This Just In...

A couple of news items of interest: Cynthia Nixon of the popular "Sex and the City" will be lending her face and name to the effort to repeal Florida's Anita Bryant-era adoption law that prohibits LGBT people from being adoptive parents. Read it here.

And a federal judge in San Francisco, noting the widespread interest in the case against California's Proposition H8 has agreed to allow the proceedings to be videotaped and released on YouTube in a tape delay. Read the Los Angeles Times story here.

Thanks to frdougal and Integrity for the tips!

Know that the Lord is God. It is he that made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.(Ps. 100:3)

Epiphany

I'm sure that the campus of my prep school is covered in ice and snow at this time, the same way it was on January 6, 1984. That was what I guess I'd call "First Epiphany" or "The Day God and Angels and Archangels and All the Company of Heaven" intervened to stop me from checking out. I was fortunate to have had enough of a life force within me that even in one of the darkest hours, I had enough light to ask someone to help me.
I didn't fully understand God's role in that moment until a couple of years ago when I was in church for the Epiphany. My mentor was preaching, and she noted in her sermon that the three wise men set out to find this new king, this child in Bethlehem, without a compass, a map, or a GPS. Just a star and a willingness to keep following the path of this light. Meanwhile, King Herod was ordering up a mass slaughter of children in hopes of eliminating a threat. Herod, as she pointed out, was afraid and preferred to remain in darkness. She posed the question, "Are we going to be like Herod?" and I remember that tears began welling up in my eyes. The question, after the set up, reminded me of what I had gone through as a teen-ager. Not that I was threatened and trying to kill off a rival. But the addiction to darkness, and to death and to fear: that all rang true for my inner troubled teen.
And so I had what I'll name "Second Epiphany" as I reflected more on her sermon. I walked down to the park near my house, and started processing my thoughts on paper. It was then that it came to me how very present God had been in the classroom with me and the school chaplain at that moment. And not just God, but all the means at God's disposal to keep me put in the chair, so that I didn't do something permanently crazy. And from that I reached the conclusion that what had really gone down that morning in 1984 was the evidence that the light can, and will, triumph over the dark. And, as I noted in this free-form written processing, the journey that I find myself on now won't allow me to reverse course. Thanks be to God!
For this Epiphany, my hope for all of you reading is that you will never allow your light to be snuffed out in the belief that darkness is somehow better. It isn't.
What made the wise men so wise, in my opinion, was that they trusted and followed a star, and they never traveled back along that same road by Herod's place. So let's all follow that example. If your steps take you backward, don't retrace that path. And may you have an epiphany on Epiphany.

Dream A Little Dream

Joseph Dream by Phillipe Champaigne

Since Sunday, I've been thinking about the communication of important information through dreams. Probably because our gospel passage, taken from Matthew, was all about how Joseph knew where to go and when because he kept getting the word via his dreams (funny how this Joseph, the carpenter, and the OT Joseph with his fancy coat had a knack for dreaming their way to safety!)

Dreams, and people listening to dreams, seem to be all over the Scriptures. Every time somebody dreams, they're given a clue or a direction that leads them to do something that is significant to the rest of the story. Think about it: the wise men didn't go back to Herod because they'd been warned "in a dream" to not let the King know, "Hey, we found the kid, and he's something else!" No such dream, and who knows what would have happened, but it probably wouldn't have been "good news".

I know that I have received important guidance in dreams. I realize that may sound very new agey-hippie-dyke-massage-therapist, but it's true. My dreams have spoken to deeper parts of me, and I believe are designed to add another piece to the puzzle that is my growth and understanding of God. I've written several posts already on various dreams that I have had, but one that will always be with me is the one that occurred prior to what my mentor now describes as my "thudding". It's the one where I saw a rapid succession of faces of all kinds: young, old, male, female, black, white, Latin, European, animal, non-mammal etc. They were coming at me so quickly that I didn't have time to latch on to one image for too long. And then, in a strong, deep voice, came the overarching message: "These are the faces of God." And my understanding of the Divine reached a new level of depth.

What have you dreamt lately? And how closely have you listened to those dreams?

“Some of the nicest people I have ever met are gay people.”

I don't feel the need to rehash the prior posting about my Sadness for Screamers. But in today's New York Times I was struck with how evangelical "christians" can be so blind to the cause and effect of the homophobia they've helped to fuel in African nations such as Uganda.

"Oh, no," they say, "we don't condone killing people." After all, as Don Schmierer so tritely put it:

“That’s horrible, absolutely horrible,” he said. “Some of the nicest people I have ever met are gay people.”

And yet, Mr. Schmierer of Exodus International, went to Uganda in March and did a "parenting" talk to tell Ugandan parents how NOT to accept the same-sex orientation of their children, advocating a position that LGBT people can change. In Uganda, that "change" is enforced with beatings, threats, and rape. Mr. Schmierer says now that he feels he was "duped". But what he, and others, have done is simply sow the seeds of hatred, tending them with tenacious and vicious care, so that they have bloomed into the bigotry we are seeing now.

For shame!

Sadness for Screamers

Is it me, or is there something really effed-up about these two smiling as they hold signs of hatred in the name of God?

Behold, the members of Westboro Baptist Church. They have gained infamy for showing up where they are not wanted or welcomed to protest the funerals of LGBT people... and soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was the latter protests that have made them wildly unpopular with most Americans.

I'm using these two as an illustration for a greater problem and a frustration I feel when I see these images. Too often, this has become the face of Christianity: the benevolent smiling soul armed with Bible verses culled for the purposes of leading people AWAY from God, and into a belief that Christ (God) hates people, specifically anyone seen as an "other". What effect does this image have on the non-gay population? Something like what I heard at dinner last night, when a young mother was contemplating her options for preschool for her daughter, and wanted to find one that was affordable and "not religious". I could understand the affordability and "not religious" part, except that she was open to considering the preschool attached to Temple Israel. "Jewish" preschool was OK; "Christian" preschool was not because a "Christian" preschool would teach things about God that this mother didn't want to instill in her child... such as God is to be feared, and God condemns and punishes people (I didn't want to point out that much of that language about God exists in the Hebrew texts).

Where would she get such an idea about "Christians"? I refer back to the image above. I point to countless statements made by "christians" over the centuries that would support her belief. And, as much as I disagreed with this assessment of Christianity, I see evidence of it myself... which makes it incredibly difficult to counter such claims.

And it saddens me. The screamers, as I call them, are successfully jamming the signal that says, "God is love". Perhaps this is why this Christmas season, I am feeling the return of God into the world more profoundly and strongly than I ever have before. Too many people, too many of those of "other" status in whatever "other" that is, have been led to think that the God who came to meet us in our humanity in an effort to show us love instead came to beat the crap out of us. That is sad.

Again, the Psalm assigned for this morning's Daily Office ends on a more appropriate note:

The Lord redeems the life of his servants;
none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned. Ps.34:22

Believe that statement... and remember it in your heart!

Let No One Put Asunder

Associated Press Photo of Olin and Carl Burkhart on their wedding night in Concord, NH.

My congratulations to all those LGBT couples in New Hampshire who will now be able to get married to the one they love!

Under the law now in effect in New Hampshire, the 800 or so couples who had gone through a civil union ceremony over the past two years will have their unions converted to marriages automatically in 2011. But they can expedite the process by applying for a marriage license now. Others took part in a ceremony in front of the state Capitol building in Concord at 12:01AM. And still others are making their plans to wed before somebody decides they need to launch a campaign to repeal this law.

For the most part, in reading about the new marriage laws for the state, many LGBT couples are sighing relief that they can FINALLY do this, but they recognize that there are still miles to go before anybody can sleep. Take this snippet from the Los Angeles Times article:

The retired Rev. Eleanor McLaughlin and her partner of 19 years, Elizabeth Hess, of Randolph, climbed a mountain and exchanged rings the summer of 1991 but didn't enter a civil union. They waited for marriage. Both devout Episcopalians, they designed their ceremony Saturday to reflect the state's role in civil marriage and their church's role in blessing the union.

McLaughlin, 74, and Hess, 62, plan on exchanging marriage vows in the vestibule of St. Barnabas Church in Berlin, then following with a church ceremony at which Episcopal Bishop Gene V. Robinson, who is openly gay, will bless the union.

Winter's starkness is their wedding theme.

"We want people to recognize we had to wait a long, long time," Hess said.

Knowing that my home state, once a hold-out against the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, has done this for my community is heartwarming and gives me hope that things can change. Those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder!

The Feast of the Holy Name: Psalm 103

When I was helping with The Shelter Christmas dinner at Temple Israel, the rabbi stopped by the kitchen to kibitz with the cooks, and the folks coming in with their food contributions. There was some banter about Christ and Christmas, and the rabbi remarked that if Christ were born on Christmas, then his circumcision would have to be New Year's Day.

Very good, rabbi. That's absolutely correct. We in Christendom celebrate what we call the feast of the Holy Name, the day on which Jesus received his name and was circumcised as any good Jewish boy would have been. I thought it fitting that the Daily Office assigned Psalm 103 for this morning, which begins:

Bless the Lord, O my soul
and all that is within me
bless his holy name.

I love Psalm 103! I love that it is joyous. I love that it is a song of how deep and abiding the love of God is for us.

The Lord works vindication
and justice for all who are oppressed.
He made known his ways to Moses,
his acts to the people of Israel.
The Lord is merciful and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
He will not always accuse,
nor will he keep his anger for ever.
He does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities.
For as the heavens are high above the earth,
so great is his steadfast love towards those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far he removes our transgressions from us.
As a father has compassion for his children,
so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him.
For he knows how we were made;
he remembers that we are dust.

This is remarkable! And no where in any of this is the caveat that says, "These verses only apply to people of a certain social status, sexual orientation, skin color, or ethnicity". This is a love so true and deep and amazing and it's for anybody who "fears" (meaning "regards") God. My soul can't help but want to repeat the refrain that is at the end of this psalm.

Bless the Lord, O you his angels,
you mighty ones who do his bidding,
obedient to his spoken word.
Bless the Lord, all his hosts,
his ministers that do his will.
Bless the Lord, all his works,
in all places of his dominion.
Bless the Lord, O my soul.

So, as I kick off 2010, I give thanks for this day on which Jesus received his name, and shed his first blood in the journey to being God living as one of us. Thanks for the love!