Belonging in the Garden

I’m not sure when the last time was that I was so glad for a dreary day but I really am, trust me. I am sure I am incredibly grateful that daylight savings time is over and I can go back to sleeping on the earth’s schedule. Hallelujah! I’m also grateful for the current atmospheric river (weather people have such fun names now, when I was a boy we called it “rain”), which has been greening my lawn and thinning out the autumn leaves for a few days now. Yesterday I pulled out my tomatoes and peppers, harvesting any late season fruit to ripen indoors. So, now I can put away the tomato cages and the fences that keep critters out of my vegetable garden. Tomorrow, when it stops raining, I will make a trip around the flower gardens clipping any buds (there are buds on all the roses and the dahlias), which I will hope will bloom indoors. It’s going to freeze tomorrow night or the next night, and then that will be that for the gardens (except for the arugula, thank goodness, which is just delighted at the cold and dark and rain).

I have gardened one way or another all of my life, but I don’t think I have been this close to nature since I was a kid living in Hawaii, where like Oregon, nature is essentially inescapable. I love the rhythm of it, and I love the fascination of the flowers and fruits. We have a fig tree at the end of the driveway and I tug off a bowl of them every few days; they’re terrific. I feel like I’m getting away with something eating food I didn’t haul home for $60 from a store!

So there is something, some sort of message from creation, in that feeling. It is almost like a sort of secret plot—”water us and clear the weeds and feed us once in awhile and we’ll delight you for months”—something like that.

There also is some sort of hidden gay thing in it too. Again, I can’t really put a finger on it, as it were. I remember when I first had my own house in Urbana, Illinois; I would be out planting around and it guys riding by on bikes would stop and chat me up. I’m sure they all were avid gardeners. Later, in Philadelphia, I actually met most of my gay friends by admiring their work in little pocket gardens on corners here and there in the Spruce Hill neighborhood where we first lived, and some of them would drop by and help me get accustomed to the soil and hills and the felonious fellow citizens who would steal plants unless you wired the roots to cinder blocks before planting them.

Community emerged from this shared experience of creation, and I think it made us all feel like we belonged in a way being gay men didn’t usually make us feel socially. Of course this all was happening in the beginning of the AIDS pandemic when we had to learn new ways of socializing. So I guess it makes sense that one of the delights of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the growth of social media groups like “bears in the garden” and “gay gardeners” and the newer “bears in the kitchen” where a cross section of gay men check in daily for support and advice and, of course, those much-sought “likes.” Back in July I broke the soufflé dish I hadn’t used in years—my husband had given it to me when we first were together four decades ago because he “always wanted a boyfriend who made soufflés.” Embarrassed, I bought a new one, and promptly made a cheese soufflé for dinner, and posted the pictures. I was humbled at the loving supportive response.

So where am I going with all this? Rain, time, winter, gardens, cooking, yes. But also, social acceptance, social support, belonging—all active forms of loving, all examples of walking in love, and still more so examples of healing, the sort of healing Jesus brought wherever he went. He helped people shift their reality into the dimension of love, which in turn brought them back to belonging, which in turn allowed them to walk in love. We see this formula over and over in his parables—person(s), problem, resolution, healing, thanksgiving, or, belonging as the shift into the dimension of love.

In today’s scripture Haggai prophesies (1:15b-2:9) that God’s spirit always remains among us, which is after all the spirit of belonging made manifest in the splendor of creation. Paul writes to the Thessalonians (2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17) to remind them that they were chosen by God to be “the first fruits for salvation” which they receive by shifting into the dimension of Christ through “the proclamation of the good news.” In Luke (20:27-38) Jesus answers satirical questions about marriage and resurrection by reminding the crowd that those who have found the dimension of love have eternal life, belonging “like angels and … children of God, being children of the resurrection.” God is “[God] of the living; for to [God] all of them are alive.”

PostScript

For readers who are citizens of the United States, Tuesday is election day. If you haven’t voted yet, please remember to do so on Tuesday. Please remember that voting is the most essential act of love we can perform as citizens of God.

Proper 27 Year C 2022 RCL (Haggai 1:15b-2:9; Psalm 145:1-5, 18-22; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38)

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

Belonging*

The first time I went to Crete, to Heraklion, was my first experience of both Greek society and what could be described as New Testament ambience. That is, learning a little bit of Greek and a little bit of Greek ways of being turned out to be really helpful in understanding stories like the one we heard today. On one trip, as usual I flew in from Amsterdam. That means I got up at 3:30 to catch a flight at 6:30 that arrived in Crete about 11:30am. I went directly to sleep for several hours. Then I needed coffee. So I wandered out of the hotel and found (no kidding) a Starbucks— tucked into a corner of a narrow street. It was sunny and warm and I sat outside sipping my coffee and watching people go by. Pretty soon I became aware of two small boys who were playing nearby. They were laughing merrily, so I started to watch and I noticed they had a shiny red top and they were twirling it rapidly so it would spin. Then they would follow it along and when it fell, they would laugh and pick it up and move a little bit and start over. It took me awhile to become aware of the adult a few meters away who was directing them about where to play. And it took me awhile longer still to realize it was all about entertaining people like me in the hopes of getting thrown a few euro coins. About the time I figured it out the manager of the Starbucks came out and shooed them away.

I remembered this when I was pondering that young woman in the story from Acts, who it says had a spirit of divination. My trusty commentary supplied the information that what she was doing was what we would call ventriloquism—throwing her voice—so, you see, it sounded like her prophecy was coming from the sky or even from Paul and Silas, the missionaries. This got me to thinking about how things often are not what they seem, which is another way of saying things often are more complicated than we want to know. Like the two little boys with the top, this young woman was earning money— a great deal of money it says— telling fortunes and throwing her voice.

So an obvious question is, why would Paul mess that up by ruining her gift?

This great story is actually full of drama and interesting, umm, characters. For instance, Paul is our hero, we know he is an apostle of Christ. But we forget that he was an itinerant preacher, homeless and penniless, dependent on living ‘ in the homes of his converts. We forget that he spent his days preaching in the marketplace. Imagine how you would react if you went to the supermarket to buy some lettuce and in the produce section there was a homeless guy preaching loudly at you? That is about how Paul looked to the people of this town. And one more thing, we also forget that Paul had had a stroke—his conversion experience on the road to Damascus, his near death in which Jesus Christ spoke to him directly and set him on the course that would see him create the church we know today, that experience also left him disfigured and unable to speak clearly. We also have the character identified as the jailer, probably a Roman official. He had the tough job of roughing up criminals and responding to the mob scenes in the city. We forget he would have been a soldier representing the occupying authority. He would have been torn constantly between his job and allegience to the Roman government who had control of his life, and the people over whom he had authority.

“That we all may be one.” This is Jesus’ prayer in the garden in that long night of the soul before his Crucifixion. It is his prayer to God for his disciples and for us— for all who have heard his word. In this moment of utter despair, Jesus prays to God that you and Jesus and God and me might always all be one. The hard part for us is to understand that God has already made it so. We all already are one. Whether we like it or not, we are all one, because each one of us and every one of us is created in God’s own image. And there is the key to this puzzle. God’s image is the image of diversity. God’s image is the image of all of us and each of us different as we are and yet together too. So, nice gay and lesbian people like you and me and other “characters” all are one. Jesus said: “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us …” And so it is.

But why did Paul exorcise that demon and cause the young woman to lose her gift and her job? The reason was, she prayed for deliverance, constantly. The story tells us she “kept doing this.” The story tells us she knew Paul and Silas had the news of the Most High God, of a way of salvation. For her, salvation meant “healing.” In the New Testament healing means becoming one with the community. Salvation is belonging forever. This young woman, an outcast her entire life, just wanted to belong. Don’t we all, just want to belong? Paul, who knew the spirit of Jesus Christ, made it happen. He made it possible for her to belong.

This is the Gospel in simple terms. That God already has made us all belong. Our salvation is, that we all, already, belong.

©2016 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

7 Easter (Acts 16:16-34; Psalm 97; Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21; John 17:20-26)