Alert with Love

We are having a good summer, thanks be to God. The weather is great, the landscape is green, the gardens are rich at last (except for tomatoes, everybody in the Pacific Northwest is having trouble with the tomatoes because of the late rainy spring). In addition to ducking out to the garden for herbs or greens I’m also cutting fresh flowers a few times a week. I feel like Miss Marple heading out the door with my basket and clippers! One evening last week we had a party for ourselves on the patio, it was great fun, lots of good food ending with marshmallows roasted over the fire pit. My husband and I are both healthy, which is great. And, one day I even had a complete run of green lights all the way home. I diligently remembered to say “thank you, thank you, thank you” for each light!

It is the thanks that is the operative thing, after all, it is gratitude that builds love by building good feelings in the heart. It is the remembrance of the source of life and creation that links us not only to God but to one another.

In the opening of Isaiah (1:1, 10-20) God rants (yes, rants!) about the formalities of worship—sacrifices of bulls and goats, clouds of incense, solemn festivals and singing. Of course, the problem is that the people have replaced faithfulness—the remembrance of and gratitude for the source of life—with functions. The worship has become human-centered, the people do those things that make them happy rather than those things that express true gratitude. It is a curiously important lesson now even as it was in Isaiah’s day twenty-nine centuries ago. The psalmist agrees (50:24) “Whoever offers me the sacrifice of thanksgiving honors me.”

Paul writes about faith and faithfulness in the letter to the Hebrews (11:1016) that faith is “the assurance of things hoped for.” They key is verse 2 “by faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.” In other words, creation is the product of God’s love, which is sustained by our interconnection with God, with creation and with each other through active love.

In Luke 12 (32-40) Jesus reminds his disciples that “it is [God’s] good pleasure to give you the kingdom” and that “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” “Blessed are those” who are alert in the moment of God’s immanence. Let’s take an example—when the supreme court went rogue in June and overturned a constitutional right to bodily integrity we had an option to be angry, to spiral deeper and deeper into despair, to be consumed by our anger. But we also had an option to love each other even more, to love our independence even more, to love our connection with God even more, and to fortify ourselves with God’s love. This is what Jesus means by “be alert”—he means by all means acknowledge reality but do not let the absence of love consume you.

It is our job as LGBTQ people not only to love but to demonstrate our love to the world around us. Thanks be to God we have an entire summer of pride around the world. We parade in all of our human glory, we sing and we dance, but we remember to give thanks for who we have been made to be in God’s own image. And we show in our grasped hands and in parades everywhere the power of building up creation, of inhabiting God’s kingdom, with just a little bit of love.

Proper 14 Year C 2022 RCL (Isaiah 1:1, 10-20; Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24 Deus deorum; Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16; Luke 12:32-40)

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

Illuminate

One of the problems with our seasonal culture is the recurrence of “doldrums”–periods of weariness I guess you might call them. Sometimes it seems to me Christmas is designed to yield doldrums—we get almost too excited with anticipation to the point that some sort of letdown is inevitable. Then, of course, is the fact that (at least in the northern hemisphere) we are in the middle of winter. I’m happy that, although it is now a little bit colder in Oregon, at least there is a bit more light each day—the occasional bits of sun make the rain seem all the sweeter. Oh well.

Of course, we also are still living in the middle of a global pandemic. Things that used to help us through the doldrums are now deadly. That means we feel like we have shrinking options, not only for picking up our spirits but for life itself. Gayborhoods, once the liveliest of winter gathering spots, had already begun to give way to better social integration of lgbt communities, but the pandemic has devastated the remaining bright spots. For the moment we cannot gather, which means we cannot see each other, which means we cannot manage our collective identity as a jubilant loving subculture.

And then there’s the continuing critical situation in the US government, which of course creates a critical situation globally as well.

Can you tell it’s a gray day in Oregon?

Well, I guess I could tell myself to “lighten up.” As it happens, our eternal call to faithfulness takes just this shape. That is, we must remember, doldrums or no, that the reason we are here is to carry forward the action of walking in love, always. Giving into dreariness is giving in to the absence of love. We are called to “listen up” for the cues in life that remind us to reach into the recesses of our hearts to find the love that lives there, to feel the love that lives there, to pass it along so as to build it up. We are called to walk in love in order that the creation of love might be a mighty cascade.

We have to look up from our winter obsessions to find the cues that call us back to lives of love. Just now I saw a blue bird hopping around in a fir tree outside my window—no winter doldrums for this bird. In fact, I know this bird from this time last winter when I first encountered him. During the summer I wondered where he had gone until one day I saw him in a tree down at the end of the road, and later that day saw him disappear back into my fir tree. I have no real idea what occupies his life but seeing him gives me joy, and seeing him living and indeed thriving gives me hope. Hope and joy are two of the hallmarks of love.

It turns out that our job is to shine with the radiance of glory. We can do that only if we can walk in love. In order to walk in love we must take care not to be overwhelmed by life’s exigencies. Rather, we must overwhelm with love.

The collect for the second Sunday in Epiphany asks that we might be “illumined” and “shine with radiance” of the glory that is God’s creation of love. The story from 1 Samuel (3:1-20) of Samuel’s own call to faithfulness reminds us that God’s call is constant and eternal. God does not let us fail to hear the recurrent visceral call to walk in love. Psalm 139:1 reminds us that God knows us each intimately. Paul, writing to the church at Corinth (1 Corinthians 6:12-20) reminds us that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, which is love, which is within us. We are to tease out this love that is placed within us the better to give it out into the world around us. In John’s Gospel (1:43-51) we see the action of Jesus calling Philip and Nathaniel with the words “follow me” and “come and see.”

What a coincidence, that this week, with all that is happening in the world at large, our call is to shine with the radiance of love, that our own love might indeed build up power enough to shift the dimensions of all creation into the path of love.

We have witnessed the labor pains of the end of a period consumed by the vacuum that opens in the absence of love. It is our job to let none of God’s love, given to us in creation, lie fallow—rather it is up to us, God’s lgbt people created by love with love for love to love, to “come and see” the new dimension of love.

2 Epiphany Year B RCL 2021 (1 Samuel 3:1-10(11-20); Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17 Page 794, BCP Domine, probasti; 1 Corinthians 6:12-20; John 1:43-51)

©2021 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.