Called to Manifest Love

The message of love is for all of humankind.

It makes me think, sometimes, of being a little boy learning to swim; of course, we have to learn to swim … no matter how silly it might seem in the 21^st century to focus on something we think of as recreation, it is still a critical survival skill, as we see day after day as people have to tread water in their apartments or to escape wildfire until they can be rescued.

The connection is that swimming is a critical skill. and love is a critical skill. and both require learning. To swim we have to learn to breathe and dunk and float and propel and yet also be economical about motion. To love we have to learn to feel, to imagine, to express love; and we have to learn that to love is to heal, which is to be loved in community.

I pondered this story of Moses’ birth [Exodus 1:8-2-10] for several days this week. At first it seems just a curiously detailed narrative until you realize that it is not only the story of the birth of Moses, but also is a revelatory story of oppression, which is an expression not of love but of fear.

How many times have I written that the current wave of oppression is from fear? The catalyzing fear is the fear of loss of control. We cannot fight that fear. We only can, as did the Hebrews (and Moses) in this story, overcome it with love.

“Blessed be the LORD” [Psalm 124] means we give thanks to God. Do you begin your prayers everyday by saying “I bless you God”? I do. Try it. It summons into your consciousness the idea of the power of God’s love. God is blessed, god is our help, God is the true foundation; in blessing God we are blessed indeed.

The message of love is for all of creation. And we all are part of one unity, even as we are differently abled [Romans 12:1-8]. Stew, not purée, somehow comes to mind. This mix, or diversity, is what we often call “God’s plan.” But, you know what, God is not sitting up there on a lifeguard stool with a big blueprint. That isn’t how it works. The way it works is that the “plan” is simply the map of what is, which is that people should use love to keep creation in harmony. There doesn’t need to be a blueprint. There only needs to be people who love. All we need is love, indeed.

In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus is challenging the disciples to express what they know about him {Matthew 16:13-20]. They have various opinions; the way the story is structured is intended to show us that they have thought it over carefully based on hearsay “14 And they said, ‘Some say … but others [say] … and still others [say].” But, the essence of this story is that Peter (Simon) knows from love, which is divine, which is from God, that Jesus is God incarnate. And it is from this revelation, of love, that the events of resurrection and of eternity of love are made manifest.

Love can change the world. We, as God’s LGBTQ people, are called to manifest love.

Proper 16 Year A 2020 RCL (Exodus 1:8-2:10; Psalm 124 Nisi quia Dominus; Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 16: 13-20)©2023 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Keep on

Time is, as Einstein pointed out, an illusion. All time is all time all at once. The dimension of love is always not past or future but always now. We must live in it always now.

And, therefore, we must always be one with God. God wants us like a lover. God wants us to be always one with God. We must let God know we are there for God.

The life God wants us to live is a life of love, a life of realizing joy, a life of giving joy.

God wants us to understand that the message of salvation is that it always is always ours. There are no conditions other than that we walk in love in the dimension where God is.

Jesus pronounced “blessings”—promises of acceptance already given—to those who were willing to walk in love. All he asked in return is that they should rejoice and be glad.

My husband gave me a CD called “ExtANNAganza” from the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus singing songs from Abba. It is an amazing gift for a whole lot of reasons. Of course, because he knows the music makes me joyful. It is music that just makes you feel good. But it particularly seems to me to be the hymnary of the LGBTQ community.

There are two extraordinary spiritual experiences in my life. I’ve written about them before, I know. But here I go again. The first was at the consecration of The Right Reverend Barbara Harris, the first woman bishop in the church of God (ok, since Joan the Pope) in Boston in 1989. Wikipedia tells me I was one of 8,000 people there that day. The thing I remember the most clearly was the moment in the liturgy when the 8,000 all rose to sing the Nicene Creed in unison. I could never ever have expected such a moment of power to come from the repetition of an ancient rite, I could never had imagined such a diverse crowd of witnesses coming together in the one thing that we all shared. It was almost an overpowering moment.

The other was, at the closing ceremony of the Gay Games in Amsterdam in 1998. I had been ordained a priest two months at that point. My friends who had supported my decade-long journey to ordination had all chipped in to give me the gift of that trip. And it had been an amazing couple of weeks, learning about the Netherlands, experiencing the thing the Gay Games gives, which is the sense of belonging no matter what. And now here we all were at the final evening, under the warm summer sky. And as the ceremony opened the strains of “Dancing Queen” began. And 50,000 (count us, 50,000!) queers all rose at once to sing and dance along. I remember my own joy. But I also remember the tears streaming down the faces of those all around me as we all stood and sang and dance. What amazing joy. What amazing reality. What amazing participation in God’s dimension of love.

And here is the message for us now—we must always hang onto that love that we all share, that joy that we alone can bring. Because our joy can change the world.

Look what we have done in three decades since—two lesbian governors, a gay former presidential candidate now in the cabinet, a trans-person in the cabinet—gay and lesbian bishops of the church, even a Roman pope who admits it is wrong to persecute us.

Keep on loving, keep on dancing, keep on creating joy, keep on keeping on.

Fourth Sunday After Epiphany Year A 2023 RCL (Micah 6:1-8; Psalm 15; 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; Matthew 5:1-12)

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

Nourishment as blessing*

We’ve been spending the weekend in a gay resort. It’s a place we found some years ago that has a nice mix of casual laid back comfort to it but also a very kind of quiet romanticism. I think I like this sort of thing for several different reasons. At the base I enjoy being away from responsibility—I might spend most of each day writing, but I can intersperse that activity with dips in the pool, walks around the grounds to look at the flowers, or even just sitting on the stoop doing nothing for awhile. But I also enjoy being in a place where it feels like I belong. There are a few single people here once in awhile, but mostly the guests are other long-term couples like us. And even though we come from different places and have different professional lives, still we share some of the basics of being gay couples making our way in the world in long-term relationships. Being together like this allows us to relax in a way that we usually can’t in the general public, where we always have to be looking over our shoulders for the next shoe to drop, as it were. It has been interesting, for instance, of the past few years, to discover ourselves sharing wedding stories, as barriers drop and we find ourselves at last eligible for something we had been raised to think never could be ours.

The urge to belong is an interesting part of human nature. I suppose it is a survival instinct at some essential level; stay with the herd and enjoy safety in numbers (like driving too fast on the Interstate, which apparently is ok as long as one is in the middle of the pack). It doesn’t always work out that way, of course. But there is distinctly a sense of ease about feeling that one is part of something. We are in our sixties, and I know younger gay men who feel the same way about belonging, but for them the desire is strongest to belong to the diversely whole of society. I’m glad that has worked out for them; they’ve grown up feeling as though gay was just another kind of person. I think we grew up in hiding, and then spent our early adulthoods as outcasts, and we’ll probably always have this desire to “nest” among those most like us.

There are two stories in the scripture for today—one is Jacob’s fight with God, all through the night on the shores of the Jabbok, in which he famously gets wounded in the “hip” (a euphemism for you-know-what); the other story is Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand with two loaves and two fish. What I noticed when I read them over in sequence was a parallel between them in which each story begins with the action of withdrawal over or near water, each action gets halted by an immediate necessity, and each story ends with a blessing, which turns out to have been always present but only revealed in the aftermath.

So here I sit at my resort, where we’ve withdrawn to be by the pool. It says to me that the blessing of God is here already in the exigencies we experience not only day to day but also in this social action. In our case the blessing is the sense of relief we derive from being in this calm space among people we might not know well but who we easily see are just like us. It is not unsimilar to the kinds of academic conferences I attend. Usually professors are the only experts in their areas of study in a given faculty, and to find like-minded scholars to talk with requires attending whatever international conference it is. And also it is similar to gay pride festivals—Amsterdam’s is this weekend—which draw huge crowds for a few moments not only of belonging but of belonging in the light. The similarity I suppose is not just in the withdrawal for focus, but more in the way in which it provides nourishment, spiritual in one sense, intellectual in the other. This nourishment is the blessing isn’t it, that sustains us when we go home? The light stays with us to fortify us as life goes on. And life does go on, across the waters and through the exigencies.

The blessing of God is always with us; the nourishment God gives us is our blessing.

*Proper 13 (Genesis 32:22-31; Psalm 17:1-7,16; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14:13-21)

Blessing God*

I know I missed posting last week. Late Friday night I returned from Heraklion, Crete to Amsterdam on a delightful airline called Transavia, which is all Dutch, but for some reason they love flying in the middle of the night. So it threw my sleep-wake pattern off schedule completely.

(The photo to the left is a ferry called Kriti I, sitting in the port in Heraklion.)

Besides, I was so relieved the rapture found me in Amsterdam, I just took the opportunity to sleep late and enjoy the sun. Sorry.

While I was in Greece I had another one of my silly epiphanies. Silly, I say, because well, they are! This one came about while I was sitting on my deck overlooking the Venetian Harbor in Heraklion, reading my “teach yourself Greek” book, when suddenly I learned “kyrie” means “mister.”

I was dumbstruck! You mean all of that ponderous ostentatious singing and beating of chests and gnashing of teeth in church, and in the end Greeks would just say “Hey, mister”? Well, yes.

(This is a photo of Dia, the island just north of Heraklion, viewed from the rooftop garden at my hotel.)

Of course, like all of my silly epiphanies I kept pondering it (and you can expert to hear more about this one). I Googled “kyrie” and “eleison” and all I could find were essays about how it means “Lord have mercy” in the Roman rite, which is true; but there was nowhere online any etymological help.

So lets go back to empirical reality. Greek people seem to live pretty close to their reality. So I could imagine that a Greek Christian might speak to God by saying “Hey, mister” and then I could imagine the rest might be something like “let me be.” (I said, I’m imagining this ….). It sort of turns the relationship between us and God upside down, from the usual western perspective.

(This is a photo of the Western end of the Venetian port, where small vessels are docked.)

Of course, upside down sometimes turns out to be right-side up, especially when we’re dealing with God. For instance, we have to learn to bless God. I know, you are thinking I have that backwards, that it ought to be God who blesses us. But no, I have it right—it is we who have to learn to bless God. God already has blessed us in the eternal act of creating us as children of God and stewards of God’s kingdom (and all you need to to do have your breath taken away is look at the beautiful waters of the Aegean).

If we already have received the favor of God (the literal meaning of to be blessed) then it is our responsibility to return the favor, to show God our love for God and our thanks for our createdness by blessing God in return. It is easy enough to do; just as easy as blessing your friend when he sneezes. In every moment when you realize how great you feel, just pray “God, I bless you for this wonderful day.”

This is just one wonderful example of how what Jesus has come to teach us is that we are so used to seeing everything backwards that we cannot see the world God has called us to live in. Maybe this all comes from our upbringing by parents who have to teach us everything. We spend so much of our lives as children feeling at once totally liberated and totally subservient. I think we learn that it is only when we run and jump and play that we are liberated, and that all the rest of the time we are subjects of an autocratic regime unable to make decisions for ourselves. So we expect Santa Claus to bring us nice things (rather than figure out ourselves how to gain them), we expect magical lovers to appear in our midst and love us at first sight, and we expect God to make a beautiful garden and let us live in it (without having to even lift a finger to tend it).

(This is the wall of the Venetian Port stretching to the northeast above Heraklion; this is where the ferries depart for Athens or other Greek isles.)

But you see, Jesus says we have to be active about creating the kingdom of God, at the very least we have to “seek” it, we have to look for it. Because so long as we wear these backwards blinders we will not see it. We have to turn ourselves around and learn that it is through us that the kingdom becomes manifest in the world. And we have to begin to think of God as our partner in creation–“Hey mister!” indeed.

This lesson applies especially to the lgbt community. We have to learn that God has made us gay on purpose, so that we can teach our nongay peers how to turn around and see the way. After all, we spend our whole lives living in a dual reality. If anybody knows how to move from one to another, we do. So it is vitally important, not just for us, but for the kingdom itself, that we learn to have pride in who we are and to bless God for the vision we have been given in our own createdness.

In today’s Psalm God is blessed repeatedly in thanksgiving for the wonders of creation. And in today’s Gospel Jesus is at pains to explain that most people cannot see the way because they do not understand how. But we, as disciples of Christ, can not only see the way but we can lead the way. And we do this by keeping Jesus’commandments. Love God, bless God, and in so doing bless and love each other.

*6 Easter (Acts 17:22-31; Psalm 66:7-18; 1 Peter 3:13-22; John 14:15-21)

©2011 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.