Interaction with the Divine

Happy New Year. And, have a happy new year–we sure need one.

The scripture this week—officially the second Sunday after Christmas—is designed to focus our attention on the critical nature of the life of the newborn Savior, who is God with us. Jeremiah, one of the prophets of the great exile, breathes joy. So intense is his faith in God who will bring people back to normality “weeping” with joy, they will “walk by brooks of water,” they will “sing aloud” and “be radiant” and “their life shall become like a watered garden” and they “shall be merry.”

Merry. What a concept.

The metaphorical importance of the use of the prophet Jeremiah is directly relevant to us now I think. Jeremiah (31:7-14) prophesied to people who had been exiled, who had suffered loss of homes and family, who had been isolated and oppressed in foreign lands, who suffered to endure corrupt leaders. God’s people in Jeremiah’s day longed for a return to “normality” in their own homes. It was Jeremiah’s role to prophesy the message, the promise that God had given, which was the promise of return, not to the former life, but to a better future.

How we long to embrace such a promise. How we long to embrace each other once again. How we long to be reunited after being separated by a pandemic. How we long for just leadership. How we long for the society of friends, for our gathering places, for human warmth, for health and security. How we long for just one day with no more worse news.

In the letter to the Ephesians (1:3-6,15-19a) Paul reminds us that despite everything, we must remember that God has chosen us to be “holy and blameless … in love.” In other words, God has given us the power we need to create a restoration like the one prophesied by Jeremiah. If we can embrace the power of God’s love, we can shift into the dimension where we reside as God’s own children, adopted through Christ, to reside in grace freely bestowed. We are reminded to see the world not with our backs up but “with the eyes of [our hearts] enlightened.” Oh my …

It is into the dimension created by this enlightening of the eyes of the heart that we find the riches of the glory of what God has given us, which, is love.

And that is the eternal and profound meaning of Christmas—that love is eternally within our grasp, that we “may know what is the hope to which” God calls us, which is the power of a universe created in love, powered by love, ruled justly by love.

It is no simple task we have been given. It is easy enough to lose hope, to dwell in the doldrums of the constant thrum of worse and worse news, to begin to forget the warmth of the embrace of those we love, the aura of their smiles, the breeze of their laughter.

Like all things spiritual, it is action to which we are called. To love is to live in love and to do that is to banish the absence of love from our hearts. The scriptural example we have is that of Joseph’s actions in Matthew’s Gospel (2:13-15, 19-23). Joseph arouses his family to escape danger not once but three times. But an interesting fact about the scripture is that Joseph never makes a decision without divine interaction. Everything he does follows from “a dream” in which “an angel of the Lord” appears. But it is not only the appearance of the angel but rather it is Joseph’s interaction with the divine, it is Joseph’s response, to go in love.

It is to this kind of divine interaction that we now all are called. It is to the power of the action of love, which begins with the active banishment of the absence of love, to restore God’s will and God’s kingdom among us. Like Joseph, we are called to be active, to act in love, to react by love, to fulfill the prophecy with love.

Happy New Year. May we be merry, may our lives become like a watered garden, may we learn to walk in a new dimension of love.

2 Christmas All Years RCL 2021 (Jeremiah 31:7-14; Psalm 84:1-8; Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a; Matthew 2:13-15,19-23 ©The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

It finally snowed*

This week it finally snowed. It was Monday midday through until early Tuesday. In the afternoon Monday I went to the gym, which was curiously busier than usual, then on the way home as the sleet started pelting my car I thought to myself “go straight home.” But I didn’t. My husband had asked me to pick up something at a store and I wanted so much to please him that I diverted to that store. So an hour later when I started home again the sleet and snow had had their effect and the streets were like a well-tended skating rink, nice and firm icing with a good bit of slush as an extra tweak. I got on one long thoroughfare and it was like a parking lot for some reason. After sitting through several traffic light changes without moving we finally got to start up and of course my car at first wouldn’t go at all and then slid from side to side until I could get it into a higher gear and get some traction going on. I decided to take the first alley I could to get off of that street. I got home pretty easily after that. But as I approached my driveway, which begins with a slope up, I saw that the village had plowed and left a slush-drift at the foot of my driveway. Cleverly I gunned the motor and shifted down and immediately got stuck in the slush. It took about another half hour to get out of that, drive around the block, gun it better and get up onto the slope of my driveway, then another fifteen minutes of gunning it to get up the hill and into the garage. I could smell my car’s over exertion but I skated into the house and decided to ignore it.

That’s really the end of that story. Nothing terrible happened. The next morning I had to pay Uber twice to go to an early meeting because my snow removal guy was stuck in his own driveway and had to wait for a city plow to get out. During the stuck part I had stopped the engine and got out of the car to try to call said guy. One of my neighbors was snowblowing her sidewalks about 30 feet to the west of where I was stuck and another was shoveling his sidewalk across the street, about 10 feet south of me. I sort of expected one or the other would volunteer to help by pushing me out of the drift. (Oddly, this happened more than once in Philadelphia where snow is relatively rare and always problematic. A couple of times when I had to go out to pastoral crises in a snow storm I backed out and got stuck and whichever neighbors were out shoveling all came and gave me a push. It’s actually easy to push a car with its engine running out of a stuck position like that. I suppose my clerical collar and little black communion kit and stole in my hand probably served as a clue that I could use some help on those occasions.)

I guess I bring this up partly because I keep thinking how odd it is that midwesterners seem so unhospitable and selfish. We have lots of neighbors on this street but we’ve only ever had a hospitable greeting from our neighbors to the east, who are pretty friendly but weren’t around this time. I go back and forth in my brain trying to figure out whether people are just standoffish culturally, or whether they’re letting us know they’d rather not have gay neighbors.

If you’re reading this you probably know what I mean. We all encounter lots of variable behavior in all of life. But sometimes you just have that gnawing sense that what’s going on is really discrimination because you’re gay. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I’m never sure what to think but I do try to keep my eyes more open henceforth.

Those would be the “eyes of your heart” I’m writing about now. That phrase appears in Ephesians 3:18. Paul writes that it is with those eyes that we will know the hope of the Christ child, the riches of our inheritance with Him as children of God and the power of our faith. It is with these eyes of our hearts that we simultaneously see and feel. Did you ever say something off the cuff without carefully considering it’s impact and see someone’s face fall in response? Those are the moments when you’ve somehow sent a message that was perceived by the eyes of the heart. It’s a tricky business, being a person of faith, and being a child of God open to the beauty of full communion with God and with each other, and yet at the same time being both totally vulnerable and totally self-centeredly human.

It is in that vulnerability and openness that we can experience the true power of loving one another. And yet it also is in that space where we can so easily hurt and be hurt, exclude and be excluded.

Our celebration of the birth of Christ is in many ways a feast of vulnerability. Joseph and Mary have to travel on foot when she is nearing term, and they have no choice when labor approaches but to park themselves in a stable. Our Prince of Peace is actually a newborn, totally vulnerable to all of creation. On and on it goes even to this story in Matthew (2:13-15, 19-23) where a very visceral threat causes Joseph to flee with his family and on return to settle in a new and foreign place as they overstate these days “out of an abundance of caution.” As always, the truth of Scripture lies in our ability to comprehend the metaphor as meaningful to our own lives.

LGBT people are living in a new more hopeful time. I am learning to refer openly to “my husband” out there in the real world without worrying what a coming out it is each time I utter it. The hope we live with in our new and relatively more equal lives is closely tethered to those eyes-of-the-heart. As Christians we need always to love actively with those eyes heart-enabled.

We have three more days of Christmastide before the Feast of the Epiphany. Enjoy them in peace.

 

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

*2 Christmas (Jeremiah 31:7-14; Psalm 84:1-8; Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a; Matthew 2:13-15,19-23)