Love is the Doorway: Remember to Love

Well … [a deep subject one of my friends like to say] … here we are. We are either at the dawn of a new day, or we are at the precipice … we won’t know for awhile I guess. But, we do know this, that God is with us always. The best evidence of that I have seen lately is all of the signs on lawns that say “we’re all in this together.” Because, you know, that’s about the size of it.

Love is always the answer. And LGBTQ people, because we are God’s special children created to love, are in charge of giving love. It is up to us to remember to love.

In the US we are experiencing a moment of cautious optimism. Okay, yesterday it was elation. But today we are cautiously optimistic for the first time in years. And in Oregon the sun is shining. Nice how that works isn’t it?

Now is a tricky time, then, because we want to believe in all of those good feelings we have. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who heard a call out to LGBTQ people in President-Elect Biden’s speech last night. I cried. When has a call out to all of the people included us? It was a combination of joy and relief and pride. It felt great. It felt like the kind of loving feeling we want to hold onto forever.

Of course, we have to remember that we can get carried away. We can allow ourselves to be almost addicted to those kinds of feelings to the point that it becomes a form of idolatry if by allowing ourselves to believe in those good feelings alone we allow ourselves to forget that we must continue to give out love. We are meant not just to take happy endorphins in, but we must always give out love. It’s like breathing really—good feelings in, love out, no matter how hard it is to keep doing it.

The story of the covenant at Shechem in Joshua (24:1-3a, 14-25) is the story of God’s people choosing love over everything. Joshua reminded the people to “incline your hearts to God”—to give love—and the people chose to serve and obey God, who is love. Foreign gods, idolatry—we easily make substitutions for God, we pay tribute to everything that gives us a vapid good feeling however fleetingly—but God is love, and only love, and only love is permanent and true and reliable. The way to remain firm in faith and at one with God is to “incline your hearts”—to give love.

But it is easy enough in the course of daily life to forget, to turn inward, to get lost in the chaos of getting along, to forget all about love. Therefore, we need to be reminded. Psalm 78 (1-7) reflects the covenant at Shechem in the form of a song, a kind of oral history, to be sung again and again as a reminder to not forget that our covenant is a covenant of love. We must be alert to the opportunity to keep loving, to look around us and see that love builds up. In 1 Thessalonians (4:13-18) Paul reminds us to “encourage one another with these words.” The triumph of love is like this then: trumpets sound in your heart, archangels call in your heart, life itself is magnified into a brilliant light, and those who love and give love are alive forever. We are to remind each other—to say “love” to each other constantly, to “encourage one another with these words.”

In Matthew’s Gospel (25:1-13) Jesus tells the parable of ten bridesmaids, five wise who are prepared and five foolish who are not. He starts with “then the kingdom of heaven will be like this,” pointing to the fact that the kingdom of heaven is already with us if we can find the doorway into dimension where it exists. You see, even in the kingdom of heaven it is critical to remember to love. The wise and foolish bridesmaids are just like us, either giving love or being distracted by false gods. We must, as Jesus says, keep awake, encourage one another, remember to incline our hearts, and remember to love.

The kingdom of heaven has always been here; it is why I call this blog “dimensions of reality”—if only we could make ourselves turn to the real God, who is love, then we would see that we already live in the kingdom of heaven. Heaven is not a promise for some distant disembodied future, heaven is now, if only we can embrace it. Love is the doorway into that dimension. To enter we have to give love.

I know, it’s really hard. Scary even. But go ahead and try, that scariness makes it more exciting too. Try it out: say “I love you” and mean it. And the next time someone cuts you off in the supermarket aisle, don’t scream, just turn around and go the other way. And when someone bumps into you by the broccoli, smile (you have to use your eyes now because your mask will hide your mouth). That’s all, just smile. I’ll bet you will hear something like “oh, doesn’t this look great today?” And you will both walk away feeling loved. It’s that simple and that hard all at once.

Keep awake, encourage one another, incline your hearts … and remember to love.

Proper 27 Year A RCL 2020 (Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25; Psalm 78:1-7 Attendite, popule; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Matthew 25:1-13)

©2020 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Stand Firm in LGBTQ Love

It is raining in Oregon. This is a good thing on many levels. It was a very dry summer, so the lawns and trees are relishing the water. Also, it is helping to wash away the smoky dust from the wildfire haze. Humorously I guess, it is nature’s way of preparing us for the real rainy season, which won’t come for awhile yet, by giving us these short two-day rains just to remind us what it is like when it rains for weeks. Oh well. I’m not complaining (too much, yet) because I cooked out every day last week and tomorrow it will be sunny and warm enough for me to get back to the grill.

It has been a month now since the high winds came, followed by the wildfires in central Oregon that chased us away for several days and then, even when we came home, filled the skies with smoke for days and days. During that time a mysterious probably motion-activated light came on on the north side of our house. There is no way to switch it on or otherwise control it, and I hadn’t really noticed it before, except this time it would not go off under any circumstances. I tried everything I could think of, including trying to hire a neighborhood helper to climb up there and unscrew the bulbs (couldn’t reach him, unfortunately). Yesterday my landscaper was here and I asked him to take a look at it, but when we walked around the corner it had gone out! I laughed—it must have been that the sensor was coated with smoky dust that caused it to come on, and now that it has rained for two days and nights the sensor must be clear again.

As I said it got a laugh out of me, and then some head shaking. It would be difficult to really convey how obsessed I had been for so long with the problem of this one tiny light fixture and then, suddenly, in a single moment the whole problem vanished. The problem disappeared as though by grace. Nature followed its own laws and brought rain, and because I left him alone the landscaper took care of lots of other things and by grace a silly bothersome problem vanished. It is a reminder to have faith in God’s grace, a reminder to feel love for the knowledge of God’s ever present grace. It is a reminder that love given builds up more love. Grace is love that follows and builds upon the love we give. But, for grace to follow us we must love first. There is no benefit to obsessive clamping down on problems, to attempting to control by grit rather than giving love and letting grace in.

Scripture appointed for this Sunday begins with the story from Exodus (32:1-14) and Psalm 106 (19-23) about the creation of the golden calf. When God calls Moses on the proverbial carpet about it God says “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are.” It is a good description of the kind of non-loving controlling obsession that arises when we let situations overwhelm our faith in God’s grace. It is an excellent example of how easy it is to replace God in our hearts with self-made objectifications that are easy to worship. It is a reminder that we must be vigilant about loving and letting God’s grace in.

That this is a universal problem of human nature that requires deliberate love (see “Deliberate Sustainable Love”) is confirmed by Paul’s letter to the Philippians (4:1-9) where the theme is to “stand firm in the Lord … Rejoice in the Lord always … Do not worry … but [pray] with thanksgiving “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” We must be firm about love and and firm in the knowledge that the path to love comes from rejoicing in God’s eternal grace.

In Matthew’s Gospel (22:1-14) Jesus tells a parable about a wedding banquet for which invited guests will not come—Jesus lists their excuses, all forms of controlling obsession instead of rejoicing in grace. The message again is that we ignore God’s grace at our own peril, that we must learn to rejoice in God’s grace and share God’s love.

These are tough times all over. The pandemic is in its tenth month (or so, depending on where you might be on the planet), we are still separated from each other by circumstances so bizarre we could not have imagined them. We are asked to love God and rejoice in God’s grace at the same time we are asked to love each other by computer video. We are asked to have faith in God’s grace at the same time we are asked not to touch each other or even come within ten feet (3 meters more or less). In the United States we are asked to rejoice in God’s grace even as we watch our reality show government outshine anything a Halloween movie producer might have dreamt up. We who are God’s LGBTQ children are asked to rejoice as we watch attempts to push back the paths to equality that have only recently been ours.

And yet, it is exactly that faith born of rejoicing in God’s eternal grace that is the door to the salvation that is already ours. And we who are God’s LGBTQ children are spiritual leaders in this—it is precisely up to us, children whose identity is defined by love, to build up love by rejoicing in the love we share. We must remember to revel in the love we have for each other, because in so doing we build up God’s love. Stand firm in LGBTQ love that is God’s gift to us in our creation in God’s own image. Then rejoice and pray with thanksgiving.

Proper 23 Year A RCL 2020 (Exodus 32:1-14; Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23 Confitemini Domino, Et fecerunt vitulum; Philippians 4:1-9; Matthew 22:1-14)

©2020 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.