Enlightening The Eyes of my Gay Heart

Growing up, I often tell young LGBTQ folks now, I didn’t know I was “gay.” The reason I say that is because we didn’t have that in those days. Or rather, I thought gay was what the yuletide was what with decked halls and all that. I didn’t know I could be a man who loved a man for life (or even for awhile). All I saw in the world was or appeared to be heterosexual. So I didn’t know there were any options.

Then again, I knew very well to whom I was attracted emotionally and sexually. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do about that so mostly I did nothing. I have now dim memories of times that I came across LGBTQ people and only much later (usually decades later) realized that was what that had been.

Like so many things in life, as I grew into adulthood and went out into the world I began to see things that were new and different for me, and very quickly I began to catch on that there was a whole big chunk of reality I knew nothing about and hadn’t really let myself encounter. So a first step for me was just letting my eyes see things in a different way.

My seeking came from an inner yearning and eventually I began to get past just observing and head for real learning. Somehow or other I came across a news stand someplace (probably in a book store, remember book stores? We used to have stores full of books of all kinds …. And often a huge magazine rack and lots of newspapers too.) and there one day was a newspaper called The Advocate. And boy did I devour every word of that once I got it home.

Now my eyes were really open and I began to see love all around me, especially of the LGBTQ variety. I wanted in and while I worked on that I opened my heart as well as my eyes. And then let’s just say one day I was delivered by an angel and never looked back.

But then a whole new world opened up for me. I remember very nervously being escorted to my first ever gay bar by a group of my new friends. It was equal parts terrifying and exciting. But it also was incredibly liberating. And I kept thinking “you mean this was here all along and I didn’t know about it?” It was both like being shifted into a new dimension, which it was, and like being delivered from exile, which it also was.

And, to cut to the chase, I met my husband and he dragged me to church. And boy was that ever a revelation. There in that bastion of holiness, surrounded by beauty and glory and joy and salvation, there were integrated people of all sexualities, of all races, of all genders, of all ages, of all social stations. I could go on and on. Again I thought “you mean this was here all along?” And, of course, it was. And it is.

Because Christ is king. Christ is king of the dimension of love, where there are no divisions, where revelation is yours if only you will open your eyes, where learning to walk in love is the surest path to eternal citizenship.

The prophet Ezekiel [34:11-16, 20-24] gives the word of God concerning God’s lost sheep, who God promises to rescue, to gather, to feed … to “make them lie down” in rest and relief. And a shepherd will be set over them. And I think of Christ, my king, who brought me back from exile and into a new dimension of being one with God’s creation of me and with and through whom I have been able to live a long life of love.

Like the Psalmist [Psalm 100] I learned to dance and sing and rejoice, not just at church but at that gay bar too. I learned to be joyful with all my heart, to give thanks and to be present with song.

Like Paul writing to the Ephesians [1:15-23] I learned the meaning of having “the eyes of [my] heart enlightened” to know the hope to which I had been called.

And then I understood [Matthew 25:31-46] that the Son of Man has come in glory and his angels are all around us and we have been gathered into the dimension of his love because we have learned to walk in the love given to us in creation by God in whose image we all are created.

And Christ is our LGBTQ king.

Amen.

Last Sunday after Pentecost, Christ the King, Proper 29 Year A RCL (Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24; Psalm 100 Jubilate Deo; Ephesians 1:15-23; Matthew 25:31-46)

©2023 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Take a Chance on Love

I know I write about ABBA’s music from time to time; the reason is that their music seems so prescient about LGBTQ+ love and lives …. it often seems sacred to me, not just (and not least) because it is so full of life and love, but also because it is so clearly aware of love, love’s pitfalls, and love’s glory. “Take a chance on me” for example …. who among us hasn’t had that anthem tell part of our story?

As God’s LGBTQ+ heirs it is our call to let love rule our hearts; that means the part where you are a little bit broken, a little bit hurt, a little bit vulnerable. Until or unless you can reach that dimension of vulnerable openness you cannot push through into the dimension of love where the answer to “take a chance on me” is “lay all your love on me.”

Take a chance, indeed. In his letter to the church at Rome [Romans 14:1-12] Paul wrote “welcome those who are weak in faith.” In other words, take a chance on them, love them, and take a chance on love. He also asked “why do you pass judgment? … we all will stand before the judgment seat of God.”  It is inevitable that we will be tempted to pass judgment. As in yesterday driving to the supermarket, I had to pull over three different times to let tailgaters go past me. Let’s not tempt love by telling you how I judged them, but see? I keep telling you, this walking in love stuff isn’t easy.

What is easy is to judge and to demand that people should conform to you. What God calls us to do is to resist judging, to just love and not give energy in the absence of love. Pull over and wait, and when they’re gone, enjoy the first blush of fall color in the leaves and the joy of being with the one who 45 years ago took a chance on me.

In Matthew’s Gospel [18:21-35] Jesus is asked how many times one must forgive before one can give up. He uses a mathematical formula that was intended in his time to be beyond the imagining of his listeners. There is no specific number of times one must forgive, of course; rather it is that forgiveness is always hard hard hard and yet must always be forthcoming. Because if we cannot forgive we are not only not walking in love, but we have left the dimension of love. Jesus offers a metaphor of eternal torture … well, when have you chosen not to forgive and how often are your tortured by that? It is all about how love comes from God to you and from you goes outward and not about those whom you are tempted to judge.

Our lectionary has us following the history of the generations of Abraham, which now on the retelling of the actual Exodus event [Exodus 14:19-31] are called “the army of Israel.” This is the famous parting of the Red Sea, and the exodus of Israel from captivity in Egypt.

The point here, as always, is how to shift into the dimension of love. Yes, this is a written account of events that were experienced in real time and recorded after centuries of oral history. But that is not what scripture is about. Scripture is for our enlightenment about the revelation of God’s action in creation. What did God do in the Red Sea but open the door into a different dimension? Israel found the door and passed through it. Those who could not did not do so well.

As indeed will we if we cannot find the door. But, if we do find the door we discover a passageway of miraculous love. And when we pass through we discover a life of love. We discover those who will take a chance on love.

It is no accident that LGBTQ+ people explain coming out as a kind of exodus. Coming out is not just escape from a closet, it is passing miraculously and perhaps perilously through a doorway into a different dimension where love prevails on a higher plane. Tough but life affirming. Scary but joyous. You know the rest.

Hallelujah! When Israel came out from the Red Sea, when you or I come out into the light of the dimension of love the mountains skip like rams and the little hills like young sheep … ‘tremble’ at the presence of [God’s love][Psalm 114].

Proper 19 Year A 2023 RCL (Exodus 14:19-31; Psalm 114; Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-35)

©2023 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

The Dimension of Love

Do you ever think about when you were born? I bet it isn’t right up there on your personal top hit chart.

I was born in 1952, in what was then called Queens General Hospital in Jamaica, today in the borough of Queens. When I started commuting from Philadelphia to Long Island University in Brookville I saw the hospital from the window of the LIRR. I thought, oh wow, that’s where I was born. I was 40 when that happened.

Now, if you were born down the street from your parent’s house, you probably had this experience when you were 2 and sort of spaced it. For me it was pretty exciting, seeing this great and famous hospital outside the train windows and thinking that one day I had been a tiny being nurtured into life there.

Was I born of Spirit?

One of the really difficult parts of understanding Christian theology is understanding this odd language of flesh and Spirit. To be born of the Spirit has everything to do with love. To be born of the Spirit is to be a person who has discovered the multiverse in which love is the only law that matters. To be born of the Spirit is to be a person who lives constantly by giving love from your heart. This is why Jesus says to be born of the Spirit means a second kind of birth, because it takes a conscious shift in your being to move from the dimension of self to the dimension of giving love. As Nicodemus asks (John 3:4) “how can anyone be born after having grown old?”

Jesus says that thing about the wind blowing—(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”)—do you ever stand outside in a fresh wind and bless it? I do. Especially since returning to Oregon, where I live surrounded by centuries-old fir trees towering higher than skyscrapers. When there is wind they not only rustle, they positively dance, a ballet of creation, a truly amazing wonder of God’s world. I think this is Jesus’ point about being born of the Spirit—Spirit is a dimension of its own and it swirls dynamically through creation always but only when we have chosen to give love do we tune into it, notice it, join it. And that shift is a kind of new birth.

In Old Testament times such shifts in dimensionality were described as literal movement. Look at Genesis 12:4 where God promises Abraham multitudes of blessing in return for ultimate faith—“Abram went, as the Lord had told him;” a shift, a movement, a conscious act of faith, choosing the dimension of God’s love. As Paul affirms then (Romans 4: 13), God’s promise is revealed in the righteousness of faith. Righteousness is a metaphor for a way of standing in faith, for that conscious movement that shifts dimensions from self (flesh) to love (Spirit). This is why Paul says it all rests on grace in which the promise of eternal blessing is guaranteed to everyone who shares the faith.

Movement, this shifting dimension, is something well-known in the lgbtq community. We call it “coming out.” For some of us it is the simple realization of true being, a kind of revelation that emerges from a lifetime of experience but seems uncannily simple once experienced—not unlike my epiphany looking out the window of the LIRR one day and seeing the place of my birth—a moment, a sudden slight shift in dimension, a new life of grace. For others of us it is a gut-wrenching experience driven by loneliness or despair or exile or dispossession but then coming as a revelation of the “exodos”—ancient Greek for “departure” but also the “way out” sign all over modern Greece.

Like the biblical Exodus, the way out is also the way in, the way into new life, rebirth in the lgbtq Spirit of love, where God’s guaranteed blessing is available to all who have faith, to all who give love. Either way, the way out must come from looking within, from realizing the truth of who God has made us to be, each of us and all of us in God’s image.

Birth from above, new life in the dimension of God’s love, is the way into the realization of God’s promised blessings to all who have faith.

 

2 Lent Year (Genesis 12:1-4a); Psalm 121 Levavi oculos; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17

©2020 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Mustard Seed of Love

I have to admit that I sometimes struggle with the concept of defining lgbt experience. Especially when it comes to reflecting on scripture, as I do to write this blog, I puzzle over just what in lgbt experience is a match for the references in the text; it is sometimes particularly tricky to match lgbt life with the stories in Jesus’ parables. No end of navel-gazing can be inserted here. There always is the old saw that if it is my experience and if I am gay (and I am gay) then it is a gay experience. So, getting the car washed, planting tulip bulbs, doing the laundry—are those gay experiences when I am the gay person in question? I guess so, actually, because it is a matter of backdrop. That is, the tulip bulbs aren’t particularly gay nor is planting them, but having a home where I can do that is a gay experience, at least for me. In fact, having the kind of life where there is sufficient stability to allow mundane things like everyday errands to happen is still a rare experience for lgbt people. We still struggle to achieve equality in the quality of life. Our lgbt friends in some parts of the world still risk their lives just getting up every day. Although in the ostensible developed west there is a façade of equality and acceptance, as we all know, too often it really is just a matter of bare tolerance. It’s okay to plant your tulips, just don’t look too gay when you do it.

Last Sunday’s scripture included a passage from Jeremiah that was recorded as a prophetic text; it is essentially the instructions for buying a house. The details are fascinatingly like they remain today. But the prophetic meaning of the text is that when and where righteousness and justice prevail God guarantees stability in the lives of faithful people; security returns like clockwork when the fulcrum of righteousness holds and the scales of faith and faithfulness are balanced.

This week’s scripture includes passages from Lamentations 1 and 3; a “lonely” “city that once was full of people” refers to an ancient exile; the response is that God is good to those whose hope expresses their faith because it is in that hopeful faith that salvation is encountered. In Luke’s Gospel (17: 5-10) Jesus gives a series of examples of the encounter of faith in ordinary life. The very power of faith, of course, is in having it. The grace of salvation is in the life of hope and atonement—a priest mentor of mine* used to delight in pronouncing that “at-one-ment” to remind us that it is we who must remember to remain one with God by living our lives in faith.

Exile, of course, is a common experience of oppressed peoples of all stripes. Lgbt people are no exception—we experience exile from family and community when we admit our God-given sexuality. Sometimes that exile is metaphorical being realized in dour faces and tight-lipped utterances. Sometimes it is more tangible—millions of lgbt children are thrown out of their homes or separated from family. It is one reason the Exodus narrative is such a powerful metaphor for us—we dream of a return to a life of equality and stability even when it involves a powerful journey filled with trials. How “lonely,” then, are the homes from which lgbt people have been exiled? The passage from Lamentations reveals the grief of post-exile: “the roads … mourn,” “children have gone away,” “all … majesty [has departed].” Indeed.

The response in Lamentations 3 is hope and faith and the faithfulness of daily life. “Life goes on” we say as we get through each day hoping, building, waiting eagerly for our own personal Exodus, our own personal return to equality and stability. Here is where Jesus’ examples of faith “the size of a mustard seed” (so tiny as to be imperceptible, yet powerful enough to produce miracles in the physical world) remind us that it is in living life to the fullest—getting the car washed, doing the laundry, even planting tulips—that we best express our lgbt faith in the God who created us lgbt in God’s own image.

People in faith communities often look for majestic signs of powerful theophanies—thunder and lightning, or volcanoes erupting or great tsunamis. The reality is that theophany—the meeting between us and God—takes place in our hearts. The reality is that the mundane life is the very place where theophany counts. It is in doing the laundry and taking care of business by building stable lives that we create around us a sea of equality based in the love of God that is in our hearts, even when it is expressed with a gentle smile while planting a tulip bulb. It is the force of that mustard seed of love that propels all of creation toward righteousness and justice and the time when “houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land” (Jeremiah 32:15).

 

Proper 21 (for September 29, 2019): Jeremiah 32: 1-3a, 6-15; Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16; 1 Timothy 6: 6-19; Luke 16:19-31

Proper 22 (for October 6, 2019): Lamentations 1:1-6; Lamentations 3:19-26; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10

©2019 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

*The Rev. Charles O. Moore

Lower than the angels*

Jesus is the master of the metaphor: “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it” he says, in Mark 10: 15. Last week I wrote about the idea of “child” in these synoptic Gospels, reminding readers that for Jesus, children were not the precious innocent things of our time, but rather were thought of more like vermin. Children were often competitors for food and shelter and water. They were outcasts, unless they had been fortunate enough to have been born to parents of royal cast. So, it is easy enough, if you really understand the scripture, to see today’s lgbt population as “little children” in Jesus’ metaphor. Outcasts, competitors of the majority, and Jesus is saying “unless you can see God’s reality in the way they see it, you cannot see God’s reality.”

Fascinating. Because it means we, the lgbt children of God, are those who see God’s reality most clearly. Now, I know that is true, just because I know I love my husband with all of my being. That’s enough evidence for me. What about you? The love you experience is your view of God’s reality in the life into which God has called you.

Today is Philadephia’s OutFest, a huge lgbt street fair. And since 1997 I have had a booth at it on behalf of the Episcopal church in the region; since 2010 we have had a booth on behalf of our own parish church. I love the sweep of people as the lgbt community flows past the table, picking out brochures and asking questions. I love the reality of the ministry right there on the street in the community. I love watching the crowd and being reminded of how God sees God’s reality among living, loving, lgbt people.

The letter to the Hebrews, which is appointed scripture this week, has a great metaphor in it as well, about how Jesus, being made human, was forced to be (for awhile) lower than the angels. And, we, because of that, were allowed to rise up to that place where, with Jesus, we also were just lower than the angels. This, of course, is the place where true happiness and godliness are known in our souls. This is what it means to be fully gay as God has made us. It is where we dance with these angels who protect us on our march toward freedom and fulfillment as children of God.

We probably will be rained out today at the OutFest. But even if that happens, the truth remains. It is that huge swath of reality, of real lgbt people who got up this morning with their kids, their divorces, their court orders, their relationship issues, and their dogs, and came down to the Gayborhood looking for a little bit of life, a little bit of community, a little bit of the healing of being accepted.

And that is what Jesus offers.

So rain or shine, whether we take our booth to sit in the rain or decide to pass this year, either way, the truth is visible in that parade of lgbt humanity that shows us the true exodus of God’s chosen people en route to the land of milk and honey.

Right, honey?

*Proper 22 (Job 1:1; 2:1-10: Psalm 26; Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16) ©2012The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Massah and Meribah?*

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ended this week. It was always a dreadful policy, dreamed up by some policy wonk someplace who figured compromise with human rights was a step forward, forgetting altogether that to compromise any human’s rights is to deny them the respect God demands for them. Well, that said, the policy has ended, but of course, discrimination has not. Serving openly won’t end the discrimination; there will still be snickering and lost promotions and low priority for housing and on and on. But at least the government no longer officially sanctions discrimination in this regard.

It is a useful lesson to hold up next to that story from Exodus, about the angry exiles wandering in the desert cursing Moses and demanding tests of God. Libertation doesn’t just happen, exodus doesn’t just happen, equality for lgbt people isn’t going to just happen. Rather, it takes a million steps, like Confucius’ famous journey, some forward, some sideways, a few back. Like most journeys there is plentiful time to pause for reflection. I think of all of the ways in which equality has come to be—marriage for instance where it is available. I remember marveling at my own wedding that it was even possible. This week I’ve spent in Amsterdam I’ve noticed a remarkable number of gay couples who’ve just been married. Marriage has been available in the Netherlands for more than a decade, but something has shifted in the consciousness of gay people such that young couples now grow up and fall in love with the expectation that marriage is a real possibility. That is the blossoming of equality in the hearts and souls of gay people. This is the outpouring of God’s grace, like the waters at Massah and Meribah, through the lives of lgbt people living into the fulfillment of God’s call to them.

I suppose that makes me like those angry exiles yelling at Moses. (More likely, I’d have been standing behind them shaking my head.) But it has happened several times this week that a couple has walked into a room and been applauded waving their rings and grinning ear to ear. Part of the beauty of it is being able to witness the shift in the community attitude. And that is a lot like what happened at Meribah too. Look at that psalm, written generations later, recounting the flowing of water as a praiseworthy deed and a wonderful work, the ire of the moment completely past in the fulfillment of the reality of the presence of God in everyday life.

And God is in the reality of everyday life, even when we grumble, maybe especially when we grumble and moan and then do the right thing. Like the first son in Jesus’ parable, who says he will not work but goes anyway, most of us push through life in a kind of reverse swim, instead of sweeping water behind we fend off whatever comes at us. And then in a moment of intense clarity we see that we need not struggle so much, because God is with us in every thing.

God is with us in the struggle for lgbt equality. We know this because we see the fruits of God’s mercy in our lives. We know this because we know God created us in God’s own image. We know this because we see God’s love in each other’s eyes.

Proper 21 (Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 78:1-4, 12-16 Attendite, popule; Philippians 2:1-13; Matthew 21:23-32)
©2011 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.