For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law*

I always shudder a little bit when these readings from Nehemiah come up because of that place-name “Water Gate.” I’m of the generation that watched a president resign–the first time that had ever happened–and the whole scandal was so associated with a building named after this famous Water Gate that we have an entire genre of “gates” now: [your scapegoat]-gate.

Curiously, or interestingly, the reading from Nehemiah points us precisely toward the sorts of crises that might lead to upsets. In the story (Nehemiah 8: 1 ff.) Nehemiah has brought the actual text of the Ten Commandments out to read them to the crowd assembled. They’re all in awe of the God who has sent them such a gift, although they haven’t heard the “rules” yet. And when Nehemiah reads the crowd breaks down and sobs uncontrollably “For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law.” We are led to believe they are sobbing in awe of their awesome God, but let’s face it, the real reason they’re sobbing probably had to do with their sudden realization that they had broken every rule in the book. If these were the rules they were … ummm, let’s use doomed here.

Or maybe they were sobbing because they knew they were going to have to give up their power and authority. And here is where I bring the story home always to the present day. We all spent a lot of energy last week being upset by the Anglican Primates and the decision at the conclusion of their meeting regarding the Episcopal Church. All week long we have been showered with official pastoral responses by almost every bishop in the Episcopal Church and many from Canada and other Anglican churches as well. But in the end it mostly all comes down to the point we find ourselves sharing with Nehemiah. Someone needs to read the two commandments, those that constitute Christianity, to those bishops from other parts of the world who seek to continue oppression of glbt people. Because my friends, there is nothing in scripture to properly account for their “conclusion” that glbt people are sinful by nature. I could rehearse all of the arguments here but I don’t need to do that, we did that decades ago. If you want, hunt back in my archives for references to the scholarly work that brings all of the proof-texts to bear. There is nothing in Christ that condemns homosexuals or homosexuality. It is a made-up position, derived from deliberate misinterpretation of Old Testament texts. In fact, there is nothing in the Old Testament that condemns homosexuals or homosexuality. There are stories about David and Jonathan and Ruth and Naomi, for example, and other examples of revelation of God’s creation of all people in God’s image, gay straight or otherwise.

So that brings us to the weepers at the Water Gate. They realized their plight, because it was not just that they had sinned and not only that they had sinned but it was really that they kept doing it on purpose. And their sin was to oppress their neighbors. Christ gave us two commandments: love God, and love each other. And Christ told us to remember that the two really were the same thing, that to love each other is to love God and to love God fully means loving each other fully. Jesus also told his disciples that whenever they went to a place to bring the Holy Spirit and they weren’t accepted they were to shake the dust off their feet and move on to another place.

So my friends, remember this: those who seek to oppress us do not need to be convinced by Scripture that they are wrong, they know they are wrong, they are doing this on purpose. They have nearly lost the fight to restrict holiness to white males, and only by continuing to oppress the weak among them can they continue to maintain power over females and non-heterosexual males. I’ve written this before (this seems to be becoming a refrain for me): the theology is not new and they’re all familiar with it. In the same way that the Roman curia knows there is no necessity to prevent the ordination of women other than as a means of control; women were among Jesus’ disciples and appear all through the New Testament as founders of the new church.

Jesus constantly reminded people that the kingdom of God had already come near, the problem was for them to put aside their self-centeredness and open their hearts to the universality of God’s creation. This is still the promise of salvation, that in Christ God has given us all that we need to be at one with God and with all of God’s creation. All we have to do is stop oppressing, stop stigmatizing, stop obsessing about self and open our hearts to the movement of a loving God whose creation encompasses all people. Even gay people.

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

3 Epiphany (Nehemiah 8: 1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 12: 12-31a; Luke 4:14-21)

 

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.

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.