Connectedness, Synchrony, Electricity

The sun is shining. That’s pretty unusual in an Oregon winter, so I am really grateful. I’m looking forward to some puttering and other simple things that bring pleasure, especially when they are contemplative (I know I’ve written about ironing—no ironing piled up for me today LOL). I seem always to be well connected when I can lose myself in something repetitive. It is one reason I discovered long ago the virtues for me of kataphatic prayer (like praying with a rosary). I suppose it is a matter of how we’re wired; I have many spiritual companions who prefer centering prayer. Diversity, of course, is part of the plan of creation. Sort of like how one of my best friends often reminds me the tall trees hold each other up. Whatever it takes to stay connected is good, is God given, is holy.

Which is why we pray to be “set us free … from the bondage of our sins” [collect for 5 Epiphany Book of Common Prayer 216]. Of course, it is not up to God to set us free. We have to free ourselves from disconnectedness. Think about it now, what is the opposite?—connectedness, synchrony, electricity! Then we can see that abundance of life that is available to us if only we will tap into it.

The second voice of the prophet Isaiah [40:21-31] sings of the mystery and magnificence of God “Have you not known? Have you not heard?…  Have you not understood …? The Creator of the ends of the earth … [whose] understanding is unsearchable … those who wait for [God] shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles.” Those who stay connected, are heirs of the power of creation.

The blessing of the Gospel is the revealed glory of life in the dimension of love as Jesus told us, as Paul learned the hard way [1 Corinthians 9:16-23].

Did you see that uproar about the homoerotic Spanish painting of Jesus? (“‘Gay Christ’ poster sparks outcry in Spain as some say depiction of Jesus looks ‘homoerotic’“). Here is the image, how does it look to you? Paul says he became all things to all people in order that he might share the Gospel. Why should the Jesus in our spiritual center not resonate with our own way of being in creation?

It is as though a “demon” had been set loose somehow. In Mark’s Gospel [1:29-39] Jesus, who has just called his first disciples, visits the home of Simon and Andrew along with James and John. All four were called from their boats as they fished at the shore; all four dropped everything to follow Christ. Now they find Simon’s mother-in-law is ill. The story says Jesus heals her. The key here is that Jesus “lifted her up.” This means he returned her to her place in the community; connected. This is why, in the story, she immediately gets up and serves lunch. In the society of Jesus’ time there was no worse “sin” or disconnection than that of being cast out from the love of others. Frequently people who were ill or in any sort of trouble were cast out. Jesus’ healing restores them to their right place in connection with their loved ones, in their societies, in their families, in their towns.  

The point of the Gospel then, the Good News of salvation, is that we are all connected through Christ. In the connection is normality, return, refreshment. Many years ago when I was becoming an Epsicopalian, when I was working with AIDS ministry, the motto of the church came from then Presiding Bishop Edmund Browning. It was: “There will be no outcasts.” (https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/pressreleases/there-will-be-no-outcasts-official-obituary-for-edmond-lee-browning/ ). It was the clarion call of the Gospel to those of us in the LGBTQ+ community in those days of oppression. It was, and remains, a blessing.

We all are called to remain connected in synchrony with Creation living fully into the LGBTQ+ lives with which we are created in God’s own image.

Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany Year B 2024 RCL (Isaiah 40:21-31; Psalm 147:1-12, 21c; 1 Corinthians 9:16–23; Mark 1:29-39)

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

Bay leaves*

I find myself missing Christmas. It seems like it went by so fast this year, as though there were just a few moments of that simple innocent sweetness, that joy we call “merry,” and then poof, it was all over, gone! The Christmas tree gone, the decorations put away, thanks to a minor thaw the outdoor lights are down. The last poinsettia gave up the ghost this week. And, we finally finished sharpening our teeth on the six week old gingerbread cookies that had been hanging on the tree; the eating of them after Christmas is as much of a tradition in our house as the making and decorating and hanging of them! I couldn’t bear to put away the cookie tin so I made peanut butter cookies. I suppose my yearning for that sweet moment to last is not unlike the yearning of our faith, the desire to hang on to a moment as though to stretch it for a lifetime.

Of course in the dimensions of our faith there are different time lines. I recently made a post on Facebook about the last bay leaf.

Almost thirty years ago, Brad’s mother sent me a wreath of bay leaves for Christmas. I remember thinking how huge it was at the time, but it was touching to receive it, and it was beautiful. We hung it up in the kitchen for that holiday season and then preserved it in various ways, and just last week the last two whole leaves (one of them is visible there on the left in the foreground) went into a pot of soup. If you think about it it is a very real example of a Christmas moment that lasted in reality for decades, and that will last in virtual reality as a memory and a story much longer.

And, of course, the story is not about Christmas or bay leaves, although it is on one level about those things. It is about the first gift a man’s mother sent to her son’s boyfriend, a man she hadn’t yet met although they’d been living together for more than a decade. A man she had heard could cook, and a man to whom she knew she now was trusting her son. She and her husband were wonderful parents and friends. They supported us through thick and thin, even when I decided at mid-life to become a priest. Eventually we were able to make it legit by getting married and making them true in-laws. You see, all of that goodness and depth and family love, all of it springing from one story about a Christmas that lasts forever in its own dimension.

That is sort of how scripture works too. The stories are likely real accounts of real events to some extent, as difficult as it might be for us to comprehend a reality from thousands of years ago expressed in language that is many translations away from its original expression. But the details connect us with God by reminding us of our own lives and how our lives connect us with God through each other. The simple stories in scripture are as complex and rich in implication as our own stories.

A reading from Jonah (3:1-5, 10) reminds us that not only is God always present but that repentance is always both necessary and possible. But the part that stuck with me was the simple statement that Ninevah was a city so large that it was a three-day’s walk across it. It reminded me of a time of distress in my journey toward priesthood. I was living in New York part of each week at the time; I left my apartment at 116^th Street and Broadway and walked, contemplating, praying, and communing with God but not otherwise paying attention until, some hours later, I realized I was sitting on a pier in the West Village, which is to say I had walked more than 100 blocks south in Manhattan almost completely unaware. Of course while my body walked, and my soul swirled in a cyclone of emotion, all around me the giant city was teaming and as they used to say on television there were many millions of stories in the city. Many dimensions intersecting all at once, of course, but I was able to be with God, the literal meaning of repentance, alone in God’s dimension. So I got to thinking what it was like for Jonah. It says he walked about a day’s distance and that he was preaching the whole time, and even that his message was effective. But what was really happening for him?

Mark’s gospel is the oldest and in some ways the plainest, the most direct, of the synoptics. There is little embellishment of the stories. And yet the essentials are starkly present. In this week’s story (1:14-20) Jesus is calling his disciples to come from their boats to follow him, to move from the reality of the hard physical labor of gathering fish for food to the hard spiritual labor of convincing people to shift into God’s dimension. The quotation attributed to Jesus shifts tenses: he says the time “is” fulfilled, the kingdom of God “has” come near, and then he commands the crowds to repent and hear. It is a sign of the shifting dimensions that the reality of the human time in which Jesus lived was fulfilled, that God’s kingdom already had been nearby all along, and that the way to find God’s kingdom was to repent in a kind of constant future, to turn in inward solitude to the place where life’s long walk of reality is at the same time unity with God, because this is where we hear the good news that we all already are God’s children. It is we who refuse to hear, you know, who risk missing the open door to God’s kingdom, which already very much is in our midst.

Sometimes when we hear these stories we cannot imagine how we ever could be called by Jesus, and yet the truth is that the real lives we are leading are those to which we have been called. The truth is that we are called to live into the reality that can find two families learning how to have gay sons and brothers-in-law, and that in that reality we can find ourselves on a long walk with God, leading to the dimension where we all share God’s kingdom. The reality is that your truth is the real truth, your life is the long walk with God. All you have to do is listen and hear and believe.

*3 Epiphany (Jonah 3: 1-5, 10; Psalm 62: 6-14; 1 Corinthians 7: 29-31; Mark 1:14-20)

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

Be a Child of God*

Today’s Gospel is the other side–the other dimension maybe–of the resurrection story we heard at Easter. After the women discovered Jesus had risen they ran home to tell the men, who then (of course) went running to see. Full of fear and not a little doubt, they set off to Galilee (as the women told them to do) but they did not really expect to see Jesus. As they walked along a mysterious stranger joined them, talked with them, and (surprise!) turned out to be the resurrected Jesus.

So what do we learn from this story about the disciples on the road to Emmaus? First, that Jesus is walking along with us. We might not be paying attention, but Jesus is walking along with us. When he talks to us our first impulse is to ignore him, and the second one is to ask him if he is a fool. This is pretty much how we treat each other too, which is why this is in this story … like everything else about Jesus, whose whole life was meant to teach us how to be righteous children of God, by treating each other with respect. Then, we see that Jesus explains everything. Then, the in the breaking of the bread we see that Jesus feeds us, always. Not with perishable food, but with real nourishment for the soul. And when their eyes are opened they say to each other “were not our hearts burning the whole time?” When we are in the presence of holiness we tend to know it, even if we do not understand it. In the end the disciples are invigorated by their experience of Jesus. It says they went running back to Jerusalem, where they found the others who had also seen Him.

The opening lesson from the Acts of the Apostles is part of a long sermon given by Peter to huge crowds in Jerusalem. It says 3000 were baptized that day. The core of that sermon is this line (Acts 2:38): “For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” By this we know not only that there is a constant message stretching from that breaking of the bread in Emmaus to this very day, but also that this message is for us. There are no conditions placed on the commandment that the promise of God’s love is for everyone. All that is required is that we listen.

In the glbt community we have a sometimes confusing relationship with God, Jesus, and the church. We quite rightly reject the abuse that comes at us from the anti-gay faction. Many of us reject church altogether, some of us participate as best we can, hopeful for the day full inclusion will come. For some few of us it seems as though that moment is just around the corner. For others it seems like it might never come. And many glbt folks reject God outright; throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as they say, because of the oppression that has come our way.

But God wants us to listen to Jesus. Jesus told us to love God and to love each other in equal measure. In fact, Jesus told us to love God and each other as we love ourselves, meaning that for us it must all begin with self-respect. And if we listen, then like the women at the tomb, like the disciples on the road and gathered around that table for bread, we too will enter a different dimension. We will enter the dimension where we will see that fullness of life for all of God’s children is God’s plan. It is not a future, it is the present, if we live into it from the strength of our own souls.

My friends Jesus is walking with all of us. Always, whether we know it or not, whether we know where we are or not, whether we are going the right way or not—Jesus always is walking with us. And his job is to call us to righteousness, to remind us to walk always in love. When we mess up Jesus is right there to teach us how to make it right. And Jesus feeds us always, as God has commanded us to feed one another, not only with bread, but mostly with God’s love.

Be the child of God. Be a lover of Christ. The fire burning in your heart will change you constantly. And this change is born not of anything perishable but of the living and enduring word of God. God has raised Christ from the dead. And God has raised us from the dead. Alleluia!

*3 Easter Year (Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Psalm 116:1-3, 10-17; 1 Peter 1:17-23; Luke 24:13-35)

©2011 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.