Love is Always the Answer

We are living in a very strange time; one might even say a paradoxical time. As I seem to say over and over, there is the constant cognitive dissonance of this beautiful early summer, on the one hand, and the horrific threat of Covid-19, on the other. There is the cognitive dissonance of ongoing demonstrations by millions for equality, on the one hand, and other millions clogging bars and beaches despite the need to distance to avoid the virus, on the other; and the churning of these two dissonant vortices is itself a source of cognitive dissonance. Then, too, there is the threat to social liberty—after decades of work at gaining equality for gay and lesbian people we find that everything we have worked for is threatened, not alone by the usual oppressive forces, but also by the threat of the virus, which requires a different expression of individual liberty to embrace life but at the same time leads to social requirements like stay-at-home orders that are critical to preserve life itself.

But here we are.

I love with all my heart every day, or at least I try.

Do you?

I hope so.

It is the only way. We must all love, meaning we must all give love. Which means we must all feel love. We must all embrace God’s love, feel it in our hearts, and give it to each other with acts of justice and respect and grace and, of course, affection.

Today’s scripture all points to the conclusion—the eternal revelation—that God’s love, which is eternal, is eternally given to us through the small things that make up everyday life. In Genesis (24) we have the end of the saga of Abraham and Sarah, which in turn is the beginning of the saga of Isaac and Rebekah. It is the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham in acts that are turning points in human life. God’s love is complete, God’s love is eternally given, and God’s love is the miraculous action of a woman bearing a child, a child growing into adulthood, a woman with a water jar, a blessing, a camel mounted and ridden, a marriage—miracles of everyday things.

Paul (Romans 7) struggles with the everyday paradox of disconnection—sin—aligned with connection—faith. The eternal battle we all take up in every waking moment between the chatter in our heads that occupies our feelings and prevents us from experiencing the love that is all around us, and the very expression of God’s eternal and eternally promised love that is the tonic that fills the soul like water filling a tide pool when we allow ourselves to feel love. Grace again.

Jesus (Matthew 11) interprets the paradoxical clutter of social forces experiencing that same battle over love. Jesus recites a hymn of thanksgiving that god’s promise of eternal love is complete in the epiphany of Christ, he reminds us that love is best embraced by those closest to God’s gracious will, the “infants” of God’s kingdom. We are (as we learned last week too) the “infants” of the kingdom when we quell the noisy paradox and embrace God’s love fully and purely. It is in this embrace of love that we receive the “rest” Jesus offers to all of us who “are carrying heavy burdens.” He tells us to take his yoke—the mantle of love—and from it to learn to be gentle, humble, gracious, affectionate and just.

In other words, take on the yoke of love and you will find rest. The rest Jesus points us toward is the grace of God, the salvation of creation, which is always and only and eternally the embrace of love. Love is always the answer.

For we who are God’s lgbt disciples, for whom our very identity is the expression of love, the job of life is to embrace the love that is within and all around us, to share it with each other, and in so doing to reveal the march of the miracles of love in everyday life. Life each day is a miracle of God’s love.

 

Proper 9 Year A RCL 2020 (Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67; Psalm 45: 11-18; Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30)

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

The Revelation of Perpetual Love

The collect for today begins with the petition: “O Lord, make us have perpetual love and reverence for your holy Name.” In other words, we pray that God will create us continually as people who have perpetual love. Various dictionaries have various definitions, but in general “perpetual” means something along the lines of “ceaseless,” “everlasting,” and “continuous,” and I would suggest the term means all of these things mixed up together. So what would be “perpetual love?” It would be love that is outpouring from us, it would be outpouring love that is ceaseless and ongoing and everlasting. If we understand that love is not just a warm feeling, but rather is the giving and doing of respect and value, the soulful embrace that heals—if we understand this then we see that perpetual love is the healing action of God’s creation.

Where do we see perpetual love at this moment in time?

We see perpetual love in the now daily protests in cities and towns and villages and households all over the world. In this ongoing ceaseless outpouring of respect and demand for justice by the everlasting soulful embrace intended to heal humanity from the sins of exclusion that destroy lives we see the action of perpetual love. We see God’s children embracing God’s children and insisting by their perpetual love on the valuing of all life, of all humanity.

We see perpetual love in the now constant care we give to each other as we hunker down to make it through this pandemic, a whirlwind of death that is just a few droplets away. We see perpetual love in our citizens masked to prevent our infection, in our shopping mates standing apart six feet or better to prevent our infection, in these and thousands of other ways we see the perpetual love that is the soulful embrace that can heal even in this time of trial.

God has, indeed, made us all to have perpetual love.

In Genesis 21(8-21) we discover God hearing the voices of all of God’s children wherever they are. We see God’s embrace in the voice of the angel bringing the message “do not fear.” We learn (as indeed, we already know from our own lives) that God hears our voices just where we are, in all situations, that God opens our eyes when we are not afraid, and that God brings salvation to those who have perpetual love for God and for God’s children and God’s creation.

In Romans 6(1b-11) we are reminded that we are like infants, perpetually in the love that brings the newness of life we experience if we are together with Christ. We learn that we are grown together with Christ, like intertwined limbs we live in the soulful embrace of healing. God hears our cries where we are. Our constantly renewed life is without sin, which means that our new life is full with connection. It is the absence of disconnection that makes us continuously newborn and it is in this perpetual love that comes from the embrace of Christ that we discover the promise of the healing that is being “alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

In Matthew’s Gospel (10: 29-31) we are reminded that God has counted all the hairs on our heads, metaphorically or parabolically, every child of God is valued and respected and loved by God and is to be valued and respected and loved by all of God’s children. This is the meaning of perpetual love, that we must bring justice to all of God’s children by living with the perpetual love, the soulful embrace of healing, that God has given to each of us in our creation in God’s own image.

Newness of life, especially the perpetual newness of life that is the gift of salvation—this newness of life comes from total perpetual love. This is what Jesus means when he says (Matthew 10: 39)” “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” Perpetual love requires rebirth into a new life that is perpetually apart from disconnection. Perpetual love requires life that is full in vulnerability, full in trust, full in the outpouring of emotion and full in the soulful embrace of healing.

Perpetual love is the revelation of God’s work in the world on this day.

  

Proper 7 Year A 2020 RCL (Genesis 21:8-21; Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17 Inclina, Domine; Romans 6:1b-11; Matthew 10: 24-39)

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

Whoever welcomes one lgbt*

Interpreting Biblical scripture is always complicated. As lgbt people know all too well, it is easy enough to read the text literally and interpret it’s context according to contemporary norms, and doing so is nearly always misleading. Today’s Gospel story, for example, ends with Jesus taking a “little child” and “put[ting] it among them.” Our visceral reaction is to go “awww …” and make whatever cute child face we are accustomed to, while ignoring the fact that the child in the story is refered to as “it.” The “precious child” that we know in our society is a modern invention, from the period after the industrial revolution, after the rise of higher education, and after the rise of the prosperous middle class. In Jesus’ day children were had usually by accident, or sometimes on purpose because more workers were needed. They were dirty and unfed, roaming the streets looking for sustenance, or something to steal to take home to the household. They were avoided by upper-class people, whose own children were raised somewhere out of sight by employees (nurse-maids, we find them called). So the little child that Jesus places in the middle of his group of disciples as an example is an example of one who is despised, disapproved of, unwanted, unwelcome, unacceptable.

That makes Jesus’ statement, then, even more shocking, as he tells his disciples in order to be seen as great they are going to have to welcome these despised creatures. “Oh, ick” would be everyone’s internal reaction.

The child, on the other hand, is making its own way, gathering sustenance, growing sinew, making a living, contributing to the household and therefore to the society, even if from the fringes. How nice, then, to be singled out by the nice man and ushered into the center of his circle. How nice to meet so many helpful people all at once. How nice to be given food and promised shelter and even a bit of respect.

So in this way we can see the promise of lgbt liberation in this lesson. We are the child in this story, it is we who are chosen by Jesus to stand in the center of his circle, and it is we who his disciples are instructed to welcome, to feed, to respect, if they want to gain the kingdom of heaven.

And so it is in our society as well. Recently I was in India, in Bangalore. It was sort of a shock to my system, which together with the jetlag really shook me up. One evening I was sitting at the hotel bar having a drink and chatting with the bartender, a nice young man. He saw my wedding ring and asked about my wife. When I replied simply “husband, not a wife, a husband” he looked shocked and said “you’re married to a man?” He really did look shocked. I tried to think carefully how to reply, and what I finally said was something like “yes, in much of the west gay people now can legally be married, we were married in Canada.” As his shock abated he grew thoughtful, and then he said “oh gays, we have some in Mumbai, they’re doing things over there.”

At the time the exchange unsettled me, although I was so unsettled by culture-shock it wasn’t at the top of my list. But I see now that in that moment I was this child in Jesus’ story. I was the outcast, light was shed on me, and learning took place. And so it goes.

The accompanying reading today from James begins with the question “Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom.” Standing up as lgbt people in the real world, being who we are, being seen as who we are, is a form of prophetic witness. It is a form of witness done with gentleness born of life’s own wisdom.

James’ lesson ends with this advice: “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.”

Proper 20 (Proverbs 31:10-31; Psalm 1; James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:30-37)

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

Rejoice at the rainbows*

“I have set my bow in the clouds.”

When have you seen a rainbow? One of the reasons I love the Netherlands is that you see rainbows all the time there. That’s because it rains a lot, but also because the sun shines a lot. Sometimes when both happen at once, you get really dramatically pretty rainbows. One of the most dramatic I have seen was over Amsterdam’s Museumplein one afternoon—just an ordinary Tuesday afternoon I think—when coincidentally the Concergebouworkestr was rehearsing Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. I had been waiting for the tram, and I heard the music, and wandered over there to see the orchestra in action. And just as they got to those amazing great gates of Kiev, here came the rainbow … the sun sparkled, and the whole plein erupted in applause and shouts.

Wow. What if every act of God could result in applause and shouts?

I love the ordinariness of the scripture this week. In the first letter from Peter we have a very direct and straightforward set of facts—Christ suffered for sins, was put to death, was made alive, proclaimed. And now you are saved. What more is there to say? In the Gospel there also is direct, straightforward language. Jesus came from Nazareth, was baptized, heard the voice, was driven into the wilderness, came back to Galilee, and proclaimed the fulfillment of God’s will.

Jesus says “repent.” I bet you think that means you should feel bad and stop doing something. That is not true. To repent is simply to turn, to re-turn, if you will, to God. Remember … remember God. That is how we repent. What is the best way to repent? The best way to repent is to remember God by re-specting each other … I divide that word that funny way on purpose because I want you to think about it. That means “do it again, as you did it before.” Remember the last time you gave someone your total and absolute utter respect? That was the last time you re-pented, the last time you re-turned to God. Re-capture that feeling.

Plain, straight-forward, direct: love God, my friends. Stop the madness, listen to the music, re-spect each other, and rejoice at the rainbows.

*1 Lent (Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-9; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15)’
©2012 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.