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.

Credit: Creative Commons/g_kovacs

It is a cold spring here in Chicago, all rain and anticipation, and, like everyone in the city, I am still pretending that eventually things will change, that if we hope hard enough, and have enough faith, the world will warm up and bloom.

Our good intentions haven’t brought it yet.

But, I’ve lived here for sixteen years of cold springs. And, as you might notice from that history, I am happy here among my neighbors waiting for flowers — partly because I adore people of good intentions who believe fervently that they are capable of making the world a better place.

I love the Shakers, whom my father revered. I think of them stooped in their fields, cultivating seeds, and thinking always of how better to put their hands to work and hearts to god. I love the Unitarians I share the sanctuary with on Sunday mornings, the way they pledge to heal the world. I love the earnest, deliberate meditating of people all over the planet who send compassion into the wind to make sure that it exists, and that, hopefully, it lands somewhere and takes root.

And, among the pantheon of the earnest that has taken up residence in my heart, I love the scientists who have built an ark for frogs in the Panamanian rainforest.

Simone Weil Fresco

The great French mystic scholar, Simone Weil, writes: “The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real. It is the same with the act of love. To know that this man who is hungry and thirsty really exists as much as I do – that is enough, the rest follows of itself. The authentic and pure values, truth, beauty, and goodness, in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object. Teaching should have no aim but to prepare, by training the attention, for the possibility of such an act” (Gravity and Grace, 173).

I am writing this post on my return journey home from Berkeley (home to Tikkun) where I have been conferring with emerging Unitarian Universalist scholars. Hosted by Starr King School for the Ministry in collaboration with Harvard Divinity School and my own seminary, Meadville Lombard, with generous funding from the UUA, the doctoral students invited to this conference work in some of the most prestigious programs and departments in the country.

Starhawk was generous with her time while she was here in Madison a month ago. She granted me two interviews, the first about Palestine and the second — which I will begin to post today now that I’m back from my vacation — about permaculture. For those of you who don’t know her, Starhawk is the best-known Wiccan author alive today. She’s published eleven books, including The Spiral Dance, which introduced many of us to Wicca. From the beginning of her career, she’s been very involved as an activist, and since the 1990s she’s been most active in promoting permaculture.

Star came to permaculture as a natural outgrowth of her Paganism. After many years in the Goddess movement — where we declared that the Earth was a sacred, living organism that manifests Herself in the cycles of birth, growth, death, and regeneration that occur in all of nature, including our own human culture — Star discovered permaculture. She soon realized it was a practical application of her spiritual path.

Growing up I believed that you could get either love OR respect in life, but not both. This was my mother’s understanding of the way the world worked — one she taught me from day one — and maybe it was true for her or even for women of her generation. But over the years, I’ve discovered that without respect, love is a hollow sweetness, and that without love, respect can result in a distance that undoes its best intentions.

These insights came back to me Sunday at First Unitarian Society in Madison as I listened to our associate minister Karen Gustavson offer one of her best sermons ever. It was well-crafted, contained great stories and great intelligence, but I disagreed completely with what she had to say. The sermon was also about a topic that I care about with every cell in my body — about our need to love and care for the Earth. And so I feel compelled to present a different viewpoint.

We in the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) are considering changes in the language of our “Principles and Purposes,” the statements that guide our work together as an association of free, but interdependent congregations. Karen was responding on Sunday to the rewording of the seventh principle, a change that would substitute the word reverence for the word respect in the phrase “we covenant to honor and uphold … respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” She made an effective appeal for retaining the original language –respect — because she believes that to revere something implies a certain passivity — true for our fundamentalist brethren, but not for me and other people on the left hand of God — while respect indicates an active response. Obviously, this is not my experience.

What all Unitarian Universalists want in this rewrite of the seventh principle is language that reflects care for the Earth as a religious imperative, not an optional activity.

The idea “to be religious is to be a theist” as Christopher Hitchens stated in his debate with Lorenzo Albacete is a quite ethnocentric claim. It is true that in the West we have often associated a theistic God with religion, but this neglects Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Jainism and numerous religious traditions which have adopted a deistic, pantheistic, panentheistic or other understanding of God. And as I pointed out in my critique of Hitchens last week, Unitarian Universalism contains 19% of people who identify as atheist/agnostic.

In the over 140 comments I received from my post “Christopher Hitchens: The Orthodox Protestant Atheist” both on the Tikkun site and in the version crossposted on Alternet.org there was both surprise and disbelief that atheists could be religious leaders. I described how I am in seminary at Starr King School for the Minstry studying alongside atheists and agnostics who are in training to become religious leaders and ministers. This seemed to be an oxymoron as for some of the respondents all religion is evil and always associated with God. So I thought it would be helpful to include a few statements from atheist students in seminary studying to be religious leaders.

From a fellow atheist seminarian at Starr King:

First, I think there is a difference between being an atheist and being anti-religious. They are orthogonal. There is also a difference between being anti-religious and being opposed to the effects of particular religious traditions. These terms should not be conflated. Since when did not believing in God mean that you are opposed to other people believing in God and or practicing religion regardless of whether they believe? I am an atheist. Just to be clear, by that I mean I don’t believe that there is a god, a higher consciousness, or a spirit. I am also opposed to the effects of certain religious traditions. But I am not by any means anti-religious. I don’t deny the value that religion or religious practice, (whether actual belief in god and the afterlife, or simply liking the pretty candles at mass and multiple opportunities for community) brings to people including myself. Religion has a lot to offer and to deny that is to deny the complexity of the human condition.

Newspaper Vendor

My newspaper this morning gave me hope. And brothers and sisters, that doesn’t happen very often. On the front page, taking up about one third of the sheet, there was an article entitled “Trying to open the ‘inner eye.’” It was a piece that described the new Center for Conscious Living, an offshoot of the Church of Religious Science, which the pastor said is “reinventing the idea of church, with ‘stand you up music,’ meditation, singing, chanting and ‘an inclusive message of self-empowerment.’” Above this article, the top story was about our governor’s clean energy plan, in which 25 percent of the Wisconsin’s energy must come from wind, solar, biomass, or other renewable sources by 2025. My friend Jack Kisslinger, whose website is called Planet for Life, tells me that 25% might be a good number, but it has to be 25% of reduced overall energy consumption. So the governor’s goal is at least a step in the right direction. These days we’re at less than 5%!?! But the miracle is that some of Wisconsin’s business leaders are lining up behind the governor, including executives of Johnson Controls, an auto parts and building products manufacturer. All of this combined with the EPA’s stricter standards for smog-causing pollution made me ebullient.

I’ve been really angry at the Obama administration lately, so it was nice to agree with them for the first time in what seems like months. The last straw for me was Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech, coming right on the heels of his announcement about expanding the war in Afghanistan. Until then had I tried to see his incrementalism as “realism.” But Rabbi Michael Lerner‘s editorial in the latest Tikkun, “Afghanistan: Obama Capitulates to the War Makers,” says it all. I agree with Rabbi Lerner that Obama’s announcement represented “a decisive endorsement of the strategy of domination.” And then Obama’s Nobel Prize speech tried to justify his decision by saying that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes, that “Evil does exist in the world.” When Obama used that final phrase, I stopped listening to him. Christopher Hedges‘ article in the same Tikkun, “Celebrity Culture and the Obama Brand,” describes the shift in my opinion at that point: “President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another.” I stopped believing in Brand Obama.

It’s hard to be optimistic given the world situation these days. But I believe that the three stories that filled me with hope today are related in a way that may not be immediately apparent. Without more spiritual exploration, people in this country will have trouble opening their minds to the changes in store for us. And those changes are going to be very fast, whether for the better or for the worse. As I said in a post several months ago,

We’ve started a new program named “Quest” at First Unitarian Society (FUS). FUS created Quest in order to help members who want it to develop a deeper commitment to their spiritual journey. Some of the introductory writings about the program describe it as “a journey toward wholeness, holiness, and peace.” It’s a very exciting two-year “pilgrimage,” and I’m blessed to be a part of it as a mentor to two women who are participants.

Today one of my partners contacted me. I’d just finished re-reading a chapter from Parker Palmer‘s A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward An Undivided Life about “Being Along Together,” a good metaphor for my role in this process. And yesterday I had finally bought two chairs for my meditation room, where I hope to meet with my partners –if that’s what they want. So synchonicities are lining up to indicate the “rightness” of this choice.

For several years now, I’ve been considering spiritual direction as a new option in my life, and being asked to become a Quest mentor helped strengthen this interest. Sometimes referred to as spiritual guidance or spiritual friendship, spiritual direction like mentoring takes place in a one-to-one relationship, in which a person who wants to become more attentive to their spiritual life meets regularly with a “spiritual director,” in order to awaken more fully to the presence of spirit and how it moves through their existence. I’m not using “God language” here, because not all UUs are comfortable with it. But what I realized while re-reading Parker Palmer is just how uncomfortable I am with the term “spiritual direction.”

Sunday we’re celebrating “Coming Out Day” at First Unitarian in Madison, and I’ve been asked to tell my coming out story. Compared to many, mine is pretty painless. It’s a story of ignorance, invisibility, and ultimately of the ability to pass. You see, I’m a bisexual woman in a committed heterosexual relationship.

I grew up in a small town in Upstate New York. It was definitely in the “provinces.” So perhaps it’s not so surprising that although I’d heard of homosexuality, I had no idea until I reached college that female homosexuals existed. I’m not sure I encountered the word “lesbian” until I was in my twenties.

In 1965 as a freshman at Smith, I started to hear rumors that the woman who lived across the dorm hall from me was “different.” Nobody stated directly how she was unlike the rest of us. But according to the whispers, she was recruiting other girls as well. By the time I returned from my junior year abroad, she seemed to have succeeded in enlisting at least one other girl, and it became apparent to me that they were lovers. None of this seemed to affect me very much. In those days, I was pretty sure that I was heterosexual.

It’s unclear to me if I ever would have discovered my sexual attraction for women if it hadn’t been for the women’s movement. Lots of the women I hung out with in the late 1960s and 1970s were out lesbians. They were strong, wonderful women. Eventually I had to acknowledge that I was attracted to more than one of them on more than a platonic level.

Teaching the “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” curriculum (and blogging about it) lit a fire under me. The title of the course refers to a story told in the book of Jeremiah. This week I finally recorded the song I wrote about this tale on YouTube. Now others can learn the tune and sing it in their “Cakes” classes.

If you don’t know the story, here’s a synopsis: Jeremiah rants and rails against the Queen of Heaven, telling the people that worshipping Her is a betrayal of YHWH. (This actually proves to be historically incorrect, since YHWH had a consort for most of the years until the Babylonian exile — even in the temple in Jerusalem. But Jeremiah doesn’t know his archaeology, since he’s living during these turbulent times.) He threatens the people that if they revere any God or Goddess other than YHWH, God will punish them. Here’s how Jeremiah expresses God’s anger at the people:

As I told you a few weeks back, the “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” curriculum empowers women in remarkable ways. During last night’s class I discovered that it sometimes empowers in different ways at the same time.

Our reading for the evening was a compelling story — the attempted sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham (Genesis 22). As told in the Bible, this tale contains no mention of Isaac’s mother Sarah. Instead YHVH tells Abraham to demonstrate his loyalty by making a ritual offering of his one-and-only child. So Abraham dutifully takes fire-making tools, a load of wood, a knife, and his son Isaac to a nearby mountaintop to be slain. Of course, at the last minute an angel stays Abraham’s hand and provides a ram instead. What our class focussed on was the conspicuous lack of information about Sarah in this story.

Sarah is not easily overlooked. More girls have been named for Sarah than for any other woman in the Bible. There are good reasons for this. Sarah was a Chaldean princess and, because royalty and ritual leadership were inextricably tied together in those days, a priestess as well. She’s the only woman whose age is given in the Bible. She was the matriarch of the Jewish people. And Abraham owed his flocks, herds, and status to her.

Before we started to create modern-day midrashim — reinterpreting and commenting on this Biblical tale — we looked at several theories that questioned how this story was told in the Bible. Dancer and liturgist Fanchon Shur deduces from her absence that Sarah was the “hand of God” that stopped the sacrifice. Carol Ochs in Behind the Sex of God concludes that

the sacrifice of Isaac marked the death of the matriarchal tradition personified by Sarah. The meaning of Abraham’s test becomes clear when viewed in the light of the conflict between patriarchy and matriarchy. The first allegiance in matrirarchy is to one’s offspring…In patriarchy, the first obligation is to an abstract moral principle…obedience to God.

Some days I really don’t want to read my newspaper. Today was one of them. It wasn’t the hydrogen peroxide bomb or Obama’s waffling on the Patriot Act. It wasn’t the Palestinians and the Israelis, who still aren’t negotiating. And it wasn’t the ongoing court battle over a new Wisconsin law granting some rights to domestic partners. All of those things bothered me. But what really got to me was the news about climate change or “global weirding”, as my brother-in-law calls it.

Today my paper regaled me with the fact that NASA scientists have found that Antarctic and Greenland glaciers are melting at a rate that’s much more rapid than previously thought (and the last time I read about polar ice, meterologists were already saying it was much faster than predicted, so they’re telling us now that it’s even worse). The glaciers in the Antarctic thinned by nearly 30 feet a year from 2003 to 2007, 50% faster than the preceding eight years. And in Greenland, glaciers are shrinking by nearly 3 feet a year, a lot faster than measurements until now had calculated. It’s bad. In fact, one Berkeley climate expert called this discovery “ominous and distressing.” In other words, climate changes will be worse and faster than we feared.

Glaciers Melting in Greeenland and Antarctica

When I read this I had visions of myself walking up and down State Street with a sign that read “The End is Near.” I guess I needed a little humor to offset my absolute terror. And as I write this post, I’m having difficulty holding onto my thoughts, because I almost instantly repress them, deny them, or distance them from myself with humor or distractions. Looking for very long at the facts of our global situation is much too scary for me.

Carlton Pearson

As a Unitarian Universalist (UU) who loves to go to Christian services in the black gospel tradition–for their emotional depth and warmth, even though I am pretty allergic to Christian theology–it was a delight to read this article about the largest UU congregation in the country teaming up with a black (universalist Christian) congregation.

First, who would believe that the largest UU congregation–in a religion that is so identified in people’s minds with its New England origins–would be in Tulsa, Oklahoma? Maybe they need it more and know they do, while New England itself is going increasingly post-religion altogether.

Second, just contemplate the courage of the Rev. Carlton Pearson. This man was a rising star in the evangelical world, charismatic, successful on the ground (he built the Tulsa church he founded to 0ver 6,000 members) and on TV, making a lot of money and garnering adulation. Then, watching the Rwandan genocide on TV, his life was changed.

His assumption was that the victims were bound for hell, persecuted yet unsaved. Feeling angry at God, and guilty that he himself wasn’t doing anything about it, he recalls, he fell into a sort of reproachful prayer: “God, I don’t know how you can sit on your throne there in heaven and let those poor people drop to the ground hungry, heartbroken, and lost, and just randomly suck them into hell.”

He heard God answer, “We’re not sucking those dear people into hell. Can’t you see they’re already there – in the hell you have created for them and continue to create for yourselves and others all over the planet? We redeemed and reconciled all of humanity at Calvary.”

Pearson had the courage to preach the gospel of God’s universal love for everyone. He was expelled from his church and lost his congregation, his TV spot, his income. Well, not his entire congregation. About 200 stayed with him, attending services he held in a sympathetic church. Now, thanks to the openmindedness of the young UU minister in Tulsa, Pearson and the 200 have joined the Universalists whom he used to despise.

Today we celebrated our annual water service at First Unitarian Society. Pouring water together that we had brought back to Madison from vacations in other spots, we celebrated our community gathering again after a summer spent apart.

Like rivers running to the sea,/We’re coming home… (UU hymn)

The worship service also commemorated water as the holy necessity it is in our lives: the sacred water that runs through our veins, the water we drink to maintain our lives, the water that brings the earth alive, the life-giving liquid flow that cycles through the clouds, the rain, the springs, the lakes, the streams, the rivers, finally streaming to the oceans, where it evaporates to become rain again. Without water, there is no life.

The ocean is the beginning of the earth./All life comes from the sea. (Wiccan chant by Starhawk)

This fall I’ll be teaching “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” again. Shirley Ranck wrote this groundbreaking curriculum about women in Western religion in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it was first published in 1986. The fact that it took the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) at least five years to put it out says a lot about this pioneering course.

The UUA is notoriously liberal, even progressive. But this class pushed the buttons of Unitarian Universalist’s still largely male hierarchy, and they delayed publication. Why? Maybe because it offered consciousness raising within a religious context. Maybe because it included some controversial research. Maybe because those patriarchs could see its long-term consequences: More women embracing the Goddesses in their lives.

It certainly had all of those effects. In fact, the consciousness of UU women — already empowered by political feminism — became raised even further by contact with spiritual feminism. And although the curriculum contained references to the controversial archeologist Marija Gimbutas, that didn’t stop UU women from pouring into Wicca, welcoming both its deities and its ritual. In fact, UU women made Wicca one of the fastest, if not the fastest-growing religion in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

With the help of the UU Women and Religion Committee, Ranck updated and re-issued “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” last year. It’s still a wonderful course. And it still empowers women in ways that political feminism can’t. Where else would a teacher request that women sketch themselves nude and then talk about how this experience helped them to understand their concerns with body image? Where else would women talk about how patriarchal mothering antagonizes mothers and daughters in a divide-and-conquer strategy that has supported male domination? And where else would women learn about the history of masculine Gods displacing Goddesses?

I don’t normally read Thomas Friedman’s op. ed. pieces. But this one — “Connecting Nature’s Dots” — drew my attention, probably because of the word “Nature” in the headline. Practicing Wicca attunes me to nature, since to me it’s sacred. I ground my spirit in its rhythms (as the title of Starhawk‘s recent book The Earth Path proclaims). We are creatures of Mother Earth. She sustains us. And being in touch with Her cycles gives me significant insights into my life.

Thomas Friedman’s recent eco-safari in Africa seems to have brought this home to him. Of course, as a journalist, he sees it all from the perspective of a newspaper. In fact, you could sum up his piece as “Extra, extra, read all about it in the animal and insect tracks on the earth.” But I found his insight significant, nonetheless. Friedman’s guide, Map Ives — the 54-year-old director of sustainability for Wilderness Safaris, which supports ecotourism in Botswana — could read the tracks of passing animals as well as detecting the weather from their marks. More importantly, Ives pointed out all the interconnections and “free services” that nature provides.

Plants clean the air; the papyrus and reeds filter the water. Palm trees are growing on a mound originally built by termites. “If you spend enough time in nature and allow yourself to slow down sufficiently to let your senses work,” Ives said, “then through exposure and practice, you will start to sense the meanings in the sand, the grasses, the bushes, the trees, the movement of the breezes, the thickness of the air, the sounds of the creatures and the habits of the animals with which you are sharing that space.”

Justice scales superimposed on this image of a Torah parchment symbolises the reliance of the Institute and the Court on social justice principles found in the Torah

The Canadian Beth Din Institute at the Metivta of Ottawa is the parent organisation of the Jewish Court for Social Justice. This all sounds very grand, and it is: the Metivta and all it purports to be is located on a sprawling campus of 400 square feet that stretches between my living room and kitchen.

I’ve had probably ten emails from several correspondents questioning many aspects of the Court. Two questions are being asked repeatedly.

1. What are you doing (and who do you think you are)?

2. Why are you doing it (there is an established order for such things!)?

I’ll address “why” here and speak of “what” below.

I began planning the Jewish Court for Social Justice almost seven years ago. There has been ample time for a credible organisation to evolve before this, an organisation that speaks to Canadian social justice issues from a Jewish faith perspective, and nothing has happened in all that time.

I perform weddings as a lay minister at First Unitarian Society in Madison. Frank Lloyd Wright built our original church, so many non-members want to get married there — too many for our professional ministers to handle. As a result, I often have the opportunity to perform interfaith weddings where I put my Unitarian Universalist (UU) principles to work.

UU’s believe in the “inherent worth and dignity of all people,” “acceptance of one another,” and “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” Instead of a creed or dogma, what holds us together is a set of seven principles, three of which I just listed for you. What this means in practice is that although I’m a pagan, I accept others’ belief systems as appropriate for them, respecting their inherent dignity and their search for truth and meaning. When I perform a wedding, I respectfully work with the couple who comes to me to create a ceremony that’s right for them.

Before the Hadron Collider went online a few months ago, some scientists expressed concern that it might cause the implosion of the entire solar system, destroying Earth — the only planet we know that harbors life. Scientists at a recent conference on Monterey Bay in California debated whether there should be limits on robotics and computer systems before humans lose control of them. And in the last few years, several biology professors have objected to the release of exotic species as biocontrols for native pests, noting how a number have proliferated and are now killing the plants they were meant to protect.

You could make a case that all of these problems reflect a “fatal flaw” in humanity’s ability to anticipate the future consequences of its actions. That’s exactly what Van Rensselaer Potter, a retired University of Wisconsin biochemist, suggested in an article he wrote in the early 1990s. According to Potter, humankind has lost — or never acquired — the ability to foresee the effects of our actions.

I disagree with Potter. I don’t think it’s a lack of insight, but hubris when it comes to our long-term decision-making. The directors of the Hadron Collider knew very well that there was a small possibility that throwing the switch might mean switching off all of life. And yet they turned on their particle accelerator. The same type of decision was made when the first atomic bomb was detonated. Some of the Manhattan Project scientists feared that the fission reaction created would burn off Earth’s entire atmosphere, and yet they went ahead with their experiment.