Synergy Glory

It is cool and raining in Oregon, although today is dry and sunny. There has been enough rain now to give us the chance to relax a bit about wildfire danger. We’re even allowed to use our fireplaces again, which is nice now that cool evenings are more commonplace. Relief has always been my favorite form of mercy. Relief—just the knowledge that I can relax a little bit—is a reflection of the synergy of creation, which of course is the synergy of the love that is God. Mercy, after all, is that quality of forgiveness that makes life possible because it allows us to keep going.

Still, life comes and goes. God is not a puppeteer. Rather we are gifted with the opportunity to walk in love in harmony with creation. When we manage that even our mistakes are greeted with mercy. When we fail to walk in love in harmony with creation then we encounter challenging times. In those times it does no good to decry love. Rather, we must love even more in those times. We must always remember that love builds up.

We can build love in simple ways, by singing with joy, by worshipping love by whipping up love. These are the ways we can encounter glory—the sustained abundance of the present manifestation of love. We must always at least try to live a life of love. As long as we try, we are grounded in the presence of God.

We do not see love subjectively. Rather we see love embodied in Jesus who taught us the ways of walking in love, simple ways: washing each other’s feet, eating together, feeding the oppressed, healing the outcast by welcoming them in. These are the ways of building up the love of God in synergy with community and creation. These are the ways of grounding the presence of God. These are the ways of seeking glory, which is the armor of love.

Hardness of heart is imperviousness to love. If you cannot walk in love it is easy enough to give one’s self over to rules: no chocolate, no dessert. Then, it is easy enough to make other rules: no outsiders, no one who is different. Hardness of heart builds up too. No love remains then, only obeisance.

The antidote always is love, always is the realization that these are the “last days” in our hearts. In every moment we have the opportunity to build love to energize the community to synergize creation. All we have to do is start. All we have to do is try.

The echoes of life for LGBTQ people are like trajectories all through this midrash. Relief comes when we can relax into our daily lives, when we can think about dinner and the garden instead of worrying about survival. We have our ups and downs. We have many opportunities to sing and share the joy in our hearts. We are called to share food and drink, to welcome each other, to build community. We are called forth from our love as children created by God in God’s own image of love. We are called forth to shine like a beacon in the synergy of these last days of building up love. We are called to embrace and nurture glory.

Proper 22 Year B 2012 RCL (Job 1:1; 2:1-10; Psalm 26; Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16)

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

John 3:8 ” The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

In Eucharistic Prayer B (BCP 1979, 368) we pray in the present tense “For in these last days” and yet the next clause is in the past tense “you sent him to be incarnate ….” So it is with these last days in which we live, which are now but yet are just the harbingers of all of the ages past and yet to come. Which is a nicely theological way of saying it seems we hear the wind blowing but do not always know where it is coming from. For GLBT folks it seems the wind is the manifestation of the Holy Spirit itself rearranging human experience by shaping it with God’s grace, even as the wind is shaping the two-foot deep snowdrifts outside as I write this.

On November 15 The Rev. Susan Slaughter became the first woman ordained priest in the Diocese of Fort Worth–a diocese now cleansed and renewed by the power of the Holy Spirit. The next day Bp. Bishop John Bryson Chane of Washington D.C. supported legislation legalizing same-sex marriage in the District of Columbia (http://www.episcopalchurch.org/81803_116895_ENG_HTM.htm). November 29 Bp. Tom Shaw of the Diocese of Massachusetts authorized the clergy of his diocese (where marriage equality is the law) to solemnize the marriages of same-sex couples (http://www.diomass.org/diocesan-news/diocesan-clergy-now-allowed-marry-all-eligible-couples).

The following weekend, December 5, the Diocese of Los Angeles in convention elected two women to be their next suffragan bishops–itself a diocesan first–one of whom is a lesbian, The Rev. Mary Douglas Glasspool (http://www.episcopalchurch.org/79901_117538_ENG_HTM.htm). While Integrity and most Episcopalians rejoiced that the logjam on the full ministry of lgbt people had finally been broken, the Archbishop of Canterbury was not in a good mood about it. But we’ll return to him in a later post.

In New Jersey both the bishops of Newark and Trenton testified in favor of marriage equality legislation, but alas, the legislature lost its nerve as 2009 drew to a close.

On December 9, as most of the world was focused on the climate change conference in Copenhagen,  a theological roundtable of Anglicans in India issued a statement rejecting homophobia and calling for open study of human sexuality (http://www.nccindia.in/news/pressrelease/n_144.htm).

We might not know where the wind comes from or where it goes, but we know when we experience it that we are in the midst of the powerful work of the Holy Spirit.