Microhabitats of Love

Microhabitats can be fascinating. It is time for Japanese Camellias to bloom in Oregon. My neighbor’s, which is about 100 meters away from my study window, has been blooming for two weeks. Mine just started blooming this week; as I drive around I see some blooming, some just budding. What makes the difference?

Well, sometimes they’re called microhabitats, small spaces that have microclimates. I know, for example, that the roses and Japanese Maple east of my house are in a protected environment and the sun’s warmth is amplified there. But in my west garden under pretty serious tree canopy, the same plants are weeks behind. Fascinating.

But then, how is it we comprehend that, but we cannot comprehend that we live in a multidimensional universe, where some of us live in a universe of love? All at once.

God, who is love, which is the power of creation, which is the force of the universe, took human form in Jesus, to teach us how to move into and thrive in the dimension of love.

Abram, encounters God, and is transformed [Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16]. Encounter with God causes what theologians call an “ontological shift;” being itself changes. You might have experienced this–my own experiences of ontological shift include my marriage and my ordinations. Everything looks the same, but everything is different too. In the story, Abram’s body is changed from elderly to vibrant, his name is changed because his being is now suffused with love, his wife is also transformed, which further transforms his ontological reality. In the aftermath of the encounter Abraham receives from God a covenant of love fulfilled.

On the face of it, the story is about how God “changes” Abram and Sarai into Abraham and Sarah. But that misses the point. In reality—one might even say in truth—Abram and Sarai were walking in love where they encountered God as they moved into the eternal dimension of love.

The Psalmist rejoices with praise [Psalm 22:22-30]. Love, God, is open to every petition. Love, God, fulfills, fills, satisifies. Love, God, sustains the heart, the heart sustains love in synchrony, love builds up.

Paul’s own midrash on Abraham [Romans 4:13-25] is focused on the promise of the covenant of love eternal, which comes through the experience of faith, which is lived experience of love. It was Abraham and Sarah’s life of loving that drew them closer to the realization of their encounter with God. In other words, love builds up, love is attracted to love, love rests on grace which is love received, faith builds as love builds as lived experience. Love, walking in love, is living rightly. “Therefore … faith was reckoned … as righteousness.”

In Mark’s Gospel [8:31-38] Jesus has quite directly told the disciples the details of the journey toward crucifixion and resurrection on which he, Jesus, and they, have embarked. Peter rebukes Jesus for saying such things. Peter lets his feelings overwhelm him. Jesus calls out the absence of love; he says to get the absence of love behind him. Jesus makes the difficult proclamation “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” To cling to self, to things, to hunker down is to shut out love, which is to lose life itself. It is a tough lesson to learn that those who give up whatever love requires thereby enter the dimension of salvation in which love transforms everything.

LGBTQ+ people often live in microhabitats subject to microclimates. We live deeply into the love we share, which is the love that defines us, which is the love with which we are created in God’s own image. We cling fiercely to our security. We celebrate our love. We have been called to walk in the dimension of love, to be transformed by love, to be the visible evidence of the power of love. We are called to lead the building up of love that has the power to transform our microhabitats into the grace and power of the dimension of love. We are called to show how to receive from God a covenant of love fulfilled.

2 Lent Year B 2024 RCL (Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22:22-30 Deus, Deus meus; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38)

©2024 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Alive in the Covenant of God’s Love

The Great Litany [Book of Common Prayer 148] begins:

O God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth,
Have mercy upon us.
O God the Son, Redeemer of the world,
Have mercy upon us.
O God the Holy Ghost, Sanctifier of the faithful,
Have mercy upon us.
O holy, blessed, and glorious Trinity, one God,
Have mercy upon us.

Remember not, Lord Christ, our offenses, nor the offenses of our forefathers; neither reward us according to our sins.
Spare us, good Lord, spare thy people, whom thou hast redeemed with thy most precious blood, and by thy mercy preserve us, for ever.
Spare us, good Lord.

And, the collect for the First Sunday in Lent asks God to “Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations” [Book of Common Prayer 218].

Remember that old phrase “the quick and the dead”? Did you know the word “quick” doesn’t mean “hurry up”? It means, “alive” (OED: “living, endowed with life, animate). So, then, for what do we pray when we pray for God to “come quickly” to help us? We pray for God to continue to fulfill the lives God created for us to live. We are asking God to stand by us, to be our fortress in every storm. Because we know in our souls that we are created in God’s image, and that we are endowed with God’s love, and that all we need is to be “quick”—to be alive.

In the story of Noah’s ark and the rainbow covenant [Genesis 9:8-17], we see a reflection of our creation in God’s image as the story presents an almost human-like God interacting with Noah and with the creatures of all creation. God announces God’s covenant four times, over and over. But, that doesn’t distract from the promise God made, to set a bow in the clouds, that would be forever a reminder that all of creation is united in love.

This week we saw evidence of that: “Greece Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage in a First for an Orthodox Christian Country” (CNN, Elinda Labropoulu, Feb. 15. 2024).

Greece is alive, LGBTQ+ people in Greece are “quick,” the rainbow—the sign of God’s covenant—blesses creation.

Psalm 25[3-9] has us sing the truth that love is love, God is love, we who are created in God’s image, are love. Compassion, everlasting, faithfulness, all have to do with love. And this love is love in action, the love that creates, the love that saves, the love that rescues, the love that sustains.

Peter explains [1 Peter 3:18-22] that indeed, “God waited patiently in the days of Noah.” God gave us baptism, a washing clean from sin, in clear running water of the Holy Spirit, as a sign of the covenant God made with Noah’s people and the creatures of the ark, that forever more God would sustain creation. Jesus, God incarnate, had to be baptized to show us how to remain forever humble in creation.

Mark’s Gospel [1:9-13] continues, or if you prefer, begins, the narrative of God’s saving action in creation through the ministry of Jesus, which begins with his baptism by John in the Jordan river. God’s Spirit in one fell swoop announces Jesus’ divinity and then drives him out into “the wilderness” of temptation.

Of course, temptation is all around us. We tend to read this story and try to imagine what might have tempted Jesus (and in other Gospel narratives examples are supplied) but the primary temptation in creation is the urge to avoid love. We are tempted not to walk in love, because it is easier to go with the flow, it is easier to think only of our own interior needs and not to blind ourselves to the beauty of the “quick,” the alive, the glory, the evidence of God’s covenant visible when we walk in love.

The story also tells us that while Jesus was in the wilderness “the angels waited on him” and indeed, angels do wait upon us, even in our own self-imposed wilderness.

In Little Richard: King and Queen of Rock and Roll [PBS American Masters 6/2/2023] we meet one of the angels that accompanied Little Richard—Sir Lady Java, a trans activist, singer, and angel who befriended Little Richard for decades. Sir Lady Java’s insightfully holy comment in is: “Being yourself is the hardest thing to be.” All of us who are God’s LGBTQ+ children know this all too well. Indeed, we know the temptation all to well. But I bet we know who our angels are, too.

Jesus returns from his time in the wilderness “quick” alive “proclaiming the good news” and “saying “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.”

All we have to do to see it is to walk in love into the dimension where we all are alive in the covenant of God’s love.

First Sunday in Lent Year B 20242 RCL (Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-9 Ad te, Domine, levavi; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15)

©2024 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Love is the Doorway: Remember to Love

Well … [a deep subject one of my friends like to say] … here we are. We are either at the dawn of a new day, or we are at the precipice … we won’t know for awhile I guess. But, we do know this, that God is with us always. The best evidence of that I have seen lately is all of the signs on lawns that say “we’re all in this together.” Because, you know, that’s about the size of it.

Love is always the answer. And LGBTQ people, because we are God’s special children created to love, are in charge of giving love. It is up to us to remember to love.

In the US we are experiencing a moment of cautious optimism. Okay, yesterday it was elation. But today we are cautiously optimistic for the first time in years. And in Oregon the sun is shining. Nice how that works isn’t it?

Now is a tricky time, then, because we want to believe in all of those good feelings we have. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who heard a call out to LGBTQ people in President-Elect Biden’s speech last night. I cried. When has a call out to all of the people included us? It was a combination of joy and relief and pride. It felt great. It felt like the kind of loving feeling we want to hold onto forever.

Of course, we have to remember that we can get carried away. We can allow ourselves to be almost addicted to those kinds of feelings to the point that it becomes a form of idolatry if by allowing ourselves to believe in those good feelings alone we allow ourselves to forget that we must continue to give out love. We are meant not just to take happy endorphins in, but we must always give out love. It’s like breathing really—good feelings in, love out, no matter how hard it is to keep doing it.

The story of the covenant at Shechem in Joshua (24:1-3a, 14-25) is the story of God’s people choosing love over everything. Joshua reminded the people to “incline your hearts to God”—to give love—and the people chose to serve and obey God, who is love. Foreign gods, idolatry—we easily make substitutions for God, we pay tribute to everything that gives us a vapid good feeling however fleetingly—but God is love, and only love, and only love is permanent and true and reliable. The way to remain firm in faith and at one with God is to “incline your hearts”—to give love.

But it is easy enough in the course of daily life to forget, to turn inward, to get lost in the chaos of getting along, to forget all about love. Therefore, we need to be reminded. Psalm 78 (1-7) reflects the covenant at Shechem in the form of a song, a kind of oral history, to be sung again and again as a reminder to not forget that our covenant is a covenant of love. We must be alert to the opportunity to keep loving, to look around us and see that love builds up. In 1 Thessalonians (4:13-18) Paul reminds us to “encourage one another with these words.” The triumph of love is like this then: trumpets sound in your heart, archangels call in your heart, life itself is magnified into a brilliant light, and those who love and give love are alive forever. We are to remind each other—to say “love” to each other constantly, to “encourage one another with these words.”

In Matthew’s Gospel (25:1-13) Jesus tells the parable of ten bridesmaids, five wise who are prepared and five foolish who are not. He starts with “then the kingdom of heaven will be like this,” pointing to the fact that the kingdom of heaven is already with us if we can find the doorway into dimension where it exists. You see, even in the kingdom of heaven it is critical to remember to love. The wise and foolish bridesmaids are just like us, either giving love or being distracted by false gods. We must, as Jesus says, keep awake, encourage one another, remember to incline our hearts, and remember to love.

The kingdom of heaven has always been here; it is why I call this blog “dimensions of reality”—if only we could make ourselves turn to the real God, who is love, then we would see that we already live in the kingdom of heaven. Heaven is not a promise for some distant disembodied future, heaven is now, if only we can embrace it. Love is the doorway into that dimension. To enter we have to give love.

I know, it’s really hard. Scary even. But go ahead and try, that scariness makes it more exciting too. Try it out: say “I love you” and mean it. And the next time someone cuts you off in the supermarket aisle, don’t scream, just turn around and go the other way. And when someone bumps into you by the broccoli, smile (you have to use your eyes now because your mask will hide your mouth). That’s all, just smile. I’ll bet you will hear something like “oh, doesn’t this look great today?” And you will both walk away feeling loved. It’s that simple and that hard all at once.

Keep awake, encourage one another, incline your hearts … and remember to love.

Proper 27 Year A RCL 2020 (Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25; Psalm 78:1-7 Attendite, popule; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Matthew 25:1-13)

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