Many of my sermons can be found in written or mp3 form on the website of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto.
Sermons
Saturday, December 24, 2011: Christmas Eve homily
Sunday, June 19, 2011: “Getting Unstuck”
Friday, December 24, 2010: Christmas Eve homily
Sunday, July 11, 2010: on judgment and mercy
Other writings
“There is a Balm in Gilead”
new verses written on the occasion of Bass Lake weekend, September 2010
“Beyond Either/Or”
essay on bisexuality and Unitarian Universalism
Sermons
Christmas Eve homily
given at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto
December 24, 2011
“Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart . . . “
Mary has had a lot to think about for many months now, ever since an angel, a messenger from her God, came to her to tell her that she was going to have a baby, and that it was no ordinary baby, but holy, born of God’s Holy Spirit. Ever since then, surely, she has been pondering, what is it that is being brought to birth by me?
In some ways, the story is hard for us to relate to. It’s so full of miracles, supernatural occurrences, predictions that come true as if by magic. One thousand and eight hundred years after Matthew and Luke told the story of Jesus’s life, Thomas Jefferson would retell it without any of that. In Jefferson’s Bible, Jesus was born, he taught, and he died. No miracles, no singing angels. Just a human baby and the miracle that is every birth. That, apparently, was meaningful enough to Jefferson.
And we don’t have to believe in the moving star or the angels or the messenger from God to connect our own lives to this story: the story which, at its core, is as common as the ground we walk on. A woman is expecting a child. He is born. She ponders what he will become. It happens all over the world every day.
We don’t have to have given birth, or be parents, or ever intend to become parents, to recognize ourselves in this story. We are all, every one of us, of whatever age and situation in life, like Mary in one key respect: Something waits to be born through us: something beyond us, beyond our understanding, beautiful, complete unto itself and yet dependent on us. It may be a dream, a friendship, a work of art, an idea, an act of love, a new way of being, a new world: something larger than ourselves and yet needing us in order to come to life. Whether it will be born depends on whether we give ourselves over to its birth.
The dancer and choreographer Martha Graham said, “There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.”
What is waiting to be born through you?
Graham didn’t have any children. But she knew all about the quickening of new life within—the stirring of images, actions, ideas—and patiently waited and worked, labored, to bring them into the world for all to see.
What is it that could come into the world, could ripen and be borne, like a peach swelling on a branch, if only you, the tree, will dig your roots deep to bring up water, open yourself to the light, allow yourself to bud, blossom, and bring it forth?
Today is the last day of Advent. The time of waiting, the days when something is coming, are almost complete.
Something is always waiting to be born. Approaching. Needing only for someone to bring it to its full form and welcome it into the world.
And so this is a meditation for Christmas: the question, what is it that can enter the world through you? However ordinary you may think you are, just a person going along minding your daily business the way Mary was, there is something that can take shape only if you allow it. You can block it—you can resist it—you can refuse to bloom and let the bud wither before it comes to fruition. Or you can try too hard to make it happen, when it has to grow in its own time, like a baby. Mary, like a Taoist sage, neither strives nor resists. She knows something is happening that is bigger than her and yet that must come through her.
Don’t most pregnant women wonder how this amazing thing can be happening? How is a new life, a whole human being, being put together within their bodies? None of us knows how to construct a human being. Something beyond our comprehension makes it happen.
Don’t most parents look into their child’s face and wonder what she is thinking, what kind of person he will grow to be, what her fate will be, whether he will be happy and loving and loved?
Aren’t so many of our most important plans and accomplishments realized by a mix of our efforts and our getting out of the way and letting that amazing power move through us?
The artist makes himself a channel for inspiration. He doesn’t know where it comes from. He practices, he hones his skills, yes, he works hard like a woman in labor, and also, when an idea comes from who knows where in the middle of the night, he picks up his pen or brush and follows it.
The athlete works and practices, gets up early, eats well, drills with discipline, but all in the interest of letting the inexplicable, unpredictable power use her body. She knows that feeling of being in the zone, when she does amazing things on the field or the court without even knowing how she does them.
Even the activist, so intent on making a difference, is a channel through which the longings of the world for peace and justice flow. Let them come through and the world will change, through us and only partly because of us.
Something is waiting to be born through you, and only through you. Part of your role is to pay attention and know what it is. And part of your role is to move aside enough to let it be born. Imagine a pregnant woman deciding to take matters into her own hands and make bones, a brain, a heart. She couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t know how. Life knows how to make new life, and so she eats well, gets enough rest, tries not to take too many long journeys by donkey, and awaits the birth of this miraculous, unknown child. The child, as we reminded parents at their children’s dedications earlier this week, of life itself.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that even what we call God may be something that is waiting to be born through us: “the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity, the one who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are.” Each person’s life, he wrote, can be lived “as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy.”
Something is ready to come into being through you. Something beautiful, unique, and holy can come to birth through you, and you alone. Like Mary, may we each ponder what it might be. May we be humble enough, simple enough to let ourselves be the sacred channel through which something new and precious travels from dark nonbeing into the light of day.
Like the morning stars, let us together praise the holy birth, give thanks, and treasure it in our hearts.
© 2011 Amy Zucker Morgenstern
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“Getting Unstuck”
given at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, CA
June 19, 2011
Happy Father’s Day! What is it we are celebrating when we celebrate fatherhood? I ask this question because it strikes me that the answer is very different now than it would have been in 1911, or for that matter, 50 years ago, in 1961. There have always been fathers, and the expectations of what it means to be a father is strongly passed down from father to son, and yet fatherhood has changed, for individual men and their families, and for society as a whole. This is good to remember, because according to some points of view, namely a lot of women and mothers I know, there is nothing more resistant to change than an American father. Clearly, it’s not true!
At some moments, we believe that change is all but impossible, whether on a personal, an organizational, or a social level. On a personal level, we know all too well the cycle of resolutions and failures: of swearing to work out more, eat less, change our work habits, but not achieving the change we aimed for. We can sing every day with the hymn we shared earlier: “I wish I could live like I’m longing to live.” (“I Wish I Knew How,” Singing the Living Tradition, No. 151) We know all about the frustration of asking our spouses to change just one single annoying habit and having it never happen; of trying to get our housemate to just empty the darn dishwasher instead of pulling clean dishes out of it on an as-needed basis; of getting our employees or co-workers to abide by a few simple common-sense guidelines that they’ve been resisting for year. We are very good at sabotaging change efforts. We do it so effectively that it’s sometimes amazing that change ever happens at all.
And yet it does. As William Schulz (Executive Director of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, former Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, and former President of the Unitarian Universalist Association) retold when he spoke here two months ago, he was once part of a conversation where academics were debating whether the state of human rights was better now than it was 100 years ago. One after another lamented that it wasn’t, but if I’d been there, I’d have responded to them the same way Schulz told us he did: by asking them, “Are you guys nuts?!” The advances have been truly incredible. A step back for every two forward, often, but still, the change, a change for the better, is clear.
What happened with human rights, with the changing roles of fathers and mothers, women and men in our society—did human nature change? Or are there perhaps more concrete, repeatable ways to bring change about?
I’ve been reading a book about change recently because I’m particularly interested in how to bring about wanted changes. It’s called Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, by Chip and Dan Heath. Like everyone, I have all sorts of hypotheses about why individuals, organizations, and societies do or don’t embrace change. But hypotheses beg to be tested, so I turned to research. There has been a wealth of research about what works for people seeking to change. The Heaths’ book digests this research and sets out some principles, beginning with three surprises about change:
(1) “What looks like laziness is often exhaustion”; help people to tap into their source of energy and they will change.
(2) “What looks like resistance [to change] is often a lack of clarity”; give clear, specific direction and have a clear destination, and people will change.
(3) “What looks like a problem with the people is often a problem with the situation”; tweak the situation, and people will change.
We can get very stuck, and stay stuck, and I’d like to spend the rest of my time this morning looking at one case of stuckness and what we know about how to shift it from research such as that compiled by the Heaths. The case I’m interested in is Unitarian Universalism’s welcome, or lack thereof, of people of color—what the Reverend Mark Morrison-Reed constructively frames as “missed opportunities.”
Reverend Morrison-Reed is a historian of African-American pioneers in Unitarianism, Universalism, and our denomination since the merger of the two in 1961. He has written a few books on the subject, and his first, Black Pioneers in a White Denomination, published almost 30 years ago, has been on the required reading list for ministers in preparation for many years, and I’m happy to learn, still is. He spoke at our District Assembly last month, and then here at UUCPA a few days later, invited by our Minister of Religious Education, Dan Harper, who also wrote the opening essay in Rev. Morrison-Reed’s most recent book, Darkening the Doorways: Black Trailblazers and Missed Opportunities in Unitarian Universalism. In that book, Mark told one story that illustrates this problem of getting stuck.
It’s the story of the hymnal commission created after merger, in order to create the first hymnal of the new, merged denomination, the one just before our “gray hymnal,” the “blue hymnal” called Hymns for the Celebration of Life. It was the early 60s and the commission included people who were acutely attuned to racial justice and the racial issues of the country, particularly black-white issues. One was Kenneth Patton, who led the way in shaping a Universalism that drew on all different traditions and world religions, and who made headlines when he wrote an essay declaring his resignation from the white race. Another was Christopher Moore, who founded the Chicago Children’s Choir, an intentionally multiracial, multicultural chorus that began at the First Unitarian Church of Chicago. And yet the hymnal that resulted had not a single reading by an African-American poet, not a single song from the African-American tradition.
The moral is that sometimes we don’t even know we’re stuck. Good people, with lots of knowledge and good intentions, and a commitment to racial justice, might still replicate old patterns.
What do we know about change that suggests some ways we could move forward? In particular, how might we apply this knowledge here, at UUCPA?
I don’t know if Mark Morrison-Reed has read Switch, but I’ll tell you, he successfully used some of their principles on me. When I went to his address at District Assembly, I was already on board emotionally with the dream of a Unitarian Universalism that is abundantly multiracial and multicultural. I agreed with the UUA president, Peter Morales, that welcoming newcomers is “the spiritual equivalent of feeding the hungry and housing the homeless,” because we have already found here something that they need and are looking for; I saw outreach to people of color as part of that mission. I had taken steps toward leading this congregation in that direction. But I didn’t have a lot of energy for the task. It felt overwhelming, like an uphill and uncertain path.
Here are a few things Reverend Morrison-Reed said and did that helped get me unstuck. More, they showed me some ways that we as a congregation can get unstuck.
I’d love to share the Heaths’ whole framework with you first, but I can’t do it all this morning. I’ll just tell you a few things that happened for me over the past month to change me from a person who vaguely wished we were more diverse, to someone with a fire in the belly, a plan in mind, and the means to make it happen—starting with the workshop I’m leading this Thursday evening, which I hope you’ll attend.
One thing they advise is to make a big job less overwhelming by shrinking the change. To stay motivated, we need hope, and we get hope by knowing that we’re partway there. Studies have shown how big a difference this makes. For example, in one experiment a group of people was given a card to fill out, eight car washes and then they would get a free car wash; and another group was given a card that said “ten car washes and you get a free car wash,” but it had the first two already punched. Eight to go for these folks, and eight to go for these folks. The ones who had the ten-minus-two were much more likely to complete the card and get the free car wash—which was of course exactly what car wash owners wanted them to do. They got to the goal because they were already partway there when they started. Well, I went to this workshop and learned from Mark how attractive Unitarian Universalism is to people of color—how many times in our history African-Americans, for example, have eagerly come in our doors, saying “This is what we’re looking for!”–and then I started looking at how many people of color and multiracial families are already here in our congregation, and I felt this burst of energy. I was feeling so overwhelmed before, but look, I already have two punches on my card!
UUCPA shifted me. One of the keys to becoming a multiracial, multicultural congregation, Mark said, was the support of lay leaders. Like any big change, it won’t happen unless there’s a broad range of dedicated supporters among the leadership, and here is where I must apologize, because I had a lot of doubt on that point. I looked at his list of keys, realized we had a lot of them in place, but looked at “lay leadership” and thought, “I don’t know. I don’t know if they want this.” Then Mark spoke here in our Main Hall a few days later. The crowd wasn’t big—about what I expect for a mid-week speaker, 22 people in addition to me and Dan, and I know because I counted and wrote down their names. But it was made up of people whom, if there were any change you wanted to make happen in this congregation, you would want to be pushing in your direction. I looked around and thought, “Wow, we do have that key too.” I’ve also been encouraged by the response of the Board and the number of leaders who have either told me they’ll be here on Thursday, or if they have another commitment, have taken the time to say, “I’m so glad you’re doing this—how else can I support it?”
A third thing that the Heaths advise that’s been happening for me over the past month is to look for bright spots—look for where you are already having success making the change—and replicate them. Again, there is abundant research on how effective this approach is, which I’ll share with you another time. For example, let’s look at that hymnal commission. It would be easy to bemoan this missed opportunity—or we could look for the bright spot, which is that, as Mark Morrison-Reed points out, the next hymnal commission did much better. The hymnal they produced, our gray hymnal, is full of resources from African-American poets and writers, and music like the hymn we sang earlier (“I Wish I Knew How”). So how do we clone that? We know some of the things the second commission did differently, and we can repeat them so as to notice the opportunities we might be missing now and grab them. For example, as Reverend Morrison-Reed pointed out, we can open our eyes to all the contributions Latino culture could make.
He started his workshop presentation at District Assembly with another bright spot, a video of a congregation that has successfully made the shift I’m hoping we’ll make, Davies Memorial in Prince Georges County, Maryland. We’ll watch the same video on Thursday. It’s a congregation I already know and admire, so that I felt, “Look, we’re already doing it there in Maryland!” It’s in much the same situation as UUCPA: it’s near a liberal urban center and located in the midst of a large middle class population of people of color. In Davies’ case, it’s the biggest black middle class population of any county in the US; in our case, it’s a huge population of middle class Latino and Asian people, a county in which 68% of the people are other than white European-American Anglos. (For the moment, as Reverend Morrison-Reed suggested, I’m setting aside considerations of class and classism, although as K. [our Worship Associate] said, they’re important too.)
Finally, the research cited by the Heath brothers emphasizes the importance of marshalling one’s sense of identity to bring about change. People don’t change when they’re told “You’re resisting change because of the kind of person you are.” They change when the change asks them not to go against their identity but to honor it. Reverend Morrison-Reed helped do that for me. He could so easily blame the whole problem on the kind of people Unitarian Universalists are, especially white European-American ones like me: that we’re not open to change, or want our congregations to remain full of people who are mostly like us, or that we’re not very welcoming. Instead, he points out how good we are, how concerned we have always been about racial justice, how anxious to be welcoming—all of which is true. It’s a part of my identity, a part of our identity, to make this change.
There’s lots more to learn and lots more to do, and I hope you’ll join me. In Julius Caesar, Cassius says to Brutus that the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves. But actually, what we know about what’s happening when people stay stuck, and what’s happening when we change, tells us that we are not fated, by either the stars or our natures, to stay exactly as we are. The more we know about our own natures—what motivates us—the better we can make any change we envision. We can do this. Please join me.
© 2011 Amy Zucker Morgenstern
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Christmas Eve homily
given at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, CA
December 24, 2010
I’m really excited about tomorrow morning. Aren’t you?
I try to live simply and not accumulate a lot of things I don’t need, but I admit I really love to see a gift bag with my name on it and a pretty ribbon on top. I love the surprise inside the tissue paper. I love getting stuff.
But I’m also a little nervous about how much I love it. I know that’s not what Christmas is supposed to be about.
Jesus never said a word about presents. They don’t appear in the Christmas story. The magi do bring gifts, but that isn’t even on Christmas, but twelve days later, when they complete their journey from the East. And of course, the presents are just for the newborn baby, not from everyone to everyone the way we give Christmas presents; and really, they’re the kind of gifts you bring to royalty to show your honor and homage, not the useful or fun thing you’d normally bring a baby, like a rattle. Still, somewhere along the line, presents became a big part of Christmas.
Of course, we’re supposed to give them, not just get them. And that’s a really fun part of Christmas too. Most of us find that it gets to be even more fun as we get older.
But is it really as much fun to give as to receive? We’re supposed to feel that way, but it’s not easy to live up to it. Especially when we’re thinking about all those goodies waiting for us tomorrow morning.
There’s a website I really like called PostSecret, where anyone who likes is invited to choose or create a postcard, write on it a secret they’ve never shared with anyone, and send it in. About twenty of these beautiful, creative, three-by-five-inch works of art are posted each week. In time for Christmas, one was posted that looked like a wrapped present and read, “I hate that Christmas makes me feel greedy.”
So I guess I’m not the only one.
And I know for sure that neither the religion Jesus followed—Judaism—nor the religion he inspired—Christianity—nor our religion—Unitarian Universalism—gives us permission to be greedy. They are united in their teaching that we should let go of all our desire to have things, let go of all our fear that we will not have enough, and just concentrate on the side of the giving-receiving equation that is in our control: that is, concentrate on giving.
If you think that that part of Christmas is challenging, just wait ‘til Jesus grows up. Then he starts to challenge us to get really generous and really fearless.
He says even if someone demands something from us that is ours, we should give it to them, and more. If they ask for our coat, we should give them the cloak we wear on top of it too. He says we’re not only supposed to love our friends, but also our enemies. He tells a rich young man who wants to know how to get to heaven that it’s very simple: all he has to do is give everything away. Yes, that simple!
Let’s imagine for a moment trying to live that way . . . giving and giving, giving it all away, without trying to receive or worrying about what will come back to us.
It can be done if we have one essential quality: trust. Trust that our needs will be taken care of. Giving makes us like a newborn baby far from his only home, utterly vulnerable, utterly dependent on the goodwill of those around him.
As a culture, we have a deep and growing fear of freeloaders. More and more, we arrange our politics, our economics, our whole social system, as if the worst thing that can happen is not that a family in genuine need will find themselves without a place to sleep, but that a family not in need will get a free night at the inn.
We are more worried about the welfare cheat than about the people who need our help and don’t get it. What kind of community does this give us? The kind where in the midst of plenty, 20,000 people experience homelessness each year, as they do in our county.
And what creates that other kind of community, where trust not only flourishes, but most of the time it turns out to be well-founded? Giving freely. Giving with no thought of being repaid.
Whereas clutching onto what we have, worrying that we will give more than we get, makes us trust people less. It drives us further into our own fortresses, walls and fences around each of us and our stuff.
Yes, sometimes someone will take advantage. But Jesus said not to worry about that. He even said to give to people who we know don’t wish us well. Just give. Not just give to the people we love, not just give presents—those are warmups for the other kind of giving.
Another rabbi, Moses ben-Maimon, known as Maimonides, told us some more about the kind of giving we’re working our way up to. And the kinds of giving he said were best are the kind we are doing here tonight.
He said there are lots of ways to give. In some, we give grudgingly. In some, we want to be thanked and recognized, maybe even made to feel like the recipient owes us something. These are not the best ways to give.
But one of the best ways to give is anonymously. The person we help doesn’t know who we are, so they can’t feel beholden; we don’t know who they are, so we can’t feel superior. That’s the kind of giving we just did with our offering. InnVision will help someone with our dollars and that person will be able to offer thanks only to an unknown angel, just as we will get nothing in exchange except the hope that we have helped an unknown Joseph, Mary, or Jesus in our midst.
The very best way to give, Maimonides says, is to help the recipient to not need our help anymore. InnVision does that kind of thing too, when it helps someone find a job. So does the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, which will take the contents of our Guest at Your Table boxes and help people close to here and far away create more just communities where they and everyone can prosper.
The rich young man asked the grown Jesus, “How do I get to heaven?”
And he said, “Give.” Does that mean we go to heaven if we stop trying to receive and just give? Not exactly. It means that if we do that, heaven comes to us. By giving to our friends and our family members, yes—and then also giving to people we don’t even know, giving to people we don’t even like, giving to people who show no sign of giving to us, giving when we aren’t sure what we’re going to get back: we make heaven, right here. This is how we get to heaven.
A heavenly Christmas to you all.
© 2010 Amy Zucker Morgenstern
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Sermon on judgment
given at the Community Church of San Miguel, San Miguel de Allende, GTO, Mexico
July 11, 2010
Readings (Revised Common Lectionary, Year C)
Amos 7:7-17
Psalm 82
Colossians 1:1-14
Luke 10:25-37
Sermon
One uncomfortable theme comes up repeatedly in today’s lectionary readings: judgment. I don’t like judgment. You could say I’m positively judgmental about it. I don’t like to be judged, I don’t like to hear people judge other people, and my own quickness to judge others is one of the qualities I try hardest to eradicate in myself.
Judgment is not nice. So how do we make sense of these passages, such as the one from Amos and the 82nd Psalm, which seem to exalt judgment, and harsh judgment at that? Aren’t they just encouraging one of our worst tendencies? The obvious answer is that the scripture is encouraging us to give our desire to judge over to God, the only true Judge. But I’m not much more comfortable with a judging God than with a judgmental person. When I pray, it’s never to the divine Judge—except when I’m vengefully hoping that an all-powerful Someone will bang the gavel and mete out justice to someone I think deserves it. Which is to say, both I and many others call on the God of Judgment when we want our own views to be backed up by the ultimate authority. And so we come round, in a very small circle, to our own harshly judging selves.
To make things more difficult still, we do have to judge. It’s part of our responsibility, part of being a good person. Sometimes it’s literally our duty as citizens, as when we’re called to jury duty and required to decide who among our neighbors is speaking truth, who is lying; who bears blame and who is innocent; who has done wrong, who should be exonerated, who should be compensated, who should be punished. Then there are the more everyday, less dramatic cases of judgment. Judging the parent who yells at his child in the market. Judging the greed of corporate directors who have trampled on human dignity or nature’s beauty in search of profit. These are just discriminations of fact, of right and wrong, aren’t they? And finally, there is the kind of judgment that we might call discernment, that is so essential a part of religious life because it is the heart of morality. How do we decide, “I should do this, I should not do that,” without implicitly shining the light of judgment on others and saying, if only to ourselves, “This person is good, that one is bad”? If we flat-out refuse to make such judgments, whether in a courtroom or our own hearts, we may be guilty of abandoning the world to injustice and chaos.
The wise designers of the lectionary have pieced together an interesting message for us, in the passages they’ve chosen about judgment and the way they’ve paired them with a complementary theme.
That theme is taken up by a midrash, a Jewish story expounding on the scriptures, that tells of a king
who had delicate crystal goblets [and he wasn’t quite sure how to make use of them]. He said, “If I pour hot water into them, they will expand and burst; if I pour cold water into them, they will contract and shatter.” So what did the king do? He mixed hot water with cold and poured the [temperate] water into the cups, and they did not break.
So it was with God. When it came time to create the world, God reflected, “If I create the world with the attribute of compassion alone, there will be an overflow of wrongful acts. No one will be afraid of punishment. But if I create the world with justice alone, how could the world endure? It would shatter from the harshness. So I will create it with both justice and compassion, and it will endure.” (B’reishit Rabbah 12:15, translation found here)
Justice and compassion, or, put another way, judgment and mercy. Today’s scriptures urge us to practice them together. Let’s take a few minutes to look at how.
The passage from Amos is chilling. In a time of prosperity and peace, God’s prophet has some bad news: God has judged the people; his verdict is “GUILTY”; and the sentence he pronounces is death. This is judgment at its most terrifying. And what makes it perhaps even more terrifying is the so-simple image of the plumb line.
A plumb line is an age-old builder’s tool that uses gravity to determine whether a wall is straight. Hang a lead weight on a string and you have an inescapable, implacable judgment of whether the work of your hands is in plumb, is true, is the way it should be.
You can’t argue with this judge, it isn’t biased, it isn’t corruptible, you can’t appeal to it with emotion or logic. It just measures us the way we really are: how we compare to the straight line. Are we upright, are we true? And none of us could escape such a judgment.
Imagine being judged for everything we do. Not judged harshly, but purely, unemotionally, as by a carpenter’s tool. Who among us could stand under that impartial gaze? We have betrayed the trust of friends. We have responded to suffering with callousness and apathy. We have spoken words that are not true and many more that are not kind, and we have left unsaid the words of compassion that could have been a balm to another suffering soul. We have seen someone in trouble and been too tired, too busy, too nervous, too bent on our own destinations to stop and help. Who among us does not deserve punishment?
Were we subject to pure justice, we would be in a bad way. We need that judgment to be tempered with mercy, or we could not withstand the force of our own failings. They would shatter us.
J. R. R. Tolkien put wise words in the mouth of his wizard, Gandalf: “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement” (The Two Towers, Book IV). It is not enough for our judgments to be just; they must also be tempered with mercy, or who could live?
That rather bizarre council of the gods in today’s psalm shows us two ways the people of the world are judged. All gods sit in judgment, but the God that is our God, our champion in this psalm, is moved by mercy as well as justice. God exhorts the other gods to have mercy on the orphan, the poor person. The psalm challenges us to consider: When we judge others, do we judge like these gods, the ones who have no kindness for the widow and the hungry and so lose their own immortality, or do we judge like the God who is Love, pouring mercy and compassion upon those in need, and so gain ourselves a kind of immortality?
Which brings us to the question asked of Jesus in the Gospel reading. It is asked by one whose realm is that of judgment: the law courts where people come to be judged and to attain justice. He seems to be a good man—he gets a lot of flak in various interpretations of this story, but he’s honest and earnest—but still, he would like to judge those around him, to sort out who is his neighbor and who unworthy of that designation, so as to make that onerous commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” a little easier to carry out.
The story of the Good Samaritan also tempts us to judge: to criticize the priest and the Levite, and of course to criticize, then applaud, the Samaritan. Just one chapter previously, Luke has reminded us that the Samaritans are Not Nice People (Luke 9:51-55). It’s as if the Gospel author is saying to his listeners: yep, I’m talking about those Samaritans, those troublemakers who don’t respect Jesus. It might even be the case that the apostles who itch to punish them for their disrespect are justified in judging Samaritans harshly.
In that passage we read two weeks ago, Luke’s Jesus gave us a hint of what was to follow when he silently prevented his disciples from passing sentence on the Samaritans. In today’s passage, Jesus doesn’t ask us to judge the Samaritans, those we despise, fairly. He doesn’t ask us to judge at all. He asks us to do mercy. That is what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves.
And so from today’s scripture, we may derive a small but profound spiritual practice. A tempering of justice with compassion, judgment with mercy, which we can all practice daily, at least if you’re like me and never go a day without passing judgment on someone. The practice is to add mercy to each of our judgments. When we hear the man speak harshly to his child and our minds leap to the judgment that he is a bad parent, we can think, mercy in our minds, “Maybe he is an exemplary father and I’m catching him at the one moment all year when he’s lost his patience. Maybe he is under stress that I can’t see and what his child did was the last straw: maybe he just lost his job; maybe his mother died last week.” When we hear the news and are filled with rage at what some criminal, some corrupt official, some greedy CEO has done, instead of just hoping that the so-and-so gets what’s coming to him or her, we can pray for a merciful outcome for all involved: that the culprits as well as the victims be healed. When we cast our eyes on someone in judgment, we can add, “there but for the grace of God go I”—and know that if we are blessed with a little extra grace right now, we could be in a very different situation in a year or a week or even an hour. “That could be me,” we can remember, and more—“Sometimes that is me.”
We show mercy to others—we grant others the same benefit of the doubt that we want for ourselves—we give them room to change—we, in short, love our neighbor as ourselves, because we are our neighbor’s neighbor. We are the one set upon by thieves, we are the thieves, we are the important official hurrying past to carry out another duty, we are the despised Samaritan. We are the lawyer looking for an easy way; and sometimes, just sometimes, on a good day, we are Jesus.
So may it be.
© 2010 Amy Zucker Morgenstern
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Other writings
There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole
There is a balm in Gilead
To heal the sin-sick soul.
(Traditional [African-American spiritual])
The original has two verses, one of which I love:
Sometimes I feel discouraged
And I think my work’s in vain
But then the Holy Spirit
Revives my soul again.
So far, so good, but the next verse veers off in a distinctly un-UU direction:
If you cannot preach like Peter
If you cannot pray like Paul
Go tell the love of Jesus
He died to save us all.
The “you don’t need extraordinary gifts to change the world” is powerful, and I’ve thought of rewriting the last line to make it about salvation by the teachings of Jesus, or the love Jesus counsels us to put at the center of our religion, but my thoughts went on other paths, because when I think about what gives balm to my soul, I think of places like Bass Lake. So I wrote:
When I cannot hear the music
That used to call my name
I sit beside the waters
And they sing to me again.
It whispers through the forest,
It floats down like the leaves:
The peace past understanding,
The courage to believe.
(c) 2010 Amy Zucker Morgenstern–please use freely, with attribution. The original lyrics and melody are in the public domain.
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“Beyond Either/Or”
essay published in reprinted version of Coming Out in Faith: Voices of LGBTQ Unitarian Universalists, Skinner House Press, forthcoming
Unlike a woman I knew in college who said unhesitatingly that she’d known she was a lesbian from age two, I had to learn my sexual orientation gradually. I didn’t get the first glimmer of the idea that I might be bisexual until I was about 18, and I didn’t strongly identify this way until several years later. There were sudden revelatory moments along the way, such as the one that came when I was watching the opening scene of Rear Window and, seeing Grace Kelly’s luminous face loom into close-up as she leans in toward the viewer to kiss James Stewart, was surprised by my emphatic wish, “Kiss me! Kiss me!” But on the whole, my realization that I was bi arrived in degrees, a gradual perceptual shift.
What I have known for as long as memory stretches back is that either/or choices make me suspicious. When presented with a confident statement that two things stand on the opposite sides of an unbridgeable divide, I reflexively ask whether they are really mutually exclusive. Material and spiritual, male and female, liberal and conservative, Israel and Palestine, teenager and elder—when two things are said to be opposites, I try to ask: what category might encompass both of these, synthesize them into a whole?
Being a both/and thinker serves me well as a minister, particularly in the role of community-builder. Part of my job is finding a way for opposites to dwell together in peace. And theologically, I am committed to moving beyond the choices that are often presented to us as either/or, and to leading others past those unreal boundaries; it gave me particular delight to once give a sermon called “Confessions of a Theist Humanist.”
I was well-trained in the habit of seeking both/and answers to either/or questions by my late teens. So when I discovered, around that time, that the world was not divided into heterosexual and homosexual, as I’d thought, but included many people who were romantically drawn to both another sex and their own, I already stood on a foundation that made that fact unsurprising, easy to accept, and, ultimately, attractive to apply to myself.
The desire to go beyond either/or also brought me to Unitarian Universalism and kept me here. I had been brought up Jewish, and the stories and rituals of that faith still meant a great deal to me even when I started searching for something else. I had found great wisdom in Buddhism and embraced much of its teaching. But neither one of those traditions was quite the right home for my spirit. And then I went to my first UU congregation, and discovered a place where I could be Jewish and Buddhist and this great new (to me) thing called Unitarian Universalist, and where no one would force me to choose just one. It was a religion that allowed room for each of us to keep adding new ideas, theologies, practices, and ethical perspectives: where the assumption that met such changes would not be “You can’t do that,” but “Let’s see how that fits in!” Unitarian Universalism was the both/and religion, the one that had successfully challenged so many rules of society and theology and shown them to be illusions.
As I learned more about my newly adopted religion, I felt more and more that this was a religion that thought the way I did, deliberately turning the false choices of either/ors into the inclusivity of both/ands. I read about how the early Unitarians and Universalists were told that if religion tried to incorporate skepticism about the Bible, it would crumble—but Channing, Parker, and Ballou insisted that reason and religion could (must!) co-exist. The resistance to women’s rights in the nineteenth century was an attempt to force an either/or choice: women could either have a moral voice in a public role or have moral authority in the private sphere. I learned that Unitarians and Universalists had led the way in insisting that women could still be women while voting, speaking, leading, in the public sphere that had so long been reserved for men. In the next century, critics of religious liberalism said that one could not both be atheistic and have moral guidance. The UU humanists who went before us replied, “Of course we can.” These Unitarian Universalists were my people!
I’m not both/and about everything. I believe there are ideas that are mutually exclusive; I believe there are actions that are incompatible with certain desired outcomes. So, for example, I am monogamous, not because I’m opposed to polyamory in principle—if people can make it work to everyone’s satisfaction, all power to them—but because what my wife and I know about ourselves tells us that we are most likely to find what we seek within a single relationship sustained as long as we both live. And then, too, much of ethics is about delineating, “If you choose A, then B will be necessarily excluded.” For example, we can’t both maintain solidarity with the poor and promote an economic system that depends on keeping people in poverty. In short, there are limits to both/and-ness. Yet the habit of thinking that seeks to rise above false either/or choices and give a more inclusive answer is one of the gifts we Unitarian Universalists have to offer the world. In turn, one of the gifts bisexuals can offer Unitarian Universalism is to help our religion to more fully develop that way of thinking, applying it to more situations, bringing ever more inclusiveness to a world that creates arbitrary categories—and to our own religious communities. I believe Unitarian Universalists will understand bisexuality better as we learn to think of ourselves as spiritual questioners dwelling in a world that prefers its categories neatly bounded, one that mistrusts those who call those boundaries into question.
We Unitarian Universalists are already boundary-challengers by nature. When I co-authored an Adult Religious Education curriculum on bisexuality, I suggested including exercises that would help people move beyond either/or thinking. One of them asks people to go to one side of the room or the other depending on whether they like vanilla or chocolate, walking alone in nature or being with friends, reading books or listening to music. Being Unitarian Universalists, they often resist the binary options. Even though the facilitators firmly instruct them to choose one side or the other, almost all participants gripe about this arbitrary division, and some disregard the rules, invent a continuum, and put themselves somewhere in between.
In other words, Unitarian Universalists are ripe for understanding bisexuality. When they don’t get it—and I’ve encountered some, both heterosexual and homosexual, who don’t–it is usually because they haven’t yet expanded their capacity for both/and thinking to encompass sexual orientation. I take hope from the fact that most Unitarian Universalists embrace both/and thinking in other areas of their lives. It also means that when we are supported in being out and clear about what our orientation means, we bi UUs can lead our co-congregants in broadening their views, not just of sexuality, but of all the elements of life that have been forced into arbitrary and false categories.
My own experience suggests that even in a Welcoming Congregation, we can have a ways to go. When I came out as bi, I was asked by one UU (sympathetically, but with an exasperatingly knowing look) whether I was “in transition.” I was so slow about the lingo that it took me a week to realize that she was suggesting that this was just a step on the way to admitting I was a lesbian. I don’t generally mind being taken for a lesbian—it’s an honorable label—but I do mind the implication that someone who claims to be bi must be only halfway out of the closet. Although many people do try on bisexuality as a self-description in the process of sorting out their orientation (and they have my support and empathy), it is a mistake to conclude from that that it is only an in-between state. Being bi is not a way station. It is an orientation of its own.
It reminds me of the bitter little joke told about UUs, that our religion is “a way station between Methodism and the golf course.” No, it’s not. Some of us live here permanently, and find it a very comfortable and beautiful home. Many people may pass through our congregations on their way from another religion to none at all, but their using Unitarian Universalism as a convenient resting point doesn’t define our religion.
Invisibility, the bane of bisexuality, is a problem in our congregations. I’ve had someone in the church’s LGBTQ community suggest that another bi person—in fact, our other minister—was not a true member of that community because she was married to a man. In other words, I and others who were in same-sex relationships were acceptable because—and, I couldn’t help concluding, only because—we resembled lesbians or gay men. Likewise, many hetero people in the congregation simply didn’t register that their other minister was bi, even though she had spoken clearly of her bisexuality from the pulpit. It was easy for them to disregard her membership in the LGBTQ community even when she proclaimed it; they could think of her as hetero, and chose to do so. In each case, people struggled to acknowledge the both/and before their eyes: that we bisexuals fit into neither category, neither gay/lesbian nor hetero, but are an entity outside that either/or.
Another such entity is our religion itself, which shares with bisexuals that painful quality of invisibility. It isn’t beneficial to either UUs or bi folk to be rendered invisible, and perhaps Unitarian Universalists can learn something about themselves, as well as about the bisexuals in their midst, from bisexuals’ dogged insistence to be acknowledged and understood by a world that often simply does not see us.
In the case of bisexuality, invisibility arises from the peculiar rules a please-check-one-and-only-one-box society imposes. It is one half of the double bind that holds us: if we are openly involved with one person, then we are implicitly identifying as either hetero or gay (depending on whether it’s a different- or same-sex relationship), which hides bisexuality from view—if not disproving its very existence. If, on the other hand, we speak openly about our past involvement in both kinds of relationship–or, heaven forbid, are in both at once—we are confirming the stereotype that bisexuals “just can’t make up their minds,” “can’t be faithful,” or are all polyamorous.
Of course, as with so many double binds, the dilemma is caused not by the nature of bisexuality but by the rigidity of the rules. When we dismiss those rules, the problem dissolves. Just as people in our congregations are learning not to assume that a man who speaks of his partner is referring to a woman, we can learn not to assume that everyone in a different-sex relationship is hetero, or that everyone in a same-sex relationship is gay. Bisexuality is always a possibility, and, studies suggest, will be increasingly so as we free people to be more candid about their true orientation. We can do that through activism—by removing the real, legal penalties for being openly bi—and, right at home in our congregations and organizations, through remembering (and reflecting in the way we speak) that many of the people who visit, join, and lead us are bi even though it doesn’t show.
When bisexuals stay closeted, it’s generally out of fear. Why do Unitarian Universalists stay in the closet? Why do we hide our religion from the world? I think it is often for the same reason. We accept the assumptions of the wider society; we define ourselves by its categories, which have no place for the likes of us; and so we become reticent to say “Actually, there is another option.” We closet ourselves. Perhaps we do so because the implications of declaring of our religious home, “We are a both/and place,” scare us. Such a statement certainly carries its pejorative connotations just as bisexuality does. According to some members of other, more creedal faiths, we Unitarian Universalists are simply unable, or unwilling, to make a commitment. Our diverse approach to spiritual sources, which is one of our great strengths, they interpret as wishy-washiness; we don’t stand for anything. We can’t commit to one path. And while this is sometimes true, it misses the larger truth that being Unitarian Universalist is a path.
All of this is very familiar to us bisexual people. We hear it all the time: you can’t commit to a single partner; you’re afraid to declare yourself as lesbian or gay; you’re trying to be trendy; you can’t make up your mind.
We know a thing or two about seeing through these accusations. We know that the reason we’re bi is not that we can’t make up our minds, but because we see the beauty of many varieties of humanity. We know that we are perfectly capable of committing to a single partner for life if we wish, just as a heterosexual woman can be attracted to men of different colors, yet choose one, with his own unchangeable skin, to be her husband; just as a lesbian can forswear women she finds attractive in order to settle down happily with just one—some say as soon as the second date. We know we are what we are, regardless of whether it fits a trend. Can Unitarian Universalism as a whole “come out” as what it truly is? We are a religion that, in explicit contradiction to what many religions consider possible, affirms both mystery and reason; is a home for both Christians and Buddhists; draws upon the Bible and other texts riddled with oppressive teachings, while firmly supporting liberation.
To assert the possibility of both/and is to blaze a new trail, or rather, to clear a trail that many have walked before but that continually becomes overgrown for lack of enough footsteps. So it can be hard going. We Unitarian Universalists have internalized many of the either/or messages from other faiths—even though, for many of us, they are the very messages that made us go look for a religious alternative in the first place. We accept too readily the either/or stereotype that says one is either a possessor of university degrees or uninterested in tackling subtle ideas, and thus we question whether our religion is attractive to people who don’t have an advanced formal education. We accept the falsehood that we must be either an activist church or concerned with tending our spirits, and thus repeat the old, tired drama of “spirituality versus social justice.”
As Unitarian Universalists, we inherit a great legacy from generations of people who heard all the “NOs” of either/or thinking and responded with a both/and, affirming, “Why not?” Will we make the most of that legacy?
A heterosexual friend of mine once said, in all seriousness, that he admired those of us who could be attracted to more than one sex–as if we demonstrated a higher spirituality, a kind of open-mindedness that “hopelessly heterosexual” people such as he had not attained. I laughed, but I strongly disagreed. There is nothing better about bisexuality; for mysterious reasons, human beings have a range of orientations and none is better than the others. We bi folks are just being ourselves. But when the wider society denies that one’s self is a true and possible thing, then being oneself is itself an act of courage and spiritual leadership. All openly LGBTQ people among us have led their UU kin in practicing integrity and wholeness, and we can continue to do so, if the others will follow. By insisting on our own truths, we can break through the walls dividing categories and lead others to freedom. What joy could follow if we Unitarian Universalists dismissed all the false categories the world and our own minds create!
We can begin with our own religious communities, where many of the barriers caused by either/or thinking still wait for us to dismantle them. We struggle, still, to say “why not?” not only to category-defying identities like bisexuality and transgender, but also to political diversity, class diversity, and racial and ethnic diversity. We are too quick to accept the either/or thinking that stuffs our religion into a mostly white, upper-class, liberal, English-speaking box. We struggle even to be open to both humanists and theists, to both children and adults, to both young adults and elders, to both cradle Unitarian Universalists and converts.
Bisexuals know just how hard it is to say both/and where others have said either/or. It puts you betwixt and between, and it’s so much more comfortable, so much more emotionally safe to fit into a set category. It is not easy to feel as if you don’t belong anywhere. It’s not easy for a bi man to turn down the solidarity offered by a gay man who assumes, with a friendly “Nice to have another gay man in this group,” that he’s gay too. It’s hard for a married man and woman to declare themselves outside the safe circle of other married couples in the church by saying, “Actually, we’re both bi.” People are comfortable with categories, and we challenge them, even frighten them, when our lives present them with evidence that the walls separating one category from another are permeable.
But we bisexuals have also learned that the problem is not in ourselves, but in the categories, which are figments of the mind. Coming out is a proclamation of faith in reality instead of the divisions that falsely claim authority. Unitarian Universalism will begin to claim its full authority as a religion when it comes out boldly as a both/and faith. Celebrating bisexuality, that dissolver of false boundaries, can be the key that opens that closet door.
© 2010 Amy Zucker Morgenstern
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