Called to Love

Hard work, hard work, hard work … I keep telling you this love stuff is hard work. Why do you think God appointed us, God’s LGBTQ+ people to do it? It’s not just a challenge, it takes guts to make the world work with love.

Our collect today (the opening prayer) asks God to increase in us “faith, hope and charity” because to “obtain [love]” God has to make us love loving [the prayer says “love what [God] command[s]!].”

These last few months the lectionary has had us following the generations of Abraham, and the journey of the Exodus. It is a story of a spiritual journey toward salvation, which God has made available to all of creation. It is a revelation, or a meditation if you will, about the challenge of living as humans in the world, about the challenge of living together in the world, about the challenge of being at once stewards and subjects of creation. The story ends today with Moses’ death [Deuteronomy 34:1-112] and the beginning of the period of Joshua as prophet. It is important that these leaders are called “prophets,” meaning they are neither autocrats nor monarchs, but rather, they stand in view of God and the people, translating as best they can, God’s law of love.

The liturgical response is Psalm 90 [1-6, 13-17], which reminds us that all time is all at once and already is. Time-space is a single continuum. Time and space bound the dimensions of love in which we live. Love indeed is all around us. When Jesus says “the kingdom has come near” he means “the next dimension over” … “can you get there?” The way to get there is through the action of love.

The testing of Jesus continues in Matthew’s Gospel [22:34-46]. Jesus resolves all questions into an equivalence: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

The revelation from scripture is that love is tough but love is the law in the dimension that God has prepared for all creation. But we have to choose love. We have to choose the prophetic action of standing tall in the face of challenges and remembering always to respond by continuing to walk in love.

It is about to be the feast of All Saints, in which we remember those who indeed walked in love. Is it just quirk of fate that All Hallows Eve comes first, in which an ancient tradition of warding off the absence of love has become a celebration of joy and childlike rejoicing? Is it an accident that LGBTQ+ people revel in the opportunity to express the love God created within us to share as we dress up and dance and rejoice?

It is our call from God, to be the visible prophets of love, to stand tall as the revelation of active love that works.

Proper 25 Year A 2023 RCL (Deuteronomy 34:1-12; Psalm 1; 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22:34-46)

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

Hearing Love

I suppose we hear what we want to hear.

I certainly listen—in the night to trains in the distance, to the rustling of the Douglas firs, especially to the rain, especially to the rain that comforts me. When I was an adolescent living by the Monterey Bay I learned to fall asleep each night to the distant sound of a foghorn, which likewise was a sound that comforted me. It was a sound of human engineering that worked in accord with nature and that idea too comforted me. When I came to Portland to go to college I learned all about this comforting sleep sound of the rain pouring but also landing on windows and roofs and gutters and flowing and the sounds of the rain became my lullaby.

We ask God to hear our prayers and then to grant us peace. The truth is, when our prayers are the voice of the love within us then God’s peace has already been granted, much like the peace of the fog horn or the rain at night. Of course, any conscious interlocution with God is a sign of not only faith but of readiness for prophecy. When we consciously join in God’s eternal conversation we become like God’s voice in creation and this is what a prophet is. God’s prophets are those who viscerally experience—hear–God’s love and speak it aloud. Sometimes we call this witness when it means being present in creation in acts of love. Witness, prophecy—these are just the evidence of the active presence of God’s love working in and through us.

Paul wrote to the church at Corinth (1 Corinthians 8:1b) “Knowledge puffs up but love builds up” and “anyone who loves God is known by [God].” Knowledge, say, like gossip, puffs up the ego, which is separated from God because it is self-aggrandizing and that separates us from each other. But love, experienced, felt, taken in like a deep breath and given out like a great cry, builds up. If you don’t believe me, just see what happens when you actually say “I love you” to someone you love.

In Mark’s Gospel (1:21-28) we see Jesus preaching in a synagogue, speaking with authority. Like many such stories, the important bit arises almost as background, as a “man with an unclean spirit … cried out.” Jesus recognizes the torment in the man’s soul—what some commentators call a demon—and commands it “be silent, and come out of him!” The healing takes place with “convulsing and crying with a loud voice.” How like the moments when love can triumph by filling the vacuum of the absence of love. How like moments we all experience every day in our relationships with those we love. The healing action is the action of hearing, of hearing both the suppressed love and the convulsing of the fear of love’s absence.

Oppressed people know all too well how this goes. Once when I was sitting in collar at my church’s booth at gay pride a man came up to me and made fun of my pectoral cross sitting on my chest below my collar but also near a set of rainbow rings. Then he spat at me and walked off. It was a fairly typical interaction with a protester at pride. But it was also an example of hearing the action of an unclean spirit interacting with the fear of love’s absence.

The power of God’s love is ours to build up through our faith expressed not only in perception of love but in the prophetic action of loving. Loving begins with hearing the truth with compassion.

4 Epiphany Year B 2021 RCL (Deuteronomy 18:15-20; Psalm 111 Confitebor tibi; 1 Corinthians 8:1-13; Mark 1:21-28)

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

Being last*

Do you cook? I do. I love to cook. Lately, the last few years or so, I have moved slowly toward veganism, mostly because my body seems to have gone on its own crusade about getting fat. And I find that I feel completely different if I don’t consume any animal products. It’s always sort of difficult when I tell people that—they always say “I could never give up meat” and I always say “I didn’t ask you to, you asked me what was going on in my life and I told you.” So take that! Ok, a few times a year I cook meat, a goose at Christmas, a turkey at Thanksgiving, a ham when we throw a huge party. I even cooked a crown roast of something or other not too long ago. Sometimes, just for fun, I don’t eat any of it. I’m always shocked by the amount of fat and other animal matter that gets flung around my otherwise pristine kitchen, which usually deals only with olive oil and onions, celery, carrots, green peppers …..  garlic, potatoes, ginger ….

So what is this word of God, which is living and active and sharp, that pierces until it divides soul from spirit, like dividing joints from marrow? Do you know how hard that is? At first it reminded me of my annual battle with the turkey carcass, even after roasting, it won’t always come apart. So, something that can divide soul from spirit like joints from marrow has to be not only sharp but also immensely powerful. And in fact it is immensely powerful. Jesus calls, powerfully, us into his family. Jesus calls us all to become for one another true family. Jesus tells us we have to stop being self-centered, and learn to dwell in community. It’s harder than you think, by the way, to do that. Look at that list of things Jesus calls the “prizes” of discipleship—houses, siblings and parents, fields with persecutions. Wow. “Fields with persecutions.” That is one of the prizes you can expect as a child of God, a member of the body of Christ. What does that mean?

It means, life has its own moments. Sometimes, life’s own moments seem like persecution. Coming out, for instance, can seem like persecution. Loving your beloved in public can seem like persecution. Being gay can seem like persecution. Unless you can learn, as Jesus tells us, to walk through the eye of the needle …. Can you  shift your perspective? Can you see yourself not as a victim of society, but rather as a precious perfect child of God? If so, then your passage into the kingdom is assured. “Then, who can be saved?” the disciples ask. Jesus says “for God all things are possible” and “there is no one who has [followed] for my sake who will not receive a hundredfold.”

And then he says “many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.” Well, we who are gay are the last in many ways. So it would be an easy read to say to gay people that we will be first in Jesus’ kingdom. But that would not be correct. Because it isn’t sexuality, but community, that is critical. Can you put aside your  egotistical self? Can you be fully a member of the kingdom? It is entirely up to you. God created us gay in God’s perfect image. God wants us to live fully as gay. God wants us to live humbly as gay. God is calling us, to be gay. And in being gay, in many ways–because it means being fully who God has made us to be–we become last. Being last is our prophetic witness, because when we put community first, we take on our role in the family of the children of God, the body of Christ. For Christ calls us to be last among many.

*Proper 23 (Job 23:1-9, 16-17, Psalm 22:1-15, Hebrews 4:12-16, Mark 10:17-31)

©2012 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.