Some of my favorite parts (disclaimer: I am, after all, the spouse of the rector at St. Thomas’ Parish!) –

That hot August 24 morning, the building that The Washington Star in 1923 called “one of the most beautiful edifices in the country” was ordered razed. The next day the church paid $50,000 to demolish itself.

The congregation is a motley crew — former Catholics, Lutherans, Evangelicals, Quakers, families from Silver Spring and Alexandria, African-Americans, Asians, Latinos, and a pride parade’s worth of gays (“a He-Man Woman Haters’ Club for Jesus,” said one, “except we actually do have female members, and they’re pretty cool too”).

St. Thomas’ is a church at its most human, its most tender and frail and vulnerable, asking questions of itself and of its past and future — and, toughest of all, its present — that it never imagined.  Akin to a 40-year-old leaving his hometown for the first time, the personal sense of identity here asks a secret, taboo question: What does church mean to you? And what would you do — how would you handle it? — if you could rebuild yours?

There’s Nancy Lee Jose, 61, the fourth-generation Washingtonian who is a priest of equal parts Geraldine Ferraro and Mary Lou Retton — petite, joking, gentle, bold — a confection of a woman topped with a whipped-cream dollop of Miranda Priestly hair. [WF: "That's my sweetheart!!"]

It’s not a best-face-forward church. It’s honest, treating people as valued, as good, as loved. God, gays, education, equality. They’re all so strong here and all about the same thing: understatement that’s both powerful and radical.

This is a real church.  And bit by bit we’re building a stronger community every year.  By the grace of God we may build a new building.  But God has been at work in this place for a long time, building what lasts – a place of faith, and love, and hope … the only things, after all, that last forever.

Glass Closet:

Homophobia, Violence and the Spread of HIV in Jamaica

Lisa Biagiotti is an independent multimedia journalist. She recently produced a documentary on toilets and open defecation in India and Indonesia for Current TV’s Vanguard documentary series. Lisa has produced and edited short-form videos and weekly radio shows for Worldfocus — a daily public television news program and website. She was awarded the 2009 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in the international television category and was nominated for a national news Emmy Award for the videos she produced on the crisis in Congo. Lisa worked with the Pulitzer Center as a Worldfocus correspondent to produce “The Glass Closet: HIV/AIDS in Jamaica.” Learn more at http://lisabiagiotti.com/

The Glass Closet is part of the Pulitzer Center’s in-depth reporting on HIV in the Caribbean, which also includes current work in Haiti and the Emmy award-winning project HOPE: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica.

The Pulitzer Center promotes in-depth engagement with global affairs through its sponsorship of quality international journalism across all media platforms and an innovative program of outreach and education. To learn more visit www.pulitzercenter.org

1. We try to be a place where all can find and be found by God. We are a community of ordinary people on a joyful and thoughtful spiritual journey together.  Our ministers are called Priests; and the senior minister in an Episcopal Church like ours is called the Rector.

2. This is a Christian community, which for us means that we are part of a long line of people who share a long story that stretches back two thousand years to Jesus and almost two thousand years before that to the earliest memories of the Jewish people.  In particular we are part of the Anglican line of Christians which stretches back to the earliest Celtic Christian communities in the British Isles, and took its Episcopal Church form in the United States following the American Revolution.

3. We practice what we call Radical Hospitality, patterned after Jesus’ own teachings and personal practice. This means that everyone is welcome – there’s no litmus test. All of you is welcome – you don’t have to check part of yourself at the door – not your mind, questions, body, feelings, doubts, or background.

4. Worship is at the center of who we are as a community, and shapes all else that we believe and do. Our Sunday morning worship is centered on the Holy Eucharist, or Holy Communion, a commemoration of Jesus’ last meal with his original followers, and a central way that we celebrate Jesus being present with us today through eating bread, and drinking wine together.  Wherever you may be on your faith journey, there is room at the table for you.

5. Our worship is ordered by what is called The Book of Common (that is, community) Prayer, which contains many of the oldest forms of worship and prayers that Christians used when they first gathered together.

6. When we gather for worship, we usually start with music and singing. We read from the Bible, and listen to sermons (shorter than those in many other Christian churches!) that help us to connect the stories of the Bible with the stories of our own lives. We pray together, give God thanks for our blessings, confess our failings, ask for forgiveness, and lift up our own needs and those of others to God’s hearing.

7. We regularly recite what is called the Nicene Creed, a shorthand way of reminding ourselves of the shape of the whole story of God interacting with our world: God made everything, and everyone. God took human form in Jesus and loves us so much that Jesus was willing to suffer and die on our behalf. God could not be defeated even by death, and lives on now with us as the Holy Spirit, who called the church into being.

8. Episcopalians are a combination of Catholic and Protestant styles of Christianity — our sacramental emphasis on Holy Eucharist is brought together with a deep reverence for the primary authority of Holy Scripture in telling us about God and ourselves. We are a both-and, not an either-or, church; the world isn’t black-and-white, and we are confident that God is with us in all that life brings our way.

9. We also believe in the goodness of human reason, as a God-given resource for understanding who we are. And we trust in what we call tradition — the ways that faith has been passed on over the centuries, down to the present day, in the beliefs and practices of faithful people long before us.

10. At the end of worship, we are sent out to be bearers of God’s love and compassion and justice in the world. Our mission as Christians is to represent Christ in our daily lives, bearing love and justice that is the life-giving power at the heart of reality. Worship gives us strength for our journey and courage to be God’s people in a challenging world.

Come and visit us and see for yourself. There is a place at God’s table for everyone.

After the original structure, church home of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, was destroyed by arson 40 years ago this August, our congregation chose to remain in the neighborhood of Dupont Circle, worshiping, as we still do, in the renovated parish hall. Over time this prophetic decision evolved into an intentional, creative, and courageous leadership role in solidarity with of the growing GLBT community in this historic Washington, DC, neighborhood.

• We opened our doors during the height of the AIDS crisis – welcoming HIV positive individuals to the Eucharist, ministering to the dying and their grieving partners and friends, and honoring the dead with funerals and memorial services when few other parishes did so.

• We pioneered the development of rites for the blessing of same sex unions in the Episcopal Church, writing a still frequently used and widely adapted liturgy in 1998. Subsequently we have hosted countless blessings of holy unions, and our clergy have officiated at many others beyond our doors. Most recently we have been celebrating a steady flow of same sex marriages at St. Thomas’ Parish, including a wedding just this week of a gay couple who have been faithful partners for 33 years.

• All of us at St. Thomas’ Parish have been blessed, too, by a steady growth in the numbers of children in our ranks, some with same-sex and others with straight parents, all of them looking for a spiritual home where they can be assured, as one said recently, that “my child will never learn to hate in this place.”

• As older straight and GLBT members have retired or moved from the parish, younger adults have found a home with us in growing numbers. The result is that the median age of our parishioners is about 35, with only a handful of members over the age of 55, and currently only one vestry member over 45. This influx of young adults has led to a doubling of our congregation’s size and budget in the past 5 years. Now we are in the both enviable and lamentable place of being almost out of room to welcome those still arriving at our doors.

People who come here find an inclusive congregation, whose life is centered in the sacraments of baptism and holy communion — “a place where all can find and be found by God.” We are constantly deepening our practice of faith rooted in vital worship and bold outreach in equal measure, continually learning to love one another and our neighbors, although sometimes it is not clear which is the more difficult. We are proud to be a part of our community, and we also are deeply committed to contributing to our neighborhood and world in days long after we ourselves are gone. We’re growing a church just for you — and a place of sanctuary and refuge, of inspiration and courage, of faithfulness and compassion for tomorrow and the day after.

Wayne Floyd, March 21, 2010

As a child growing up in the pre-civil-rights world of the Deep-South, warm spring nights like tonight were often occasions for deep prayer.  I would lie on my back on the thick mat of St. Augustine grass in our small town front yard, look up at the stars winking through the leaves of the huge pecan tree overhead, and fervently pray that a spaceship would come down and take me to a galaxy far away, where I was sure I had been born, only to be inadvertently lost and abandoned in Mississippi.

At the tender age of ten or eleven, maybe I had read too much science fiction in the library where my mother worked, and where I spent many an afternoon after school reading whatever I could find to feed my precocious imagination.

Or perhaps I already felt somehow in my heart what I couldn’t really name until I was almost out of high school — that there was something inherently wrong with any child having to grow up shaped by an apartheid world, originally shaped by life on cotton plantations worked by slaves, and still into the 1970s subject to a system of racial segregation that had changed little since post-Civil War Reconstruction.

Intuitively, I knew something was wrong, although as a lower middle-class white child, I had no inkling just how wrong things were – often entirely dependent on the color of one’s skin.  I never once visited a house on the black side of town.  And little did I know that some of the parents of the children I went to school with all week, or to church with all day Sunday, were supporters, if not organizers, of the states’ rights segregationists who engineered the continuing separation of the races … and enforced it by violence, if necessary.

I knew something was wrong when from the church pulpit ministers preached God’s love for all, but denied entrance to the blacks (who outnumbered whites in my hometown almost two to one) not just for Sunday worship, but even for the funerals of people they had worked for, and sometimes cooked for, cleanup up after, and provided nursing care for up to the time of their deaths.

Later I was to discover just how ordinary a thing it is for adolescents of all sorts to see themselves as strangers-in-a-strange-land, aliens lost in an adult world that seems to have no idea whatsoever who they are.  This entirely natural sense of awkwardly-adolescent, newly-awakening self-identity was wrapped up at the time, however, in the entirely unnatural social conventions of segregated Mississippi and the entirely indefensible hypocrisies of a form of Christianity that had all but given up its ability to stand as any sort of prophetic witness against injustice.

As I matured into young adulthood, I slowly learned that my sense of alienation from much of the culture and religion that had raised me made it impossible for me to stay any longer where I was.   And so I gradually moved away from the Deep South, geographically and socially, and away from the United Methodist Church that had been the cradle of my earliest and fondest spiritual awakenings.

I first came to be able to name the things I was running away from – the brutalities of the Vietnam War, the atrocities of attempts to wipe out the civil rights movement by intimidation and violence, and the inabilities of the Christianity I had known thus far to help me make sense of any alternatives, either for myself, or for my country.

All I really knew to do was to flee. So I ran away from it all.  Facing an imminent draft into the Army, and having failed to secure alternative service in a Mississippi National Guard unit, I accepted what I at the time saw as my only other alternative, an offer of a full scholarship to Candler School of Theology, the United Methodist Seminary at Emory University.  Now I’m very aware of the ironies of fleeing rural Mississippi only to wind up in urban Atlanta, thinking I’d escaped ‘the South’; or leaving life in my local Methodist Church only to wind up in a Methodist Seminary; or that I chose to shift my allegiances to the Episcopal Church while I was earning my M.Div. in an entirely ‘Methodist’ place.  But that’s another homily.

Let me just say that, as a still-very-wet-behind-the-ears twenty-two-year-old first year seminarian, I learned some powerful and lasting lessons right away.  I’ll stick to my Big Five, and be brief about it.

First, although I had expected my teachers to answer all my barely post-adolescent questions, I discovered instead that what they had were not all the answers, but far better questions than I had ever dreamed.

Second, I learned that racism and intolerance of all sorts of human differences aren’t something a Deep Southerner can easily simply turn away from; it is a disease from which I would always be in recovery.

Third, I discovered that most of my fellow students, and many of my professors, had fled the same things that I had, and that one of the things that bound us together was the commonality of our life-journeys.

Fourth, I experienced the deep humanity of the faculty who taught me, who could lecture to us on John Wesley, or pastoral care, or the Undivided Trinity by day, only to stay up all night drinking beer at a student keg-party, arguing about who had had the greatest impact on the human race, Jesus Christ or Bob Dylan?!  Those were the 70s – you probably just had to be there to understand!

And fifth, I learned that there were deep wells of wisdom in the Christian tradition that I had only begun to fathom, and that some of the wisest voices were those who in their own times had wrestled with questions similar to mine, and had discovered in their pilgrimage through life how to hear God’s voice speaking from the midst of the whirlwind of change and confusion that are an endemic part of the human experience.

One of these was the man we know as St. Augustine of Hippo, from whom the grass in my childhood front yard had indirectly gotten its name.  He was a fourth century north African Christian who lived in times as turbulent as our own.  Augustine’s life spanned the time of the fall of the Roman Empire, a time of civil, and cultural, and religious turmoil we should have little trouble imagining – whether we look back at the upheavals of the 1960s or just look down the street at the Capitol this evening, at the rancorous and uncivil demonstrations by protesters who during the past two days have been hurling at U.S. Congress members racial and homophobic slurs that have not been heard in public in decades.

Augustine wasn’t thought of, however, as a saint in his own day.  He was a headstrong young man who was initially controlled by the ambitions of his mother.  He fled from her to the arms of a mistress with whom he had a child.  Then he fled from Christianity to try every other religion and philosophy that he could find – the creation-hating Manichees, the secrecy-laden Gnostics, the other-worldly neo-Platonists.

Augustine had come to understand something I had recognized only slowly in my own life – how important it is to flee away from what distorts our humanity and community, and yet how difficult it is to run towards something that is any better.

In the volumes of writings known as his Confessions, Augustine tells of a discovery that was to change his life.  It came when he realized that the point of life isn’t to find the answer to all of the questions, or arrive at the right destination.  The point is the journey itself, for it is one that God has placed us on, indeed a journey God has been on as well.  And so our humanity is not a simply a moral journey away from things that we or others find objectionable; life is mainly a pilgrimage towards the very reason why we’re here.  As Augustine put it far more eloquently: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

It was in conversation with St. Augustine that I came to value the restlessness that I have felt since I can remember.  And I learned to trust that wherever that restlessness leads me, it doesn’t lead me away from God.  For God is in the journey itself. God made me to long for my creator.  And the restlessness of my heart is the sign that I am still on the way there, being pulled and tugged Godward, by God’s own desire for me.  It is the pull and tug of God that has brought me here – by however circuitous a path – to be a member of St. Thomas’ Parish.  It is the lure of God that pulls us together as a church community further into the reaches of Lent, drawing us all towards the mystery of Easter.

I still think occasionally about my childhood fantasy of being taken away by aliens to a world where there were no unfulfilled longings.  I’m glad now, however, that God’s answer to that prayer was NO, because God had a better question to ask me, the question of who I am, and whose I am.  It is a question answered only by journeying with God, until at last we rest with God forever — which, of course, will be where we’ve always been, however long it takes some of us to realize it.

St. Thomas’ Parish at Dupont Circle has just announced the start of its Capital Campaign, as reported by the TheInTowner newspaper, to build a new worship space on the site of the previous neo-Gothic structure that burned forty years ago. A gala dinner on March 6, attended by more than half of the membership of the parish, celebrated the beginning of this venture.

Already $400,000 has been contributed by parish members in the first two weeks of the campaign.

The Episcopal Cafe noted the post in David Alpert’s GreaterGreaterWashington blog, which said: ”

After the fire, St. Thomas’s attendance declined by half. But the remaining members kept the congregation alive, and especially with their openness to gays and lesbians, grew substantially in the 1990s. In 2005, the growing congregation began exploring the possibility of rebuilding the church.

In 2008, they selected parishioner and Swiss-educated architect Matthew Jarvis. Jarvis studied under Swiss architect Peter Zumthor before moving here and working for David Jameson Architects, where he worked on many glassy and rectangular buildings.

Jarvis cites the Dutch Glaspaleis as inspiration for this project, which he says “has long outlived its then young author, 36-year old Architect Frits Peutz.”

Representatives of the congregation made their first presentation to the Dupont Circle ANC this past week, prompting spirited comments in the GreaterGreaterWashington blog post that immediately followed.

Like many musicians, I am not a fan of public speaking – it makes me incredibly nervous, so please be merciful as I speak.

I’d like to speak for a moment about what being here at St. Thomas means to me in my own faith journey.  That thing more than anything else is the gift of being ordinary.

Like lots of people who grow up gay, I felt different than others from an early age.  But I suspect that, even if I had been heterosexual, I would have still been a bit of an outsider.  I was a shy, chubby nerd, and I’m sure the sight of me gamely hauling my gigantic double bass around my high school was more than enough to assure me oddball status.

The powerful desire to fit in, to belong, to have a community, a home, has haunted me in various forms for much of my life.  Many people deal with these feelings by trying to conform to what they think will make others like them.  Some others cope with these feelings by declaring themselves special, embracing their outsider status and redefining the norm as “boring.”  I have tried both of these methods at various times in my life.  In fact, I think that almost all of us have used these two methods on occasion as we navigate our way through life.

However, I think the truth about each of us is far more complex than either of these two answers.  We are each special and unique, and our faith encourages us to remember that God created each of us and loves us just as we are.  But we also have to come to terms with our own ordinariness.  We need to see that our problems are generally no greater than anyone else’s problems, and that our gifts, careers, goals and relationships are fundamentally no better that anyone else’s.  It is this ordinariness which is the thing I most love about St. Thomas.  We have services which, yes, are always special and wonderful.  And of course we all know in our hearts that the St. Thomas choir is the best, that our preaching is the most inspiring, that our liturgy is the most inclusive.  But I think that the truth is that a lot of our life here is actually not extraordinary. Our preachers do the very best they can, our musicians play and sing with all the talent they can muster, our various committees work hard, but can we really say that the same thing doesn’t happen at other churches all over the city, the nation, the world?  We like to believe that we are special people for having given our time, our money, our attention to this place, and in a way we are.  But others all over the world do the same for their churches, their communities, their families.

And it is this sense of ordinariness, of comfortable averageness, that I love about St. Thomas.  And as with many who come through these doors, I have struggled to find a place in my life where I can be ordinary and average.  I love being able to know that I can stare at the same stain on the ceiling every time that I come here, and that the same person will ask me the same questions about how my week went every Sunday after the service.  The things that I love about St. Thomas, and yes even the things I don’t love about it, will hopefully be here for me each week.

This is why I feel that, while I have attended and even belonged to other churches and other congregations in my life, St. Thomas is the first true church home that I have ever really had.  The ordinary acceptance of me as a person that St. Thomas offers gives me the space I need to grow in my faith and life.

The irony of all this is that I know that it is the struggle and extraordinary efforts of many people over many years that has obtained for me the gift of St. Thomas’ ordinariness.  The “radical” half of the phrase “radical hospitality” that is so much a part of what happens here acknowledges that truly giving a home and a safe space to everyone will come at a cost, and one of the most important parts of St. Thomas is the presence of people who have been willing to pay that cost.  But even so, it’s good to remember that all that striving and sacrifice is only a means to an end – the end of being able to, in ways both unusual and common, draw each of us and our community closer to God.

The most amazing experience of the ordinary that St.Thomas has given me has been the chance to have an ordinary marriage.  My husband Silvio and I were married by Nancy Lee last Fall, and one of the greatest gifts I got from that experience was our marriage counseling sessions with her.  After many of them I often reflected on the fact that the questions that she asked of us and the conversations that we had were almost certainly the same questions and conversations that she had with other couples that she had married, gay or straight.  And why not?  Our marriage is not extraordinary.  We face the same questions and struggles that most couples do.  But in a world where some feel that our marriage is literally capable of bringing down Western civilization, it is a source of enormous grace and spiritual strength to have our love and commitment be so matter-of-fact to everyone here at St. Thomas.

Some of us attended the opening dinner for our new capital campaign last night in this very room.  If you didn’t, you may in some other way be connected to this campaign or to the broader conversation about our future here at St. Thomas. Capital campaigns can tend to be laden with references to our specialness and importance, and indeed, who wants to give lots of money for something ordinary?  If we do build a new church building here at St. Thomas it will indeed be a truly special thing in many ways.  But my hope for all of us is that we’ll seek to humbly remember the simple and the ordinary as we press forward with the extraordinary things that we hope to accomplish here.  Lent is a time that God gives us to remember how unimportant lots of the things we concern ourselves with in this life really are.  We fast and smear ourselves with ashes to remember, among other things, what our bodies are really made of and how weak they are.  We pray in order to remember that God hears everyone equally regardless of social status.  And we give alms to remember that we have what we have only by grace. In fact, as Jesus says today in the Gospel reading, if we presume that those who suffer more and have less than we do somehow deserve what they get, we are misunderstanding the core of the Gospel itself.  The ordinary rhythms of life and liturgy here at St. Thomas are as much a path to God as are the holidays, concerts, and building campaigns, and having a chance to listen to those rhythms is something I am thankful for everyday.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYvtjr0C-yM

St. Thomas’ Parish — a dynamic Episcopal Church in Dupont Circle, Washington, DC --  is about to launch a Capital Campaign to raise the additional funds needed for a new worship space to replace the building that burned down, a victim of arson, in 1970.

SOMETHING NEW is in the air, in the works, on the drawing board.

SOMETHING OLD continues — the long tradition of St. Thomas’ Parish of radical hospitality and commitment to human rights that stretches back to the time when Franklin Roosevelt was on our vestry, and Eleanor Roosevelt worshiped here, and Lyndon Johnson visited during the height of the Civil Rights movement.  It is the tradition that has continued in the regular presence of Bishop Gene Robinson in our community life, and in St. Thomas’ leadership in developing rites for blessing same-sex unions and hosting and celebrating these services as a parish.

Here’s what we are on the brink of doing.  There is much more to come.  Start here.  And then Grow with Us.

I believe that quality health care is a human right not a privilege for only the fortunate.  “We the people” need to stand up not just for ourselves but for those who do not have the same health care benefits we do.  Besides, without reform there will come a time when most of us will not have available the health care we need.

The major proposals for health-care reform ensure that all people have access to affordable care, either through an employer-based plan or through subsidies to buy insurance in an exchange marketplace.

To say as you have done that “there is no need for health care reform” is to turn a blind eye to those less fortunate than ourselves.  “We the people” ARE the government of the United States of America, and we all should be proud to live in a nation which chooses to care not just for the majority in power, but for all of those who live in our land. 

Democracy should not be administered according to the vagaries of the marketplace; for we are only as strong as the least fortunate among us.  This means that I cannot act just for the benefit of myself; “we the people” have an obligation that comes with our freedom to share our bounty for the sake of the common good.  Anything less is an insult to our shared human dignity, and should be beneath what is acceptable to any proud American, however fortunate or humble.

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