Restoration, Nourishment, Integration, Witness

It’s Juneteenth, a quintessential American kind of holiday. Obviously a contraction of June 19^th, it commemorates the date in 1865 when emancipation of enslaved African Americans was announced and enforced in Texas. The history of emancipation is complex (check out Juneteenth in Wikipedia). But that’s not the only Americanism—the actual date of the holiday is June 19 but the federal holiday is celebrated on the following Monday (tomorrow as it happens this year). The original celebrations centered around shared food, the quintessential form of fellowship, but the holiday has become a time to celebrate the richness of African-American culture in all ways.

It also is Father’s Day when we celebrate the bond of fatherhood. It was special for me while my Dad was still with us, all the more so because he wasn’t my father but my step-father—the bond we shared was created from love and experience (and much adolescent angst on my part) over decades. I have Dad to thank for, among other things, teaching me that saying “I love you” builds up the love shared in its very expression. After he and my mother were divorced he had another marriage that lasted for decades, and I had the constant example of the two of them saying “I love you” to each other all through the day every day. Whenever we talked Dad would end the conversation by saying “you know I love you Son.” When my husband and I were married, the priest who presided (curiously, not as an ecclesiastical but as a civil officer of the City of Toronto) blessed us and then said “remember to say ‘I love you’ to each other every day.” My brain, newly ontologically shifted by the marriage, vectored immediately to Dad. And that’s just one tiny example of the power of the fatherly bond.

Maybe it’s no wonder then that people confuse their images of God with those of a paternal parent, it is an easy connection to make. But, of course, God is so much more. In 1 Kings 19 Elijah is hovered over by a very maternal God, by a God who shadows him as he journey’s in the wilderness and who three times wakes him up to make him eat something, one time baking for him a “cake baked on hot stones” to go along with “a jar of water.” Holy food, spiritual nourishment, food provided from love like all those Father’s Day breakfasts and brunches and very much like all those Juneteenth feasts. The love baked into that food is so powerful it keeps Elijah going for forty days, until God finally tells him to “go out and stand on the mountain before [God],” in other words, go stand where you can encounter shifting dimensions, go get on the dimension of God’s love. Elijah goes, after all, the call of love is all powerful, and withstands hurricane-force wind, an earthquake and a fire. But God is recognized, not in those demanding disasters but in the utter “sound of sheer silence.” God is in the gentleness, the new dimension.

In Luke 8 Jesus heals a man possessed by demons. Jesus names the demons, which robs them of their power. In the aftermath we find the man utterly transformed by love into a fully integrated member of the community—the ultimate meaning of healing. Healing means to be restored, to be fully integrated, to be welcomed, to be nourished. The transformed man wants to follow Jesus but Jesus sends him home with the command to be restored, to give thanks, and to tell people of the power of love.

We still are wending our way through LGBTQ pride month. Like Juneteenth and Father’s Day LGBTQ Pride is about fellowship, about shifting into the dimension of love through sharing and feasting and celebrating what God has done in our lives. LGBTQ Pride is about healing in the ultimate sense of restoration and integration and nourishment. And nourishment is just love expressed, love built up by giving, love towering through sharing.

And yet while we celebrate our pride we also have to think hard about the restorative and nourishment parts of it. We have to focus on listening to God calling to us in the sound of sheer silence, we have to remember that all of us created in God’s own loving LGBTQ image are called to build up love by loving. We have to raise our awareness that loving is our sure defense in times of stress, in times when it seems demons are everywhere.

More than ever before LGBTQ Pride must be more than celebration, more than feasting. It must be witness to the love that God has called us to live, to the love that God has called us to give, to the eternal possibility of the dimension of love.

Proper 7 Year C 2022 RCL (1 Kings 19:1-4, (5-7), 8-15a; Psalm 42 Quemadmodum and 43 Judica me, Deus; Galatians 3:23-29; Luke 8:26-39)

©2022 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

A Place of Refreshment

I first saw “The Castro”—San Francisco’s famously gay business district—many years ago when I was attending a conference there. I lived in central Illinois at the time, and although I had a large circle of caring gay friends, I had no idea what it was like to experience an entire neighborhood where gay people were in the majority. Of course I thought it was delightful, but then again I was just out for the evening during a conference. Not quite two decades later I was living in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, which was a recognizably gay neighborhood at the time, when I experienced an even greater epiphany. I was in the habit of running down to the corner bodega first thing in the morning to grab a newspaper and some fresh fruit, so half awake and not really paying much attention except to the “to-do” list in my head, down I went. While I waited to pay I began to realize everybody else in the store was gay. When I went outside to walk back to my apartment I could see that it looked like everybody on the street also was gay. I had stumbled into the opening day of the Gay Games. I remember having the odd thought that this must be what it feels like to be straight—to look around you and have the sense that you are like everybody else and everybody else is like you. Imagine my ecstatic experience that same evening when a friend offered to take me along to the opening ceremonies—we took the subway up the entire west side of Manhattan and all of the gazillions of people on the train were gay. It was like your birthday and Christmas and the fourth of July all at once.

Later still, after I was ordained, I had a ministry of evangelism in Philadelphia’s gayborhood. That meant that I did what I could to convince all of the neighborhood Episcopal churches to really keep their doors open, and that I engaged in a ministry of witness by helping those churches to be visibly present in the community. That particular neighborhood was not exclusively gay, but it was pretty much the center of gay life in Philadelphia at that time, not unlike the gay villages that used to be so critical in Toronto and Montréal. My ministry took me from the William Way LGBT Community Center to street fairs like the October OutFest in the gayborhood and June’s Pride parade and celebration at Penn’s Landing. I worked at different parishes in Philadelphia over the years but eventually settled at The Church of the Holy Trinity on Rittenhouse Square, where for a decade I served as “Missioner among the Gay & Lesbian Community.” I wrote a column that was a precursor of this blog for the Philadelphia Gay News, so when I went out for a drink or my husband and I went out to dinner in the gayborhood I often was recognized. If I was in collar I often was asked for help of various sorts—it really was a ministry of witness, LOL we might say today—all I did was show up in collar and the rest took care of itself.

Of course, the gayborhood had restaurants and bars but also hardware stores—one was the best place to buy Finnaren and Haley paint, which exists no more but at the time was the best paint for the colonial and neo-colonial structures like the one we bought in nearby Queen Village. I remember after we moved in a lesbian acquaintance remarking that now we lived in “the” zip code—the one shared by the gayborhood. There were clincs and SROs and pharmacies and coffee shops and pet stores and bookstores. It was and still is a real neighborhood with a heavily lgbt demographic. LGBT people voted and swept their stoops and gardened and painted their homes and generally made the place a pleasant place to live and work. I laughed to remember that before I was ordained when I had been asked whether I had a vision of my ministry I said “I see brick sidewalks.” Of course, most of the sidewalks I was treading in my ministry were the brick sidewalks of the gayborhood and western Center City.

Jeremiah’s long narrative prophecy to the exiled people of God continues this week with am exhortation to “build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce [29: 5]” and “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile … for in its welfare you will find your welfare [29∷ 7].” I wrote last week about how many LGBT people find that coming out turns into a sort of exile. My experience of the gayborhood, and of the gay village in Toronto, is that there you will meet lgbt people who have come from all over to find a safe harbor, a welcoming home. Is that exile? I suppose it is, even when it is we who seek it.

I know that younger generations of lgbt people are seeking a sense of inclusion, a feeling of integration in which sexuality is just part of the panoply of life and not a deciding factor. In many of the world’s former gay havens the villages have splintered, just because integration means literally that lgbt folks will be living everywhere. It means that some of the critical centers have faded away—even the formerly “gay” bars are now frequently not so gay any longer. It is a sign of progress. But it also means that newly exiled folks just after coming out might have a harder time finding that safe harbor. It’s a good thing the community centers like William Way in Philadelphia continue to thrive.

In 2 Timothy 2:15 Paul writes “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him ….” Our gayborhoods, whether demographic centers or simply integrated neighborhoods like the one where I now reside in Oregon, are places were we have been called by God to live a ministry of witness—just by being visible. In these places God has called us to build houses and plant gardens and care for the welfare of the neighborhood. In so doing we live into Paul’s idea that we are thereby presenting ourselves to God in recognition that we are created by God in God’s own lgbt image.

In Luke’s Gospel [17: 11-19] we find a story about Jesus healing ten people but only one remembers to thank him, and that one was a “foreigner”—an exile perhaps. The moral of the story is to remember that God’s richness flows like the mighty Columbia River and creates “a place of refreshment” [Ps. 66:11] experienced by everyone, but it is for those of us who are in the minority, one way or the other, that that place of refreshment brings with it an epiphany about what true inclusion, true integration, true equality can look like. Remember to give thanks for the place where you are living into the lgbt life God gave you.

Proper 23 (Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; Psalm 66:1-11; 2 Timothy 2: 8-15; Luke 17:11-19)

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

Calm, proud, insistent, equal*

In so many ways glbt people are just like everybody else. In fact, increasingly lgbt folk are being integrated into the larger community and with that comes both benefits and drawbacks. The benefits of course are all associated with being “normal” and part of the “crowd.” It’s great to just be one of the folks and not to have to even think about how you are maybe a little bit different. For those of us who grew up knowing we were “different” and likely going to get in trouble for it, this new kind of inclusiveness is a blessing. The simultaneous drawback, of course, is that we are in danger of disappearing into the woodwork. This would be a good thing, if true integration were just around the corner, but the fact is that true integration is still not quite here. That means, we need to be visible, because the squeaky wheel still gets the grease.

I suppose marriage equality is an example—whoever of my generation thought we ever would be allowed to marry? And now we are required to file federal income tax returns as “married”! We are having to learn to say “my husband” and not “my partner.” Not only are we having to get used to saying it, we have to get up and keep up the nerve to remind everyone else too. In the fall I joined an organization that presented me with the dreaded form on which to record not only my name, but my spouse’s name as well. At first I left it blank, not thinking about it; or, rather, thinking “that’s for heterosexuals.” The woman processing the form sent it back to me by email and asked me to fill it in. I was going to be upset about it until I noticed her email was very carefully worded. She had not said I should identify my “wife,” but rather, she had said “spouse” repeatedly. “Oh …” I thought, and filled it in. Recently I was receiving brief medical attention for a minor problem, and the receptionist who filled out my “record” didn’t blink when I replied “married” and gave my husband’s name. But the nurse who followed kept asking about my “partner.” The first time I said “my husband” was out in the other room. But when she responded pointedly that she would look for my “partner” I said, “he’s my husband; you’re going to have to learn to say that, because marriage is the law now.” I was proud of myself. Calmly, but insistently, I had stood up for us.

Sometimes I want to shake the community up, I want to scream “stand up for who you are and wear your rainbows with pride.” I get angry when I hear young gay men say they don’t want any of that “pride &X@$.” I want to remind them that once upon a time—like, still in most of the world!—there was no equality, no integration, only oppression.

But spiritually it is important to be who God has made us to be, and furthermore, to be so insistently, and calmly, and visibly. This, after all, is what God is calling us to do. God made us gay, God loves us just as we are, God calls us to testify to the glory of God just by the simple act of being gay. So go out to dinner with your spouse, or to the hardware store, or wherever it is you go together (yesterday we had to take our new iPhones to the Apple Store, and the pleasant young man who worked with us picked up right away that we were married!). Let the whole community see that you are gay and normal and equal and integrated. For God who created the heavens and stretched them out has breathed life into you, God has called you in righteousness, God has taken you by the hand, God’s soul delights in you—so that you can open the eyes that are blind to oppression, and bring the prisoners out of the dungeon of the closet.

Psalm 29 says “The voice of the LORD is upon the waters; the God of glory thunders … The voice of the LORD is a powerful voice; the voice of the LORD is a voice of splendor. It is God’s voice, calling you to equality. The final verse of this psalm is: “The LORD shall give strength to his people; the LORD shall give his people the blessing of peace.”

Baptism, of course, is how one becomes a Christian. The practice of ritual washing in moving waters, as a sign of the cleansing of sins, apparently preceded Jesus’ ministry. But it is clear from Mark’s Gospel that Jesus was sent by God to be baptized by John, and for just this reason—to open the eyes of all who are blind, to bring all prisoners out of their dungeons, to show the glory of the power of God’s which is the blessing of peace. God has ordained this sacrament of baptism for all of God’s children to give us the real experience of God’s grace received in the power of God’s voice thundering with your own blessing of peace.

It often is said that God’s time is not like human time, and that for God a thousand years last but an instant. In church time we have the odd experience that Jesus, an infant just days ago, now is a grown man baptized in the river. It is a reminder that sin is not a thing we do in time but an attitude with which we live. It is a reminder that salvation is not some future goal but a living reality in every moment, ours freely given by God requiring only that we accept it by glorifying God, which we do by being the people God has made us to be—glbt, calm, proud, insistent, equal.

*1 Epiphany (Genesis 1:1-5; Psalm 29; Acts 19:1-7; Mark 1:4-11)

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

Diversity in your midst*

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if gay people truly were integrated. In my own mind I would want it to be something like the atmosphere at the Gay Games. There, almost everybody is lgbt. I first experienced that in New York in 1994, and then again in Amsterdam in 1998. It was wonderful, if fleeting, to be able to walk around in an exclusively lgbt environment. But I don’t think that is what integration is going to look like. I think integration is going to look a lot like, well, Amsterdam today, or maybe San Francisco or New York or Los Angeles. There, lgbt culture sort of disappears into the background. I was in Los Angeles earlier this summer, and the main thing I remember was hearing Lady Gaga everywhere I went. I think that’s what integration will look like.
Which sort of goes to show you that God has God’s own plan for things. This is a close relative of that old saw “be careful what you wish for (or we could say, pray for)” because you might get it. But, it might turn out to be not at all what you had in mind.
This week’s scripture has that lesson from Exodus about “manna from heaven.” The people complain that by following God they’ve wound up out in the wilderness starving. So God promises them plenty of bread. Only when they get it, it comes in the form of a dust-like substance in the morning dew. No leavened loaves for them. It goes well with the Gospel parable about the laborers hired last in the day who have got the same wage as those who worked all day in the hot sun. These go well together because they both speak to the issue of the power of God to make the experience of creation equivalent, regardless of the many kinds of divergence humans try to introduce. In God’s intension, all is equal, all parts of creation are equal, all persons in creation are equal, and each person’s share in creation is equal.
That’s a good thing, because it means there truly is no discrimination, no bar to salvation, no room for injustice in God’s kingdom. If people suddenly stopped discriminating, what would the world look like? It would look about the same, except there would be more diversity in each person’s immediate presence. And the cultural things that arise to keep us apart would begin to disappear.
It is a situation much to be desired. Do you want a glimpse? Have a look at the chancel at the Church of the Holy Trinity any Sunday, then, when you come to communion look along the rail, and as you head back to your seat look around the church. There you have it. God’s kingdom in diversity, in equality, in your midst.

*Proper 20 (Exodus 16:2-15, Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45 Confitemini Domino, Philippians 1:21-30, Matthew 20:1-16)
©2011 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.