The law of love must be expressed in deeds*, or, Driving in Philly

I spent most of this week writing to deadlines. It wasn’t so bad, except it meant I hardly got out of the house all week. When I did, it was because something was needed from the supermarket, and partially also because it was a chance to get away from my desk and breathe a little bit. Seriously, I didn’t shave for six days this  week because I couldn’t spare the time it would have taken.

So, then, when I dashed out in the car, I just had to keep shaking my head. It’s a wonder I don’t have whiplash. People were driving all week like lunatics. But then, I had to remember, I had just been in Seattle where people are nice. So it was just a bit of culture shock fitting back into the pattern of aggression and rudeness that seems to rule Philadelphia.

Do  you know the law about what to do when you stop at a stop sign in  a four-way stop intersection? Well, first, you have to have your cell phone in your left hand and at your left ear, and your coffee cup in your right hand so you’re driving your SUV with your knees. That’s required, I saw it in the motor vehicle code the other day. Now, make sure whatever you do that you never bring your vehicle to a stop. If there are other vehicles you have a choice. You can put down either your phone or your coffee and wave at them like a lunatic. Or, you can push down full throttle on the accelerator and barge through the intersection at about 60 mph. That’s also in the vehicle code. Of course, to do this, you have to have one of those special license plates—I think it says “[other nearby state with two words in its name]” on it.

Sound bitter?  Yes. Try living in my neighborhood for a little while. It was a ramp up to the full moon kind of week and the craziness got worse all week. So I’m glad that was over on Friday night. Maybe we can get back to some sort of human productivity now.

There’s no particularly interesting gay news this week. Egypt’s revolution goes on, tenuously, now in the aftermath of having succeeded at toppling the Mubarak government, but not having yet managed to create a democracy. Memo to Egypt: it takes more than a few days to make a democracy. Try to be patient. But Memo 2 to Egypt: stay there in that square until the army gets elections going on and a constitution written and don’t let them delay. You don’t need more than a few hours to write a constitution. And once you have a draft a congress can amend it and vote on it. So this shouldn’t be months or years, but rather weeks. It is 2011 after all.

The other uprisings frighten me. Except the one in Wisconsin, of course. Hurray for my colleagues who keep marching on the capitol.

The message of the scripture this week all boils down to Paul, of course—to “I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it.” What more can we do in life than build a foundation, and hope that, someone else will build on it? As our collect this week reminds us, without love what we do is worth nothing. So the answer is that there always is more we can do in life by  bringing a little bit of love from our within, from our soul, to bear on the outward building of life’s foundations. Walk in love, as Paul said, or go in peace, as we say at the end of each mass, or as you go proclaim the good news, as Jesus says all through the gospels.

Gay people have a special gift to offer greater society, because what defines us is the way we love despite the obstacles. We learn to differentiate our love, to make it sharper and more focused and more specific. And so we can learn to walk in love, because it’s our job to lift the whole boat as it were, to show the whole community how to bring love to bear in everything we do.

Jesus has another sermon full of contradictions. Of course you aren’t supposed to give away your coat. But, you are supposed to offer grace as your challenge in the face of evil. Just another way of saying “Walk in love.”

*7th Sunday after the Epiphany (Leviticus 19:1-2,9-18; Psalm 119:33-40; 1 Corinthians 3:10-11,16-23; Matthew 5:38-48)

©2011 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

How to Run an Airline*

In order to be faithful to my blog and my bloggers and my commitment to myself to engage the scripture each week I’ll take a shot at this. But I’d just better begin by saying I’m exhausted. I was in Seattle all week at a conference, and am just barely home. I always think it sort of humorous when I’m conference-going that the world goes on around me. The rest of the time, you see, I’m at the center of the universe. Hmmmm … and if you believe that let’s talk about that bridge in Brooklyn. Okay, still there’s little opportunity to engage the news in the usual ways when your work and life routine is up for grabs. So let’s just acknowledge that there was a revolution in Egypt this week.

But maybe there’s a hook here after all. I was thinking (again sort of bemusedly) about how hard I have to work to get home from a trip, especially via air (but it used to be like this on the train as well). It takes all of my emotional energy to keep the plane in the air, to keep the airline running on schedule, to generate enough emotional energy to make the people around me sit still and not put their seatbacks down in my lap and so on. It wears me out! And this is what Ecclesiasticus points to, and what Jesus also is teaching, in today’s scripture. (Remember, Jesus is never teaching about the actual thing in his story—never; his examples are supposed to make you think deeply, so you’ll internalize what he has said, and change.) Ecclesiasticus says you make your own choices in life, God has given you both fire and water and you get to pick which one you want to live with. And all of the dichotomies Jesus raises are examples.

It all goes back to the real meaning of sin, which is to cut yourself off from God. (And don’t go finishing the phrase by adding “by doing X” because that is exactly my point. There is no list of naughties that are “sins” that you can just tick off on your list to make yourself a good boy! Or girl!) Cutting yourself off from God means turning off the part of your soul that listens quietly to God’s voice, that plugs into the gently powerful energy that is God’s creating love. And since it is by sharing God’s creating loving energy with each other that we prove we are connected with God, when we cut the circuit—when we are in sin—then we usually have cut ourselves off from each other as well. In fact it’s the first sign. And that, as Ecclesiasticus says, is all up to us. Every one of Jesus’ examples is such a thing. Jesus doesn’t say you shouldn’t ever have a disagreement. He says if you consume yourself with anger you have already shut the door on God. And so on. Paul says the same thing in two ways in 1 Corinthians. He says don’t argue about whether you belong to him or to Apollos (another early evangelist)—you are missing the point, because you belong to God. Grow up, Paul says, get ready for solid food. Stop demanding selfishness (this is what Paul means by “in the flesh”) like a spoiled brat and learn to deal with your fellows as an adult joint heir of God’s kingdom.

There’s nothing explicitly gay here this week … jetlag got me I guess. I could do some Philadelphia-bashing. I could say I was in Seattle all week, and while I didn’t think it was the best place I’d ever been, I did discover some really nice people. Nobody I encountered was mean. I found a gay bar for cocktails one evening and although my back hurt too much to relax, everybody was very friendly. And I found a really nice gay restaurant, where I managed in two days to become practically a regular, just because everyone was really friendly. (You figure out why this is Philly-bashing.)

I can say I shouldn’t have spent all day yesterday running the airline and all of my fellow passengers. That’s the true lesson of this scripture. Let God be God. Love each other. And the rest will fall into place on its own.

*6th Sunday after the Epiphany (Ecclesiasticus 15:15-20; Psalm 119:1-8; 1 Corinthians 3:1-9; Matthew 5:21-37)

©2011 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Salt of the Earth*

A year or so ago my husband gave me a book about salt. I was a little curious when I opened it (it was a Christmas gift) but I trust his judgment and he was right. It was both interesting and important. It is the sort of book you can read on a long flight, and since I had a few trans-Atlantic flights going on then, that’s exactly what happened. I read about salt as I flew back and forth from Philadephia to Amsterdam.

It was interesting all on its own. And although I had never seriously considered the role of salt in the history of humankind, I began to see its importance emerge from the narrative. This was very well-written history; compelling even. And what’s more, I began to recognize salt I knew! Those salt flats at the southern end of San Francisco Bay for instance. We’ve all flown over them landing at San Francisco International Airport. But those of us who grew up in California have driven past them for decades. When have you flown in there, or driven there? I first drove past them in 1964 en route to Hawaii (on the USS Lurline). Next when we flew back from Hawaii in 1967 and drove south to Monterey. And then over and over en route to San Francisco, but especially when I flew to New York to take conducting lessons when I was 17, and then again, and again, and again as I flew back and forth from Portland Oregon, where I went to college. And then more. So that was exciting. And it turned out I knew other salt flats as well. But the real thrill came for me when I was on the train through Belgium, when I began to think to myself “my, this looks like how the salt flats were described” and then whoa, there they were …..

So this Gospel is great because Jesus is equating being salty with keeping your light shining, and that is exactly correct physiologically speaking. But how else is it correct? Remember, the body is mostly salt and water; if we subtract the water, what’s left is salt. If the water is the electricity that makes the engine run, the salt is the substance on which and from which and within which it runs. Sounds like the soul to me.

Never thought of your soul as salt, huh? Well, take a shot at it. Isaiah says shout out your love of God, don’t think all that posturing with candles and vestments and pretty language is convincing God of your love … God knows better, God sees through you, God knows your salt because God knows you’re salt. Paul says the same thing to the Corinthians; he says “we have received not the spirit of the world but the Spirit of God.” He means, we have received our salt—our souls—from God. And that is how we are the children of God. And like orphans everywhere, it is up to us to recognize God our Father as our Creator, and to acknowledge that love that made us and makes us and is in us.

God my friends wants to be with you in your saltiness. I think this is a terrific message for gay people. We’re always being accused, usually by other gay people, of being too gay—“oh my gosh you will mess it up for us if you keep being SO GAY.” Well, my friends, God wants us to be gay, and salty to boot. And God wants us to be gay because it is how we lift the boats, it is how our salty souls provide a place for the whole world to relax and see that sexuality is not freakish, it is of God.

That means of course that sin is irrelevant. How many times have you  been told you are a sinner because you  are gay? Well, that is always wrong, wrong, wrong. Sin is how you disconnect yourself from God. Isaiah’s prophecy is all about how to stay connected to God. Love each other, respect each other, help each other; for heaven’s sake (literally), participate in creating the kingdom in your own midst.  Because you my friends, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, you are the salt of the earth.
*5th Sunday after the Epiphany (Isaiah 58:1-9a, (9b-12); Psalm 112:1-9, (10); 1 Corinthians 2:1-12, (13-16); Matthew 5:13-20)

©2011 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

David Kato, gay martyr

You might have noticed my mention of David Kato’s murder in Sunday’s homily. David was a gay Ugandan, who was working within the church as best he could, which wasn’t too good, and with Integrity where possible, to bring the promised “dialogue” about gay people to the Ugandan Anglican church, and to the greater Anglican Communion. He was butchered last week by homophobic fellow citizens.

Here is a story from the Episcopal News Service about his “funeral” which was conducted by a lay-reader when his own rector refused to honor his death http://www.episcopalchurch.org/80050_126792_ENG_HTM.htm.

Our Presiding Bishop, The Most Rev. Katherine Jefferts-Schori, has very bravely called the whole church to respect the dignity of every human being. To see a video of her entire sermon click http://www.episcopalchurch.org/ens.htm.

Somewhat belatedly, the Archbishop of Canterbury has made a second statement, after the first in which he seemed to doubt that this had been a murder, see his comment on  Video http://www.rte.ie/news/2011/0130/anglicans.html#video.