St. Patrick's Day -- and it's cold (at least by Virginia standards: it's in the 30s). TS Eliot might have had other criteria in mind, but when it comes to weather, March is the cruelest month. March can tease us with warmth (like the past few days), and then it breaks our hearts.

At least, in Virginia, there are some warm days in March. I remember, while in seminary in Chicago, March was relentlessly, depressingly cold. I remember, in particular, St. Patrick's Day of 1979. A couple other classmates and I decided we had to go down to the Loop, since it was our last year in Chicago, to see the St. Patrick's Day parade. The cold, the fabled wind, I'm not sure I've ever felt so cold. (Well, there was one overcast day in Fenway Park. But that's another story.)

In those years, St. Patrick's Day was a big deal in Chicago. The political leaders even dyed the Chicago river green! Of course, those were the dying days (sorry about the pun) of the Richard J. Daley political machine. While I lived in Chicago, Mayor Daley died, and he was replaced by a semi-competent political hack named Michael Bilandic. Bilandic's chief attribute was that he, too, was Irish. He only lasted two years, though. One winter the public works department did a bad job clearing away snow and the public blamed Bilandic. He was defeated in the next election by an upstart named Jane Byrne.

Of course, the snow was never plowed in our neighborhood of Hyde Park. Our Alderman was an Independent. (Trivia fact: he was Ralph Metcalf, former Olympic sprinter.) The two ruts in the streets during the months of snow season were our punishment for not electing a machine candidate.

There was usually old, crusty, dirty snow on the ground in early March. The cold lasted. Even when baseball season began, the weather was pretty much the same. I spent numerous April evenings in the (old) Comiskey Park watching terrible White Sox teams, wearing a down coat from Ambercombie and Fitch (before that store went bankrupt and then became cool) bundled in a blanket and clutching a thermos of coffee. I lived on the south side, so my home team was the Sox. I would only go up to Wrigley Field when the Phillies were in town. The Phillies had great teams in those years and the Cubbies were hapless, so I nearly always left the ballpark happy.

Chicago really doesn't have the season of spring. It stops being the coldest place on earth, and then it gets hottest place on earth. I much prefer living in the Commonwealth!

Anyway...

Since it was so cold this morning, I didn't get out on my bike. After prayer over the daily lectionary, I made a start in reading the draft ELCA Social Statement on Sexuality. It's a challenging piece of serious theological and ethical reflection. I highly commend it to you because the process of responding, revising and ratifying this Social Statement will guide the ELCA's teachings in the future. (It's available for download on www.elca.org) I'll be interested to hear how you do with it. So far, I realize that I need to re-read Luther's treatise "The Freedom of a Christian," because that provides important foundation for the draft statement. Also, the authors state that they are not basing their work on natural law, and I need to know more about what that means. The online Journal of Lutheran Ethics had an "issue" devoted to natural law a few months back, and it would be helpful to re-read those essays. The task force that developed the report is soliciting responses through November 1. It would be good to devote some congregational study time on the statement in the fall, after I return from sabbatical.