[Dialogue] 2/16/17, Spong/Gretta Vosper: Take Care of Number One

Thu Feb 16 07:41:54 PST 2017

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Take Care of Number One
By Gretta Vosper

Take Care of Number One. And everything else takes care of itself.

I know. You think you’ve opened the wrong email or caught a link to the wrong page. This must be from Mind, Body, Green, or A Daily Dose of Motivation. Maybe you’re signed up to Les Brown’s email list and are used to getting motivational encouragement just like this every day.
But this isn’t that. This is what you were looking for. I promise.
THIS IS THIS
It is a privilege to have been supported throughout the challenge of finding my own voice in the church by one of the most generous of voices we have known in a generation, Bishop John Shelby Spong. Over the course of my entire engagement in theological education and leadership, he has shared his persistent vision of a new church, a new Christianity for the twenty-first century, a Christianity risen from another which no longer made sense. We call it his work, a New Reformation.
The New Reformation rises from the ashes of what was and Bishop Spong has spelled out the “what was” with unwavering clarity over the past decades. His vision has been challenged and discussed, wrestled with and dismantled. When his thoughts are crystallized in his next book, I expect the response will be much the same as the response to all his books has been: “More! More!” from one sector and “Enough! Enough!” from another. The one thing that all will agree upon, I am sure, is that the work he stimulated into being is work he hopes will continue with you, with me, and with the next generation. This is this; it is what you were looking for. It is his work, continued. It may not sound like him. It may not even end up where he would have taken it. But this is this, the evolution of a work begun and seeded in each of us. Let’s make him proud.
LOOKING OUT FOR NUMBER ONE
Bishop Spong gives God first place in his twelve theses. No surprises there. His challenge is not a new one to those who have been exploring Christianity with him over the past decades. Even those very new to his work will recognize his voice in point number one:

1. God
Understanding God in theistic categories as “a being, supernatural in power, dwelling somewhere external to the world and capable of invading the world with miraculous power” is no longer believable. Most God talk in liturgy and conversation has thus become meaningless.

I'll say.

In the spring of 2016, a colleague, irked by my reference to a claim that over half of United Church of Canada clergy “didn’t believe in a supernatural, theistic god,” decided to do a survey to find out just what clergy do believe. He designed it and sent it out to his Facebook friends and followers, and some closed United Church Facebook groups. After collecting over seven hundred and eighty replies, he was encouraged to reach a little further and sent the survey out to presbyteries across the denomination, gathering in a further six hundred and thirty-five respondents. The results represented 56% of active clergy and 31% of inactive clergy, those who are retired or not currently practicing ministry. They were significant numbers even though the survey method prevents us from extrapolating hard truths from its results.

The findings were discussed on a variety of platforms and in the media. Initially, they were used to champion the fact that 95% of all clergy in the United Church believe in God. That’s not a big surprise and it didn’t refute what I had said. The bigger question for me, and more the point of the quote I’d presented – that over fifty percent of all clergy in the United Church did not believe in a theistic, supernatural god – was what those clergy mean when they use the word “God” in their liturgies and sermons. I think that’s where Bishop Spong has been going all this time, too. What does the word “God” mean anymore?
To make the survey manageable, my colleague had googled the definitions of certain understandings of god that he felt were valid – atheism, agnosticism, deism, panentheism, and theism – and added to them the idea that God was a metaphor, something suggested by a friend. He used the definitions to create statements to assist respondents with their replies. I’ve further morphed his statements to answer my own question, “What do you mean when you use the word “god”? Here are their answers.

“Something greater than the universe, that includes and interpenetrates it.”
“The creator and ruler of the universe, revealed through supernatural revelation.”
“Something that can be only proven through reason and nature, not something supernatural.”
“What is good in the human condition.”
“Well, I don’t really know if there is such a thing because it can’t be known or proven …”
“I don’t use the word. I don’t believe in god(s).”

As it turned out, only slightly more than a third of respondents are using a traditional, theistic, supernatural understanding of god in their ministry. In the other section, more respondents reached beyond the prescribed responses to finish the sentence with the words “… a life presence” than those who typed in “God is Trinity.” Clearly, the quick brushstroke that claimed almost all clergy believe in God didn’t represent what is going on.
WHEN ONE DOESN’T ADD UP TO ONE
The other two-thirds of clergy who responded hold beliefs that don’t fit the grammar of church. They either don’t believe at all or the things they call God don’t necessarily allow for intervention in human affairs or the reception of prayers, aren’t limited by the concerns of the human species, can’t dictate scriptures or privilege one nation or football team over another. They are concepts that have been fleshed out in the halls of academia and claimed by a clergy cohort that has lost faith in the faith of our fathers. And concepts are exclusively tied, so far as we know, to the human brain.
Our liturgies, however, don’t celebrate the struggle the human brain experiences when it considers god beyond the childhood images of the long-bearded patriarch lounging on his golden throne. They fall into line with third or fourth century ideas of begotten sons and corporeal beings. Breathe on Me, Breath of God doesn’t sit well with “something greater than the universe, that includes and interpenetrates it.” Even the popular and so much more contemporary All Are Welcome by Marty Haugen speaks of “God’s children,” “God’s reign,” “God’s grace,” “God’s face,” and the ubiquitous “love of God.” These don’t translate into something that can only be proven through nature or reason. Nor do they work very well as metaphors for the human condition.
And that’s just a couple of hymns. The sacraments and festivals of the church must make those clergy, who do not hold belief in a traditional, theistic, supernatural god, wince, or as one colleague shared quietly with me at Presbytery one evening, cross their fingers behind their backs. The impregnation of Mary and the Christmas birth narratives; Easter; the language of baptism and communion; the absolution that comes after confession. It is hard to say “God be with you” and hold to an idea of god that is impersonal, universal, interpenetrating everything we know yet beyond anything we can know.
It is a simple fact that when we use the word “god,” many of us don’t mean God anymore. We mean something else.
MY NUMBER ONE
For many years, I was content to use “God” in my liturgies, prayers, sermons, and pastoral visits. I’d been raised in a liberal congregation with an erudite preacher and a Sunday School curriculum that actually taught me about a non-theistic god, even though I had no idea such a concept existed. It was just “God” to me. The love I felt in my family, the warmth of a contented friendship, the exhilaration of a day on the lake in the wind and the rain, the looking out for younger children, and my mother’s care for those in need. We could call all that “God”, though we usually only did that on Sunday. The rest of the time, we just called it love, friendship, fun, responsibility, and being good.
Over the course of my education, both in my undergrad and at theological college, new ideas about God fascinated me. Stretching myself past the simple clarity of my youth, the complexities of love, friendship, fun, responsibility, and being good, in other words, of God, were sometimes confusing, sometimes galvanizing, and sometimes heart-wrenching. I learned that love was costly; that friendship not always selfless; that fun could be okay in one situation and completely terrible in another; that responsibility was often too heavy a burden to be carried alone; and that being good was often exhausting and sometimes something I simply couldn’t do. And that all of it could be wrestled with using theological language that bound the struggle to an ancient, often illuminating story.
If we are to honor the work of Bishop Spong, we will need to take care of his Number One item: the problem of God. We need to learn to use language that captures the essence of what it is we wish to say but that no longer uses terms that obscure or distract. The best way I know how to do that is to get back to the mid-week language that described and haloed my childhood, the language that, on Sunday, was transformed into “God”. Not a letting go of what God has meant to us but a letting go of the three letters that limit our ability to express it well to one another. Beyond those letters, there is much to celebrate, nurture, engage, and transform. There is also, I believe, a much greater likelihood that we will really care for what it is we’ve called God.
~Gretta Vosper

Read the essay online here.
About the Author
The Rev. Gretta Vosper is a United Church of Canada minister who is an atheist. Her best selling books include With or Without God: Why The Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe, and Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief. She has also published three books of poetry and prayers.

Question & Answer
Janine from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, writes:

Question:
If Jesus was divinely conceived, then why do Matthew and Luke give us his lineage in their genealogies?

Answer: By Bishop John Shelby Spong

Dear Janine,
Your question bothered the early Church Fathers who probably added the words found in Luke 3:23 "as was supposed." They also spent lots of energy trying to reconcile the obvious differences in these two accounts of Jesus' ancestry. Your question also speaks to one of the many contradictions that are found in the Bible.
I think it is fair to say that the genealogies serve different purposes in the two gospels you mention. It was important to Matthew to link Jesus with the history of the Jews so he begins his genealogy with Abraham and works through the royal line of the Kings of Judah.
On the other hand, Luke, who appears to have been born a gentile and to have converted first to Judaism and then to Christianity, begins with Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus and works backward until he arrives at Adam, the presumed father of all humanity, which, of course, included the Gentiles. Luke also ignores the royal line of the Kings of Judah, once he gets past David. He traces the line from David to Nathan (see Luke 3:31). Indeed a comparison of the two genealogies (Matthew 1 and Luke 3) reveals that they do not agree in many details.
These early Christians defined God as a Being who was outside of life. When they believed they experienced God in Jesus, they had to explain how this external Being got into this human Jesus. The Virgin Birth was one way two of them, Matthew and Luke, addressed that question. You will not find a miraculous birth tradition in Paul, Mark or John. But Matthew and Luke, the authors of the Virgin tradition, also wanted people to know that Jesus was fully human. The genealogies served well that purpose. This explanation doesn't really close the circle on all the dimensions of the God people believed that they met in Jesus but no human definition of the Holy ever does.
~John Shelby Spong

Read and share online here.

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