Prophets of Love

We were watching an old movie last night and the heroine said “I just want things to stop happening to me.”

I said to my husband “that’s how I feel.”

Peace.

Peace is that place where nothing is happening. Because when nothing is happening, everything can happen.

Well, that’s hard to explain isn’t it?

But first, a note about Amy Schneider, whose forty day winning streak ended this week on Jeopardy!. Yes, she was just one of those people who plays on tv game shows. But, no. She was a heroine of the LGBTQ movement, for showing up, for telling her story about Princess Ozma on national television and for then continuing to show up. This is the essence of prophecy, showing up and being visible and sometimes nothing seems to happen. Prophets bring peace in just this way.

After a couple of challenging weeks, I am really looking forward, with love in my heart, to a fire in the fireplace and tuna casserole for supper (although I am puzzled by the shortage of medium shells in the market!?). I’m really looking forward, with love in my heart, to my husband’s hugs and his laughter. I’m really looking forward, with love in my heart, to peace, to that time and place where nothing is the best loving thing happening, where love can just be.

The essence of God’s creation is love. Love underlies all else. We call that subtstrate in my science. It means everything else rests on its functioning. The way it functions is that we must call it forth to make it visible. We can do that easily, by just being people of love.

Making the supper, knowing your husband will revel in eating it. That kind of thing is what it means to love.

In Luke’s Gospel (4:21-30) Jesus returns to the synagogue of his youth. Everyone is smiling and welcoming him and beaming with pride at this nice young man, now all grown up. That is, until he tells them the truth about love. He recounts this history of prophets who came and found no love and so could build no love. The crowd, without love, notoriously becomes enraged and chases Jesus to the edge of a cliff. The cliff is very real but is also a perfect metaphor for the cliff we live on if we fail to walk in love. Jesus, who has love for them, is protected by the love in his being and they part, like the proverbial Red Sea, for him to pass through the midst of them.

Prophets come from God to show us a glimpse of ourselves. We can see in them the source of love that can be built up for the glory of creation. We can find that peace that passes all understanding if we can see the love the prophet shows us and find just a bit of it in our own selves. All we need is a scintilla, from which to build up. As Paul says (1 Corinthians 13:12) we need only see love as “in a mirror, dimly” for it to begin to build.

At the beginning of the Gospel story (which is also the final line from last week’s appointed scripture) Jesus says “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” As I wrote last week, it is important that it happens in their hearing, in a community sensibility, rather than in their sight, which they might easily ignore. He means, love has come for you, love has come to tell you love is here, love has brought you a prophet to show you the way, love is ready for you to grasp it and to build it up.

In a way, in this time and this world, all of us who are God’s created LGBTQ people are prophets. Our job is to love, to love and to live, in peace, to be seen to be loving people living in peace, to build up the power of love. Even when we understand only as in a mirror dimly.

Epiphany 4 Year C 2022 RCL (Jeremiah 1:4-10; Psalm 71:1-6; 1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30)

Celebrating Us

I’ve been bringing Amy Schneider into my midrash every week lately. I’m fascinated by the phenomenon of a trans-woman making such an impact in such a regular kind of “normal” American venue. After all, Jeopardy! is watched by millions daily, but is very well-known to be the stomping ground of those who are, shall we say, “mature” (of which I must admit I am)? When I was training to be a hospital chaplain and we were being instructed to make rounds every evening (we were to visit anyone who was to have surgery the next morning) we were told to go eat supper during the 30 minutes Jeopardy! was on television—“nobody will want to talk to you if you interrupt Jeopardy!” we were told! It was true, even the nurses tried not to bother people then.

So it is pretty exciting that it is in this venue that a trans-woman is receiving acceptance, even being honored. Amy has now won over 1 million dollars and joined the exclusive club of long-term winners. Friday I was also a little bit startled (can you be a little bit startled?) to realize one of the other contestants (Sean Sweeney) was a gay man, which is not so unusual, but during the comment period was talking about his husband. Maybe “surprised” is a better word than “startled.” It reminded me (and I know I’ve told this story here someplace) of a time when I was hospitalized briefly (for a few hours, which made us all wonder what they were thinking!) and I had to go three rounds with a nurse about my husband. He had gone to get a cup of tea or something and when I asked her if she had seen him she said pointedly “your FRIEND” is sitting outside in the waiting room. I said “he’s my husband” and she said “your FRIEND” is probably more comfortable out there. And I said “look, we’re married, he’s my husband, it’s the law, get over it!” Interestingly, I didn’t see her again, another nurse took over until I got sprung.

Well, I guess my point is that I was pleasantly surprised to see on regular evening television both a trans-woman champion and a married gay man and nobody batted an eyelash. It made me think about the past centuries of phobia and oppression, the decades of striving for equality, the power summoned by the LGBTQ community to come out and stand up for ourselves insisting on our basic rights as citizens to life and love. And here is how it plays out in the end, on Jeopardy!.

(Another curious point is how little feedback I’ve been getting about Amy and her social witness. One might have expected a larger proportion of readers of t his blog to be excited about this amazing development.)

I’ve been fascinated watching Christmas deconstructed in my neighborhood the past ten days or so. Of course, we kept our outdoor lights on and decorations up until the Feast of the Epiphany, until the twelfth night of Christmas had passed. Many of our neighbors began to take things down the day after Christmas, most of them had everything gone by New Year’s Day. It led me to ponder the true meaning of Christmas, which is not a singular event but an eternity. That is, Christmas is not a one-off event that we remember each year. Rather, Christmas is the epiphany of the incarnation of God as human, it is the reminder to us that it is in every moment that God not only is but also is becoming with us, and that we are called by God’s covenant with us to manifest God’s presence among us through sharing the love God gave us in creation. Indeed, we are called to share the love God gave us by creating us as LGBTQ people of love in God’s own image. We are to celebrate us, and in doing so, build up love in the whole of creation.

God is love, in us God has created a powerhouse of love, through us God has honored our creation in God’s loving image. We are called to fuel that powerhouse of love by building up love, by sharing love, by celebrating love, eternally. We are called to lay aside the distractions of daily living and to embrace the Spirit of God’s love. We are called to walk in love, until we, like those assembled at the baptism of Christ, hear the transformative power of the voice of God saying “with you I am well pleased.”

1 Epiphany Year C 2022 RCL “The Baptism of Our Lord” (Isaiah 43:1-7; Psalm 29; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22)

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

Making Room for Love

I now declare it officially Christmas; Advent has ended, the expectation is fulfilled. Go ahead, light up your lights, power up the Christmas tree, knock yourself out with Christmas music.

The solstice is imminent, soon there will be more daylight than dusk in our days, soon love will blossom.

The Jeopardy professor’s tournament is over, Amy Schneider, trans-glorious champion will be back tomorrow.

Love will blossom this week, its power growing day by day until we reach Christmas Eve on Friday night and then Christmas itself on Saturday. We will sing “Joy to the World” and we will feast and we will hug and kiss. We will exchange gifts, because they are symbols of our love. My husband put all the ornaments on our enormous tree himself last weekend, and yesterday eagerly piled wrapped presents under it, his smile ebullient, his joy permeating the whole house. It made me love him even more, if you can imagine such a thing. Love builds up. We are so blessed.

It’s Christmas. Christmas is all about making room for love. God has prepared a mansion of love in which God has called us to dwell. God has prepared the path for love into our hearts and from our hearts into the world, a synergy of love building up joy and peace and righteousness and justice. Our souls proclaim God’s greatness and our spirits rejoice. In God’s love we are blessed, and with God’s love we bless each other.

The pandemic surges again, but this time we are prepared, we know how to take care of ourselves, we will not let even this suppress the love God has called us to live into, to share, to build up.

Go ahead, embrace joy.

4 Advent Year C 2021 RCL (Micah 5:2-5a; Canticle 15 Magnificat Luke 1:46-55; Hebrews 10:5-10; Luke 1:39-45 (46-55))

©2021 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Prepare the Way of Love

The sun is shining today in the Willamette Valley. When I went outside to get my newspaper this morning the sky was hazy with fog but the sun’s rays were pointing brilliantly in a fan shape through the stately Douglas firs all around. It was heavenly.

This past week we had arborists here. We had an old silver maple that had slowly been dropping its branches on our house and our neighbors’ backyards over the past year and a half. It took months to figure out what to do and finally get someone here to do it, but this week the tree was trimmed. Now there is a lot of fresh firewood in our woodshed and there is no possibility any branches will fall on anything. It is that last bit that I am noticing each morning as I look out where the cracked branches used to be. I had grown so accustomed to worrying about when they might fall that I find it difficult to remember, now, that that problem is resolved. We are prepared for ice storms and winter winds, whenever they might come.

Preparation means change, and change means both working past the former reality and accepting the new.

Advent is a season of preparation. We are called to look inward, to work past former realities, to generate new realities and to accept the change.

Love is the path to the dimension where change is not just accepted but embraced, cheered with joy, accepted with grace—dare I say (?) it is the dimension where change is loved.

Love, of course, is the “robe of righteousness that comes from God” (Baruch 5:2), the “diadem of the glory of the Everlasting.” It is the love of creation making those heavenly rays of sun shine through the trees to remind us not only that we are all part of something larger than us but also that we and all of creation are loved. It is the love that comes to us in this way that is the robe of righteousness and the diadem of glory. It is the love to which we are called that is the manifestation of our blessing. This call to love, that our love might “overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight” (Philippians 1:9), is the affirmation of the certainty that we are called to love. It is our sign as LGBTQ people that we are called as God’s loving children who are defined by the love we share, to love.

We are called to “prepare the way” (Luke 3:4).

We are called to embrace the love in our hearts as the instrument of change, of new reality, of preparation. Why, it is just like the new reality that Amy Schneider, a trans woman, is still an on-going champion of Jeopardy. The brilliance of her smile shows that love that fuels her. Her gentle embrace of her identity, her proud posture in the world, is a sign to all of us that we, too, can find the dimension of love.

Prepare the way indeed.

2 Advent Year C 2021 RCL (Baruch 5:1-9; Canticle 16; Philippians 1:3-11; Luke 3:1-6)

©2021 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Trans Glory

Often I wonder how it is we will know when we have entered the dimension of love, when we have gained God’s kingdom. How will we know we have arrived in a dimension of justice and righteousness governed by the love that powers all of creation?

Jesus famously and often reminded his listeners that although they were good at deciphering the signs of the changing seasons through reading fig trees or stars or winds and so forth, they were no good at all at looking for the signs of righteousness and justice that point to the pathway into the dimension of love.

This week I think I saw a sign, a beautiful sign, a surprising sign. My husband and I are addicted to Jeopardy. Like many people, we watch it partially out of habit and partially out of curiosity. But like many people of our generation we also use it as a tool to check daily our sharpness. I often also learn trivia watching—like the time I learned that “vulpine” means “relating to foxes” and then I understood how a colleague had chosen the name for her new firm. But this week was different.

This week a high-rolling winning champion was unseated by a surprisingly fierce demur woman. Amy Schneider is her name and it turns out she is a trans woman. As we arrived at the weekend she had won three championships with a brilliant mind and a dazzling smile. That smile, by the way, is our sign, that Amy is showing us the pathway into the dimension of love where justice reigns and all of God’s created children, including especially we who are LGBTQ are thriving. God’s love does, indeed, restore all things.

Not only are Amy’s wins phenomenal all by themselves, but they lent a special meaning occurring as they did in Trans Awareness Week. If you haven’t seen Amy or her wonderful smile here are a couple of links:

(You will have to Google “Amy Schneider Jeopardy” look for first one from Uproxx “Transgender Woman Amy Schneider Becomes New ‘Jeopardy!’ Champion During Trans Awareness Week” and then “the second one” is from Newsweek “Transgender Woman Amy Schneider Becomes New ‘Jeopardy!’ Champ During Trans Awareness Week.” WordPress isn’t having any links today for some reason. I apologize.)

If you want to risk tears of joy have a look at the second link and scroll down to the smiles of the two men applauding her first win. If that isn’t a sign I don’t know what is. It is a beautiful example of the description (2 Samuel 23:4) of “ruling in the fear of God” as “like the light of morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.” Hallelujah! Rejoice and sing (Pslam 132:9).

Today in the church is the feast of Christ the King. It is  (according to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Religion) “celebration of the all-embracing authority of Christ, which shall lead [humankind] to seek the ‘peace of Christ’ in the ‘Kingdom of Christ.’” It is a sign in many ways. It is a sign that Advent is coming, that time when we turn inward and seek to align ourselves with the manifestation of Emmanuel “God with us.” Christ the King is a sign that we must always remember to love, because it is in the love we build up that we find the paving stones of the path into the dimension of the authority of God’s love. It is, as the Revelation tells us (1:8) a sign to look always through our love to find grace and peace from the one who is “the Alpha and the Omega,” who is and was and is to come.

The reading from the passion in John’s Gospel (18:33-37) is the revelation of the blindness of many to the dimension of love, even when it stands in their midst. The signs are all around them and yet they cannot see. The truth is given to them and yet they cannot hear it. “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

The signs are all around us, the truth is being told to us eternally. Can we listen, can we hear, can we find the path into the dimension of love? Can we learn that glory is to be found in the brilliant smiles of people all around us? Check out the manifestation of trans glory and follow Amy’s brilliant smile.

Christ the King Year B 2021 RCL (Proper 29): 2 Samuel 23:1-7; Psalm 132:1-13(14-19); Revelation 1:4b-8; John 18:33-37 ©2021 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.