Hospitality Reveals the Pathway

The weather is beautiful here, at last. Sunny, warm, late spring still not quite summer but hints of summer. The constant rain is gone now. No matter how showers reappear, we have the promise of warm evenings under the stars in nature’s magnificent canopy of tall firs. We will trade in the tv and the fireplace for the grill and the firepit. I was on the patio for several hours yesterday cleaning winter away from the furniture and our wildlife companions kept up a constant chatter the whole time. I told my husband after months of abandoning the outdoors to them it’s time to remind them we live here too. We do that by sitting outside, by tending the gardens, by being gently present with them in nature.

God calls us to live in harmony, to experience love in the goodness of nature, the better that we might build up that love and extend it not only to each other but into all of creation. This is God’s message, this is the Good News about love—that we are blessed so long as we return the blessing always.

In Acts 16 we are reminded that the nascent church in the days after the resurrection of Christ was not only not established but it was the province of regular everyday people called to love. Paul has a vision that leads him and his companions to discover a woman, “a dealer in purple cloth,” who is open to receive the Good News. She not only receives the news but invites Paul and his companions on the way into her household, and the Good News spreads thus through hospitality, through the building up of love through sharing and living in harmony with creation.

Psalm 67 reminds us that love rescues us, love blesses us, love shows us the light, love comes to us. We give thanks for love at all times. Love gives so many blessings that all the earth is in awe.

The Revelation (22) reminds us that God is love, that God’s angels are love. Love carries us to where we can see the clearing, the opening in the forest, the beginning of the pathway to the dimension of love. Once we can see it we can attain it by simply taking the first step of loving over and over, each first step leading to the next.

In John 14 (23-29) post-resurrection Jesus soothes his companions with the reminder that love is the true power. Love is the answer, love is the Good News, love is the way. Love is everything. As the angels sang to the shepherds at Jesus birth, thus on the eve of his ascension he says to his disciples “do not be afraid.” Just have love.

We who are God’s LGBTQ people, created in God’s image to be the visible power of love in creation, we are called in the present time to be the very household of love, to be bold in our own love, to inhabit creation in harmony, to use our hospitality to build up the dimension of love.

The Sixth Sunday of Easter Year C 2022 RCL (Acts 16:9-15; Psalm 67 Deus misereatur; Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5; John 14:23-29)

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

Touch, See, Love

I hope everyone had an amazing Easter.

I have missed a few weeks here because of a family emergency. My own Easter was sweet enough, as it was the day the emergency receded and a semblance of normalcy began to return. It was a lesson in faith and hope greater than I have experienced in a long time, a reminder that Easter is not just a date or a church holy day but rather an eternal state of life. Resurrection is constant and eternal and always, always linked to faith and hope. Alleluia!

In John’s first letter (3:1) we are called to perceive the evidence of God as love: “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God.” We might paraphrase it thus: see what love love has given us that we should be the result of love. Love is the power and the glory, love is the key to life, and indeed love is the key to resurrection life. It is in the glory of a life lived walking in love that we who are the evidence of love are called to, in turn, keep the love going. Verse 7 says: “Everyone who does what is right is righteous” and that means that everyone who manifests love is, indeed, love.

As I walked through the weeks of our emergency I was uplifted by what I can only describe as my own personal cloud of LGBTQ witnesses, especially one angel with multihued hair who seemed to hover protectively over me. I felt the warmth of the love of these several angels whose own faith in the love we share in our own logical families (https://rpsplus.wordpress.com/2020/07/26/the-majesty-of-love/) upheld me and reinforced the love that was within me.

In the resurrection appearance in Luke’s Gospel (24:36b-48) Jesus calls his disciples to turn from the absence of love that occupied them (“they were startled and terrified”) and to turn toward the love he knew was in their hearts “touch me and see,” he said, and then, “have you anything here to eat?” It is in the reality of shared humanity that we see the truth of the love we all have been given in our creation in God’s own image. It is in the simple things, a smile, a pat on the shoulder, a warm greeting, a touch, a bit of hospitality, a bite to eat—it is in these things that we “touch and see” the glory of love, the vitality of love, the power of love.

3 Easter Year B RCL 2021 (Acts 3:12-19; Psalm 4; 1 John 3:1-7; Luke 24:36b-48)

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

Embrace the holiness of life’s banquets

Labor Day weekend in the United States—it seems almost like Christmas or Thanksgiving these days—lots of cooking of traditional foods, freedom from obligations in the real world which mostly is closed for business (thanks be to God), time to spend relaxing with family and friends. It is a nice break for us after almost two months of uproar from our move across the country and near total change in our way of life. Contrast is always a good thing. Busy-ness breaks for calm, there is time after all to enjoy that which we have been trying to build—a home.

The real world eh? Well, out there in the real world there is a trade war, a looming recession, an enormous hurricane, a continuing crisis in the American presidency, a new mosquito-borne infection … plenty of reality, almost more than we can bear at times. In our own corner of reality we are in a constant state of uproar between recalcitrant contractors and balancing priorities about the house. What are we to do?

Why, we need to embrace the holiday, of course. We need to take time out of busy lives to reflect, to appreciate, to realize the value of the love we share with friends and family, the love with which we interact with community and even with nature. These are the real gifts of our lives and they are created—even curated—when we give love, which we only are able to do if we can step aside from our self-induced regular mad dash to get things done.

Embrace the holiday as a way of preparation as well. Bask in the shared love of family and friends, nurture each other with love and good food, Store up the love given and received. Appreciate the power of that love.

I had one of those “wake up and smell the coffee” moments the other day. The place where we live has recently banished all plastic bags, which is a good thing for the environment. But it has discombobulated the grocery experience because every approach to the check-out presents a crisis of one sort or another. Either you forgot your bags in the car and now have to pay for paper bags or stuff all of the groceries in your cargo pockets, or, you brought your bags but there is no place to put them, and because they’re floppy cloth bags they won’t stay open while you madly try to shove everything in them to get out of the way of the person behind you in line. Whew! In all of this one of the nice things about the culture here—the pleasant cashiers—got displaced. They try to talk pleasantly with you but if you’re like me, you’re too busy jamming things in bags and pockets. Well, the other day for no apparent reason I totally forgot myself, and at the end I looked the cashier in the eye and said “thank you.” (I never do such things, despite my constant preaching about it, I’m way too introverted.) The entire situation shifted in a heartbeat. Calm descended, she smiled and said “you’re welcome” and we all relaxed a little bit.

We forget that scriptural guides like “do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers” (Hebrews 13:1-8) mean just such moments, as indeed does “for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” (Luke 14:1, 7-14). The letter to the Hebrews talks of angels and Jesus in Luke’s Gospel makes examples of banquets, but we need to remember that everyday life is a banquet, that every encounter is an opportunity to show hospitality, that in every moment the opportunity to change reality by giving love is present. All we have to do is remember we are all in this together.

Reality is real enough, as we all know. All too soon we will crank up our busy-ness again. But for now, we need to embrace the holiness of life’s banquets by showing hospitality in every moment.

 

Proper 17 (Jeremiah 2:4-13; Psalm 81:1, 10-16 Exultate Deo; Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16; Luke 14:1, 7-14)

©2019 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)