Spiritual charger*

God says “I have called you by name, you are mine.” It’s an awesome concept (to revist a badly misused term) that somehow everyone of us is called by name by God. I’ve always wondered whether cats really understand their names, or whether they just respond to a tone of voice used by their human companions. Several times over the course of my life I have met people whose name I just could not remember no matter what I tried. In a couple of cases I finally let myself memorize them by the phrase “A whose name is B” and that worked. I guess it works because it allows me to remember the key stuck in my brain and from there to connect to the actual name.

The scripture for today is all about the baptism of Jesus. As I wrote last year, it seems a little odd that the baby wise men were just visiting last Wednesday is now 30-some years old and wandering in the desert where he can come across John the Baptizer. But, that’s scripture for you. I like to take these occasions to remind us that sequential time is a human interpretation of God’s spacetime, which is a single continuum. Maybe last Wednesday really was thirty years ago! (Okay, I know better …. I’m just pondering things here.)

Two of my closest friends got engaged this week, Tuesday to be exact, and it got announced Thursday if I recall correctly. I enjoyed watching their Facebook feeds go berserk with congatulatory messages. Each message included their names. Names are important because calling someone by name is an acknowledgment of the power of God within. When we call someone directly by name we connect with the soul that was called by name by God.

As a priest I have presided at weddings and baptisms. The liturgies for these sacraments are lengthy and complex. But the key moments are the naming of the people and the invocation of Father-Son-And Holy Spirit. It is like connecting electrodes so the power can arc through the connection. For all the words I might have uttered at any of these events, the moments I remember are those electric moments when the power of naming a person baptized, or the power of naming two persons married sets the power of the Holy Spirit arcing about, connecting them and god and me and everyone present to all past and future in a heartbeat.

It is just one reason lgbt people can rejoice for full inclusion in the church as married individuals. It is one way of connecting the power from the moment of baptism with the power of the moment of marriage. It is one way of understanding the ontological shift—the change in being—that takes place when two become one literally in God’s sight and in the sight of God’s people.

I was crossing a street in downtown Toronto the other day when I passed a woman and two young men as the woman said “all the gay people are getting married now.” I chuckled a little bit. Of course we are, I thought. Now that we understand the power of entering into a sacrament together.

I can’t end of course without reminding us all that that’s the same power of entering the sacrament of the Eucharist together, which too few of us do often enough. It’s all a matter of plugging into God’s spiritual charger in order to remain always connected through the power of the Holy Spirit shared among us.

Peace be with you.

©2016 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

*1 Epiphany (Isaiah 43:1-7; Psalm 29; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22)

 

At the Intersection of Dimensions*

Happy New Year everybody.

I admit I’ve been neglecting this blog lately and I thought perhaps a good way to kickstart myself would be to try to generate some thoughts on New Year’s Day.

In the church it is the feast of the Holy Name of Our Lord. It is the feast that celebrates the giving of the name “Jesus” to the infant at ritual circumcision on the eighth day. The feast used to be called the feast of the Circumcision, but things being what they are, this was changed in the late twentieth century, at least in the Anglican calendar. The meaning of the day, as usual, is richly complex. The event time-line places this at the eighth day after the birth of the infant, and shows his incorporation into the human Jewish family literally, spiritually and metaphorically. We’ve had a star and angel choirs and shepherds, and now we have the giving of the name “Jesus” (which means “The Lord is salvation”). The Gospel story (Luke 2:15-21) pulls us back from mortal timelines into the spiritual timeline of the birth of the Savior when it tells us that the shepherds, on finding the child as predicted, recounted the whole story of the angel presence bringing the news from God to them. It says Mary “treasured all these words” and as she pondered them she no doubt connected this story to the very presence of the angel Gabriel who came to tell her she was to bear the son of God, thus connecting a spiritual timeline in another dimension. Mary the mother and Jesus the infant, in the bleak reality of a stable trough, occupying a point on which human reality connects to God’s greater reality by their role in salvation history. The scripture for the day rounds out the story then by reminding us that God blesses God’s people and that the glory of God is found even in the wild reality of creation.

Whether it is accident or design that this feast occurs on the secular feast of the new year I leave to others to discuss. It seems to me that it is yet another instance of dimensional interaction, as it were, as the every day reality of the beginning of a new year, which by the way occurs in the midst of winter, represents an awakening of sorts. The naming of the child takes place in a ritual that binds him to his faith and also that changes his physical body. Our recollection of the physical then once again meets the metaphorical. From small changes come major results just as from this one day a whole year of yet unknown events will seem to have sprung.

That’s all very mystical I know, but then the season of Christmas is itself very mystical in the way in which it connects us between the human and the divine. It’s no mistake we put bright lights on trees and on our houses to create light in the nighttime. We act out this very story on large scale as we seek each year at this time to generate enough hope in our hearts to sustain us into the new spring.

The year just past gave witness to brutality and horror and even mystery on the large human scale. Mother Nature also seems to have intensified her campaign of extreme weather on a global scale. There was good news too, the U.S. economy is booming, millions more Americans have health care than ever before, some parts of life keep getting easier through technology and medicine. Whatever else might be true, I am much healthier than I was a year ago, taking fewer medications, in better physical shape, and enjoying my sleek new updated smartphone.

For lgbt Americans 2014 was a year in which almost incomprehensible progress was made on marriage equality. Of course, much of the rest of the developed world got there before us. Still, it once seemed impossible that we ever would be allowed to marry in the U.S. and now it is the law in the majority of states. There is a long way to go to complete this progression. Even in the places where marriage equality is the law, like Wisconsin, there is much educating to be done. (I have grown weary of married heterosexuals asking me whether we’ve remarried now that we’re in Wisconsin. I always tempted to ask whether, when they go on vacation, they get remarried every time they cross a state line. But I digress.) I admire the U.S. Supreme Court for refusing to get directly involved so far and I hope their strategy to let this essentially social movement take place without their instruction works. Those who think our rights as citizens ever are well served by deliberation by any arm of government would be advised to revisit the history of oppressed people everywhere, including especially those of us in the U.S.

Christian communities were moved and enlivened and encouraged by the actual emergence of conversation in the Roman Catholic church about social issues such as divorce and sexuality. I was startled, saddened even, by the naivety of gay Roman catholics posting on social media that all now was resolved (!). The Roman church is not likely to transform, even a little bit, over night, ever. But it is good to see the work of the Holy Spirit taking place in their midst at this time. You see, in Anglicanism we believe that God speaks to us through scripture, tradition and reason, the latter being the result of discourse (a fancy word for conversation) by which the will of the Holy Spirit becomes known among the people. We also believe that the Holy Spirit is just fine with us having more than one point of view at a time. We have been listening for six centuries to the Holy Spirit among us. I’m glad the Romans are trying it on for size.

Our human reality always is taking place at the point between the dimension in which we live with our bills and chores and worries, and God’s dimension in which we are the beloved heirs of God’s kingdom. The glory of God sung by angel choirs in a starry night is enshrined in the very reality of our lives. The love in our hearts and the hope in our souls is God’s glory.

Happy New Year!

 

©2015 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

*The Holy Name Of Our Lord, Jesus Christ (Numbers 6: 22-27; Psalm 8; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:15-21)

A crumb of faith*

We are accustomed to being told that everything works out for the best but I, for one, have never believed it. I think the truth is rather more complicated than that. It’s more like, after every storm there is a blue sky and pleasant sailing, for awhile. And, of course, it is a matter of self-preservation to think that the way things now are must be the best, because that is where we seem to have landed out of our own whirlwinds.

LGBT people have always been everybody’s brothers and sons, sisters and daughters. In God’s creation there is no distinction between one person and another, there is no discrimination, there is justice for all. There only is connectedness—righteousness—or its opposite—sin. And yet it often seems that the whole struggle for equality takes place in the county of sinfulness, where some of our fellow creatures of God insist on false distinctions, despite God’s will.

It must be this morning’s gray sky making me so maudlin! We are all doing fine, aren’t we? I met two young people the other day (not children, adults in their early 30s) who had no recollection of a time when people actually sat at their desks smoking all day. I had to laugh. Of course, I only barely remember it either, even though I was one of those people then. Still it seems like a distant other reality. And all has worked out for the best, hasn’t it, at least in that regard?

So lgbt people hold high posts, such as the sometime prime ministers of Iceland, Netherlands and Belgium, and we live everywhere now, no longer in bar-land ghettos, and some of us are mayors and doctors and professors and priests. It seems everything is working out for the best, after all.

Or is it that we have had the tenacity of a single crumb of faith? Is it that inequality, stripped of its sexual innuendo, is inequality pure and simple and our faith, our crumb of faith comes from our knowledge that we are created in God’s own image, and that means gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and questioning, all in God’s own image. “For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” [Romans 11:29].

For in the long tail of the AIDS pandemic that killed so many of our loved ones and still imprisons millions more in lives of chronic illness, and in the face of incontrovertible evidence that even marriage is a right that should be ours, perhaps all is working out for the best because we have had the tenacity of faith of the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15. She had the tenacity to argue with Jesus, and eventually to point out that “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

(Anglicans among us will recognize that phrase from its paraphrase in the ancient and beautiful “Prayer of Humble Access,” which occurs immediately prior to the receipt of communion in some traditional liturgies, and in which we remind ourselves that in sin we are unworthy even to sweep up those crumbs.)

It is the woman’s tenacity that is the key to the story, because it is her tenacity that is the outer sign of her faith, and it is her faith that brings about the miracle of healing.

So perhaps it is that everything works out for the best when we, with the tenacity of our faith, even faith as tiny as a single crumb, insist on the equality which is God’s gift and calling for all of God’s people.

*Proper 15 (Genesis 45: 1-15; Psalm 133; Romans 11: 1-2a, 29-32; Matthew 15: (10-20), 21-28)

©2014 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Nourishment as blessing*

We’ve been spending the weekend in a gay resort. It’s a place we found some years ago that has a nice mix of casual laid back comfort to it but also a very kind of quiet romanticism. I think I like this sort of thing for several different reasons. At the base I enjoy being away from responsibility—I might spend most of each day writing, but I can intersperse that activity with dips in the pool, walks around the grounds to look at the flowers, or even just sitting on the stoop doing nothing for awhile. But I also enjoy being in a place where it feels like I belong. There are a few single people here once in awhile, but mostly the guests are other long-term couples like us. And even though we come from different places and have different professional lives, still we share some of the basics of being gay couples making our way in the world in long-term relationships. Being together like this allows us to relax in a way that we usually can’t in the general public, where we always have to be looking over our shoulders for the next shoe to drop, as it were. It has been interesting, for instance, of the past few years, to discover ourselves sharing wedding stories, as barriers drop and we find ourselves at last eligible for something we had been raised to think never could be ours.

The urge to belong is an interesting part of human nature. I suppose it is a survival instinct at some essential level; stay with the herd and enjoy safety in numbers (like driving too fast on the Interstate, which apparently is ok as long as one is in the middle of the pack). It doesn’t always work out that way, of course. But there is distinctly a sense of ease about feeling that one is part of something. We are in our sixties, and I know younger gay men who feel the same way about belonging, but for them the desire is strongest to belong to the diversely whole of society. I’m glad that has worked out for them; they’ve grown up feeling as though gay was just another kind of person. I think we grew up in hiding, and then spent our early adulthoods as outcasts, and we’ll probably always have this desire to “nest” among those most like us.

There are two stories in the scripture for today—one is Jacob’s fight with God, all through the night on the shores of the Jabbok, in which he famously gets wounded in the “hip” (a euphemism for you-know-what); the other story is Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand with two loaves and two fish. What I noticed when I read them over in sequence was a parallel between them in which each story begins with the action of withdrawal over or near water, each action gets halted by an immediate necessity, and each story ends with a blessing, which turns out to have been always present but only revealed in the aftermath.

So here I sit at my resort, where we’ve withdrawn to be by the pool. It says to me that the blessing of God is here already in the exigencies we experience not only day to day but also in this social action. In our case the blessing is the sense of relief we derive from being in this calm space among people we might not know well but who we easily see are just like us. It is not unsimilar to the kinds of academic conferences I attend. Usually professors are the only experts in their areas of study in a given faculty, and to find like-minded scholars to talk with requires attending whatever international conference it is. And also it is similar to gay pride festivals—Amsterdam’s is this weekend—which draw huge crowds for a few moments not only of belonging but of belonging in the light. The similarity I suppose is not just in the withdrawal for focus, but more in the way in which it provides nourishment, spiritual in one sense, intellectual in the other. This nourishment is the blessing isn’t it, that sustains us when we go home? The light stays with us to fortify us as life goes on. And life does go on, across the waters and through the exigencies.

The blessing of God is always with us; the nourishment God gives us is our blessing.

*Proper 13 (Genesis 32:22-31; Psalm 17:1-7,16; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14:13-21)

Stormy weather*

I apologize for the long hiatus here …. I was traveling, and I was teaching, and although each week I pondered the scripture, I could not think of anything to add to the message in the scripture. So I guess, if you’re missing my voice, I would tell you to look at the Lectionary Page and just ponder the scripture here: http://www.lectionarypage.net/

On the other hand, I can tell you that I went to Montréal for the World Social Science Forum (http://www.wssf2013.org/) and although I was there to speak about a vision of the evolving future of virtual knowledge and virtual information institutions, I also had the opportunity to chair a panel with speakers from Nigeria and Korea whose papers about the social status of their own cultures was shocking and alarming and probably very enlightening for me to hear. It was sunny and warm when I arrived in mid-October and leaves were turning lovely colors. A week later when I left for Amsterdam and the International Universal Decimal Classification Symposium (which actually was in The Hague), it was cold and raining. While I was in Amsterdam Brad emailed me that there had been a huge windstorm in Milwaukee and all of my potted plants in the yard had blown over, blown out of the pots, and blown into neighbors’ yards. I guess he picked them up.

About two days later on Sunday evening October 27, there was some kind of news about a storm approaching southern England and maybe Dutch trains would be delayed the next day. Well, it was something like a hurricane without rain. I remember thinking at the time that it must have been the same storm Brad encountered, just now a few days later and half a world away. It started some time in the night and I could hear it whorling by outside; it did sound rather a lot like Hurricane Sandy had sounded a year before (I spent that night in bed too listening to the wind and hoping my house would be okay–it was). When I got up the wind had died down and it looked pretty much normal outside. I had my morning coffee, and as it was nearly the end of my time in Amsterdam I prepared to go to one of my favorite spots for a broodje (which is a kind of marvelous Dutch sandwich). I got there okay and picked up the morning paper to see that, in fact, there had been severe damage and even some loss of life. On my way back to my apartment I discovered the famous picture of a tree in the canal was a picture of my own little gracht (canal) just the other way than I had gone earlier. Oddly, I noticed my neighbors’ potted plants had blown over and the plants had blown out of the pots and blown up and down the gracht.

After that I went back to Montréal for the Association for Information Science and Technology, and also for Brad’s birthday–he is a graduate of McGill University and hadn’t been back since college, so I had him come up for the weekend for his birthday. He had a good time seeking out his favorite haunts from decades earlier and we had some terrific meals, although by then it was cold and wintery there and in Wisconsin.

Now as I write this I’m waiting for Brad’s flight to depart, we’re in between tornado warnings. As we were going out to the car we got the first warning and went to the basement instead. Then after that passed I drove him to the airport, and on the way home I drove through driving rain and hail. I hear planes overhead so the airport must be back in operation. But this is not November weather!

Today’s Gospel is from Luke 21. Here Jesus is giving his listener’s the keys to the universe and also the assurance of grace but all they can think about is worldly things.  I like it that Jesus, clever teacher that he is, never answers them directly. This is because he knows learning does not happen without interiorization. So to every question he responds with a puzzle. One hopes his disciples, now as then, will learn to think for themselves.

Where is the kingdom? It is here now. When is the kingdom? It is here now. How will we know? Well, it’s here now and you can’t see it, you’ll have to figure that out yourself. Maybe you’re too self-possessed to find a kingdom that requires a giving up of self ….

The reading from 2 Thessalonians 3 speaks to doing the work of the Gospel and particularly to evading idleness. “Do not be weary in doing what is right” it says. While I was on the road marriage equality came to New Jersey on the heals of Minnesota, and in the past few days Hawaii and Illinois have passed legislation. More than a third of the U.S. population now lives in places where what is right has been done. Let’s not forget that the good news of salvation in Christ is essentially the news that we all have been given equality and justice by God. What God has given it is our duty to preserve, nurture, and enable.

The Old Testament scripture today is from Isaiah 65 and opens with God saying through the prophet “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth.” That action of God is ongoing always. It is our job as children of God in Christ to see that we always are ready to move into God’s new dimensions of equality and justice and love.

©2103 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

*Proper 28 (Isaiah 65:17-25; Canticle 9 (Isaiah 12); 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19)

Nearer now*

We have to admit it was a pretty interesting week for gay people in the United States, and especially for those of us who are or who hope to be married. I am cynical enough that I had suspected sending the issue of our right to marry to the Supreme Court was only inviting disaster. And I have to admit I was wrong, sort of. The good news is that the decisions they made in our favor acknowledge that we exist and that we deserve equality under the law. Make no mistake, the dissenting opinions go more in the usual direction of pointing out that we are not born gay and our sexuality therefore must be controlled by heterosexuals. And while there was some positive decision-making on their part, there also was a good dose of side-stepping the issues—failing to decide California’s Proposition 8, for example, which allowed them to avoid admitting that we have a right to marry.

Still, it is progress, and we had better take it and run with it. I remember right after Brad and I were married in Toronto, we were introduced to a young gay man who said something like “good for you … we have that right and we had better use it or they’ll take it away from us.” He was on to something. Not only that, his point accords nicely with Jesus’ role in Luke 9, where it tells us he “set his face” to go to Jerusalem—nothing like the stern look of a young prophet who has made a firm decision! Jesus is en route, moving ahead, not stopping, and not looking back. He ignored the unwelcoming villagers and excoriated his disciples for complaining. Don’t stop now, don’t look back, was his message. Then a follower wants to join him and Jesus reminds him there is no stopping, no resting place along the way. The next guy wants to go home and put things in order (by burying his deceased father no less!) but Jesus says no again, don’t stop, don’t turn back, keep going is the message. And finally the last follower wants to say goodbye to the folks at home but Jesus says “No one who … looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” And that is the message.

The kingdom of God is the kingdom of justice. It is the kingdom of righteousness, which means all is right with God and within, and righteousness is the flower of the seed of justice. Equality is the garden where justice blooms, and in the kingdom of God, equality, justice and righteousness demand constant attention. Equality, justice and righteousness demand constant awareness, constant motion, and constant motion forward. There is no turning back.

That’s a good message for us, spiritually and otherwise  this week. We have marriage in 13 states now. Thirteen countries have made marriage legal and in some of them it has been long enough that it has become normative. This is true in the Netherlands where I marvel each time I meet two young men who are planning to marry. They plan for a year or more, they make sure they have their finances and their romances in order. And they enter into marriage with a maturity that would make Americans blush.

We all are fit for the kingdom of God, because God has made us heirs of the kingdom by creating us in God’s own image, and that means God’s own lgbt image. Don’t look back, don’t stop, not now, the kingdom has come even nearer this week.

*Proper 8 (2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14; Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20; Galatians 5:1,13-25; Luke 9:51-62)

©2013 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Where you go, I will go*

Brad, my husband, and I have been together for something like 34 years and a bit. We lose track of the exact number sometimes, because like most couples we’ve had moments when we were less together than others, and because after three decades memories are less precise. Still, it has been a blessing. I remember walking with him on the beach in Galveston shortly after we met, but when we were both clear that something momentous was working in us. He said he thought we would last a long time because we had a similar world view. I guess he was right.

The past two weeks have been a bit of a trial. He had pneumonia, the critical kind, and wound up in intensive care. I wound up at his bedside, listening to each breath, watching every tick or eye movement, wishing I could just take him home and give him something to eat. He is fully recovered now and will come home later today, by the way, or I probably wouldn’t be writing about it.

I think one thing that kept coming to me all during the ordeal was how the two of us have become everything for each other, real family. I know this has been palpable for both of us since our marriage in Toronto, on our 30^th anniversary. We thought we were making a political statement, and we thought we were making a wise decision, but we both were stunned to discover how different it felt to be married. We are family.

So instead of looking at the displaced propers for All Saints that most Episcopalians are using today, I wanted to stick with the propers for this Sunday, the 23^rd Sunday after Pentecost, not in the least because the opening lesson is the story of Ruth and Naomi, and the trials that made them a family unto themselves, and the beautiful song that Ruth sings to Naomi: “Where you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” It should be read at every same-sex wedding, heck, it should be read at every wedding.

There also is a reading from Hebrews that rather gruesomely compares the theology of sacrifice made by Christ for sin—disconnectedness from God—for all humanity, with the sacrifice of goats and calves and bulls and heifers. Let’s just be clear, in Christ we are all connected with God forever through our humanity which we share with Jesus. Mark’s Gospel story for today is the story of Jesus giving the greatest commandments, to love God and to love one another. At the end of the story Jesus tells a scribe, who has understood that to love God is to love one another and to love one another is to love God, that he is not far from the kingdom of God. We need to understand that in the love we share for each other we can see and touch the palpable presence of God, who is always within us as love.

Several priests came to visit us and to pray with us during this. One friend said she could see Brad change as the prayers were said over him. As the process went on I became more insistent in my own prayers, and gave up the formulas I’ve memorized over the years for more precise demands. “Jesus do this now!” (Fill in  your own blanks there.) What do you know? It worked. It works. Our salvation is that we already are with Christ. Our knowledge of Christ who is God is palpable in the love we share.

*Proper 26 Year B (Ruth 1:1-18; Psalm 146 Lauda, anima mea; Hebrews 9:11-14; Mark 12:28-34)

©2012 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Get behind me Chris Christie*

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.

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.

God is holding you fast*

I think you’ve got to love the opening scripture for today (Genesis 32:24): “Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.” The “man,” of course, is God; this lesson is about how Jacob fights with God all night long on the banks of a river, and how God kicks Jacob in the privates, and then eventually, at daylight, God blesses Jacob, bent over and sore and limping away.

It sounds a little bit like Congress right?

Well, really it sounds a lot like real life, all the time. And, of course, although this story is from the oral tradition of the Hebrew people, the reality is that whether it is true or not is irrelevant. The story is revelatory, because it explains to us something about life and God and the real world. It is always a struggle (life, that is), and the blessing comes in the dawn, after the fight, and often everybody gets wounded.

Well, that was uplifting!

A couple of my friends are on the cover of the local gay paper this week. They just got married in New York state. Finally equal, or at least, more equal than before. How’s that for a marathon struggle? Gay people actually have rights as humans in many countries—just not many in the United States. In many of those other countries, gay people can marry: 1998 Netherlands, 2003 Canada … it is old news. So it is in the U.S. where we supposedly have no established religion where the so-called “Christian” right keeps people of color and women and gay people oppressed. Inequality is all over–we have no health care to speak of, we have few rights, and the rights that we have are not accorded willingly to us. We have to fight for them over and over.

Just like Jacob fighting God all night at the Jabok.

So go read that whole story (Genesis 32: 22-31; yes, I know it says “hip-socket”—in the Old Testament, whenever it says hip socket or feet it means privates). It is a story of redemption. It is a story of, not a magical miracle, but of how it goes in real life. God is with us in our struggles. Do you think God is fighting Jacob? No my friends, Jacob is fighting, and God is holding him fast.

God is holding you fast.

Go, get married, enjoy your redemption.

Remember to sing Hallelujah!

*Proper 13 (Genesis 32: 22-31; Psalm 17: 1-7, 16; Romans 9: 1-5; Matthew 14:13-21)
©2011 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.