The anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion is June 28, which is next Weds. This is why “Pride” always fell on the final Sunday in June (until it didn’t). For years I never experienced Pride, I just wasn’t there then …. And then one year I was in San Francisco for the American Library Association and trying to get from one committee meeting to another there it was in my way … San Francisco Pride. OMG I might have said! Was I shocked? Yes, but not because of what I was seeing; I was shocked to realize I had blown off this responsibility for so long. I never made it to that committee meeting; I joined the ragtag bunch on the fringe of the parade (ok, we were just invited to join if we wanted and march along) and eventually there I was at Market and Castro—another name for “heaven” if you were a gay man at that time.
Back in real life I discovered “Pride” in Philadelphia was always on the wrong day (in theory so as not to compete with the big Pride in New York City). Nevertheless, and decades later, the day after I was ordained a priest it was Pride in Philadelphia. Bishop Walter Righter (who had famously been tried and acquitted of heresy for ordaining a gay man) was the parade guest of my diaconal gay outreach ministry, and all of the dozens of family members who had come to my ordination came along.
I said my first mass as a priest, we sang Te Deum Laudamus, I gave my mother a rose (my brother and I had spent hours the night before wandering around Center City looking for that rose!) and then everybody went to the parade. Bishop Righter was seated in a convertible, I was marching just behind him. At the end of the parade we went into Christ Church Pine Street to a planned Evensong where I preached. Then we all gathered at my house in exhaustion, and … in PRIDE of course! I’ll never forget my college friends exchanging reminiscences of the day with my 70-something Dad who had taken his paraplegic wife the whole route in her wheel chair alongside my brother and my mother (Dad’s ex!). How’s that for parental love?
God’s love is the sure foundation, for sure!
Sometimes. normal things are the things that are the most significant catalysts. Like my Dad taking his wife in her wheel chair to follow me on a gay pride parade the morning after I was ordained a priest. You couldn’t make a movie about this sort of thing, nobody would believe it. But there it was, God incarnate, love incarnate, love in action, love generating love. Not unlike God hearing the voice of Hagar’s outcast son and providing first life-saving water and then an eternal blessing [Genesis 21:8-21].
And oh my that Evensong, we sang and sang and sang and sang and sang … and prayed. And rejoiced. We gave thanks for God, for love, for each other, and for God’s having brought us to that moment. Love, supplication, God will answer [Psalm 86:5-7].
This all happened in 1998. Three weeks later I went to Amsterdam to the Gay Games and my life was changed again and again, almost daily. I couldn’t believe I was finding myself in a place where everybody was like me, instead of the usual reverse where I was the outcast. It was exactly what I was called to do: to look, to see, to receive the revelation, to reject the state of disconnection, which is sin and to be born over and over in total connection. Alive to God in Christ [Romans 6:1b-11].
[Matthew 10:24-39] “Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.” Be proud! Be proud of who God has made you to be in God’s own loving image, be proud of the love you share, be proud of those who love you in the form in which you are.
Proper 7 Year A 2023 RCL (Genesis 21:8-21; Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17 Inclina, Domine; Romans 6:1b-11; Matthew 10: 24-39)
©2023 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.
Dimensions of Reality: glbt Christian spirituality 