The Disciples Eat Wheat on the Sabbath (painting by James Tissot)

Mark 2:23-28: One Sabbath he was going through the cornfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, ‘Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?’ And he said to them, ‘Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions.’ Then he said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath.”

Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty made news recently by saying that gay marriage devalues traditional marriage. This is, of course, far from a new argument against legalizing same-sex marriage, but it has always struck me as a curious one. Proponents of this argument can never say clearly and coherently how exactly people in opposite-sex marriages are harmed by same-sex marriage – only that marriage itself is somehow devalued, tainted, or offended. And let’s face it: marriage doesn’t care what happens to it. Marriage is not a person or a being; it is an institution. Institutions don’t get their hearts broken. They don’t sing with joy. They are not treated humanely or violently. They don’t protest for their rights. They are, simply, social practices writ large.

Parable of the Leaven (etching by Jan Luyken, photo by Phillip Medhurst)

This sermon was preached at the High Plains Church, Unitarian Universalist, on Colorado Springs Pride Day, 2011. The sermon has been modified somewhat to fit the current context.

Luke 13:20-21: And again he said, “To what should I compare the Kingdom of God? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”

In 2009, I went to theannual conference for my Unitarian Universalist district, where singer and activist Holly Near gave the keynote speech, which was really more of a keynote sing with brief stories between the songs. We all sang along and had a marvelous time. When Holly got to “Singing for Our Lives,” which we often sing during pride services, she introduced it with an explanation for a recent change of words in one of the verses.

Robert Kessler (photo by Janet Lincoln)

Three generations of us sat at the Café Figaro on Bleecker Street in New York City. My grandfather sat there with his son. My father sat there with me. I sat there with friends, boyfriends, girlfriends. All of us drank cappuccinos and ate pastries and fixed the world, in our conversations at least.

This Father’s Day I remember those coffee drinks and pastries but mostly I remember those conversations. And this Father’s Day I want to honor both my father and his father for making me the left-leaning progressive I am today.

Jesus teaching ("Sermon on the Mount" by Carl Bloch)

And he said to them: once there was a country, an Evangelical social justice organization, and a Protestant denomination. The country considered passing a law allowing people to be put to death or imprisoned because they loved people of the same sex. The social justice organization refused to run an advertisement supporting full inclusion in churches for same-sex loving people. The denomination, after struggling with the issue, changed its laws so that same-sex loving people could be clergy members if they were of good morality and character, and loved G-d and neighbor. Now, I ask you: which of these three was enacting the Kingdom of G-d?

And one disciple said, the country that was eager to follow to the letter Leviticus 20:13, indicating their utter commitment to G-d’s Law. And he said, the Kingdom is a realm of life, not death; of love, not hatred; of binding up the broken, not breaking the despised. The country was not enacting the Kingdom of G-d. And the disciples muttered among themselves and fell silent.

Mother's Day Cake (photo by Xurble/Gareth Simpson)

When I was younger I feared becoming my mother. I saw her foibles without really seeing either her strengths or graces, and from time to time, when I caught sight of those foibles in myself, I thought, “Oh darn. I am becoming my mother.” (Well, I thought something stronger than that. But this is a public blog.)

Then, this morning, I caught myself talking to our cats as I got out of the shower. A little context may be helpful here: my mother has lived alone for most of the years since I went to college, which is longer ago than I care to admit. And I know she has talked to her cats all that time since she did it when I lived at home and she still does it now. And while I have a partner, my partner has been in Africa for more than four months and so for all intents and purposes I live alone right now – for another week anyway, till she comes home. So I watched myself have a conversation with the cats and I thought: I am becoming my mother. But without the expletive. And with a sense of gratefulness. So I thought it was time, in honor of Mother’s Day tomorrow, to give thanks for some of the ways that I am becoming my mother.

I’ll get right to the point: in the wake of Osama Bin Laden’s death, the US desperately needs a national day of mourning, a solemn affair in which we acknowledge our need for broken-heartedness, humility, and compassion in the wake of almost ten years of human anguish.

This is going to be a controversial post. Read on at your own discretion.

There are marvelous progressive analyses of where we stand today at commondreams.org, and Rabbi Lerner and Peter Gabel have written a superb account for the online Tikkun magazine (separate from the daily blog). Much of what might be said from a progressive and indeed a spiritual progressive perspective has already been said. But I have not seen a call for a national day of mourning. Here’s why I think we need one:

"Happiness" (photo by Sabrina from Baronissi, Salermo, Italy)

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything, mostly due to life difficulties and a sense that Tikkun was not really the venue for the things I felt called to write. I’m sorry about that. I’ve missed all of you.

In any case, I certainly can’t let Easter go by without posting something. So here is a liturgical reading for the day that I just wrote; think of it as a responsive reading:

Some Other Resurrections

Despair is sapping our spirits, damaging our souls, hurting our hearts.
We need to be resurrected into hope, faith, and trust.
Today, may we be resurrected.
Violence is shortening our lives and robbing us of our joy.
We need to be resurrected into peace and its many blessings.
Today, may we be resurrected.
Selfishness is tearing our social fabric, hiding us from one another, turning us inward.
We need to be resurrected into generosity, compassion, and open-heartedness.
Today, may we be resurrected.
Fear is pitting us against each other, stripping our delight, poisoning our relationships.
We need to be resurrected into courage and connection.
Today, may we be resurrected.
Injustice is devaluing and dehumanizing us all, punishing some terribly, frightening others deeply.
We need to be resurrected into justice and healing.
Today, may we be resurrected.
Hatred is breeding despair, violence, selfishness, fear, and injustice among us and among our children.
We need to be resurrected into love.
Today, may we be resurrected.
Amen.

Peace, grace, shalom, tikkun olam, Amanda

Westboro Baptist Church protest (photo by JCWilmore)

Given the events happening around the world and in our own country, this may seem like a strange time to pause and ask questions about what kind of religion would heal the world now. To me, it is a perfect time. Our religious and spiritual commitments are undoubtedly influencing how we respond to the news each night; we could do worse than make that point explicitly.

Two weeks ago I proposed that we desperately need religions of grace and compassion right now. This week I would like to add another criterion for world-healing religion. This is extremely hard to live out but I think it is worth our consideration, and particularly worth some conversation given the state of our own society right now.

Church of the Pilgrims, Washington DC (photo by Drama Queen)

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says that homosexuality is “against the human spirit” even as several Iranian men are hanged for “sexual offenses.” A gay activist is murdered in Uganda and Christian preachers disrupt his funeral so viciously that the townspeople won’t bury his body. A Utah legislator introduces a state bill that would require all publicly funded programs, laws, and regulations to exclude families headed by same-sex couples; his reasoning is based overwhelmingly on his religious values. On a different but not entirely unrelated topic, Roman Catholic bishops strip hospitals of their Roman Catholic affiliations because the hospitals are willing to perform abortions to save the mothers’ lives. Less related but still painful to me, a Huffington Post columnist points out that many conservative Christians see Obama’s health care plan as the work of the devil.

How does one even begin to respond to the above list? Religion is not supposed to be death-dealing; it is supposed to be life-giving. If the only way it can be experienced as life-giving by some people is to deal death to others, whether social death or physical death, something is very wrong with that religion. The blame cannot lie entirely with sacred scriptures; every major world religious tradition, after all, has a version of the golden rule. No, this must be human frailty at work, painfully stripping people of their life chances and even their lives.

Dr. King Portrait (by Betsy G. Reyneau)

Somehow the timing of Dr. King’s birthday falling so close to the Tucson shootings haunts me. All tragedy happens close to some holiday or other, but this one seems made to order. On King’s birthday I happened to be meeting with one of the ministers who is guiding me along my ministerial training path and she opened our time together with King’s quote about the need to be maladjusted to those elements of our social order that harm people or interfere with human flourishing.

King said that we should be maladjusted to segregation, discrimination, militarism, and physical violence. (Elsewhere he added religious bigotry and the gap between rich and poor.) Certainly, all of these still exist to disheartening degrees in our society and around the world, and we should still be maladjusted to them in thought and action. But concerted maladjustment today should probably also include the following:

Antiwar poster (photo by Baltine)

The first time I saw my father after my AIDS civil disobedience arrest (during my senior year in college), he approved of my actions and then said, with a mixture of sadness and bemusement, “It’s a shame you won’t be an idealist after you’ve been an adult for awhile.” I recall bursting into tears and protesting that I would be an idealist my whole life.

Well, Dad was both right and wrong, bless him. Twenty-something years later I am still an idealist, but now I am a chastened idealist, and I think you should be too. Or at least that you should think about the idea, since it has elements to commend it.

UU Flaming Chalice (author unknown)

It’s common around the turning of the year to look forward, to make resolutions of change, to wonder what new experiences might await us. Today, I would like to do something different: in honor of the year just passed, I would like to list the five most important lessons I learned this year as a spiritual progressive. I’m culling these lessons from three particular sources: my seminary experiences to date (since starting in August), my experiences writing for Tikkun (which began late spring), and my long, slow, and incomplete recovery from a detached retina in late August, which has cost me a fair amount of vision in my right eye. I realize these experiences are individual and personal, but my sense is that the insights that have come from them are not particularly unique. Indeed, I would normally say that these lessons are simply clichés, but for me they have been hard won and so are precious. In no particular order:

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night” (Luke 2:8)The shepherds make for a nice presence, don’t they, both in Luke’s nativity and more recently in countless nativity pageants the world over. In Luke’s version of the nativity story, the shepherds are the first to receive the good news of Jesus’ birth.

The shepherds matter to my understanding of Jesus – of Yeshua ben Miriam – because of where they stood in the social hierarchy of their day. So who were the shepherds? Peasants at best, and therefore marginal figures. There is some possibility they even belonged to the outcast class, according to writings from after Luke’s time. They were not people with power or status. Who would they be in our time? Poor kids who are lucky to get fast food jobs, maybe. If they really were outcasts, perhaps undocumented immigrants. We have plenty of shepherds today. And we know who they are.

What would constitute “good tidings of great joy” (luke 2:10) for the shepherds of Judea, circa 4 BCE? Maybe the announcement of a particular birth: the birth of a man who would, as an adult, go into the synagogue and say that God had anointed him to bring good news to the poor. And especially in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus had a lot of good news for the poor. He said they were blessed. He said the Kingdom of God was theirs. He ate with them and healed them and invited them to walk with him along the way. What an incredible experience that would have been, to be a marginal figure in society and suddenly to find oneself in relationship with a God-intoxicated prophet and teacher.

DADT Defense Dept. Report

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” has been repealed by the Senate, and now only awaits the President’s signature. A great day for social justice, right?

It is. But my joy is profoundly mitigated by the Senate’s failure to pass the Dream Act, a bill that would have granted legal status to undocumented immigrant students and allowed them to go through a process by which they could have become U.S. citizens. What a wonderful pro-lives stance that would have been. And with the incoming Congress, we can’t reasonably expect to see the bill passed anytime soon.

Seattle LGBT youth chorus Diverse Harmony (photo by benjiboi)

It had to happen sooner or later: critiques of the “It Gets Better” campaign. But not from antigay religious conservatives; oh no, that would be too easy.

Instead, the critique appears to be coming from the left, and it comes down mostly to the following: the campaign is too assimilationist; it only really supports white middle-class young gay men and its vision for them is that they will turn into Dan Savage, though perhaps with fewer insights about how to write a sex column. Left out of the equation are women, queers of color, transyouth, and poor LGBTQ young people, according to these critiques (well-represented by Jasbir Puar’s piece, which ends by claiming that the campaign might be making things worse for queer youth who don’t fit the wealthy white male profile).

Then there’s Danah Boyd’s research on how teens in general don’t conceptualize bullying the way adults do, with the consequence that well-intended adult attempts to address teen bullying are falling on largely deaf teen ears. This piece doesn’t address sexuality at all, but winds up presenting bullying as a simple (and complex) matter of teen social dynamics. One could read the article and come away thinking this issue really is not about social injustice at all.

Rochester, MN UU church sign (photo by Jonathunder)

It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to blog, something I have been learning about over these past few months. You have to be pretty sure of yourself. But sometimes, the ethically and spiritually right thing to do is apologize. And I owe you my readers an apology. (We’ll get to the question later. It is on a different topic.)

A few days ago, I posted on DADT for the first time ever. I did so because I felt that a particular argument needed to be made and offered to the public, and not having seen anyone else make it (maybe I just haven’t been reading broadly enough), I decided it must be mine to deliver. But I did so with trepidation, and my trepidation proved well-founded.

US Army: Border Police in Paktiya (photo by Staff Sgt. Andrew Smith)

In times of war, sacrifice is, unfortunately, required. The US is at war now, and we live in a profoundly dangerous world. Thus, while we may wish it were not so, when it comes to DADT we must put personal agendas aside and focus on the greater good.

That’s right, DADT supporters, I’m talking to you.

LGBT ally Kristen Chenoweth (photo by chris.ptacek)

When I was a kid, “Getting to Know You” was one of my favorite songs from the musical, “The King and I.” Now it’s a strategy for tolerance and healing.

Both academic research and personal experience have suggested for years that heterosexual people who know LGBT people are more likely to be comfortable with us, and even if they have religious inclinations toward homophobia, those inclinations may be at least somewhat tempered. Now there’s a new book out by sociologist Robert Putnam, American Grace, which finds the same thing to be true with people of different religions (to a moderate extent).

Bishop Gene Robinson (photo by janinsanfran)

Today the New York Times reported on two stories that might seem only tangentially related: the new culture wars around schools’ attempts to put anti-bullying curricula into place, and the announced 2013 (early) retirement of Episcopal Bishop V. Gene Robinson, the country’s first openly gay bishop. Yes, they are both about homosexuality, but what else do they have in common?

Casualties. The story on Bishop Robinson makes it clear that the uproar around his episcopacy has been hard on his personal health as well as on his otherwise healthy and happy diocese. And while schools debate about what can and can’t be said about homosexuality, young LGBT people are still at risk of self-harm and suicide because of precisely the kinds of attitudes held by those opposing the curricula.

Gay-friendly church (photo by Drama Queen)

Last October, retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong wrote a manifesto declaring his unwillingness to keep publicly debating the issue of LGBT inclusion with conservatives who oppose inclusion on religious grounds. The manifesto is strong, clear, and bold. LGBT people of faith should be grateful to have (to have had?) such a powerful ally on our side.

But I’m not writing to Bishop Spong. I am writing to the rest of us, for whom there is no rest. We who continue to labor in the field for a harvest of LGBT religious inclusion need our own manifesto, especially those of us who are ourselves LGBT. We need some stirring words as we confront opportunities to clarify our position, to witness to our basic humanity, and to demonstrate empirically that faith informs our life as strongly as it informs the lives of those who witness against us. Here are a few words – perhaps not stirring, but intended as a small start, one that can be built upon by many others: