Love, By Name

What is God trying to tell us now? And why doesn’t God just send us a text so we’ll know what God is up to?

It’s a good question. How are we supposed to know what we are supposed to do?

The answer, of course, always is, we are mostly already doing what we are supposed to do, what we are doing is what God has called us to do. Unless you are troubled by what you are doing, in which case you are maybe needing to reconsider what it is that you think God has called you to do. Most of us, day by day, soup by sandwich by roast by cake by granola, we are doing what God has called us to do. Instacart, Telehealth, Zoom, we are doing what God has called us to do.

A theme in today’s scripture is being called by name by God.

My own calling(s) were more intimate than that, no names required. When I was 5 years old and beyond I was called to go to church with my grandmother, whose father had been a pastor. Grandma knew even then that I was called to follow in her father’s footsteps. I loved going to church, and I especially loved the shared intimacy of knowing God together with my beloved Grandma. She rocked me in her arms as a baby, she famously rocked me in her rocking chair in the basement through a tornado, she gave me quiet space where an introverted child could thrive, she taught me to teach (she was a teacher), she taught me to cook, she taught me most of all to love and to love being loved. And she took me to church. I remember sitting beside her too small to see over the pew so I colored the bulletin. Then I remember growing taller, and eventually singing with her from the same hymnal. Her favorite hymn was Holy Holy Holy and that was indeed the processional hymn at my ordination to the priesthood. My husband and my mother and brother and cousins all sat in the front row next to a chair reserved for Grandma, who had passed in 1972 but we all knew she was there with us. I felt her strong arms and her powerful spirit as I knelt at the bishop’s feet and the priests pressed down on me during Veni Creator Spiritus, I felt her warm smile and her applause as the bishop and my best friend stood me up and turned me around to great applause as “the newest priest.”

When we hear God’s voice we know we are called to what we do.

Even in the tough times.

Even in the trenches.

Even in the hurtful moments. Especially in the hurtful moments. We were called to love each other, even when it doesn’t work out. And, even then we are called to continue to love each other.

I know, it’s “Mother’s Day.” My mother passed in 2010, and my husband’s mother passed in 2018. We joked yesterday “did you send a card.” We loved our mothers and they loved us and we still love them and they still love us.

But on this Mother’s Day what we all are called to do is: keep Ukraine uppermost in our prayers, constantly; keep liberty uppermost in our prayers, because the liberty of LGBTQ people is now more seriously threatened than it has been in decades; and, keep love uppermost in our prayers, because it is love that calls us each by name. It is love who knows our voices, it is love that raises us up, it is love that powers the great multitude of the saints before the throne.

I still say, as I have said for decades now, that this white-robed army of martyrs singing before the throne of God is the choir of all of my friends who died from AIDS, the white robes are those hospital gowns they died in. They were all perfectly joyous children of God, they all loved perfectly, and they were all called before their time to go to God. And they were all acolytes and choristers and beautiful hearts and powerful souls, all called in their white hospital gowns to go before God and sing “hallelujah.”

The Revelation says “God will wipe away every tear.”

In the meantime, we are no sheep. We are the disciples. It is we, who like Peter are called to pray and love and heal by calling all of God’s children by name.

Fourth Sunday of Easter Year C 2022 RCL (Acts 9:36-43; Psalm 23; Revelation 7:9-17; John 10:22-30)

Theophany of Love

I am blessed to live in one of the most beautiful corners of creation. In fact, I consider myself doubly blessed because, having lived in Oregon as a college student many moons ago and then headed off to points east to make my way in the world, I have been called back to this magnificent cathedral of sky and forest and mountain and sea and powerful river. A favorite meditation pastime for me has become “what called me back,” and “why am I here again now?” There are, as you might guess, many answers to those questions. But I keep coming back over and over to the deep comprehension that there is holiness in the beauty of this creation. This very holiness moves my soul to deep expression of love. Indeed, all of my life I have had the charism of responding physically to the revelation of great beauty. Anything of immense beauty—from the chords of mighty music to the blood-red sunset on the Aegean to the vast fields of tulips in The Netherlands to the smiles from the hearts of those I love—any manifestation of beauty produces in me a dual physical and spiritual response of the outpouring of love from my soul. While it is entertaining to regale friends (and readers) with stories of having to pull over to the side of the road when I am reduced to tears of joy at the vision of Mount Hood, there is at the same time a powerful explanation. As a priest I am called to lift up holiness as both an offering and a sacrifice. It is crystal clear to me that this life I now lead in this splendiferous environment is intended to plug my soul into the Holy Spirit the better to allow me to serve as a conduit for love. The more love I experience the more love I can give, the more love I can give the more love there is in creation, the more love there is in creation the more love all of us can tune into for healing, and (of course) for love.

Part of the job of the calling to spiritual leadership is the job of discerning the presence of holiness in the mundane all around us. Like most people I experience this in the very simplest expressions of love—a grin, a sneeze, the flick of a wrist, a facial expression—all of those things that are the electricity of love between people. I know when I see a smile on the face of my beloved that God is with us.

I find it in nature too, of course, as I often convey in this blog. Sitting here writing this listening to music I have to chuckle at the way the sun keeps breaking through the cloudy gray skies each time my heart begins to sing. This is no accident, this is the revelation of God’s presence, which is always with us but which, unfortunately we too often forget to realize. It is only when we remember to walk in the dimension of love that we can see clearly that we are in the presence of holiness. It is exactly when we remember to walk in the dimension of love that we know we are in the presence of God, especially when we bask in a loved one’s smile.

Theophany is the theological term for the manifestation of the divine in human cognition. The word means roughly “the appearance of God” and it is a wonderful description of the surprise we encounter when we experience holiness. The surprise at the appearance is the wonderfully tender chuckle of the Holy Spirit at the simple beauty of the moment when any one of us remembers to walk in the dimension of love and “bingo” there is our theophany, there is a glimpse of sunlight in our hearts.

In Exodus (33:12-23) we see Moses bargaining yet again with God. God makes two promises, first that “my presence will go with you and I will give you rest” and then that “I will make all my goodness pass before you” and that, indeed, as Moses will see the retreating presence of God so will all of God’s faithful people know mercy and grace.

In 1 Thessalonians (1:1-10) Paul sums up what it means to respond to holiness by walking in the dimension of love. It is to give love as the very work of faith, it is to grow and expand the giving of love as the blessed labor of faith, and it is to be steadfast in hope. To be steadfast in hope is to be secure in the knowledge of love given and received and grown and expanded. To be steadfast in hope is to know in your heart the power of those simple grins and sneezes that are the signs of the presence of God’s love within and among us always.

What does it mean to see God? How can we see God? We can see God when we see glory pass across the smiling face of another. We can be steadfast in hope when we understand that it is in and through each of us that holiness becomes theophany in the simple expression of love.

In Matthew’s Gospel (22:15-22) Jesus tussles with his adversaries about what seems to be a coin for paying a tax to the emperor: “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” In reality the challenge is to understand the power of temptation to draw us from the holiness of love. It is easy enough to become ensnared in the embrace of irrelevancies that seem too real, when the reality is in the giving of love, the reality for us must always be found walking in the dimension of love.

God gives us love, God asks us to walk in love and this is God’s due that we not only see the presence of God in and among us but that we maintain the realization of holiness by the constant giving of love. We give God God’s due when we look into the hearts of all of the children of God where we will, indeed, see God’s face.

So then where is theophany for LGBTQ people? In our hearts of course. We especially are called to the realization of the presence of God in and among us and in the love we share. We especially, who are created by God in God’s own image as people of love, are called to remember to walk in love.

LOL, the sun just came out again.

Proper 24 Year A 2020 RCL (Exodus 33:12-23; Psalm 99; 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10; Matthew 22:15-22)

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

Bay leaves*

I find myself missing Christmas. It seems like it went by so fast this year, as though there were just a few moments of that simple innocent sweetness, that joy we call “merry,” and then poof, it was all over, gone! The Christmas tree gone, the decorations put away, thanks to a minor thaw the outdoor lights are down. The last poinsettia gave up the ghost this week. And, we finally finished sharpening our teeth on the six week old gingerbread cookies that had been hanging on the tree; the eating of them after Christmas is as much of a tradition in our house as the making and decorating and hanging of them! I couldn’t bear to put away the cookie tin so I made peanut butter cookies. I suppose my yearning for that sweet moment to last is not unlike the yearning of our faith, the desire to hang on to a moment as though to stretch it for a lifetime.

Of course in the dimensions of our faith there are different time lines. I recently made a post on Facebook about the last bay leaf.

Almost thirty years ago, Brad’s mother sent me a wreath of bay leaves for Christmas. I remember thinking how huge it was at the time, but it was touching to receive it, and it was beautiful. We hung it up in the kitchen for that holiday season and then preserved it in various ways, and just last week the last two whole leaves (one of them is visible there on the left in the foreground) went into a pot of soup. If you think about it it is a very real example of a Christmas moment that lasted in reality for decades, and that will last in virtual reality as a memory and a story much longer.

And, of course, the story is not about Christmas or bay leaves, although it is on one level about those things. It is about the first gift a man’s mother sent to her son’s boyfriend, a man she hadn’t yet met although they’d been living together for more than a decade. A man she had heard could cook, and a man to whom she knew she now was trusting her son. She and her husband were wonderful parents and friends. They supported us through thick and thin, even when I decided at mid-life to become a priest. Eventually we were able to make it legit by getting married and making them true in-laws. You see, all of that goodness and depth and family love, all of it springing from one story about a Christmas that lasts forever in its own dimension.

That is sort of how scripture works too. The stories are likely real accounts of real events to some extent, as difficult as it might be for us to comprehend a reality from thousands of years ago expressed in language that is many translations away from its original expression. But the details connect us with God by reminding us of our own lives and how our lives connect us with God through each other. The simple stories in scripture are as complex and rich in implication as our own stories.

A reading from Jonah (3:1-5, 10) reminds us that not only is God always present but that repentance is always both necessary and possible. But the part that stuck with me was the simple statement that Ninevah was a city so large that it was a three-day’s walk across it. It reminded me of a time of distress in my journey toward priesthood. I was living in New York part of each week at the time; I left my apartment at 116^th Street and Broadway and walked, contemplating, praying, and communing with God but not otherwise paying attention until, some hours later, I realized I was sitting on a pier in the West Village, which is to say I had walked more than 100 blocks south in Manhattan almost completely unaware. Of course while my body walked, and my soul swirled in a cyclone of emotion, all around me the giant city was teaming and as they used to say on television there were many millions of stories in the city. Many dimensions intersecting all at once, of course, but I was able to be with God, the literal meaning of repentance, alone in God’s dimension. So I got to thinking what it was like for Jonah. It says he walked about a day’s distance and that he was preaching the whole time, and even that his message was effective. But what was really happening for him?

Mark’s gospel is the oldest and in some ways the plainest, the most direct, of the synoptics. There is little embellishment of the stories. And yet the essentials are starkly present. In this week’s story (1:14-20) Jesus is calling his disciples to come from their boats to follow him, to move from the reality of the hard physical labor of gathering fish for food to the hard spiritual labor of convincing people to shift into God’s dimension. The quotation attributed to Jesus shifts tenses: he says the time “is” fulfilled, the kingdom of God “has” come near, and then he commands the crowds to repent and hear. It is a sign of the shifting dimensions that the reality of the human time in which Jesus lived was fulfilled, that God’s kingdom already had been nearby all along, and that the way to find God’s kingdom was to repent in a kind of constant future, to turn in inward solitude to the place where life’s long walk of reality is at the same time unity with God, because this is where we hear the good news that we all already are God’s children. It is we who refuse to hear, you know, who risk missing the open door to God’s kingdom, which already very much is in our midst.

Sometimes when we hear these stories we cannot imagine how we ever could be called by Jesus, and yet the truth is that the real lives we are leading are those to which we have been called. The truth is that we are called to live into the reality that can find two families learning how to have gay sons and brothers-in-law, and that in that reality we can find ourselves on a long walk with God, leading to the dimension where we all share God’s kingdom. The reality is that your truth is the real truth, your life is the long walk with God. All you have to do is listen and hear and believe.

*3 Epiphany (Jonah 3: 1-5, 10; Psalm 62: 6-14; 1 Corinthians 7: 29-31; Mark 1:14-20)

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