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.

Justice and Diversity*

I’m the sort of person who enjoys regularity. I like to count on knowing what each day will be like. I know, it sounds boring, but it is how I work best. I find it jarring when things are out of the ordinary. Like when I plan to have guests in my backyard but it is so hot we have to stay in. Or when I plan to have a whole day with no plans at all, and I discover everybody el’ has lots of plans for me.

LGBT people understand about this sort of thing, except it takes a cultural form for us. We go through life expecting to be treated like everyone else. But then, all of a sudden some little thing just isn’t quite right; is it discrimination? is it my imagination? Let’s say you try a restaurant with your spouse, and the service is terrible. Now, is this a terrible restaurant, or is your server showing some attitude to a gay couple? Often it is, in fact, discrimination, subtle or otherwise. It’s jarring, it throws us.

God occupies a place that is unbounded by time or space. God is everywhere and in every moment. Scripture in general, has a lot of reminders about how to watch out for God, as though God might drop by at any moment and catch us by surprise. But the truth is God is already here, God is always already here. It is we who do not understand that God is not like a tv commercial that comes and goes and runs a couple of minutes and then it’s over; you know, you can fast forward over it. God is already, always, here. No fast-forwarding past God.

We find God by learning to walk in love. That expression is St. Paul’s, from his letter to the Ephesians [5:2]. It mirrors much of what we often hear Jesus say, constantly reminding us that the kingdom of God has come near.For example, waking in love reminds us that we find God when we learn to experience God’s love. Now God’s love, is shared experience; God’s love is mutual caring; God’s love is mutual giving— sharing, caring and giving, always mutually, God’s roads go both directions.

Isaiah tells us that this is accomplished by learning to do good, and especially to seek justice. We experience the presence of God when we share and care and give to each other. We experience the presence of God when we create justice for every part of God’s kingdom. We experience the presence of God when we let ourselves be open to each other. Justice means not just equality of being, but equality of treatment, and special attention to it.

Another important part, of course, is action; we are to “walk” in love, not sit about, not wait, but walk, go, and do. We discover God walking with us when we take loving action, sharing and caring and giving and creating justice.

Jesus often reminds us we have to be ready. He means, we need to boldly walk in love, we need to always create justice. And then Jesus says [Luke 12:40]: “the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” He means, God, in Christ, is already here. What is more unexpected than right now?

One more thing: we are told that God will not be keeping silence; [Psalm 50:3] “round about [God] is a raging storm.” It means we cannot let our faith fall into complacence. We cannot just take our faith for granted. We have to work at it, in every moment. We have to learn to push through life’s raging storms. We have to demand the kind of justice that leads to regularity within the diversity of God’s kingdom.

Regularity is not a bad thing. God loves regularity too. That’s why trees are green and the sun is yellow and the sky is blue. But then again, every day, the water in Lake Michigan is a different color of blue. That is God’s diversity. Just as each one of us is made in God’s image, as different as we all are, we all are the image of God; even LGBT people.

 

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

*Proper 14 (Isaiah 1:1, 10-20 Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24 Deus deorum Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16 Luke 12:32-40)

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)

Once in a blue moon*

Metaphor can be both a wonderful and a terrible thing. I mean, it’s nice to know some things happen only once in a blue moon while others are common as pie. It’s exciting to encounter the best thing since sliced bread, and it’s a relief not to be as skittish as a cat on a hot tin roof. I grew up in the Midwest with Midwestern parents and their language was well-seasoned (I was going to say peppered but thought to be more meta-analytical about it) with metaphors that helped explain both life around us and our course through it. It is a part of human experience.

A few years ago in my other work as a scholar of knowledge organization, I was studying tagging—you know those labels you stick on things in Facebook or Youtube or Flickr?—and the peer-reviewers of a draft paper I had written sent me to read about cognitive linguistics, which itself is a bit of a brain twister, because it is about subconscious linguistic ticks. Thinks like “once in a blue moon” that we say and mean but without really being cognitive about it. That is, we don’t think about a moon that is literally blue before we use that phrase; in fact, most people have never seen a blue moon, and if they have it probably wasn’t actually blue, but they use the phrase anyway and with a pretty specific meaning. (Which means that both “moon” and “blue moon” are the kinds of signs called icons, but that’s semiotics, I’ll save that for another occasion).

There are a couple of reasons this might be important for my research. For instance, many people believe we can harvest all of those tags people have added online and use them like a thesaurus. So let’s say we do that, and you want to search for uses of blue cheese in salads from different cultures. Do you really want also to retrieve all of the expressions about “blue moon”? Remember, the moon is made of cheese (green, if I recall correctly). So in such a search engine a blue moon and a moon made from green cheese will be retrieved in a search for “blue cheese.”

Well, it gets worse too. It turns out there is something called fictive scanning. We all do it (except me, now, because I am too afraid of it, so I’ve just stopped talking spontaneously; that’s why, when you ask me a question in person, I often just stand there staring … I’m frozen in abject horror about all of the potential linguistic errors I could commit). This is the one where you tell a lie but everyone overlooks it, because it is more efficient than telling the truth. My favorite—you are sitting on a passenger plane, which just has landed at some airport, and all around you people start jabbering on their cellphones “I just landed.” Well, no they didn’t and they’d better be grateful they were on a plane that did! Well, maybe you see my point. And, maybe you understand why it is that sometimes I think between linguistics and theology we should just give up—one big shrug. But, that is not the Anglican way—it is the way tried by other faith communities all around us but it is not our way, our way is to use reason in equal measure with tradition. Thinking is hard, but useful, as it turns out.

So do you know what a plumb line is? Do you know what plumb is? Plumb means square, as in not crooked or leaning in any direction. When something is plumb it won’t collapse as a victim of gravity, but it will stand and be strong. We’re talking about structures here, but only metaphorically. A plumb line is great fun if you’re a beginning carpenter. It’s a long string wrapped around a core that is hidden inside a big weighted pendulum (a bob). Mine is blue, and has blue chalk inside it, so that when you pull the string out the string is covered with blue chalk (this has nothing to do with the blue moon, mind you). You hold the end of the string at a given specific point, and when the bob (ever hear of a plumb bob? now you have) stops swinging the line is plumb. If you can manage to secure the bob then pluck the string, it will snap and leave a straight blue line where it hit the surface. These often are used for making saw cuts, or for aligning pieces that need to fit together.

Clever theologians have pulled together three pieces of scripture for today and added to them a delightful Psalm, which is to be understood as our heartfelt songburst in response to the other scripture. The lessons are Amos 7:7-17 in which God says God has set a plumb line in the midst of God’s people and they’d better learn to live squarely around it, Colossians 1:1-14 in which Paul says he will pray constantly that we might know God’s will, not to mention be strong about it, and Luke 10:25-37 in which Jesus makes it pretty clear the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself, the oft-referred to “golden rule”, this is the plumb line. In between we find Psalm 82 in which the psalmist prays for those who go about not understanding and acknowledges the power of God, who is holding that plumb line.

It’s all very clear (just kidding), and we could even make a good lgbt point that the story of the good Samaritan can be read as what would it be like if an outrageous persecutor of gay people was set upon or robbed or injured in our midst, of course Jesus would want us to treat that person as we would want to be treated. That’s all perfectly clear.

But the part that is not so clear is the part about the plumb line. Remember, it moves. It swings, inscribing an arc as it goes,

 

 

 

and when it settles and you try to snap that line as a marker you are in peril of causing it to swing more or to move to the right or left a tad and thereby inscribe yet another arc.

 

 

 

So what does that mean? It means God’s creation is solid and strong and sure because it is made plumb by God. But, like the arcs in the second pictures, it also means there is no single place where God’s judgment is without reason. It means there is diversity in God’s creation. It means there is room inside all of the many overlapping arcs inscribed by God’s plumb line. It means life is gloriously messy with lots of space for diversity. The plumb line is in your heart; it is only you who can love your neighbor as yourself. Just remember, everybody is your neighbor. There are no exceptions.

Proper 10 (Amos 7:7-17; Psalm 82; Colossians 1:1-14; Luke 10:25-37)

©2103 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Diversity in your midst*

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if gay people truly were integrated. In my own mind I would want it to be something like the atmosphere at the Gay Games. There, almost everybody is lgbt. I first experienced that in New York in 1994, and then again in Amsterdam in 1998. It was wonderful, if fleeting, to be able to walk around in an exclusively lgbt environment. But I don’t think that is what integration is going to look like. I think integration is going to look a lot like, well, Amsterdam today, or maybe San Francisco or New York or Los Angeles. There, lgbt culture sort of disappears into the background. I was in Los Angeles earlier this summer, and the main thing I remember was hearing Lady Gaga everywhere I went. I think that’s what integration will look like.
Which sort of goes to show you that God has God’s own plan for things. This is a close relative of that old saw “be careful what you wish for (or we could say, pray for)” because you might get it. But, it might turn out to be not at all what you had in mind.
This week’s scripture has that lesson from Exodus about “manna from heaven.” The people complain that by following God they’ve wound up out in the wilderness starving. So God promises them plenty of bread. Only when they get it, it comes in the form of a dust-like substance in the morning dew. No leavened loaves for them. It goes well with the Gospel parable about the laborers hired last in the day who have got the same wage as those who worked all day in the hot sun. These go well together because they both speak to the issue of the power of God to make the experience of creation equivalent, regardless of the many kinds of divergence humans try to introduce. In God’s intension, all is equal, all parts of creation are equal, all persons in creation are equal, and each person’s share in creation is equal.
That’s a good thing, because it means there truly is no discrimination, no bar to salvation, no room for injustice in God’s kingdom. If people suddenly stopped discriminating, what would the world look like? It would look about the same, except there would be more diversity in each person’s immediate presence. And the cultural things that arise to keep us apart would begin to disappear.
It is a situation much to be desired. Do you want a glimpse? Have a look at the chancel at the Church of the Holy Trinity any Sunday, then, when you come to communion look along the rail, and as you head back to your seat look around the church. There you have it. God’s kingdom in diversity, in equality, in your midst.

*Proper 20 (Exodus 16:2-15, Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45 Confitemini Domino, Philippians 1:21-30, Matthew 20:1-16)
©2011 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.