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.