Alive in the Covenant of God’s Love

The Great Litany [Book of Common Prayer 148] begins:

O God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth,
Have mercy upon us.
O God the Son, Redeemer of the world,
Have mercy upon us.
O God the Holy Ghost, Sanctifier of the faithful,
Have mercy upon us.
O holy, blessed, and glorious Trinity, one God,
Have mercy upon us.

Remember not, Lord Christ, our offenses, nor the offenses of our forefathers; neither reward us according to our sins.
Spare us, good Lord, spare thy people, whom thou hast redeemed with thy most precious blood, and by thy mercy preserve us, for ever.
Spare us, good Lord.

And, the collect for the First Sunday in Lent asks God to “Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations” [Book of Common Prayer 218].

Remember that old phrase “the quick and the dead”? Did you know the word “quick” doesn’t mean “hurry up”? It means, “alive” (OED: “living, endowed with life, animate). So, then, for what do we pray when we pray for God to “come quickly” to help us? We pray for God to continue to fulfill the lives God created for us to live. We are asking God to stand by us, to be our fortress in every storm. Because we know in our souls that we are created in God’s image, and that we are endowed with God’s love, and that all we need is to be “quick”—to be alive.

In the story of Noah’s ark and the rainbow covenant [Genesis 9:8-17], we see a reflection of our creation in God’s image as the story presents an almost human-like God interacting with Noah and with the creatures of all creation. God announces God’s covenant four times, over and over. But, that doesn’t distract from the promise God made, to set a bow in the clouds, that would be forever a reminder that all of creation is united in love.

This week we saw evidence of that: “Greece Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage in a First for an Orthodox Christian Country” (CNN, Elinda Labropoulu, Feb. 15. 2024).

Greece is alive, LGBTQ+ people in Greece are “quick,” the rainbow—the sign of God’s covenant—blesses creation.

Psalm 25[3-9] has us sing the truth that love is love, God is love, we who are created in God’s image, are love. Compassion, everlasting, faithfulness, all have to do with love. And this love is love in action, the love that creates, the love that saves, the love that rescues, the love that sustains.

Peter explains [1 Peter 3:18-22] that indeed, “God waited patiently in the days of Noah.” God gave us baptism, a washing clean from sin, in clear running water of the Holy Spirit, as a sign of the covenant God made with Noah’s people and the creatures of the ark, that forever more God would sustain creation. Jesus, God incarnate, had to be baptized to show us how to remain forever humble in creation.

Mark’s Gospel [1:9-13] continues, or if you prefer, begins, the narrative of God’s saving action in creation through the ministry of Jesus, which begins with his baptism by John in the Jordan river. God’s Spirit in one fell swoop announces Jesus’ divinity and then drives him out into “the wilderness” of temptation.

Of course, temptation is all around us. We tend to read this story and try to imagine what might have tempted Jesus (and in other Gospel narratives examples are supplied) but the primary temptation in creation is the urge to avoid love. We are tempted not to walk in love, because it is easier to go with the flow, it is easier to think only of our own interior needs and not to blind ourselves to the beauty of the “quick,” the alive, the glory, the evidence of God’s covenant visible when we walk in love.

The story also tells us that while Jesus was in the wilderness “the angels waited on him” and indeed, angels do wait upon us, even in our own self-imposed wilderness.

In Little Richard: King and Queen of Rock and Roll [PBS American Masters 6/2/2023] we meet one of the angels that accompanied Little Richard—Sir Lady Java, a trans activist, singer, and angel who befriended Little Richard for decades. Sir Lady Java’s insightfully holy comment in is: “Being yourself is the hardest thing to be.” All of us who are God’s LGBTQ+ children know this all too well. Indeed, we know the temptation all to well. But I bet we know who our angels are, too.

Jesus returns from his time in the wilderness “quick” alive “proclaiming the good news” and “saying “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.”

All we have to do to see it is to walk in love into the dimension where we all are alive in the covenant of God’s love.

First Sunday in Lent Year B 20242 RCL (Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-9 Ad te, Domine, levavi; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15)

©2024 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

A Tsunami of Mercy and Justice and Love

I have been having an IKEA moment. After moving to our new home it seemed we had been spending money like (as my dad used to say) it was going out of style, so when my husband pointed out that I was tripping over the armoire that I had lovingly selected in Philadelphia two decades ago I decided to replace it with a simple chest of drawers. IKEA won my bidding war because it had a piece the right size and shape and color and it was not only inexpensive but also on sale. So much for the easy way out though. Actually I enjoyed the first couple of hours of assembly, which went swimmingly and was even sort of fun. It reminded me of the 1980s when all of our furniture came from IKEA and had to be assembled, usually on Saturday night for some reason. Anyway, as I approached the final step of putting the top on, the entire structure crashed to the floor, and even worse, of course the particle board splintered where joiners had been secured. Woe was me, and more to the point I had a mess on my hands. I gave up, but then worried about it all night. First thing the next day I tried to put it back together, but it became clear the splintering was so bad it would never be stable without intervention.

Now, while I had been worrying through the night I had kept thinking that I knew what to do—I had to drill new holes and insert long heavy-duty screws to hold the frame together. But, like most people facing a problem, I tried every which way to get out of it. I called the famous help-line at IKEA. The first guy I spoke with said they would gladly replace the two wooden pieces that were messed up, then transferred me to someone who would ship them, but that call hung up on me. I called back three times, but IKEA’s phone system had my number (so to speak) and kept hanging up on me. I cruised through want ads online sure I had seen one some place recently for someone who would fix IKEA assembly problems, but no luck. Finally, facing a sprawling mess on the floor and the prospect that I had just thrown that money down the drain, I did what I should have done in the first place. I got my drill and my toolbox full of screws and some wood glue to boot, and in no time I had the piece assembled, standing up, sturdy and with its top in place. I kept thinking there was a lesson in there somewhere.

How often do we read the stories in the scripture literally, trying to imagine ourselves in the story, rather than comprehending them metaphorically? In Luke 16 Jesus tells a story about a corrupt “manager” (I’m pretty sure older translations called this person a “steward” but who would know what that meant today?) What do we know about corrupt managers? All I could think of was the episode of I Love Lucy where Ricky so wants to become the nightclub manager that he puts Lucy on a horrific schedule. Hilarity ensues, the schedule gets shredded and at the end everyone congratulates Ricky on becoming “Mr. Manager.”

But I digress. The key to this parable is the part, of course, where the manager forgives a large portion of everyone’s debt. It is, on the face of it, an act of love, and it works, not only presumably are the debtors happy but the boss is pleased because the manager, at last, has done the right thing—the thing he knew was right in the first place.

There is more. The act is more complex than we imagined, because the portion of the debt that was cancelled was the manager’s commission. Not only has he given back, but he has given back his portion. But what he has given is multiplied, isn’t it, in the hearts of those who have received not only mercy but justice. The manager, by doing not only what was right, but what he had known all along was right, has changed the situation by creating space for love to fill.

This is what Jesus means by “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.” The promise is that the eternity of living in love is guaranteed by the building up of love not in just one heart but in everyone’s hearts spreading through creation as the simple act of doing the right thing creates love through mercy and justice.

And that reminded me of marriage equality. Back in the days of my youth my gay coupled friends all said they didn’t need marriage, that that was something heterosexual people had created for themselves that gay people didn’t need. And straight society was just as firm in its conviction that marriage was not meant for us. Never mind the historical reality that marriage in its earliest times was not gender-oriented. Never mind that even the Old Testament has examples of same sex love. Never mind that everyone knew what was right all along, but ran all around proverbial barns trying to ignore it. But what did we learn when marriage equality became a cascading force? We learned that doing the right thing created space for mercy and justice. We learned that mercy and justice created space for love. We who are gay married people learned that marriage really does change everything because it binds two people and their families together in love. And binding love spreads through an ever more loving creation.

There you have it—from IKEA to the crafty manager to I Love Lucy to marriage equality. What have we learned? That doing the right thing is always the right thing to do; that being faithful in a very little is as powerful as being faithful in much; that giving a little bit of love can cascade into a tsunami of mercy and justice and love.

 

Proper 20 (Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; Psalm 79:1-9; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13)

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

Ontological shift*

It has been a curious year.

I had a spell of illness, not serious but temporarily debilitating, earlier in the year. As often happens, like a summer storm, it led to a period of much improved health. As I said, curious.

I continued to work in Europe, making visits to Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Heraklion this year, as well as to Ottawa and Toronto in Canada. Immigration security is tight everywhere—immigration officers in every country routinely meet you at the door of your arriving aircraft looking for passports. But otherwise things are much the same as always. It was a relief to find Crete looking shiny and clean and with business seeming to thrive despite the news we hear in the west about Greek economics. While I was in Heraklion I purchased this icon of the Annunciation. I knew there was a reason, I just didn’t know what it was.

Marriage equality became the law in the United States this year, allowing same-sex couples in the US to join those in much of the rest of the developed world. It has been interesting to watch this evolution over a period of about a decade and a half. Once we all said routinely that we didn’t need marriage, we had our own loving approach to partnership. But once the possibility existed in reality we thirsted for equality. Many of us who were long-partnered were among the first to wed. Many of us were surprised to discover it does, in fact, make a difference. My own experience was that it shifted the manner of being in our relationship as we became literally each other’s family. It was reminiscent of the famous ontological shift priests experience in ordination. It is an awareness that something is radically different along one dimension even as everything else stays the same. My husband and I now in the 39^th year of our relationship and the 8^th year of our marriage are ever more deeply in love and ever more connected spiritually.

Elsewhere terror and violence have spread around the world. Politics seems to have run amok everywhere. And yet the scripture speaks to us as always. “In those days” the story of Mary’s annunciation begins. “Consequently” is the opening of today’s appointed passage from Hebrews. God’s mercy and compassion are eternal and timeless. The world exists in many dimensions—chaos along one intersecting with peace and joy in another. It’s tough to be human, even in these days. Just as it was then. When the angel came to Mary to bring her the news that she would bear the prophesied child it was into a moment of grace in a chaotic life. This is how God always comes to us it seems. It is up to us to embrace the news, to allow God’s grace to work in and through us. It is up to us to live through the ontological shift.

For God a heartbeat is a thousand years long and a millenium is but a second. Micah (5:2-4) prophesies the advent of a child of Bethlehem “whose origin is from of old” but who will “stand and feed his flock” forever, and this flock, that would be us, will “live secure” because this child will become “the one of peace.” It is not a prediction, it is a prophecy. It is not a bet or a riddle, it is the story—the narrative—of the reality of the coming into each human heart of a moment of ontological change that takes place when we realize we are the children of God. This is the meaning of Christmastide, which is now upon us.

Prepare, once again, for the ontological shift that is Christ’s birth within and among us.

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

*4 Advent (Micah 5:2-5a, Canticle 15 Magnificat, Hebrews 10: 5-10, Luke 1:39-49 (50-56))

 

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.

Snow and convergence*

 

The second Sunday of Christmas is sort of a last gasp reminder that the season of hope is still with us. We woke up to snow this morning in Milwaukee. It finally looks like Christmas doesn’t it? It is yet another reminder that life takes place in multiple dimensions. Nature’s time line is different from ours. Coincidence can lead to wonderful moments of inspiration as doorways to new dimensions are opened. Tonight also will bring a full moon introducing the motion of a celestial dimension into this party of inspiring coincidences. Tuesday will be the feast of the Epiphany, and as we celebrate the arrival of the wise men from the east, Christmastide will come to an end.

The scripture appointed for today all points toward the story of the Holy Family fleeing into Egypt after angel apparitions in Joseph’s dreams guide them. Although the story is quite condensed it must cover a fair bit of time before the angel comes back and sends them back to Israel (Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23). Of course it all is couched in prophetic terms, as the author of Matthew’s Gospel was concerned with making explicit parallels between the prophetic literature and the life of Jesus. Still, one wonders what they did during that time. We see couples with infants on airplanes all the time; it rarely occurs to us to wonder about the circumstances that compel them away from the bosom of their home. The Old Testament reading from Jeremiah (31:71-4) is the proclamation of Israel’s return from exile. We think of it as a joyous moment but look at the text: “among them the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labor … with weeping they shall come ….”

It is a reminder that God is in the details in every dimension of life. It is also a reminder that our very real lives take place alongside the time lines of parallel or diverging or converging dimensions of nature, society and culture. Some would interpret this as randomness, but: a) that isn’t what “random” means; and b) to see life that way is to miss the importance of understanding how God is in all those points of convergence. The opposite misinterpretation is what I call the “God as puppet-master” theory, that somehow God is in the sky pulling all of our strings to manipulate us. But the truth is that the hallmarks of our lives are these points of convergence where who we are meets where we are and in what truth we live. Well, that’s all rather cerebral.

What I mean is the same thing as the dichotomy St. Paul frequently presents between spirit and flesh. We are here, no matter how we choose to interpret that. We can choose to see ourselves as the center, deciding who or what to allow access to our internal living spaces. Or, we can choose to see ourselves as the children of God, inheriting God’s creation, and residing at many crossroads. Crossroads bring opportunity; opportunity is the spirit enlivening us as the dimensions around us converge. Like the people in scripture all of us are leading prophetic lives at the convergence of the dimensions of creation and society, the crossroads of spirit and flesh, of God and humankind.

In the U.S. lgbt people are rejoicing at the flowering of marriage equality opening a dimension of fertile life all around us. In my morning news is the story of Egyptian gay men being arrested on charges of debauchery so as to drive the lgbt community into hiding.

The snow outside my window this morning is stunningly beautiful. It reminds me of the creative power of nature and of the timelessness of our lives. Christmastide presents a series of dramatic stories in Christian culture to remind us that the birth of hope in the child Jesus was not a one-off moment but rather, is an ongoing rebirth in the souls of the children of God in the timeless dimension of God’s kingdom. Let us rejoice for the goodness and mercy God has shown to us. Let us pray for the end of oppression and suffering that still continues in too many places.

*2 Christmas (Jeremiah 31:7-14; Psalm 84:1-8; Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a; Matthew 2:13-15,19-23)

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

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)

Very married*

What a surprising week for gay Americans. To be honest, I had been guessing the SCOTUS would choose to let the circuit court decisions stand rather than take the cases for states that had voted marriage discrimination laws. It made sense to me that the conservative majority would not want to be associated with a decision in favor of marriage equality, even if they knew they could not stop it. But what I think is most interesting is that by this narrow precise decision concerning a few cases, the court has allowed society to transform itself. In simpler terms, although the court’s decision was to let stand decisions overturning discrimination, the effect is the utter transformation of the majority of the United States of America into (mostly) a land of marriage equality (35 states and the District of Columbia by current reckoning).

Christians often catch the “God is love” theme from the Gospels without understanding that it is not about smarmy greeting card love, but rather about justice and equality. For what is God’s love if it is not a guarantee of life, equality, and justice? God’s glory is in the glimmer of justice known, experienced, and lived.

Finally I could say to my husband, “well, dear, now you’re really stuck with me.” For a gay American born in 1952 I cannot imagine a more glorious thing to say. (For the record, we were married on May 31, 2008, at City Hall, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; we have been together 36 years.)

Someone posted a reminder of National Coming Out Day on Facebook the other day. I always remember that the date of that event is October 11. Of course, for sixteen years of ordained ministry in Philadelphia it coincided with the lgbt street fair known as OutFest. We would sit at a table replete with symbols of the Episcopal Church, make sure a collared clergy person was always present along with some savvy normal-looking parishioners. Hundreds would stop by our table to ask questions about the church—everything from “do you know one with good music?” to “will you baptize our baby?” But I always thought our real impact was on the thousands more who walked by about twenty feet away, slowing down to read the signs, looking us in the eye with frightened longing. I always knew those were the people for whom our quiet witness was most effective. Just before I left Philadelphia I finally met someone who came to church and said casually “I used to walk past you at OutFest; it took me years to get up the nerve to come here.”

Witness, faith worked out in justice, is righteousness made into the transformative power of God’s love.

But the real reason I know October 11 is National Coming Out Day is that when I was a young lecturer at my first academic post the local lgbt group announced “wear jeans on coming out day” as a sign, a witness, of the presence of lgbt people throughout the whole community. I remember it because I was not yet “out,” not yet certain what “gay” really was, not yet certain whether that was a term that described me. And yet I wore jeans every day (ex-hippy that I was and still am). So I remember being terrified that whatever I did would be a lie in some way. I worried about it for weeks. And when the day came I called in sick (this was before computers and email!). The power of my emotional upheaval made a permanent impression on my psyche. And yes, by the following October, I had come out. The rest is history, as they say.

In Matthew’s gospel (22:1-14) Jesus tells the parable of the wedding feast. At the very end, when finally the rabble joyously constitute the guests at the feast, one man refuses to wear the wedding gown and is thrown out. “For many are called but few are chosen.” Of course the parallel of the jeans is not lost on me. Until I ponied up and put on my jeans I was relegated to the exile of outer darkness. Once I became the gay man God had made me to be, once I had put on the robe of righteousness by acknowledging and rejoicing in the gay man God had made me to be, I was once again admitted to the feast. Who’d ever have thunk such a critter could become a priest?

But you know what, today I am very married. That is the transformative power of God.

Proper 23 (Exodus 32:1-14; Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23; Philippians 4:1-9; Matthew 22:1-14)

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

An organic whole*

Creation is an organic whole. I’m sure that comes as no surprise to anyone. I read this week that the ozone layer has begun to recover, more than two decades after we stopped using ozone-depleting chemicals. The Milwaukee paper today has a cover story about algae blooms in Lake Erie; they’re a problem in all of the Great Lakes, and problems in the lakes signal problems in the environment and presage problems in life all around those lakes, not to mention reverberations worldwide from changes in the socio-economics of the region. It’s a bit like chaos theory, which most of us learned about in Jurassic Park. Everything is connected.

If everything is connected then it follows that a disturbance in one place can lead to a domino-effect of disturbances along the line. This is the reasoning glbt liberators have used for decades to encourage coming out. People who do not come out harm themselves for sure, by not reaching personal fulfillment. But they also harm those around them, entering into relationships based on false pretenses, as well as bringing harm to the rest of us who are gay who are seen as somehow odd for having come out. When all glbt people stand up in society for just whom God has made us to be, there will be no room for oppression or suppression. Paul writes to the Romans (14:7) “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves.” Paul’s focus in this passage is on unity with God, living into life with God. But lest we live fully into life with each other we cannot be one with God.

The other side of this coin, to mush a metaphor, comes in Matthew’s Gospel (18-21-35) where we hear Jesus repeatedly telling his disciples that they must forgive and forgive and forgive and then forgive some more and it must come from the heart. Without the opening to God created by the flow of love among people there can be no space for justice. Without forgiveness there can be no room for everything, which is interconnected, to thrive. Forgiveness must come from the heart and must flow among us, but of course, it does not mean we must be doormats.

Yes, there must be marriage equality. Yes, our families must be respected as such. To that end we must continue to stand up for ourselves. A former mentor used to say repeatedly that the most important thing gay people did in the church was to show up and be visible, as a witness to their faith among the whole congregation. So, yes, we also must find a way to forgive, and with forgiveness in our hearts continue to show up and be visible. Creation is an organic whole.

*Proper 19 (Exodus 14:19-31; Psalm 114; Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-35)

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

Justice and love*

The world is a scary place sometimes but the world also is a wonderful place and these two poles—beauty and fear—exist simultaneously all the time. Around the world hurricanes and earthquakes and acts of savagery are going on twenty-four-seven. But in my backyard there seems to be a convention of cottontail bunnies hopping around in my newly refurbished lawn. They’re eating something I suppose, but it sure looks like they’re playing to me. Last night while I was cooking dinner I was watching them out the window and it was both the manifestation of all of the childhood books about bunnies I ever read and way better than anything on television. It was odd I thought, that as I finished cooking and was wiping up the counter they seemed to finish eating and hop away. That made me wonder whether they had been watching me! Maybe I was the entertainment for their dinnertime! (Unfortunately, their brown coloring against the garden colors at dusk makes it almost impossible to get a good picture of them.)

This week there is a cluster of scripture appointed that includes God’s instructions to Moses for the first Passover, a psalm of praise that moves rapidly from praising God with dance and song and timbrel and harp to rejoicing in justice—beauty and fear all in one, as it were. Paul’s letter to the Romans explains the relationship between law and love, in which we are instructed to move from reliance on law to salvation in embracing love. Matthew’s Gospel has instructions for adjudicating disagreements in the church. This passage has a curious clause that I never noticed before (or, rather, I never paid attention to before), where Jesus says those who refuse to reform should “be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” Of course, that is a dichotomy isn’t it? Because Gentiles were not part of the Jewish community of Jesus’ followers and tax collectors were the hated agents of the occupying Roman government. But, didn’t Jesus sit down to eat with tax collectors and heal Gentiles on the road? Even the reviled, even those who persecute us, even those who refuse to repent, must be embraced in our love, it seems to say. Those are tough instructions in any generation.

There is a lot of detail in scripture and too many people are too hung up on that. The texts in the Bible contain the revelation of God’s action in the world. They are not sets of instructions, nor are they like a cookbook or a rule book. Rather, the revelation in each case must be teased out through interpretation, and that interpretation cannot be done once for ever but rather must continually be reembraced, revisited, realized by each generation of believer in each new context.

The critical point that emerges is that God is love, and we, born of God, also are to be love, and that for love to thrive there must be justice. The precondition for God’s love is justice. The two go hand in hand. The God of love is also the God of justice, just as the psalmist sang.

And so this week we have (again) confusing Federal court adjudications about marriage equality, one circuit declaring two state bans on equality unconstitutional (and we must stop saying they are bans on “gay” marriage—they are bans on equality in marriage), another Federal court declaring they are reasonable. Even the courts that declare these laws unconstitutional then “stay” their decisions meaning the result is continuing injustice. Marriage equality, it seems, is still a tough slog in the US. The world is a dichotomous place.

Our God, who is love, demands justice for all of God’s creation. It is in justice that love can thrive. But remember that Jesus teaches us to embrace even those who insist on injustice, tough guidance but real, because it is only in love and respect that justice can be found. In other words, keep the faith.

Proper 18 (Exodus 12:1-14; Psalm 149; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20)

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

Necklace? No, the cross of Christ*

I have been having lots of interesting intersections with the healthcare people in Wisconsin. This isn’t going to be a complaint, they’re great and they do a wonderful job. But, I just wanted to tell you that for something like nearly four decades I have worn a crucifix around my neck. Actually, in Philadelphia, if you are Italian (as I am), it is required by social convention.

Whenever I had to get an X-ray or such in Philadelphia, the technician would gingerly say “lets move your crucifix out of the way” and move it to one side or the other. But here, they always say, “oh what a pretty necklace, you’ll have to take off your necklace.”

Boy do I feel put down as  a sissy boy when they say that.

Also, boy, do I feel put down as a Christian, and a priest, when they say that, although I also wonder what is so culturally different that it might lead to such a divergence of response and reaction.

Matthew’s  Gospel reading this week begins: “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.” I think that’s enough. The rest is just midrash. And the examples in the story in Matthew do not speak to 21^st century sin in a direct way. We cannot imagine how wanting some bread is a sin. But, of course, that is not what the text intends. It intends to tell us that, people who lust, judge. Is the bread God has given you not good enough? That is a judgment on your part. If so, you have made yourself into a little god. And that is sin.

It is both thrilling and frightening to watch the spread of the marriage equality movement in the US, of course, almost two decades after it began the Netherlands and Canada. I hope the U.S. finds the right path, meaning, I hope we win this civil rights battle. And I wish ardently that gay people would understand that the sins here are two: first that the heterosexism leads to a facade of normativity. The second is that we fail to understand the cultural divergence of this dynamic, not entirely like my experience with my crucifix. God asks us to love one another. God means, we should understand when our neighbors have got it wrong. Here is our own potential for sin, if we judge instead of understand.

Jesus died, and rose again, so you and I could see that this is the pattern of life, and that in the end God is always with us, and we already always are saved, meaning we always will be in the eternity with God. Nothing matters in this equation except faith. You know, faith is not such a mystery, it is just a matter of learning the keys to open the door to the proper dimension.

Have a Holy Lent my friends. Pray, for the equality of all humankind.

1  Lent (Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7; Psalm 32; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11)

©2104 The Rev. Dr. RIchard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.