The prophet’s life*

Greetings from the finally frozen North. It hasn’t snowed in a couple of days, but the temperature right now is 1°F/-17°C.

In the Episcopal Church it is the Second Sunday after the Epiphany. The lessons all revolve around the theme of the light of Christ. We remember Jesus is the light of the World, we pray that we the people might be illumined and shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory. It’s all part of the extended hope of the coming of God among us as Christ–the real meaning of Christmas. Another clear theme in the scripture appointed for today is the idea of the wedding feast; the Gospel lesson is the story of Jesus’ first miracle at the wedding at Cana.

But I kept getting distracted by the first lesson from Isaiah, in which the prophet insists he will not stop prophecying until God has succeeded at the metaphorical marriage of God and God’s people. It is the union of God and humanity that is the eschatalogical outcome of the Christ Event, which ushers salvation into human history. (I know, lots of big words … it means the now and future and eternal unity are the ongoing eternal result of Salvation, which is ours in Christ.)

I kept getting stuck on this prophetic role. I’ve written about this before. LGBT people often have played a prophetic role in the church just by showing up and being seen. The fancy theological term for this is “witness.” Unlike the legal usage, this kind of witness is not what we see, rather it is what everyone else sees when we show up. Much of the remarkable evolution of equality for LGBT folks has come about through just this sort of prophetic witness, whether it means we showed up for church, or to vote, or to be counted in the census, now to get married–all of that is prophetic witness. Like Isaiah, we cannot give up. We have to keep showing up.

This week, famously, the Anglican Primates met to discuss, well, things gay mostly. It seems some of the Primates are unsettled by the advancement of what we see as equality in the lives of LGBT people in the Anglican Communion. The Episcopal Church (the historic face of the Anglican Communion in the United States) has been “suspended” by this body for making marriage equality canonical.

I don’t want to belabor the point, but I know I can’t escape writing about it here. Of course all of the instruments of the messy and disorganized body of Christians known as the Anglican Communion must be carefully considered and all of the people involved must be accorded respect. “Suspension” in this case means no vote in a body that makes no decisions. So that’s one place to begin. The Anglican Communion is just that, a community of Anglicans who share the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the tradition of the reformed Church of England as passed down through the past five hundred years or so. No one person is in charge, no particular body is in charge, the shared tradition involves rather a lot of constant conversation and quite often people disagree with each other. Disagreement is normal in our polity, so this is not unusual. Newspaper reports of the meeting listed a number of other national bodies in the Anglican Communion, most of which are in countries that now also embrace marriage equality. This means that likely, well before the three year suspension is up, most of those other churches will have made the same decision the Episcopal Church has made. Eventually the tide will turn, as the saying goes.

It doesn’t make the prophet’s life any easier. It’s never easy to keep showing up in the face of oppression. We have to count on all of our resources to strengthen our resolve, like Isaiah, to keep showing up and showing up and showing up. Remember this: there is no reasonable theological stance for the oppression of LGBT people. And remember that it was the whole Episcopal Church, gathered in convention, after decades of witness, who decided as a community to embrace revelation.

There has been a lot of quoting this week from within the Episcopal Church of Galatians 3:28 “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

I myself would point us to 2 Corinthians 5:17: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! ” And, to the words of Jesus, in Matthew 22:40: Matthew 22:40 “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

The Presiding Bishop who is the Primate of the Episcopal Church, The Most Rev. Michael Curry, said “We are part of the Jesus Movement, and the cause of God’s love in this world can never stop and will never be defeated.” here

And so we have to keep on keeping on, showing up, leading the LGBT prophet’s life.

 

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

*2^nd Sunday after the Epiphany (Isaiah 62:1-5; Psalm 36:5-10 Dixit injustus; 1 Corinthians 12:1-11; John 2:1-11)

Keep Shoveling*

We’ve had lots of snow this week in Philadelphia. I have to laugh while people carry on about it. I spent a substantial part of my youth in Illinois, where this would not even have attracted anyone’s notice. I keep thinking, “it’s winter, it’s supposed to be like this.” Winter is good, because it is part of the cycle of creation. Summer brings heat and plant growth and bugs; winter brings snow and rain and cold, bugs die or hibernate, it is the cleansing cycle. So stop your bellyaching, I want to say.

It has been an even more curious week in the rest of the world. Wow I suppose the revolution in Tunisia was an amazing example of people power. But the spill-over into Egypt is genuinely frightening. It has not been this frightening on a global scale since the period when the Shah was driven from Iran and the world seemed to shift on its political axis. Let’s hope our own government knows what its doing (okay, we know it doesn’t, so let’s all just pray harder about that). Of course, the oppression of gay people in Egypt is well-documented and needs to come to an end. But replacing this regime doesn’t necessarily spell liberation. We’ll have to see. And wonder, we have to wonder, whether this is a kind of political winter. Is this a part of a cleansing cycle?

In the Anglican Communion there is considerable turmoil as well. The primates of the communion are meeting, except of course for the homo-phobes and mysogenists who have refused to attend because Presiding Bishop Jefferts-Schori is attending. David Kato Kisule, a lay leader in the Anglican Church of Uganda who had tried to organize the dialogue called for repeatedly by Lambeth councils about gay life in Africa, David was murdered this week. Let’s just make note that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the first to issue a press release condemning his murder and celebrating his life. The presiding bishop has also done so. At last, today, the Archbishop of Canterbury has done so as well, although let us also note that his press release backed away from acknowledgment of political murder.  No surprise there. Canterbury has rarely been so ill-served.

Am I ranting? I guess. Is this a proper homily? No, that should be clear by now.  This week’s scripture has no fun stories. The Gospel is Jesus preaching the beatitudes—you will be reviled if you love God. That’s always a neat slap in the face coming a few weeks after Christmas. The key this week is the last line in the pericope from Micah:  “and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” If that doesn’t sum up the whole of the Gospel I don’t know what does.

Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with God. Easy enough to say. Much harder to do.

People are just sort of typically difficult. I think it is born of defense mechanisms that originally were programmed into our genes to help us flee from predators and protect our offspring. So we are constantly pushing back at each other, and constantly on guard at each other, and constantly ready to spring against each other. Not exactly a prescription for peace. What about all of those people on the streets in Egypt? What are they doing but pushing back, staying on guard, and springing against their oppressors.

But, there is another way to look at it. Maybe they are doing justice. They certainly have lived for decades, maybe even centuries, without justice. Maybe now is the time to do justice. Maybe they are loving kindness, and trying to throw off a regime that prevents both justice and kindness. And maybe, just maybe, they are walking humbly with God for once, instead of giving in to the demands of men. And I do mean men.

I’m not doing much for gay and lesbian uplift this week, am I? I think for that we have to look to the lesson from first Corinthians. Paul writes “has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” And a bit later, “God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are.” Ahh, that sounds like us. You see, there we are, wise for being oppressed, low and despised maybe, but lifted up by God because of it. As I keep telling you, God made us gay on purpose because the world needs us. We might be oppressed by humans but we are blessed by God for our capacity to love and our capacity to encourage doing justice and loving kindness wherever we go in the world. And when we do that, we are walking humbly with our God.

Okay go shovel your snow. There’s more coming Wednesday so you have a few days to clear out last week’s stuff. Think about it as a life metaphor. As you shovel, think about what in your life needs to be shoveled out of the way. So that when the sun next shines, you can do justice, and love kindness, which is why gay people have been put here. To show the world how to walk humbly with God.

*Fourth Sunday after Epiphany (Micah 6:1-8, Psalm 15, 1 Cor. 1:18-31, Matthew 5:1-12)
©2011. The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.