Do Not Fear Love

It was chilly last night … I had to get up and turn up the heat for the first time in months. Just one of those wonders of the Pacific Northwest. Now at midday the sun is shining brightly and we’re on our way to another late summer afternoon with temperatures around 80° F (27° C); indeed, the coming week will see us back in mid-90° F (32° C) territory. Life here is beautiful always. This is one of the reasons I feel so blessed to have been called to return to Oregon after a many-decades absence. It is really a blessing to be again in the grace of the Douglas Firs and the mountains and rivers and big blue sky and amazingly starry nights. I was able to watch the Pleiades meteor shower just by wandering out in the back yard at night and looking up. Whoosh they were streaking across the sky just for me, like my own movie direct from creation central. It is love that creates this beauty. God’s love, which is the love we all share not only with each other but with the universe provides the theater in which our lives create the play. The very essence of God is love, and even the name of God is love. We are put here as the products of love in order that we might embrace the love that nourishes us and brings forth more love as brilliantly as the Oregon sunshine.

The scripture today is all about perceiving love in the magic of our own realities, about recognizing love when we perceive it, and about giving love in return, which is the life to which God has called us all. In Exodus (3:1-15) we have the amazing story of Moses and the burning bush. We are told that an angel appears in “flame of fire out of a bush … the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.” It is a powerful image of course, but even more powerful is the realization that the angel Moses perceived is really God in all the pure power of love blazing as in our hearts, and yet in the blaze nourishing and protecting and not consuming. Nourishing protection that does not consume is pretty much the very definition of love, isn’t it? Moses and God exchange a little word play about the name of God. God famously says “I AM Who I AM.” What does it mean to say “I am”? It means to define your own very essence. God is love, therefore because the essence of God is love, the name of God also is love.

Angels (both in scripture and in real life) are the manifestation of God’s presence; they appear suddenly and unexpectedly but often in mundane circumstances to let us know that God is with us. In the recognition that we are in the presence of an angel we shift dimensions so as to see that we are actually aware of the eternal presence of God. The presence of God is made known to us in love that nourishes and does not consume, which is timeless and which is ours to return.  The dimension of love is a wonderful place in space-time where nourishment and nurture are the only continuum. All God asks of us is that we give thanks and give love.

In Romans (12:9-21) Paul reminds us of our responsibilities as children born of love. He says “let love be genuine” and reminds us that this means “hold fast to what is good … love one another with mutual affection … outdo one another in showing honor … rejoice in hope … persevere in prayer.” Remember always that love goes out from you; whatever you feel is the love you give so let your love be as genuine as honor, affection and perseverant hope. And in all things seek to overcome the absence of love by filling the space with love.

In Matthew’s Gospel (16:21-27) we have the famous interchange between Jesus and Peter in which Jesus says “get behind me Satan.” The beloved disciple Petros, Jesus’ rock, now called a stumbling block for embracing the opposite of love in his denial of the truth told by Jesus, who is the human manifestation of God (Emmanuel “God with us”), who is love. The figure of “Satan” in scripture is a manifestation of the opposite of love, the obstruction of love. It is the chasm that can arise within when we step back from our responsibilities as children of love, when we fail to recognize the angels in our midst who are pointing us to the presence of God who is love. Of course such a chasm is a stumbling block. The chasm is bridged and then redeemed by filling the space with love. Jesus famously reminds the disciples that to embrace love is to give up the life of self for a better life full of love.

The message is that we must not fear love. We especially as LGBT people, whose very identity is love given by God, in whose image we are created, we especially are made of love, we are made to love, we are called to love. Do not fear love, love will reveal the presence of angels, which will help you move into the dimension of nourishment and nurture—the dimension of love.

 

Proper 17 Year A 2020 RCL (Exodus 3: 1-15; Psalm 105: 1-6, 23-26, 45c Confitemini Domino; Romans 12: 9-21; Matthew 16: 21-28)

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

Love is Always the Answer

We are living in a very strange time; one might even say a paradoxical time. As I seem to say over and over, there is the constant cognitive dissonance of this beautiful early summer, on the one hand, and the horrific threat of Covid-19, on the other. There is the cognitive dissonance of ongoing demonstrations by millions for equality, on the one hand, and other millions clogging bars and beaches despite the need to distance to avoid the virus, on the other; and the churning of these two dissonant vortices is itself a source of cognitive dissonance. Then, too, there is the threat to social liberty—after decades of work at gaining equality for gay and lesbian people we find that everything we have worked for is threatened, not alone by the usual oppressive forces, but also by the threat of the virus, which requires a different expression of individual liberty to embrace life but at the same time leads to social requirements like stay-at-home orders that are critical to preserve life itself.

But here we are.

I love with all my heart every day, or at least I try.

Do you?

I hope so.

It is the only way. We must all love, meaning we must all give love. Which means we must all feel love. We must all embrace God’s love, feel it in our hearts, and give it to each other with acts of justice and respect and grace and, of course, affection.

Today’s scripture all points to the conclusion—the eternal revelation—that God’s love, which is eternal, is eternally given to us through the small things that make up everyday life. In Genesis (24) we have the end of the saga of Abraham and Sarah, which in turn is the beginning of the saga of Isaac and Rebekah. It is the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham in acts that are turning points in human life. God’s love is complete, God’s love is eternally given, and God’s love is the miraculous action of a woman bearing a child, a child growing into adulthood, a woman with a water jar, a blessing, a camel mounted and ridden, a marriage—miracles of everyday things.

Paul (Romans 7) struggles with the everyday paradox of disconnection—sin—aligned with connection—faith. The eternal battle we all take up in every waking moment between the chatter in our heads that occupies our feelings and prevents us from experiencing the love that is all around us, and the very expression of God’s eternal and eternally promised love that is the tonic that fills the soul like water filling a tide pool when we allow ourselves to feel love. Grace again.

Jesus (Matthew 11) interprets the paradoxical clutter of social forces experiencing that same battle over love. Jesus recites a hymn of thanksgiving that god’s promise of eternal love is complete in the epiphany of Christ, he reminds us that love is best embraced by those closest to God’s gracious will, the “infants” of God’s kingdom. We are (as we learned last week too) the “infants” of the kingdom when we quell the noisy paradox and embrace God’s love fully and purely. It is in this embrace of love that we receive the “rest” Jesus offers to all of us who “are carrying heavy burdens.” He tells us to take his yoke—the mantle of love—and from it to learn to be gentle, humble, gracious, affectionate and just.

In other words, take on the yoke of love and you will find rest. The rest Jesus points us toward is the grace of God, the salvation of creation, which is always and only and eternally the embrace of love. Love is always the answer.

For we who are God’s lgbt disciples, for whom our very identity is the expression of love, the job of life is to embrace the love that is within and all around us, to share it with each other, and in so doing to reveal the march of the miracles of love in everyday life. Life each day is a miracle of God’s love.

 

Proper 9 Year A RCL 2020 (Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67; Psalm 45: 11-18; Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30)

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