The Beginning of the Good News

Atmospheric rivers … what a concept. Well, it seems the Pacific Northwest is the new home of them. At least this past week; we’re now on number 4 I think. True, they keep the terrestrial rivers full and the trees green and the mountains covered with snow.

Also true that they now remind me that we are in Advent. Just goes to show you how easily reference points shift; when I was a boy it was the first snowfall that let us know Christmas was right around the corner.

I always think this is a curious time of year, caught someplace between secularism and the holy. There is expectation, yes, and a glimmer of hope. There is excitement and all kinds of busy-ness from decorating to baking to shopping to … (fill in your own blank here). In the church it is a new year that opens with prayer and solemnity and with calls to the internal, which is to say we are called to turn inward to discover the ways in which we disconnect ourselves from each other and thus from God. Still, this time of year we all know what is coming soon and we have in our hearts the knowledge of the joy that is coming our way.

The prophet Isaiah is instructed by God [Isaiah 40:1-11] to “speak tenderly” and to “comfort” God’s people. Way back in 1994 I was living and working in New York City when I first encountered the Gay Games. I had no idea there even was such a thing. But one morning upon awakening and realizing I didn’t need to go to my office at the university I decided to wander down to the bodega on the corner and get a newspaper and a bagel (usually I would acquire these at Penn Station running to catch my train). Of course, it was a brilliantly sunny summer day! At the bodega I recognized the owner (of course) but nobody else, which was odd, and also it was odd that the place was crowded. I was barely awake, but slowly it began to dawn on me that it seemed like everybody in there was gay. It was a strange realization frankly. I sort of chuckled, then walking back to my apartment through crowds (I lived in Chelsea, which was then the heart of the gayborhood) I realized everybody around me seemed to be gay. And I had the odd thought “Oh, this is how they (i.e., straight people) feel all the time!” And I was comforted.

I was comforted to have known, if only for an instant, what it felt like for once in my life to be “normitive,” to be one of the “regular” majority. To let down my walls and just be me. It was glorious. Talk about “rough places plain” and “glory … revealed” and “all people see it together.”

I know I’ve written often here about the 1998 Amsterdam Gay Games; it was right after my ordination and it was a powerful time in my spiritual life. And the opportunity to be there at that time and to experience this sense yet again and for two weeks this time was a real gift.

We are too often afraid to look around us and see that the words of the prophets are not predictions about some dim future, but rather, they are revelations of our own reality.

So as I go about my daily life I no longer find myself in crowds of young gay men (more’s the pity) but I do live in a world of love created by the synchrony of my relationships, especially with my husband, who is clearly the greatest gift in my life as well.

In that realization, that this is the life given to me, that this is the glory love creates for me, is the sense of the critical importance of walking in love. When we walk in love we dwell in peace, and there in that place is where mercy and truth have met together [Psalm 85:7-13], for love produces peace which is the mother of mercy which can only thrive in truth.

I’ll say it again, that prophecy is not prediction but is revelation of our own truth, the reality about our own path into the dimension of love. There is no human time in the dimension of love, rather God’s time, which is all time all at once, forms the parameters of love. Love once experienced, once attained, is eternal [2 Peter 3:8-15a]. A glimmer is forever. The instant of realizing that there is a world full of LGBTQ+ people who God created in God’s own image—just that instant—becomes in my heart a pathway for walking in love each day. We are loved, we are created by love, we are called to love. Peter writes “we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home” … therefore we must “strive to be found … at peace.”

That brings us to the beginning of the good news” [Mark 1:1-8]. The good news, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is the pathway into the dimension of love. It is heralded by repentance—a reminder always to return to walking in love–which means connection, which means life eternal in the dimension of love.

2 Advent Year B 2023 RCL (Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13 Benedixisti, Domine; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8)

©2023 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Interaction with the Divine

Happy New Year. And, have a happy new year–we sure need one.

The scripture this week—officially the second Sunday after Christmas—is designed to focus our attention on the critical nature of the life of the newborn Savior, who is God with us. Jeremiah, one of the prophets of the great exile, breathes joy. So intense is his faith in God who will bring people back to normality “weeping” with joy, they will “walk by brooks of water,” they will “sing aloud” and “be radiant” and “their life shall become like a watered garden” and they “shall be merry.”

Merry. What a concept.

The metaphorical importance of the use of the prophet Jeremiah is directly relevant to us now I think. Jeremiah (31:7-14) prophesied to people who had been exiled, who had suffered loss of homes and family, who had been isolated and oppressed in foreign lands, who suffered to endure corrupt leaders. God’s people in Jeremiah’s day longed for a return to “normality” in their own homes. It was Jeremiah’s role to prophesy the message, the promise that God had given, which was the promise of return, not to the former life, but to a better future.

How we long to embrace such a promise. How we long to embrace each other once again. How we long to be reunited after being separated by a pandemic. How we long for just leadership. How we long for the society of friends, for our gathering places, for human warmth, for health and security. How we long for just one day with no more worse news.

In the letter to the Ephesians (1:3-6,15-19a) Paul reminds us that despite everything, we must remember that God has chosen us to be “holy and blameless … in love.” In other words, God has given us the power we need to create a restoration like the one prophesied by Jeremiah. If we can embrace the power of God’s love, we can shift into the dimension where we reside as God’s own children, adopted through Christ, to reside in grace freely bestowed. We are reminded to see the world not with our backs up but “with the eyes of [our hearts] enlightened.” Oh my …

It is into the dimension created by this enlightening of the eyes of the heart that we find the riches of the glory of what God has given us, which, is love.

And that is the eternal and profound meaning of Christmas—that love is eternally within our grasp, that we “may know what is the hope to which” God calls us, which is the power of a universe created in love, powered by love, ruled justly by love.

It is no simple task we have been given. It is easy enough to lose hope, to dwell in the doldrums of the constant thrum of worse and worse news, to begin to forget the warmth of the embrace of those we love, the aura of their smiles, the breeze of their laughter.

Like all things spiritual, it is action to which we are called. To love is to live in love and to do that is to banish the absence of love from our hearts. The scriptural example we have is that of Joseph’s actions in Matthew’s Gospel (2:13-15, 19-23). Joseph arouses his family to escape danger not once but three times. But an interesting fact about the scripture is that Joseph never makes a decision without divine interaction. Everything he does follows from “a dream” in which “an angel of the Lord” appears. But it is not only the appearance of the angel but rather it is Joseph’s interaction with the divine, it is Joseph’s response, to go in love.

It is to this kind of divine interaction that we now all are called. It is to the power of the action of love, which begins with the active banishment of the absence of love, to restore God’s will and God’s kingdom among us. Like Joseph, we are called to be active, to act in love, to react by love, to fulfill the prophecy with love.

Happy New Year. May we be merry, may our lives become like a watered garden, may we learn to walk in a new dimension of love.

2 Christmas All Years RCL 2021 (Jeremiah 31:7-14; Psalm 84:1-8; Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a; Matthew 2:13-15,19-23 ©The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Acting with Boldness*

Recently a friend of mine won an award from the Guinness Book of World Records. My friend’s real name is irrelevant here (just like the prophets in the Bible), in the record books you’ll find her as Michelle DuBarry. She is, at the moment, at the age of 84, the world’s oldest performing drag queen (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/torontos-michelle-dubarry-on-being-the-oldest-performing-drag-queen/article28611008/).

And I’m proud to say she was maid of honor at my wedding.

Talk about acting with boldness. When Michelle began drag it was a sort of theater, this was in the 1950s, and the men who dressed as women to do short musical reviews, had to wear men’s underwear, because when the cops raided their shows they actually had to pull up their dresses and show their BVDs (the law was written in such a way that this made it legal, don’t ask me for the details ….). Michelle is a darling lady. When I first met her a decade ago she asked me how I was and I said I was very old and she said something along the lines of I didn’t know the half of it. She’s young at heart and always has been. But she’s also bold, and always has been. Prophets act with boldness.

I seem to be on a kick here. Prophecy is not that weird made up prediction nonsense you find all around. Prophecy is when people act in ways that God calls them to do, to show the rest of us the truth. Michelle is a prophet, and at this point she’s nearing Isaiah’s experience level!

In Wisconsin the snow has melted, and across the US the election is actually engaged and soon some people actually will vote (remember, at caucuses people don’t vote, they count how many are at which casserole). Yes, that was rude, but caucuses aren’t elections and the press shouldn’t treat them as elections. (We did see that they don’t actually count people, they actually just toss coins.)

Boldness is how God has called all of us to live. We are called to live life to the fullest, pushing the boundaries at every moment. No fear, no closet—it’s time to be out and to be boldly who God made you to be. No less than the world’s oldest performing drag queen has said “now we can be who we are.” That means you, too.

This Sunday in the Christian calendar is often called the Transfiguration. It is the last Sunday of the season of Epiphany, which means Christmas really is over now (so take those damn lights down!).

It’s time for Lent, and that means it’s the point in the calendar when we turn from the intimate darkness of winter to the encroaching spring and to the promise of new life. In the Church we soon will enter the season of Lent, with ashes and repentance and penitent acts—we are called to look inward.

I know, there is a great secularization of giving things up, this is caused by the irrational approach the Romans have brought—”tell them the rules but don’t explain!” But the purpose of Lenten repentance is not to give up something that is bad for you. If you smoke, you should quit smoking, and not blame it on Lent. But if you enjoy baloney sandwiches, you might give them up for Lent. Every day when you have a turkey sandwich instead you will miss your baloney, and in that moment of “missing” you will have repented and found a window open to God. That is what Lent is about.

When you look inward, do you find someone acting with boldness? You should. Because Lent is about acting with boldness. Don’t give something up, rather, think of it as entering into that spiritual space where you can be one with God. And then, once there, figure out who God has called you to be, and be that person. Like our great prophet Michelle DuBarry.

 

©2016 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved

Last Sunday after Epiphany (Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99; 2 Cor 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-36, [37-43a])

Mirrors dimly*

I’ve been thinking a lot about my spending time with my cousin when I was a boy, and how we often spent summers at each other’s houses. He’d be at my place for awhile and then his parents would come to get him but somehow when they left I’d go with and spend awhile at his house. This went on for years. Still, and this is the point, there were things about their house that were just a little bit off for me. I got to thinking about this because I was trying to remember how it was I got so taken with strawberry soda, which we never had at home. I think it must have been something they had at their house. Silly kinds of memories like this come after six decades. I keep trying to recreate the experience of delicious strawberry soda and I can’t quite duplicate it, and the reason probably is that whatever it was probably was locally-produced at the time.

I think of things like this when I read that line in 1 Corinthians (13:12) where Paul says “for now we see in a mirror, dimly.” He’s writing about growing up and putting an end to childish ways as a metaphor for putting away self-centeredness and growing into Christlike lives. He says we understand only dimly how real a life of clarity there could be if only we could live fully into the salvation God prepared for us in Christ, a salvation that already is ours if only we can fully grasp it. To grasp it, we keep trying to see it.

The mirror part is important because Paul wasn’t living in any urban condo with mirrored walls. He walked from place to place or rowed a boat, lived where he could find shelter in villages along the way. And mirrors in their day were pieces of metal or more likely the inside of the abalone shells we collected growing up in Monterey that reflected light about as well as a still pond on a sunlit day. You can see the image and you can tell what it is but it’s not exact and there’s no detail. We see it only dimly.

Paul brings this up together with prophecy—or prophesying he says, meaning playing the prophetic role. He says we prophesy only in part, because we see our role in God’s kingdom only in part. There are two other readings today about prophecy. In Jeremiah 1 we enter into the dialogue between Jeremiah and God when God commisions Jerermiah’s prophecy. Like most prophets, Jeremiah isn’t interested in it as a career choice and doesn’t think he’s going to be good at it. But, God says, there is no choice, it was intended in God’s plan all along. In Luke 4 (21-32) we have the story about Jesus trying to preach in his childhood synagogue and getting turned away.

Well, prophesy we all do every day, whether we like it or not. LGBT Christians are prophets in many ways. We show the church what faithful life is like for lgbt people. We show the world that God made us lgbt and wants us to live fully into our lgbt lives both in and out of the church. We show our heteronormative fellow travelers on life’s journey that there is more than one way to be normal, to be Christian, to be faithful. We do it whether we like it or not, because God has ordained us to do so. And as Paul reminds us we see only dimly what it ultimately means, like Jeremiah we do not set foot on the prophet’s path with speechwriter in tow but merely with the life and breath that God has given us. And, like Jesus, sometimes people don’t or won’t see or hear us. Then again, sometimes they do.

We in the United States are on the cusp of a political year. One day from now the looniness of a so-called campaign played out by and for the media will end when actual voters begin to make their points of view known. It won’t be quick, it will last until November. The voices won’t be clear, they’ll be muddled and inconsistent, just like that dim mirror. But one thing is true for lgbt people and that is that we have played a major prophetic role in advancing God’s kingdom by bringing equality out of the closet and into the living rooms and driveways and offices of America just as our friends in other parts of the world have done. We haven’t got it quite perfect yet and we won’t right away but we absolutely are en route.

We have to keep growing up into adults in Christ, into reasonable prophets in God’s kingdom. It’s our calling.

©2016 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Epiphany 4 (Jeremiah 1:4-10; Psalm 71:1-6; 1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30)