, walking in love, loving ourselves and our neighbors, all of these manifestations of Jesus’ commandment, require us to be alert to these moments when we stop loving and turn to our own inward impulses.

In my last post I told about being gay-bashed in a restaurant. It was all by itself an unpleasant moment, but the most difficult part for me was the combination of disappointment about not being able to give my husband a lovely evening (I even had worn a new shirt he had given me to celebrate) and frustration that I couldn’t make the event go away.

Life is full of challenges, tiny ones as well as giant ones. The challenge as a follower of Christ is to maintain love in the forefront, to maintain a loving equilibrium despite the challenges.

We rely on scripture—the lectionary guides us through with readings from Old and New Testaments coordinated with the collects (prayers) of the church—to remind us both how important it is to walk in love and how easy it is to become distracted. This week we pray to be granted liberty from anxiety about earthly things but rather to “love things heavenly.” God, who is love, laments (“grief is upon me, my heart is sick”) people who have turned completely away from love (Jeremiah 8:18). Paul wrote to Timothy “I urge that supplications, prayers, intecessions and thanksgivings be made for everyone,” advice to strengthen and nourish and preserve walking in love. Jesus (Luke 16:1-13) tells the parable of the “dishonest manager” (in some translations the “crafty steward”) who actually is held up as pragmatic because he does not despair but copes in every situation to restore harmonious loving life.

Our job as LGBTQ Christians is to be crafty lovers, to walk in love, to restore harmony by pushing out anxiety and fear and disappointment and anger and whatever else distracts us by reminding ourselves that we are God’s heirs because of how we love.

We know love well, our job is to use it.

Proper 20 Year C 2022 RCL (Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; Psalm 79:1-9; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13)

©2022 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.