To Be is to Love

There are so many ways of experiencing love it is at once awesome (in the original meaning of that word) and impossible to contemplate. I love a beautiful day, I love the sun and warmth that signal a beautiful day, I love the aroma of pine needles in the warm sun on a beautiful day, I love how my heart sings when I experience a beautiful day, I love loving on a beautiful day, I love loving, giving love makes my heart sing—and on and on I could go. To say “I love” is at once the most beautiful and intimate thing any human ever can say because it is not just an expression of affection but it is also an expression of trust. It means “I trust”—I trust how my heart sings on a beautiful day, I trust how my singing heart embraces you on a beautiful day. To love is to trust with our entire being.

It is this kind of love, trust in being, that God asks of us. Indeed, it is all God asks of us, because if we can love, then we love God and each other and creation all at once. God creates us in God’s own image, and God gives us all of creation to nourish and nurture us, and all God asks of us is that we return the favor, that we love God by creating love in every relationship, by mirroring the images of the beloved people in our lives, that we nourish and nurture each other and thereby we trust God and each other and all of creation with our entire being. To be is to love.

The story of the Passover (Exodus 12:1-14) is a core liturgy of Judaism. In the traditional meaning of “liturgy,” which is “the people’s work,” remembrance of the Passover is an expression of faith that takes place through actions of families. It is interesting that much of Jewish faith takes place in the family. The Passover seder is more than a ritual meal, it is ritual action that in its performance stirs the love of the people participating. This love, once stirred, insures the awareness of the presence of God. Like the original narrative from Exodus, it is the expression of trust among the members of a community in each other, in God and in all of creation. In particular, as God has given it to be “the beginning of months …,” it is not just a day but it is a ritual of the eternal beginning of redemption, for it is in the eternity of beginning that redemption finds its realization. When we begin to love, we begin to be, and to be is to love. In this remembrance we experience God giving God’s people, who are eternally created in God’s own image, God’s eternal promise of love.

Of course, LGBTQ families are more often “logical”—made up of people we love and who love us whose life trajectories have brought together—than biological (see “The Majesty of Love” https://rpsplus.wordpress.com/2020/07/26/the-majesty-of-love/). Our families are created by the outpouring of love—trust with our entire being—from our own hearts. God redeems God’s families created by the love of God’s children. God protects the families truly created by the outpouring of God’s love.

“’Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law”—(Romans 13:8-14). I think Paul is trying to say first and foremost that love is all, therefore love must be pure and unfettered. When we love, Christ (who is God with us) is loving through us. Paul goes on to say that “now is the moment to wake from sleep” because salvation is ours if we can be awake to it, if we can be alert to love, if we can trust God and each other and all of creation with our entire being. Paul says “lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” He means to leave the night behind and embrace the morning, the day, the light, the beginning—it is this light that is the cloak of Christ—for it is in the eternal beginning that we embrace not only our redemption but, indeed, our very salvation. To wear this cloak is to love, to embrace beginnings.

In Matthew’s Gospel (18:15-20) Jesus says “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Love is the binder; to trust with our entire being is to bind ourselves to each other, to God and to all of creation. Whereever love is, Christ who is God with us, also always is. It is for this reason that “if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. ” Whatever is bound with love is eternal. Whatever is bound with love is the eternal beginning of being, which is love.

 

Proper 18 Year A 2020 RCL (Exodus 12:1-14; Psalm 149 Cantate Domino; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20)

©2020 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Christmas without the trappings*

I spent most of Christmas in a hospital, first in an emergency department and then in a room in the hospital. I won’t go into the details at the risk of making readers crazy, but frankly it isn’t relevant to my point. In writing this I have rediscovered the success of my childhood inculcation into the spirit of Christmas, Santa Claus and herald angels and joy to the world all wrapped up together in my six decades of experience.

This year was the first time in my whole life Christmas Eve didn’t include sleeping in expectation with memories of midnight mass (even midnight mass that was actually at 8pm) to sustain me and the hope of something sublime awaiting me in the morning. It was the first time in my life that Christmas morning held neither cinnamon rolls around the tree nor early mass, Christmas daytime was not about cooking and family and all the rest. Instead a full night of wakefulness was followed by dusk asleep in awkward positions upright in a chair. (At one point I remarked that this was exactly how I feel when I arrive in Europe after twelve hours in transit from the middle of the US—my Facebook friends know these posts as “arrived Amsterdam … ugh ugh.”) Then the day included quiet and many naps and fortunately, even a visit from a rabbi. It was sunny and cold but there was nowhere any evidence of Christmas.

So what is Christmas like without the trappings? My immediate sense is that it made me sit up and remind my emotional intuitive being of what my intellect always has known—that Christmas is about hope and eternity, about faith lived out over time, about a celebration of that which is ongoing in our hearts and souls if only we can live into it. Christmas is about the power of knowing that God is with us and within us and among us, now of course, but always as well.

This is always a tough lesson for Christians in the west because we live in a world that is mostly secularized, where Christmas means shopping and “holiday” parties and ends at sundown on the 24^th, Christmas daytime means driving some place and eating too much like a sort of second class Thanksgiving only with different traditional dishes but probably the same family fights. Awaking on the 26^th is no longer even either Boxing Day or The Feast of St. Stephen but instead some sort of new black Friday with even better sales than in the days running up to Christmas. What happened to hope? Where is faith born of the internalized knowledge of unity with God? It is as though it all has vanished, poof, in the night.

So we have to think carefully about how we can keep Christmas alive. In the church we celebrate it through the feast of the Epiphany on January 6, the famous “twelfth night.” A few years ago I was amused when a new priest colleague set up the nativity scene at the front of the church but placed the wise men and the shepherds at different places around the church, even Mary and Joseph were about half-way back. Each Sunday in Advent the pieces moved forward a bit, and as we moved through Christmas week angels began to appear as Mary and Joseph made their way to the crib. On Christmas Eve the child appeared and the shepherds drew near. And over the next two weeks of Christmas the wise men moved closer and closer as well. It was amazing to experience this sense of Christmas in motion—not static, not just one night, but dynamic and fundamentally about the growth of faith from hope rewarded. This is the meaning of Christmas.

In Galatians 3 and 4 we hear always at Christmastide this passage about “before faith came” when we were captives of “the law.” It is always read as about the past, but I think we should read it instead as being about the present and the eternal. We are not to live solely according to a list of rights and wrongs, as though some ecclesial Santa Claus is keeping a list. Rather we are to live according to our faith in the hope that Jesus makes ever visible as he continually is born and dwells among us (John 1). We are to love God always and to love each other as ourselves, always. It should be second nature, no list required.

“From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” (John 1:16).

We are home now, everything is on the mend, Christmas dinner is cooking and the presents under the tree will become the warm experience of giving and loving in vulnerability. We are filled with the renewed love born of shared experience and the faith born of hope revealed in answers to prayer and the firm knowledge of God’s presence with us and between us and within us.

How is this relevant to lgbt lives? In the most direct way possible, it is my story—our story—lived fully as Christians and fully as gay people. It is the story of our hope rewarded, our faith, our redemption in Christ, for we too are God’s children and heirs. It is the story of love fulfilled in the living, just like every day of every lgbt life.

Merry Christmas.

 

©2015 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

*First Sunday after Christmas (Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Psalm 147 or 147:13-21; Galatians 3:23-25;4:4-7; John 1:1-18)

 

Where you go, I will go*

Brad, my husband, and I have been together for something like 34 years and a bit. We lose track of the exact number sometimes, because like most couples we’ve had moments when we were less together than others, and because after three decades memories are less precise. Still, it has been a blessing. I remember walking with him on the beach in Galveston shortly after we met, but when we were both clear that something momentous was working in us. He said he thought we would last a long time because we had a similar world view. I guess he was right.

The past two weeks have been a bit of a trial. He had pneumonia, the critical kind, and wound up in intensive care. I wound up at his bedside, listening to each breath, watching every tick or eye movement, wishing I could just take him home and give him something to eat. He is fully recovered now and will come home later today, by the way, or I probably wouldn’t be writing about it.

I think one thing that kept coming to me all during the ordeal was how the two of us have become everything for each other, real family. I know this has been palpable for both of us since our marriage in Toronto, on our 30^th anniversary. We thought we were making a political statement, and we thought we were making a wise decision, but we both were stunned to discover how different it felt to be married. We are family.

So instead of looking at the displaced propers for All Saints that most Episcopalians are using today, I wanted to stick with the propers for this Sunday, the 23^rd Sunday after Pentecost, not in the least because the opening lesson is the story of Ruth and Naomi, and the trials that made them a family unto themselves, and the beautiful song that Ruth sings to Naomi: “Where you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” It should be read at every same-sex wedding, heck, it should be read at every wedding.

There also is a reading from Hebrews that rather gruesomely compares the theology of sacrifice made by Christ for sin—disconnectedness from God—for all humanity, with the sacrifice of goats and calves and bulls and heifers. Let’s just be clear, in Christ we are all connected with God forever through our humanity which we share with Jesus. Mark’s Gospel story for today is the story of Jesus giving the greatest commandments, to love God and to love one another. At the end of the story Jesus tells a scribe, who has understood that to love God is to love one another and to love one another is to love God, that he is not far from the kingdom of God. We need to understand that in the love we share for each other we can see and touch the palpable presence of God, who is always within us as love.

Several priests came to visit us and to pray with us during this. One friend said she could see Brad change as the prayers were said over him. As the process went on I became more insistent in my own prayers, and gave up the formulas I’ve memorized over the years for more precise demands. “Jesus do this now!” (Fill in  your own blanks there.) What do you know? It worked. It works. Our salvation is that we already are with Christ. Our knowledge of Christ who is God is palpable in the love we share.

*Proper 26 Year B (Ruth 1:1-18; Psalm 146 Lauda, anima mea; Hebrews 9:11-14; Mark 12:28-34)

©2012 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Lucy moments*

Lucille Ball’s 100th birthday … wow! Who’d a thunk it? (to quote “The Beave”). I am a major fan of Lucille Ball, and especially (of course) of “I Love Lucy.” As a kid I was called “little ricky” by my family; my cousins and I used to play “Lucy” in the basement; we would yell at each other in made-up Spanish “mia cosa …..” and have “Ethel” moments (usually by spilling something). When I grew up I began to see the stories from I Love Lucy in my daily life, and over time I have come to see them as carefully crafted morality plays. I have in the back of my head a book called “The Gospel According to I Love Lucy” and maybe some day I’ll find a publisher who’ll let me write it. But it is amazing how often I have a recollection from the series.

I doubt you could say that about much television writing these days; but in the 1950s those folks were not just writing funny jokes; they were making a point, they were teaching, using Lucy and Ricky and Ethel and Fred’s foibles, and their always very human reactions. And you know what, in those tightly wrapped 25 minute dramas, there is always redemption based in love. As there is, indeed, in reality. God is all about redemption. People stray; God redeems. That’s the whole story in a nutshell.

Paul writes with so much intensity in the letter to the Romans. I wonder how many true Christians understand that this letter is the heart of the Gospel. And the heart of the heart is this passage “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart” and that, of course, is a quotation from Deuteronomy, that Paul (born Saul, the Jew) would have known. It is like waiting for a parent’s hug—a feeling in your soul that only can be realized by the actual touch, but you know it in your bones. And when your parents are gone on to God’s kingdom, still you feel their touch, and it brings alive this sensation of the word that is on your lips and in your heart.

We each know God in our own way. Many times we do not think we know God, when the reality is that we just are afraid to admit it. Or, perhaps we just don’t honor the ways in which we actually know God. Like Peter demanding a sign from Jesus, then, when walking on the water, letting go of his faith. This story is all about dishonoring the reality of God in our very daily lives. Jesus calms the storm, Jesus walks on water, Jesus gets in the boat with them to save them, and still the disciples are terrified, even when God incarnate is standing right there. If it was tough for them, how much tougher can it be for us? And yet, the truth is that God made us gay in God’s own image, and God has called us into this storm that is life, and God has sent Jesus to teach us to walk in love, even when we are afraid. The word is always near us, because it is always within us. Even in Lucy moments.

Proper 14 (Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28; Psalm 105, 1-6, 16-22, 45b; Romans 10:5-15; Matthew 14:22-33)
©2011 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.