Lent is about coming home. I know all about coming home, because I travel all the time. Coming home has lots of layers of meaning. First, there is the journey. I know when I got up Friday morning in Milwaukee and headed for the airport all I really had in mind was being at home …. Then there is the actual journey, the flight in this case, the dealing with people en route, the intersection with creation (otherwise known as the weather), and then there is the shifting in the soul from there to here, from other to this.
This, exactly, is what God is asking of us. Always. And Lent is the season in which we celebrate this asking of God for us to think about coming home. God wants us to remember that wherever we have been, home is with God, and now is the time to focus on God. This is why we give something up for Lent, just as a daily reminder that we are trying to focus on God.
I have two impressions this week. One is that Maryland has made marriage legal. This is the ninth state to do so. New Jersey was the eighth, but of course the obstructionist homophobic governor has vetoed that legislation. The other impression is from a story in Philadelphia’s City Paper about a gay family that cannot continue to live in their own home due to harassment from a neighbor. I have to say, gay people need to come out in droves … I cannot even begin to remind you that as long as people think we are strange or weird they can get away with oppressing us. And as soon as they know we are the accountants signing their paychecks, they will get the right idea. Maryland has approved equality for marriage. Chris Christie, has shown his true colors as a hater of people. He should not have been elected in the first place, and his opinion should not trump the rights of humans.
In this week’s lessons we see God making Abram into Abraham, making his 90 year-old wife Sarah fertile, and from that issue showing us that God can do what God wants to do. Marriage equality is about sharing our humanity. It might be late in the day for me, but for our glbt friends in their teens and 20s and so forth it is an opportunity to begin to be families. It is an opportunity to begin to realize that God is making a new thing in each of us, always.
“Get behind me, Satan,” indeed. Get behind me Chris Christie. Go persecute weaklings who allow you to bully them. But you cannot dampen my spirit, and you cannot make me less than an equal human in either God’s creation or the United States of America.
*2 Lent (Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22:22-30; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38)
©2012 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.
Dimensions of Reality: glbt Christian spirituality 