2012: It's Been A Gay Ol' Time!

The news for the LGBT community in 2012 was beyond amazing.

Openly-gay people elected to city councils, state legislatures, and Congress. A presidential administration that finally said there is nothing wrong with marriage equality which caused, what I would describe as, an earth-shifting event in our political discourse that led to LGBT people finally celebrating victories for their relationships at the ballot box.

The Episcopal Church further opened its doors to equality with the adoption of a rite for same-sex blessings, and giving the transgender members of the church the invitation to not only be included through their baptism, but to ascend to leadership, both lay and ordained. Amazing! Truly amazing.

Well, that is, if you live in those places where the truly amazing has been allowed to be the reality.

If you live in Florida, as I do, you can rejoice with your LGBT brothers and sisters and celebrate the advancement in the political arena with the election of two openly-gay members of the state legislature. As one who used to cover the state capital for public radio, I assure you that this development, and advancement, is huge. Some of the more homophobic representatives are gone, and so it is possible to hope and dream that maybe, just maybe, even Florida might see a brighter future for the LGBT community.

But there is still a long way to go, especially within the church.

If I drive across the bridge on Highway 98 into Apalachicola, I will be in the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast. The Episcopal bishop there, Philip Duncan III, is allowing priests and churches to use the new blessing rite in recognition of couples wishing to get the church's approval of their relationship.  Go about a half-hour north of Tallahassee into Georgia, Bishop Scott Benhase is allowing a portion of the blessing rite to be used.  My partner and I even attended what may well have been the first use of the new rite in Bainbridge, not exactly a hotbed of liberal thinking.  Stay put in Tallahassee, the Diocese of Florida and, well.... is that the sound of crickets chirping?

There is definitely a stained-glass ceiling that still exists in parts of the Episcopal Church for LGBT people.  The good actions at General Convention don't seem to reach down to the local level, particularly if you happen to live in some parts of the southeastern United States. But glass can, and does, break  especially as more pressure mounts against it in the form of a firestorm that I call, "The Holy Spirit."  Those bishops and dioceses that refuse to recognize that "equality is godly" are going to find themselves in a similar position that I see occuring in England.  Bull-headedness and foot-dragging on entering into the 21st century on "gays and girls" has resulted in many of the churches in England standing empty on a Sunday morning.  The vote on the Anglican Covenant in England should have said everything in respect to what the majority there think about the continued petty nonsense and hand-wringing about gays in the episcopate. New Hampshire Bishop Gene Robinson, only a few days from retiring now, is no longer "the gay bishop" in the United States, and the Episcopal Church hasn't collapsed.  If anything, it is the actions happening in those parts of the country that have broken the stained-glass window that are drawing the interest of LGBT people of faith searching for something beyond themselves.  Pay attention!  Wake up!  We are part of the future that God is creating for the church!

As I close out this entry, I am thinking again of the words my late dear friend, Fr. Lee Graham, left  for me to ponder:

Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labour is not in vain. --1Cor. 15:58

A new year brings new opportunities for the LGBT community to raise up valleys and bring down mountains so that we all may stand on equal ground.  For those of us who hold fast to our faith, it is also a time to light our candles and march them into our dioceses that insist on sitting in darkness.  We are Christ's hands, feet, heart in the world today.  And we are marching.  We are marching.  We are marching in the light of God.
 




 

What's in a Word?

The Word of the day for the First Sunday After Christmas is.... Word. Check out the collect for this Sunday:

"Almighty God, you have poured upon us the new light of
your incarnate Word: Grant that this light, enkindled in our
hearts, may shine forth in our lives..."

The Word, as we will learn in the Gospel lesson from John, was with God. It was in the beginning, just like at the start of Genesis. John the Evangelist makes a rhetorical point to use the same structure as the opening of the first book of Torah for a reason. He is writing to an audience that is suffering rejection from within the Jewish community because they maintain that Jesus is the Messiah for whom they've been waiting. John's Gospel gives this group the assurance of the rightness of their position because not only was Jesus a human being; he is fully divine. And--yes--this would be a major schism between Christians and Jews.

Similar to the way last week's lesson with Elizabeth and Mary was the meeting of the old and the new, I see this week's Gospel as John taking what is the text of the old, familiar Torah of the Jews and using it to tell a new story, the one of the Word made incarnate, Jesus Christ. The plot of the story, that God loves us and wants the best for us, is still the same. But with Christ, God is embarking on a new tactic to keep us engaged in relationship by bringing the Divine into the world as one of us, the God with us, the Word made flesh.

In today's vernacular, when somebody says, "Word," it means, "Truth." It's a convenient shorthand for, "You speak the truth on this subject." So, what is the truth for us on this subject of 'the Word'? In essence, that is the place I think we are now as we tell the story of who we are as Christians in our season of Christmas. God has re-entered the world, and now we must consider and encounter this Word. And really what I think that means is we must confront our own truth, whatever that may be. It may require us to let go of long-held beliefs and see things in a different way. This may be a time of personal transition that requires stepping outside of the familiar patterns to learn something new, or accept that new circumstances require a shift in the way 'things have always been.' It may be the time for coming to a new place of letting Love into your heart, so that you may learn to love the person you are as you are, not as others think you ought to be. This incarnate Word is not just an abstract other; it's the in-dwelling of Christ in each of us, and he's on a mission to spread Love to all, everybody, no exceptions. Are we ready?

Word.

Holy Innocents: Bring Us Together

Holy Innocents by Fra Angelico

Today is probably the darkest day of the Christmas season as the Church remembers the slaughter of all the children two years old and younger in Bethlehem on the orders of King Herod. Called "The Holy Innocents," these little ones have been regarded as the youngest martyrs. The story of their killing appears in Matthew's gospel:

Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.’ Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I have called my son.’
When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:
‘A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.’--Matthew 2: 13-18

The slaughter of children continues today as we saw two weeks ago in Connecticut. It happens outside the townhouses of kids playing in Chicago. It happens in war-torn areas of the Middle East. Every time we see images and hear these reports of young children killed by bullets and bombs, our hearts break at the horror of it all. And, yes, there is wailing and loud lamentation, and parents who can not be consoled.

And yet there was a line that stood out for me as I read the Morning Office today.  From Isaiah, it says, "Your builders outdo your destroyers, and those who laid you waste go away from you."  This is the yin and yang relationship of darkness to light, and ultimately the light, that which builds up and does not tear down, will come and brighten a darkened world.  This is the message for those of us who hold up the ones suffering from loss.  We don't know why, as the culture says, "Shit happens." We know that it does, we recognize the pain it causes.  We also know that it will not have the final word even when words fail us to say how we know that to be true.

Like Joseph, I had a dream this morning; not about getting me, my partner and the cat off to Egypt, but about the violence and suffering and distrust and misunderstanding that seems so prevalent in the world today.  A young African-American child had broken into an apartment and the owner of the apartment, a middle-aged white man, had shot the child.  A regular "Stand Your Ground" situation.  I was enraged with the white man and was in the apartment to prove that he could have done something other than shoot at the child.  After much arguing, I came to realize something about this man: one was that he may NOT have been the one who fired the gun since no gun had been found. The other was that he had made many assumptions about the child and I had made many assumptions about him.  And, in the end, I found myself in the dream arguing not about guns, or racism, or poverty.  I was arguing that we have lost a sense of interdependence on each other and an understanding that when one part of the body of Christ is suffering and in pain, it is the responsibility of all of us to come together in an effort to bind the wounds and build up that suffering member.  We have come to see ourselves as more separated than together.  It's from this place of a fractured existence that "the destroyers" outdo "the builders."

Perhaps this is what I need to consider in the deaths of all those innocent children.  When young children die, it's a disruption of order. Young children aren't supposed to die ever. When murder cuts their lives short, then it's time for us to consider all the factors at play, and come together to ensure that we protect young lives in the future. Perhaps that is what we are to hear in today's collect:

We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by King Herod. Receive, we pray, into the arms of your mercy all innocent victims; and by your great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Perhaps it's time for us to be more about living and thinking as us and rethink our priorities so that we might establish that rule of justice, love and peace.

St. John: Love One Another

I know the Christmas carol would lead you to believe that today's gift to the true love is three French hens. And while that might work for some, for me, the third day of Christmas is a pause between two otherwise brutal tales during this season to remember St. John the evangelist, the one whom Christ loved.

John is given credit for the Fourth Gospel, three of the Epistles, and some believe he was the author of Revelation, although that one is a little less certain. The Gospel of John is also thought to have had some additions thrown in at the end long after he died in Ephesus. 

All this wonkiness aside, the important thing to me in John's gospel showed up in this morning's assigned Gospel reading.  Jesus is gathered with his disciples.  He says to them:

"I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’"--John 13:34-35

Interestingly, this statement follows the moment when Jesus dips the bread and hands it to Judas Iscariot, a sign that it would be Judas who would betray him. The text says that "Satan entered into him [Judas]" at that moment. That is to say, Judas gave into the temptation to sell out his friend for a cash payment of some silver. Jesus sends Judas off and then gives this new directive about love.

It seems to me that his timing was intentional.  Having sent Judas off, he is shoring up those who remain with him in the reminder that there first mission must be to love... in the face of what is to be a frightening and chaotic moment as they see him arrested and sent to certain death at the hands of the Roman authorities.  If there is ever a time for them to hold fast to love, and to remember the love he demonstrated to them, this would be the time.

Probably more than any of the synoptic gospels, the Gospel of John has the constant refrain of, "Love, Love, Love." Love, not only expressed in words, but in actions such as the conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, and Jesus weeping for his friend, Lazarus. But it's in the giving of this new commandment that I see Jesus passing on the essential truth which reaches beyond the disciples to touch each of us today.

Sometimes, I think this is the passage that many Christians have forgotten as they go about leveling judgment against friends and neighbors, not to mention those who they keep as the strangers at the gate.  The song, "They Will Know We Are Christians By Our Love," puts me on edge, simply because I have seen and experienced how this love sometimes gets expressed, and it isn't in a way that I think Christ himself would recognize as the kind of love he was bringing to the world.  Accusing LGBT people of undermining the moral fabric of society, denying immigrants the ability to access health care or education, decrying the "pluralism" in churches as a threat to Christianity: all of it leads back to that anti-Christ called, "Fear."   And what does our patron saint of the day have to say to this?

"There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.We love because he first loved us.Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also."--1 John 4:18-21

And so, my rhetorical question is: who is that we do not love?   Who is it that we can not love? 

Perhaps before we attempt to do anything else, we should take the time to consider those questions, and wade into those waters of Fear that keep us from perfecting our love.  In all likelihood, if we are really honest, the one we can not love is quite often the person staring us in the mirror.  And that's my invitation on this night: love yourself, as you are, because He loved you first.  Peace. 

St. Stephen: Paving the Way for More Love

St. Stephen by Giacomo Cavedone

 

The story of St. Stephen has a sad and gruesome ending. He was one of the seven selected by the apostles to become one of the first deacons in the church, doing the hands-on work of serving the needs of the widows and orphans while the twelve studied and prayed. In the Book of Acts, he's described as having an angelic face, a regular fresh-scrubbed cherub. And he wasn't shy about speaking out for Jesus Christ. This would eventually be his undoing within the Jewish community. False charges brought against him, which leads to his accusation that the Jewish leaders have consistently killed prophets and rejected the Holy Spirit. You can just imagine how well they received that tongue-lashing from the young deacon:

"When they heard these things, they became enraged and ground their teeth at Stephen. But filled with the Holy Spirit, he gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!’ But they covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him. Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’ When he had said this, he died."--Acts 7:54-60

Take a moment. Take a deep breath. And now, consider this particular line:

"Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul."

Saul, as we will learn in an upcoming chapter of Acts, is the persecutor of those who follow "The Way" and was en route to Damascus to wage war on the believers in Christ as Messiah when he had an encounter with the resurrected Christ:

"He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ He asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ The reply came, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting."--Acts 9:4-5

Saul is blinded and must now rely on others to lead him into Damascus where a follower of The Way, Ananais, receives the instruction to pray over this man and restore his sight. Despite his misgivings, Ananais follows this order from God, and Saul, now with new eyes to see, becomes St. Paul, the one who would traverse from here to there to establish churches throughout the region and become a major influence on the spread of Christianity.

I have often wondered about the influence it must have had, even if subconsciously, for Saul to witness in approving silence the stoning death of Stephen. We are told that Saul was OK with watching Stephen die. But what was God working in that moment? Could it be that this death would pave the way for more love?

I imagine that this death of Stephen somehow did trouble Saul much in the way I think any person of good conscience gets agitated when they witness injustice, or humans being brutalized. It's the story of those who witness the bullying of their classmates. Perhaps they just stand by and collect the coats of the ones who are throwing the punches. Perhaps they need to do this in order for God to do the work necessary to make them discover empathy for the one who is being beaten up.

It's what happened to me when I witnessed the execution at Florida State Prison in 1996. I was indifferent about the death penalty until I watched the state put a man to death in the electric chair. And my shift in thinking didn't happen right away. It happened over a period of months as the scales fell from my eyes with each report I did for public radio on capital punishment and the justice system. I was no longer on the fence about it when it became clear that it was indefensible.

I imagine, too, this is the process that a former homophobe goes through when they encounter a gay person in a way that blows their prejudices out of the water. It's hard to hold on to beliefs when those beliefs come face-to-face with reality, and the reality isn't as scary or "weird" as one thought.

St. Stephen died with his eyes fixed on the Christ who would not only forgive those who killed the deacon, but would later intervene to take their most ardent enabler and convert him to the purpose of spreading the Good News. More proof that with God, nothing is impossible.

Christmas Eve 2012

It's Christmas Eve afternoon, and I am more harried than merry.

I have been back and forth to a couple of different supermarkets three times today. Do we have an onion? Aw, man, we forgot the beef broth! We need port wine for the sauce.

Seriously: we need it only for the sauce, not to get sauced.

It's amazing how a simple task like dinner can become a production. And that production, which winds up being several trips to the store where you encounter all the other harried and bothered people of the world can very quickly make you lose sight of the true meaning of Christmas as you curse under your breath the guy who just took that parking space you'd spied from afar.

On other days during this season, I have taken a deep breath, and allowed my frustration to flow out through my nose and mouth, so that I could stay a little closer to my center. That wasn't working today.

And perhaps that's as it should be. Advent, the season of patient waiting for The Lord is done; we are now at Christmas and I am aware of just how stirred up things are around me. I sense my life is about to shift into a new gear, but I don't quite know what that gear is or what speed I'll be traveling at as I bump along the road. And I do mean bump. The road in front of me doesn't appear smooth. So I better buckle up as God revs up the engine. I have had to take on more responsibility as a co-mentor of our EfM group. My name has been thrown out there to become a verger. And I have tossed my hat into the ring to be considered a delegate from St. John's at the Diocesan Convention.

And that's just what's happening to me in the church.

Outside of the church, I am watching the shifting attitudes in our population on issues such as marriage equality, and am wondering what will be the fate of the case going before the U.S. Supreme Court in March. And what impact will that have on my life with my partner as we continue to live in the less-than-enlightened state of Florida.

And what about our gun culture? And what about climate change?

These are the "things" stirring as I welcome the return of Christ into the world. He comes, as he has every year, in such a tiny and unassuming way, as a baby. But the cute baby does grow up, in more ways than one, to become my example of what it means to be an advocate for a more just world. He is grounded in Love, a listener, and a healer, amidst a harried and difficult world. And I know it is those times when I am feeling at a loss for what to do next, that when I earnestly turn to God and say, "Help me!" the help comes.

And so maybe that's what today's overstimulated rushing around was about. Remembering to stop, breath, and ask for help. Because it will come.

A Blessed (and Historic) Advent Event

There's not a whole lot of time for us to celebrate the fourth week of Advent, the day as noted in the previous post that we in the Church mark the occassion of Mary and Elizabeth's meet up and rejoicing at their parallel, and historic, situations.  Elizabeth, the elder woman, is about to give birth to the last of the prophets of the "Old Covenant"; Mary, the teenager, is bearing Jesus, the one who will give us the "New Covenant."  Old meets youth, and the old celebrates at the hope that is coming forth from this young woman.

 

What a fascinating backdrop to have as I witnessed today the first-ever blessing of a same-sex couple in, of all places, Bainbridge, Georgia, under the authority now granted by the Episcopal Church for such happy occasions to occur in their diocese.   Two women, who have a flash-in-the-pan relationship of a mere 19 years, held a ceremony surrounded by their friends in a parishioner's home.  My partner and I were the official wedding crashers.  We'd been invited by my spiritual director who was the assisting priest at the ceremony.  It was lovely.  It was warm.  They used Eucharistic Prayer C, (y'know the one with the "vast expanse of interstellar space" language) that jettisoned my mind back to my childhood in New Hampshire.  And it was a pleasure to be present, and be in a community of people lifting up this couple in their relationship.  This is how a blessing within the church should be.  Georgia law does not permit people of the same gender to marry; however nothing should stop a church from honoring the commitment a couple wants to make to each other.  Church blessings and civil marriage rights are not the same thing.  So, in this instance, the state can go stuff it.

 

And so a new thing has happened in a part of the country where the "old way" still rules the roost. 

 

It also comes as news has filtered out about the death of one of the earliest pioneers for marriage equality.  Richard Adams and his partner, Tony Sullivan, applied and received a marriage license from a county clerk in Boulder, Colorado, named Clela Rorex in 1975.  Rorex had been issuing wedding licenses to gay couples when she learned through the district attorney that nothing in Colorado law strictly forbade it.  Adams and Sullivan had been in a relationship for four years, and wanted to be married not just for love, but for the practical purpose of protecting Sullivan, an Austrailian native, from being deported.  After getting their marriage license and having a ceremony in the Unitarian Church, the couple immediately applied with the then-Immigration and Naturalization Service for Sullivan's residency.  They got back a one-sentence answer from the government agency:

 

"You have failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots."

 

Adams sued the INS in 1979, and thus began a lifetime of struggling for recognition of their rights as a married couple.  What he and Sullivan... with the help of Rorex... began was the heralding of what was to come.  And while Richard Adams died on December 17th, he was able to live long enough to see President Obama put a halt to the break-up of LGBT families through deportation, and to witness the changing times in this country on marriage equality.  Adams is one of those who was announcing that a new thing was coming, and it was time to bring down mountains and lift up the valleys, so that we might all be on the same level field in our relationships.  

 

His life and witness with his husband are part of the reason an Episcopal congregation in South Georgia will now celebrate the same-sex relationship of two church members.

 

The tune that has been on my mind for a few days now ended up being our recessional hymn this morning.  I think it quite nicely sums up my feelings on a day of witnessing the new things occurring in the midst of the old:

 

Tell out my soul, the greatness of the Lord!

Unnumbered blessings give my spirit voice;

tender to me the promise of his word;

in God my Savior shall my heart rejoice.

 

Tell out my soul, the glories of his word!

Firm is his promise, and his mercy sure.

Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord

to children's children and for evermore!