[Dialogue] 6/16/16, Spong: On Celebrating my 40th Anniversary of Being the Bishop of Newark
Ellie Stock via Dialogue
dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net
Thu Jun 16 05:13:34 PDT 2016
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<div style="color: #000000;font-family: Georgia;font-size: 16px;line-height: 150%;text-align: left;"><h1 style="color: #003d4a;display: block;font-family: Georgia;font-size: 34px;font-weight: normal;line-height: 100%;margin-top: 0;margin-right: 0;margin-bottom: 10px;margin-left: 0;text-align: left;">On Celebrating my 40th Anniversary of Being the Bishop of Newark</h1>
<p>It had the nature of a tribal gathering, or perhaps of “old-timers day” at Yankee Stadium. People came from across the nation and throughout the Diocese of Newark, which encompasses the Jersey suburbs of New York City, stretching from the Hudson River to the Delaware Water Gap. Clergy and people, who served so many years ago, gathered in St. Peter’s Church in Morristown, New Jersey, on June 5th to remember their time in history.</p>
<p>I became the Episcopal bishop in this diocese in June of 1976. I was 44 years of age. My picture from that time, which was on the cover of this anniversary bulletin, looked young, even cherubic. One might even wonder if I had yet begun to shave! It was, however, my privilege to serve this remarkable diocese for 24 years. Those years covered the presidencies of Jerry Ford through Bill Clinton. They were tumultuous years both for church and state. The intellectual revolution that started as long ago as the 16th century with Copernicus and went through Freud and Einstein into our day, had eaten at the fabric of both religious understandings and our social structures and values. It was also the era that gave us the civil rights struggle, the reaction to the divisive war in Vietnam, the rise of feminism, the first Iraqi war, and the gay movement, all of which would feed the emotions of our people during my years as bishop. Most of us did not know how deeply our unadmitted racism, sexism and homophobia really went and was.</p>
<p>The choice facing the Christian Church when I arrived in the bishop’s office was to engage these issues and, in the process, to become radically controversial, or to ignore these issues and to become totally irrelevant. Death comes by boredom more frequently than it does by conflict. I made a decision; we would engage our turbulent, changing world both intellectually and socially. It was a fateful decision, but clearly, even in the retrospective gaze of a 40-years later perspective, it was the right decision.</p>
<p>First, we committed ourselves to the eradication of all vestiges of racism in our common life. The Diocese of Newark had the first black cathedral dean in the United States. Instead of electing a Suffragan or assistant bishop, who would have been, in all probability, one more white male, we instituted a visiting bishop program, in which three or four third world bishops would be in residence in the Diocese of Newark for long periods of time each year. In this program on three occasions, we welcomed a South African bishop named Desmond Tutu, as well as other African bishops from Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Liberia. From Latin America we brought in the bishops of Puerto Rico, Panama, Cuba and Venezuela. From Asia we brought in the bishops of Taiwan and Hong Kong. The people of our diocese became accustomed to seeing black, Latino and Asian faces sharing in our common life while wearing the vestments of and performing the functions of a bishop. Consciousness rose and racism retreated. Today the Presiding Bishop of the entire Episcopal Church is an African-American. I beam with pride, knowing that the Diocese of Newark had a hand in making that possible.</p>
<p>We also embraced the cause of women, fighting for both their equality and their ordination. A group of women deacons known as the “Philadelphia Eleven” had been irregularly ordained in 1973 by three retired bishops, directly challenging the anti-female bias present in the then all-male authority structures of our church. Two of those eleven served in our diocese. We joined the fight and when the priesthood was finally opened officially to women in 1979, this diocese ordained three new female priests in the first ten days of that January and had services designed to recognize and “regularize” those who had been among the Philadelphia Eleven.</p>
<p>Because the Episcopal Church is part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, it was not enough just to pressure the American Church to remove its own anti-female bias. So when an English deaconess, who had been refused ordination to the priesthood by the Church of England, appealed to the Diocese of Newark to “test my vocation,” we did and in time, joined by Mervyn Stockwood, the liberal Anglican bishop of Southwark (South London), we ordained that woman, Elizabeth Canham, to the priesthood in the glare of television cameras from ITV in London. The New York Times covered this ground-breaking ordination on the front page of its Sunday paper. Elizabeth was assigned to work as a curate at one of our churches, but when she went home on holiday, she was besieged with invitations to celebrate the Eucharist in private homes because no church in England would permit her to function as a priest inside its doors. When Alan Webster, the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, invited Elizabeth to celebrate the Eucharist in the deanery of St. Paul’s, packed as it was, with members of the “Movement for the Ordination of Women,” the Anglican bishop of London, Graham Leonard, became apoplectic. He finally left the Anglican Church for the Roman Catholic Church, so that he could live out the balance of his days without the “corrupting presence of women priests.” More than a decade later the Church of England finally authorized the ordination of women. Better late than never.</p>
<p>As a direct result of our visiting bishop program, women priests were ultimately ordained in Kenya, Uganda and Liberia. We also appointed a woman priest to be Anglicanism’s first female archdeacon. What a trouble-making diocese we were in the cause of justice!</p>
<p>In 2006, our national church finally made the issue of women in the priesthood moot by electing Katharine Jefferts-Schori to be the Presiding Bishop of the entire Episcopal Church. Today almost 50% of our clergy are female.</p>
<p>Spurred by this growing success, we then turned our attention to another dehumanizing prejudice. We appointed a far-ranging task force, and assigned to it the somewhat innocuous name: “The Task Force to Study Changing Patterns in Family Life.” The Rev. Dr. Nelson Thayer, a member of the faculty at the Theological School of Drew University chaired this effort. In 1987 this task force presented its report to the Diocesan Convention calling on the Episcopal Church: “to recognize, to welcome and to bless liturgically the sacred commitments of our gay and lesbian members.” The convention voted: “to receive this report with appreciation and to commend it to our congregations for a year of study.” After that intensive year of study and listening to the witness of our gay and lesbian members, the recommendations of that task force were adopted by an overwhelming majority at our annual convention. The Diocese of Newark had assumed the leadership of the Episcopal Church in the struggle for the full inclusion of the lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender people into both the church and the society.</p>
<p>In these activities our diocese became a beacon of hope and a magnet for those who had felt the church’s homophobic rejection. We accepted that vocation and we did not lower the pressure. In June of 1989, we ordained to the diaconate an openly gay and partnered man and placed him on the staff of our church in Hoboken, with the charge to develop what we called “The Ministry of the Oasis,” designed to create a place where gay and lesbian people could find the love and acceptance that would enable them to come back to their once rejecting church. In December of 1989 in that packed Hoboken church we ordained that gay deacon, Robert Williams, to the priesthood. He and his partner were introduced as a family at that service. He was the first openly gay, openly partnered person to be made a priest in the Episcopal Church. Our church had not authorized this action officially, but it had also never prohibited this action so it was perfectly legal. Three bishops and about eighty of our diocesan clergy participated in the service. So did the public media, protesters, picketers and people quoting from Leviticus! The Christian Church has had many homosexual clergy in its ministry over the centuries, but we had always pretended that they were not there. The church likes to hide from reality inside the myths that it has itself created. This diocese destroyed those myths! Hostility flowed. There was talk of a heresy trial to expel this bishop. Angry letters were written, petitions were signed; we were spat upon when entering a church to give a lecture. Sixteen death threats were received, but we persevered. Ultimately the church moved to change its official policy. When I retired as the Bishop of the Diocese of Newark, we counted 35 openly gay and lesbian clergy on our clerical roster. Thirty-one of them lived in publicly acknowledged partnerships. Today in our church this battle is over. Gay and lesbian clergy are serving in every office our church has to offer. Gay marriage is now commonplace throughout our churches and legal in our nation.</p>
<p>One does not change practice without also changing thought. So this diocese also challenged both theological formulas and liturgical practices. We established a program called “New Dimensions,” which brought the scholars of this world to help us think through yet again what it means to be a Christian. In order to live, Christianity could no longer hide inside the words of our traditional past. We had to find a way to be Christians in our modern world.</p>
<p>These were the things we celebrated at this 40th anniversary service, acclaiming the heroes of those struggles, men and women, ordained and lay, a bit older today than they were during the days of conflict and change. The church that had called us into ministry had changed over the years of our service. It is now more whole, alive and honest. This renewed church we hand to the next generation. When I listened to the sermon at this service, delivered by Janet Broderick, the brilliant, first female rector of St. Peter’s Church in Morristown, I had no doubt that my church was ready to enter tomorrow with a new, competent hand on the guidance system.</p>
<p>John Shelby Spong</p>
<p>Read the essay online <a target="_blank" style="color: #4487cf;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;" href="http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=666dc6d331&e=db34daa597">here</a>.</p>
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<div style="color: #000000;font-family: Georgia;font-size: 16px;line-height: 150%;text-align: left;"><h2 style="color: #4487cf;display: block;font-family: Georgia;font-size: 30px;font-weight: normal;line-height: 100%;margin-top: 0;margin-right: 0;margin-bottom: 10px;margin-left: 0;text-align: left;">To my readers:</h2>
<p>This week’s column was written before the tragedy of the Orlando, Florida massacre.</p>
<p>Dear Friends,</p>
<p>I grieve deeply over these attacks. I grieve even more when one of our candidates for the presidency of this nation seeks to use this tragedy to score political points. I am amazed to hear not only innuendo from one of them, but also actual hints that the president of the United States is either so weak and inept as to be helpless in the face of this threat, or is actually in collusion with these terrorists, thus revising the charges this candidate once made that our president was not born in the United States, but in Kenya, and is really a Muslim. As lawyer Joseph Welsh once said to Senator McCarthy of Wisconsin when he was on a witch hunt for communists: “Have you no sense of decency?” Those words are once more totally in order to be spoken in our national life at this time.</p>
<p>I also grieve that terrorism is now linked with homophobia, which makes one of America’s most oppressed minorities newly vulnerable. I recently learned from members of the Orlando gay community that the Orlando killer had himself not only been to this gay club on a number of occasion, but that he also had contacted some of his victims previously through a gay dating app, presumably seeking to line up sexual encounters. I recall well that some of my church’s most homophobic clergy turned out to be self-hating and deeply repressed gay men. If repressed homosexuality turns out to be a factor in this tragedy then I fear it will once again open the floodgate of hostility toward the LGBT community. It makes me want to march once again in the New York City Gay Pride Parade in an act of solidarity.</p>
<p>This nation’s rising consciousness about homosexuality will not be suppressed or turned around, but mentally sick people will make others their victims, before this prejudice joins other such shameful moments in our nation’s history as the witch hunt of Salem, Massachusetts. A dying prejudice can sometimes be a lethal force in our society. I never want to underestimate the power in human beings to do evil to their fellow human beings.</p>
<p>The gun laws in this country will also once more be debated. The ratio of guns to American citizens is the highest in the world—eighty guns for every hundred Americans. Despite the political rhetoric that suggests that the 2nd Amendment is about to be repealed, I know of no candidate for president who calls for such an action. What has been called for is the banning of the sale of assault weapons that have no purpose being in the hands of anyone except those in the Armed Services fighting to keep this nation free. There is nothing in the 2nd Amendment that should permit an individual to own an assault weapon with a magazine holding thirty bullets. No one hunts with such a weapon. No one needs such a weapon to protect his or her safety. It is nothing other than a weapon of war. If individual citizens can legally own an assault weapon then why not sell them a tank or a canon? Gun laws can be made sane, safe and sensible under the terms of the 2nd Amendment. The current political rhetoric that suggests the contrary is irresponsible, ignorant and profoundly dangerous.</p>
<p>I love my country I grieve that so many of my fellow citizens today feel such fear, anxiety and insecurity that they can respond to the politics of hate. We will honor the victims of the Orlando killings by building a nation based on hope for a better tomorrow for all Americans, not on vengeance, exclusiveness and the fear of those who are “not like us.”</p>
<p>John Shelby Spong
<a target="_blank" style="color: #4487cf;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;" href="http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=356abe5c09&e=db34daa597">Read and Share Online Here </a></p>
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<h3 class="aolmail_aolmail_null" style="color: #4487cf;display: block;font-family: Georgia;font-size: 26px;font-weight: normal;line-height: 100%;margin-top: 0;margin-right: 0;margin-bottom: 10px;margin-left: 0;text-align: left;"><span style="color:#0000FF">Bishop Spong at the Chautauqua Institution, NY - June 27th - July 1st, 2016</span></h3>
<div style="text-align: center;color: #000000;font-family: Georgia;font-size: 16px;line-height: 150%;"><a target="_blank" style="color: #4487cf;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;" href="http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=a2d8b0cc05&e=db34daa597"><img align="none" height="266" style="width: 444px;height: 266px;margin: 0px;border: none;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;outline: none;text-decoration: none;text-transform: capitalize;display: inline;" width="444" src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/b51b9cf441b059bb232418480/images/7b794e88-c38b-486b-b3fd-205e7d08a0c7.jpg"></a></div>
This week is about Jewish storytelling. John Shelby Spong explores the Bible’s literary and liturgical roots—its grounding in Jewish culture, symbols, icons, and storytelling tradition—to explain how the events of Jesus’ life, including the virgin birth, the miracles, the details of the passion story, and the resurrection and ascension, would have been understood by both the Jewish authors of the various gospels and by the Jewish audiences for which they were originally written.
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