Nonconventional Joy

These wonderful stories from the Acts of the Apostles are often considered to be about the founding of the church but it is clear that they are really about how the Gospel of love spread (did spread, can spread, does spread) from household to household, primarily through nonconventional populations. That’s an academic way of saying the people we see being baptized and embracing the Gospel in these stories are the outcasts of their time and place. This is surely directly a call to LGBTQ people. Look at what it says! Last week (Acts 16:13-15) we had “Lydia the woman who sold purple cloth.” She listened and understood and heard the message and her whole household was baptized. This week (Acts 16:16 ff.), we have gone out from Lydia’s household in Thyatira to Phillippi and now we meet a carny, described as a “slave girl who had a spirit of divination.” Later, after a fantastic earthquake comes as the climax of a prison hymn sing along, the suicidal jailer receives the Gospel and invites the whole community into his household. Does any part of this story ring any bells for you? How about a pride fest? How about a gay bar? How about drag and dancing queens? What do all of them have in common? They all have embraced joy and full out humanity as life’s path.

So it is to the people who embrace joy as life that first Jesus and then his apostles appeal. And it is these LGBTQ people who were and are the first missionaries of the Gospel, the first apostles of love.

The Revelation (22:12 ff.) reminds us that the reward of a life of love is to know timelessness. Jesus always is coming, Jesus always has come, Jesus always is to come; love always is coming, love always has come, love always is to come. Time is not linear, time is all at once. That is how love is forever both the beginning and the end. Jesus’ high priestly prayer in John (17ff.) points to the same idea, that love is all and love is always timeless. We must learn to embrace love in all things. We who love are love.

Where are we in this timelessness today? Are we on a linear path or are we living in the timeless reality of God? In the United States it is a holiday weekend—Memorial Day. COVID is rising relentlessly again even as people ignore means of mitigation, every other day it seems I learn another friend of mine has succumbed to it, after more than two years of careful avoidance. War in Ukraine plods on. The week just past in which we planned a remembrance of the murder of George Floyd we wound up sandwiched in what surely is timelessness between mass shootings in a supermarket in Buffalo and an elementary school in Texas. One of my cooking magazines is filled with references to queerness even as the threat of institutionalized violence against a woman’s right to choose hangs over us. How do we choose love in this time, in these times?

God’s eternal message to us is that we need to learn, to practice, to constantly improve, to appreciate truly how to love. It is this sense of love within us that is the manifestation of the Holy Spirit. We must embrace joy, we must follow the example of the LGBTQ lives we have been created to live by learning not only to lead lives of joy but to spread our love. Love builds up. Love help us! Amen.

7 Easter Year C 2022 RCL (Acts 16:16-34; Psalm 97 Dominus regnavit; Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21; John 17:20-26)

©2022 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.