Love Blooming into Eternity

Daffodils are blooming.

Tulips are next.

The rhythm of life is always visible.

I love life.

I love my husband.

I surely love God.

Life is messy by nature for sure, which is what makes it “unruly” (to quote this week’s collect). It is one thing to believe in love and another thing entirely to keep love uppermost as you go through the day dealing with dropping your keys, stubbing your toe, forgetting to pick up tomatoes on the way home, dealing with traffic, and on and on and on. We ask to be granted “grace,” which is love unbounded and freely given, because if we can achieve a state of grace then our hearts will be fixed on the place where love prevails.

God’s law is love. God speaks through the prophet Jeremiah [32:31-34] that love has been written on our hearts, in other words, God has made it a part of our created nature. An inscription for eternity. So we will know that when we love we are naturally the people of God.

The Psalmist [51:1-13] sings a prayer for mercy according to God’s “loving kindness” and “great compassion.” Cleanse us from disconnection by washing away unruliness; create a clean heart that will make my spirit love until joy sustains me.

The epistle to the Hebrews [5:5-10] connects Christ to the Old Testament stories of creation by reminding us that God has created Christ a “priest forever.” A priest is one who accepts responsibility for mediating God and humanity. One accepts the responsibility both from God and from one’s peers. The job is richly rewarding, on the one hand, and constantly challenging on the other. Although on the face of it there are lots of potlucks and plumbing repairs and learning to fire up the oil burner, mostly, the job is to lead, spiritually.

That’s it, to lead, spiritually. Christ “became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him,” linking through eternity to the people of creation. In other words, all is all, all time is all at once, and God is just God. Paeans to God notwithstanding, God is not a mighty warrior or a royal prince or anything else other than what people need God to be.

And we need more than ever for God to be love.

In John’s Gospel [12:20-33] Jesus reveals the truth of love and connection and all creation. A grain of wheat falls on the earth, it germinates, in that it ceases to be a grain of wheat, becoming a plant that bears fruit that nourishes creation. We must likewise let our lives be open to the path of creation that makes us ever flexible for love. The Jesus tells the crowd: “Now is the judgment;” now is the time.

Now is always the time. Now is always connected to all eternity. The daffodils bloom in spring; but in between they are hard at work for next time creating new life, multiplying and generating more beauty. Love builds up.

A piece I saw this week in a gay venue said that now is the time for LGBTQ+ people to celebrate ourselves. Our community created in God’s own image of love, is incredibly loving.

I posted a picture this week of my hellebore, which I planted 3 years ago and which only now, at last, has bloomed. The loving response from other queer gardeners has been not only overwhelming but profound in its love. Love builds up.

Let us bloom like the hellebores and the daffodils and tulips, let us show our love shining forth in the universe, and then let us use that love to multiply and regenerate and to sustain connection with each other, with God, with creation, into eternity.

Happy Lent.  

5 Lent Year B 2024 RCL (Jeremiah 31:31-34;; Psalm 51:1-13 Miserere mei, Deus; Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33)

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

The Beginning of the Good News

Atmospheric rivers … what a concept. Well, it seems the Pacific Northwest is the new home of them. At least this past week; we’re now on number 4 I think. True, they keep the terrestrial rivers full and the trees green and the mountains covered with snow.

Also true that they now remind me that we are in Advent. Just goes to show you how easily reference points shift; when I was a boy it was the first snowfall that let us know Christmas was right around the corner.

I always think this is a curious time of year, caught someplace between secularism and the holy. There is expectation, yes, and a glimmer of hope. There is excitement and all kinds of busy-ness from decorating to baking to shopping to … (fill in your own blank here). In the church it is a new year that opens with prayer and solemnity and with calls to the internal, which is to say we are called to turn inward to discover the ways in which we disconnect ourselves from each other and thus from God. Still, this time of year we all know what is coming soon and we have in our hearts the knowledge of the joy that is coming our way.

The prophet Isaiah is instructed by God [Isaiah 40:1-11] to “speak tenderly” and to “comfort” God’s people. Way back in 1994 I was living and working in New York City when I first encountered the Gay Games. I had no idea there even was such a thing. But one morning upon awakening and realizing I didn’t need to go to my office at the university I decided to wander down to the bodega on the corner and get a newspaper and a bagel (usually I would acquire these at Penn Station running to catch my train). Of course, it was a brilliantly sunny summer day! At the bodega I recognized the owner (of course) but nobody else, which was odd, and also it was odd that the place was crowded. I was barely awake, but slowly it began to dawn on me that it seemed like everybody in there was gay. It was a strange realization frankly. I sort of chuckled, then walking back to my apartment through crowds (I lived in Chelsea, which was then the heart of the gayborhood) I realized everybody around me seemed to be gay. And I had the odd thought “Oh, this is how they (i.e., straight people) feel all the time!” And I was comforted.

I was comforted to have known, if only for an instant, what it felt like for once in my life to be “normitive,” to be one of the “regular” majority. To let down my walls and just be me. It was glorious. Talk about “rough places plain” and “glory … revealed” and “all people see it together.”

I know I’ve written often here about the 1998 Amsterdam Gay Games; it was right after my ordination and it was a powerful time in my spiritual life. And the opportunity to be there at that time and to experience this sense yet again and for two weeks this time was a real gift.

We are too often afraid to look around us and see that the words of the prophets are not predictions about some dim future, but rather, they are revelations of our own reality.

So as I go about my daily life I no longer find myself in crowds of young gay men (more’s the pity) but I do live in a world of love created by the synchrony of my relationships, especially with my husband, who is clearly the greatest gift in my life as well.

In that realization, that this is the life given to me, that this is the glory love creates for me, is the sense of the critical importance of walking in love. When we walk in love we dwell in peace, and there in that place is where mercy and truth have met together [Psalm 85:7-13], for love produces peace which is the mother of mercy which can only thrive in truth.

I’ll say it again, that prophecy is not prediction but is revelation of our own truth, the reality about our own path into the dimension of love. There is no human time in the dimension of love, rather God’s time, which is all time all at once, forms the parameters of love. Love once experienced, once attained, is eternal [2 Peter 3:8-15a]. A glimmer is forever. The instant of realizing that there is a world full of LGBTQ+ people who God created in God’s own image—just that instant—becomes in my heart a pathway for walking in love each day. We are loved, we are created by love, we are called to love. Peter writes “we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home” … therefore we must “strive to be found … at peace.”

That brings us to the beginning of the good news” [Mark 1:1-8]. The good news, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is the pathway into the dimension of love. It is heralded by repentance—a reminder always to return to walking in love–which means connection, which means life eternal in the dimension of love.

2 Advent Year B 2023 RCL (Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13 Benedixisti, Domine; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8)

©2023 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Nonconventional Joy

These wonderful stories from the Acts of the Apostles are often considered to be about the founding of the church but it is clear that they are really about how the Gospel of love spread (did spread, can spread, does spread) from household to household, primarily through nonconventional populations. That’s an academic way of saying the people we see being baptized and embracing the Gospel in these stories are the outcasts of their time and place. This is surely directly a call to LGBTQ people. Look at what it says! Last week (Acts 16:13-15) we had “Lydia the woman who sold purple cloth.” She listened and understood and heard the message and her whole household was baptized. This week (Acts 16:16 ff.), we have gone out from Lydia’s household in Thyatira to Phillippi and now we meet a carny, described as a “slave girl who had a spirit of divination.” Later, after a fantastic earthquake comes as the climax of a prison hymn sing along, the suicidal jailer receives the Gospel and invites the whole community into his household. Does any part of this story ring any bells for you? How about a pride fest? How about a gay bar? How about drag and dancing queens? What do all of them have in common? They all have embraced joy and full out humanity as life’s path.

So it is to the people who embrace joy as life that first Jesus and then his apostles appeal. And it is these LGBTQ people who were and are the first missionaries of the Gospel, the first apostles of love.

The Revelation (22:12 ff.) reminds us that the reward of a life of love is to know timelessness. Jesus always is coming, Jesus always has come, Jesus always is to come; love always is coming, love always has come, love always is to come. Time is not linear, time is all at once. That is how love is forever both the beginning and the end. Jesus’ high priestly prayer in John (17ff.) points to the same idea, that love is all and love is always timeless. We must learn to embrace love in all things. We who love are love.

Where are we in this timelessness today? Are we on a linear path or are we living in the timeless reality of God? In the United States it is a holiday weekend—Memorial Day. COVID is rising relentlessly again even as people ignore means of mitigation, every other day it seems I learn another friend of mine has succumbed to it, after more than two years of careful avoidance. War in Ukraine plods on. The week just past in which we planned a remembrance of the murder of George Floyd we wound up sandwiched in what surely is timelessness between mass shootings in a supermarket in Buffalo and an elementary school in Texas. One of my cooking magazines is filled with references to queerness even as the threat of institutionalized violence against a woman’s right to choose hangs over us. How do we choose love in this time, in these times?

God’s eternal message to us is that we need to learn, to practice, to constantly improve, to appreciate truly how to love. It is this sense of love within us that is the manifestation of the Holy Spirit. We must embrace joy, we must follow the example of the LGBTQ lives we have been created to live by learning not only to lead lives of joy but to spread our love. Love builds up. Love help us! Amen.

7 Easter Year C 2022 RCL (Acts 16:16-34; Psalm 97 Dominus regnavit; Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21; John 17:20-26)

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

Christmas without the trappings*

I spent most of Christmas in a hospital, first in an emergency department and then in a room in the hospital. I won’t go into the details at the risk of making readers crazy, but frankly it isn’t relevant to my point. In writing this I have rediscovered the success of my childhood inculcation into the spirit of Christmas, Santa Claus and herald angels and joy to the world all wrapped up together in my six decades of experience.

This year was the first time in my whole life Christmas Eve didn’t include sleeping in expectation with memories of midnight mass (even midnight mass that was actually at 8pm) to sustain me and the hope of something sublime awaiting me in the morning. It was the first time in my life that Christmas morning held neither cinnamon rolls around the tree nor early mass, Christmas daytime was not about cooking and family and all the rest. Instead a full night of wakefulness was followed by dusk asleep in awkward positions upright in a chair. (At one point I remarked that this was exactly how I feel when I arrive in Europe after twelve hours in transit from the middle of the US—my Facebook friends know these posts as “arrived Amsterdam … ugh ugh.”) Then the day included quiet and many naps and fortunately, even a visit from a rabbi. It was sunny and cold but there was nowhere any evidence of Christmas.

So what is Christmas like without the trappings? My immediate sense is that it made me sit up and remind my emotional intuitive being of what my intellect always has known—that Christmas is about hope and eternity, about faith lived out over time, about a celebration of that which is ongoing in our hearts and souls if only we can live into it. Christmas is about the power of knowing that God is with us and within us and among us, now of course, but always as well.

This is always a tough lesson for Christians in the west because we live in a world that is mostly secularized, where Christmas means shopping and “holiday” parties and ends at sundown on the 24^th, Christmas daytime means driving some place and eating too much like a sort of second class Thanksgiving only with different traditional dishes but probably the same family fights. Awaking on the 26^th is no longer even either Boxing Day or The Feast of St. Stephen but instead some sort of new black Friday with even better sales than in the days running up to Christmas. What happened to hope? Where is faith born of the internalized knowledge of unity with God? It is as though it all has vanished, poof, in the night.

So we have to think carefully about how we can keep Christmas alive. In the church we celebrate it through the feast of the Epiphany on January 6, the famous “twelfth night.” A few years ago I was amused when a new priest colleague set up the nativity scene at the front of the church but placed the wise men and the shepherds at different places around the church, even Mary and Joseph were about half-way back. Each Sunday in Advent the pieces moved forward a bit, and as we moved through Christmas week angels began to appear as Mary and Joseph made their way to the crib. On Christmas Eve the child appeared and the shepherds drew near. And over the next two weeks of Christmas the wise men moved closer and closer as well. It was amazing to experience this sense of Christmas in motion—not static, not just one night, but dynamic and fundamentally about the growth of faith from hope rewarded. This is the meaning of Christmas.

In Galatians 3 and 4 we hear always at Christmastide this passage about “before faith came” when we were captives of “the law.” It is always read as about the past, but I think we should read it instead as being about the present and the eternal. We are not to live solely according to a list of rights and wrongs, as though some ecclesial Santa Claus is keeping a list. Rather we are to live according to our faith in the hope that Jesus makes ever visible as he continually is born and dwells among us (John 1). We are to love God always and to love each other as ourselves, always. It should be second nature, no list required.

“From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” (John 1:16).

We are home now, everything is on the mend, Christmas dinner is cooking and the presents under the tree will become the warm experience of giving and loving in vulnerability. We are filled with the renewed love born of shared experience and the faith born of hope revealed in answers to prayer and the firm knowledge of God’s presence with us and between us and within us.

How is this relevant to lgbt lives? In the most direct way possible, it is my story—our story—lived fully as Christians and fully as gay people. It is the story of our hope rewarded, our faith, our redemption in Christ, for we too are God’s children and heirs. It is the story of love fulfilled in the living, just like every day of every lgbt life.

Merry Christmas.

 

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

*First Sunday after Christmas (Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Psalm 147 or 147:13-21; Galatians 3:23-25;4:4-7; John 1:1-18)