Hard work, hard work, hard work … I keep telling you this love stuff is hard work. Why do you think God appointed us, God’s LGBTQ+ people to do it? It’s not just a challenge, it takes guts to make the world work with love.
Our collect today (the opening prayer) asks God to increase in us “faith, hope and charity” because to “obtain [love]” God has to make us love loving [the prayer says “love what [God] command[s]!].”
These last few months the lectionary has had us following the generations of Abraham, and the journey of the Exodus. It is a story of a spiritual journey toward salvation, which God has made available to all of creation. It is a revelation, or a meditation if you will, about the challenge of living as humans in the world, about the challenge of living together in the world, about the challenge of being at once stewards and subjects of creation. The story ends today with Moses’ death [Deuteronomy 34:1-112] and the beginning of the period of Joshua as prophet. It is important that these leaders are called “prophets,” meaning they are neither autocrats nor monarchs, but rather, they stand in view of God and the people, translating as best they can, God’s law of love.
The liturgical response is Psalm 90 [1-6, 13-17], which reminds us that all time is all at once and already is. Time-space is a single continuum. Time and space bound the dimensions of love in which we live. Love indeed is all around us. When Jesus says “the kingdom has come near” he means “the next dimension over” … “can you get there?” The way to get there is through the action of love.
The testing of Jesus continues in Matthew’s Gospel [22:34-46]. Jesus resolves all questions into an equivalence: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.”
The revelation from scripture is that love is tough but love is the law in the dimension that God has prepared for all creation. But we have to choose love. We have to choose the prophetic action of standing tall in the face of challenges and remembering always to respond by continuing to walk in love.
It is about to be the feast of All Saints, in which we remember those who indeed walked in love. Is it just quirk of fate that All Hallows Eve comes first, in which an ancient tradition of warding off the absence of love has become a celebration of joy and childlike rejoicing? Is it an accident that LGBTQ+ people revel in the opportunity to express the love God created within us to share as we dress up and dance and rejoice?
It is our call from God, to be the visible prophets of love, to stand tall as the revelation of active love that works.
Proper 25 Year A 2023 RCL (Deuteronomy 34:1-12; Psalm 1; 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22:34-46)
©The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.
Dimensions of Reality: glbt Christian spirituality 