[Dialogue] Progressing Spirit: 12/13/18, Lauren Van Ham: The Medicine of Intimacy: an Advent Challenge; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Dec 13 07:50:25 PST 2018
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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4553886032 #yiv4553886032templateBody .yiv4553886032mcnTextContent, #yiv4553886032 #yiv4553886032templateBody .yiv4553886032mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4553886032 #yiv4553886032templateFooter .yiv4553886032mcnTextContent, #yiv4553886032 #yiv4553886032templateFooter .yiv4553886032mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } In what ways will I choose to become more intimate this holiday season and in the New Year?
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The Medicine of Intimacy: an Advent Challenge
Column by Lauren Van Ham
December 13, 2018At the beginning of November, I dizzied myself in a dervish with 7500 participants at the Parliament of World Religions. In a series of keynote presentations spanning Peace & Reconciliation, Climate, Women, Indigenous Voices, and the Next Generation, one unifying message was consistently offered, “Humans have caused this.” Whatever the challenge before us, it is our species who has created the conditions for our current reality.Not an easy pill to swallow. And we might well agree that this is part of the problem: we’re not swallowing. Many of us are able to read the headlines or hear the news while simultaneously numbing out to, “business as usual:”“Conservationists have issued a demand for urgent international action after a major report uncovered an unprecedented crisis in nature that threatens to devastate the world economy and imperil humanity itself.”i“Last Friday, just hours after the last funeral of a victim of the Pittsburgh shooting, a man with a history of misogyny online walked into a yoga studio and killed two women in Tallahassee. Just a few months earlier, one of the women killed at the yoga studio, and her father were among the many families that swarmed Florida’s state capitol after the Parkland high school massacre in February that left 17 students and teachers dead. Reports have said that several of the Thousand Oaks survivors had escaped the mass shooting that left 58 people dead at a Las Vegas country western festival last year.”ii“The world’s leading climate scientists have warned there is only 12 years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.”iiiThis is NOT business as usual. We are being asked, right now, to embed in all of our day-to-day activities, behaviors and actions that care for one another, for all species, and for the generations to come. We created this complexity – in all its genius, and in all its messiness – and now we are the ones to bring ourselves into a safer, sustainable reality. There is no guarantee that we can, or will. Understandably, the level of release and reinvention before us can feel so daunting – so frightening – that disconnecting or compartmentalizing becomes a natural default.We know we can be a fear-prone species, and we have been sold a story that thrives on “independence,” but is that who we are really? The antidote is intimacy. Intimacy with ourselves, and with one another. Somewhere along the way, intimacy became VERY unpopular. It’s not nearly as convenient as anonymity, and it requires an investment of time when many of us anxiously confess that we have none.In the days of Advent, and in the darkening days of the Winter Solstice, we enter the womb (a very intimate space) so that we can better perceive and embrace Emmanuel, “God with Us.”In that fecund darkness, we’re encouraged to welcome our fears, vulnerability and disbelief. I’m thinking of Mary, a virgin, who was told by an angel that she would be impregnated by the Divine; or Joseph, being shown in a dream, that he was to name his immaculately-conceived son, “Jesus;” and those shepherds shaking (!!!) as they were directed by celestial visitors to go to Bethlehem. In each of these, the individual faces the unexpected, an uncomfortable disruption in business as usual.During one of the sessions I attended at the Parliament, a presenter told the room, packed with enthusiastic listeners, that she no longer uses Amazon…and that she’s inviting her congregation to do likewise. The room fell s-i-l-e-n-t. And reading this right now, some of us might feel a similar welling-up from within, “Not my Amazon!!”But isn’t this a rigorous example of our loss of intimacy? Being seduced by an apparent convenience over a possibly transformative connection? What are our alternatives?Maybe like you, my morning coffee is more than a caffeinated beverage, it’s a ritual that I call, “ordinary/extraordinary.” It’s so mundane, it’s sacred. Knowing this and not wanting to be unappreciative, I traveled to Guatemala in 2011…to make it intimate.This is Raniero, and his niece, Flor. Raniero coordinates a Fair Trade coffee cooperative in Guatemala that supplies parts of Europe and a large grocery chain in the US with fair trade coffee beans. Upon landing in Guatemala City, Raniero and Flor drove me out to the shores of Lake Atitlan to meet Maria Luis.To find her, we scrambled up a steep, jungle-covered mountainside. Maria Luis, very much at-work, was expecting us and smiled as she shared the story of her organic, fair trade coffee cherries (beans), start-to-finish. She gestured up the slope, explaining the land was hers and that she oversees a women-owned collective.In the months between the planting and harvest, she and the women cook and sell their meals for folks in town. That year, the profits from their coffee crop were to be pooled to create a covered structure to better support their catering business.Caressing the coffee cherries in her basket, Maria Luis gently laughed, “My husband left a long time ago… he said he couldn’t understand me.” I wept as I listened. I was so touched by her vision, by the pride she held for her work, by the joy she exhibited in sharing her life with strangers. A cherry slipped from her basket and I scrambled to pick it up.These coffee cherries were suddenly worth a fortune. They were funding Maria Luis’s sons’ dreams of attending college! Never again could a bean fall to my floor and find its eternal fate beneath my refrigerator. Intimacy is defined as “being familiar or belonging together.” Since returning home from Guatemala, I cringe a little watching our country’s many abandoned, unfinished cups of coffee. Warm, strong memories of Maria Luis remain. New Testament scriptures this season declare,“And the Word became flesh and lived among us…” – John 1:14Fair Trade is one way – in a growing collection of others – to practice the medicine of intimacy, to feel the Divine living here among us. The movement exists to ensure farmers and artisans receive a just wage, that their villages and towns retain some of the profits, and that the land supporting these endeavors is tended in a life-sustaining way both for today, and decades to come. Fair Trade is built on personal relationships between the workers, distributors and buyers. It’s not only wonderfully intimate, it’s also a powerful vote for an economic model that values equality, working together and restoring Earth’s resources. And like all movements, Fair Trade works best when lots of us play.Humans have caused this. And God is with us. Intimacy lives here among us, patiently and enthusiastically waiting to be employed. Here is my Advent Challenge for all of us:In what ways will I choose to become more intimate this holiday season and in the New Year?Be creative! Lean in to relationships – especially the ones that raise fear or threaten inconvenience. Ask for help from the Divinity present all around you. We can’t do this alone and we’re not supposed to. It’s Intimate.~ Lauren Van Ham
Click here to read online and to share your thoughtsAbout the Author
Lauren Van Ham was born and raised beneath the big sky of the Midwest, Lauren holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, Naropa University and The Chaplaincy Institute. Following her ordination in 1999, Lauren served as an interfaith chaplain in both healthcare (adolescent psychiatry and palliative care), and corporate settings (organizational development and employee wellness). Her passion and training in the fine arts, spirituality and Earth’s teachings has supported her specialization in eco-ministry, grief & loss, and sacred activism. Lauren’s work with Green Sangha (a Bay Area-based non-profit) is featured in Renewal, a documentary celebrating the efforts of environmental activism taking place in religious America. Her essay, “Way of the Eco-Chaplain,” appears in the collection, Ways of the Spirit: Voices of Women. Lauren tends a private spiritual direction practice and serves as Dean for The Chaplaincy Institute in Berkeley, CA.*************************************
i https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/30/global-wildlife-populations-fall-60-wwf-declares-state-emergency/
ii https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/11/08/the-thousand-oaks-massacre-is-more-evidence-the-u-s-needs-effective-gun-control-now/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ddced7c5c1db
iii https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-warming-must-not-exceed-15c-warns-landmark-un-report |
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Question & Answer
Q: By Jack
What gets me miffed is using the word Christ without ‘the’ before it. The lack of this preposition before Christ denotes exclusivity, something, I’m definitely sure God also gets miffed at. This is a Greek word added to Jesus’ name in the early years of Christianity and had the preposition ‘the’ used. Who are we to be so arrogant that we can limit an infinite God to only Jesus, when we know in our hearts that the God-man has been on the earth more times in different guises than we can count. So, we need to get honest and not be hypocritical, since that action is the one action that God finds the most difficult to forgive.
A: By Rev. Roger Wolsey
Dear Jack,That’s a truly interesting question and take on things you’re presenting. I hear you. As many have put it, “The Cosmic Christ” transcends Christianity and is something that is, has always been, and always will be. Christianity doesn’t have a monopoly on this. So, dropping “the” as part of the Christ can lead people to think that it’s a uniquely Christian concept and personage.That said, a case can be made that the concept of the Christ is in fact a Judeo-Christian one. The word “Christ” comes from Χριστός, Christós, a Greek word meaning “[the] anointed [one].” It is the equivalent of the Hebrew word masiach, or Messiah. With this in mind, to be the Christ, or Messiah, is to be “the anointed one of God” – literally, to have oil poured on one because God has chosen the person for a special task. This Hebrew concept came to refer specifically to a title for the savior and redeemer who would bring salvation to the whole House of Israel. Christians, of course, have expanded this understanding of salvation to include Gentiles, not just Jews.Let’s consider the following insights of a more conservative Christian writer:“Priests and kings were anointed, and occasionally prophets. Kings were anointed during their coronation rather than receiving a crown. Even though prophets and priests were anointed, the phrase “anointed one” or “the Lord’s anointed” was most often used to refer to a king. For instance, David used it many times to refer to King Saul, even when Saul was trying to murder David and David was on the verge of killing Saul to defend himself: Far be it from me because of the LORD that I should do this thing to my lord, the LORD’S anointed (mashiach), to stretch out my hand against him, since he is the LORD’S anointed (mashiach)” - 1 Samuel 24:6. The overriding biblical imagery of the word “Messiah” or “Christ” is that of a king chosen by God. Often in the Old Testament, God would tell a prophet to go anoint someone and proclaim him king. The act of anointing with sacred oil emphasized that it was God himself who had ordained a person and given him authority to act as his representative. I remember being quite surprised when I first learned this. If you would have asked me to describe Jesus’ identity, “Son of God” or “Suffering Savior” would have been my two best guesses. “King” didn’t even make the list. While Jesus also has a priestly and a prophetic role, the prominent idea within the title “Christ” is actually that of a king.”So the Christ is not merely a term that is synonymous for all other demi-gods that have been part of global culture, but a very specific “god-man” (who is often thought of as being a mere human who God has chosen for a liberating role to play). But again, we do well to recall the various persons who were considered by the Jewish people as being anointed messiahs and saviors.Moreover, some would contend that placing “the” in front of Christ also limits how this aspect of God shows up in the world, because “the” refers to a singular – as opposed to “them/they.”But back to your point that we’d do well to have a more humble and generous understanding of The Christ, let me close by sharing these words:“from a progressive Christian perspective, Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life,” and all who follow Jesus’ way, teachings, and example — the way of unconditional love, of radical hospitality, of loving-kindness, of compassion, of mercy, of prophetic speaking truth to power, the way of forgiveness, of reconciliation, and the pursuit of restorative justice – by whatever name, and even if they’ve never even heard of Jesus, are fellow brothers & sisters in Christ and his Way. To the extent that other world religions are about instilling, fostering, and nurturing those universal values – we see [the] Christ in them.”In The Christ,~ Rev. Roger Wolsey
Click here to read and share onlineAbout the Author
Rev. Roger Wolsey is an ordained United Methodist pastor who directs the Wesley Foundation at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is author of Kissing Fish: christianity for people who don’t like christianity; The Kissing Fish Facebook page; Roger’s Blog on Patheos “The Holy Kiss” |
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This Rabbi On That Rabbi
A modern Portland, Oregon rabbi explains Jesus’s messages in a 6-Part Video Series. View this exclusive video content below.
Part 3 Heaven (on their minds)
Heaven. It’s quite a large concept.
Whether you believe in Heaven or not, it behooves you to think, “What did this idea mean to this group of people who so long ago seemed so obsessed with it as a concept?”
The people of the ancient Near East had Heaven on their minds.
What did they understand by this concept and what can we use the idea of Heaven to mean to us in our lives?
The birth of the idea of Heaven in the ancient Near East
In the beginning books of the Bible, there was Earth, and there was water below, and there was water above.
No early book of the Bible makes any reference to a place called Heaven where the good get rewarded or another place where the wicked are punished.
How did the firmaments above become a destination for the blessed? Is this land of judgment even what Jesus and his contemporaries were thinking and talking about?
Let’s look at this for a moment.
The Gospels in the New Testament are not very detailed with accounts of Heaven as the location where God’s justice would be meted out. This is understandable because the early Hebrew books in the Bible also have different notions of God than do the later books. Early descriptions of God did not include God being either everywhere or all good. As you know, the God depicted in the very earliest books of the Bible represent a more jealous totalitarian ruler who has to ask the first humans to reveal to him their locations. (While I’m a big fan of reading these lines metaphorically today, their original readers tended not see these words as such.)
But God’s character changes. God becomes more of a constitutional monarch (in Abraham’s time) and then a body-less, name-less deity of history (in Moses’ time).
It is only much, much later – the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE – that the character of God becomes accepted and understood to be omnipresent and omnipotent – everywhere existing and in control of everything.
There is an interesting effect that this notion of God brings with it – theodicy: the question of how bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people.
The solution to this problem probably has its origins around the time of the Maccabees – 132 BCE – when so many “good Jewish men” who were fighting the Greek culture were being killed.
It seemed awful to the average person that they should not be given some place of eternal and reverential rest. God will make it alright in the world to come, was the solution to this dilemma.
Martyrdom could now make sense to the average person. It could serve a redemptive and holy purpose.
The idea of a life after death was not a new idea. After all, we know that the Egyptians buried their loved ones with possessions to take to the next land.
But while this more ‘modern view’ was contemporaneous to Jesus’s time, it was not what Jesus was talking about. when he spoke of heaven.
What Jesus meant by Heaven
When Jesus referred to Heaven, he was not talking about a location in the beyond. The Kingdom of Heaven (used by Matthew as synonymous with The Kingdom of God) that Jesus was talking about was a reality to be experienced here on earth, in the here and now.
Heaven is not above and beyond in a different land. It’s here.
We see much evidence of this.
We can see this clearly as Jesus is recorded having told his disciples how to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
The gospels of Luke says the Kingdom of Heaven is not without, but it is within a person.
Luke 17:20-21
When asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The kingdom of God will not come with observable signs. Nor will people say, ‘Look, here it is,’ or ‘There it is.’ For you see, the kingdom of God is in your midst.”
Thomas 3b
The kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are and who experience that poverty. Let me paraphrase Jesus to try to help us get our minds around the notion of a location. Jesus’s words could have been something like this:
“If you have a mystical experience, if you see that the kingdom is within, if you are born in spirit, if you are born from above, then you will be in the Kingdom of Heaven – you will be in the Kingdom of God.”
Hebrew and Heaven
There is a Hebrew phrase that might help: irat ha’shamiyim. These two words often get translated to the phrase: “the fear of Heaven.” And, indeed, that is a good translation of those two words.
The word “SHaMayim” meant the firmaments above, and Heaven is a good enough translation of that. “Ira” is a biblical notion for ‘fear.’
Except the phrase, “fear of Heaven,” wasn’t ever a phrase that was supposed to mean we should be scared of not getting into an eternal place of salvation.
That notion of Heaven as a resting place for good souls to have eternal life had yet to be developed.
“Fear of Heaven,” as a phrase, meant (and is still used to mean) someone who believes that God is in control of their life.
Ask any rabbi you can find. You will get the same explanation: irat ha’shamiyim or ira shmaiyma is a designation of a person who believes, in the sense of a surrendering of one’s will to that of God.
Words are limited. The word Heaven – no matter what our contemporary culture uses it to mean – was used as a synonym for living a religious experience of this world.
When the phrase is used in the Lord’s Prayer it means . . .
The Lord’s Prayer, famous throughout all of Christendom, has an interesting couplet that shows this notion of Heaven being a place on earth, an experience.
The specific words in question are “thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”
It is best to look at those lines as a question and answer.
“Thy kingdom come?” – When is the kingdom coming?
“Thy will be done.” – The kingdom is coming and will be here when “God’s will is being done.”
This is a Jewish notion, a very Jewish notion: that Heaven on Earth is not something that we are waiting for – it is not a waiting for a savior to make this world a better place for us ,but that it is something incumbent upon us to bring to pass.
In conclusion
When will it be Heaven on Earth? When we see that it is Heaven on Earth and when we will it to be so.
When we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and take care of those who are in need That’s when we will experience Heaven on Earth.
That’s what Jesus was talking about.
That is the meaning of the Bible in Jesus’s time. It is a picture of peacefulness, of feeling a sense of salvation - a word which comes from the word ‘salve’- a wonderful feeling of healing and wellbeing. It is not surprising that we describe in with the word ‘Heaven’ an uplifting and transcendent experience. It is not that we’re going to get a room upgrade in the world to come, but that our experience in this life will be evermore blessed.
With Love, Rabbi Brian
Rabbi Brian is the C.E.O. of Religion-Outside-The-Box, an internet-based, non-denominational congregation nourishing spiritual hunger. Find out more about newsletter, podcasts, videos, and other good ROTB.org is doing for thousands every week.
This Rabbi on That Rabbi is a co-production of Religion-Outside-The-Box and Progressing Spirit. This is a 6-part video series also available for purchase here, it is made available to our subscribers to purchase as a gift or for a study group - the course contains six videos and audios along with their written companion PDFs. |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
Miracles in the Bible, Part II
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong on September 6, 2006
There is a great desire among religious people for quick answers to complex issues. “What is the meaning of prayer? What do you believe about life after death? Do you believe in Miracles?”
These are questions that I am often asked when giving lectures, where I am limited to only a few minutes for each response. The fact is that none of these questions can be competently addressed until I have unloaded the dated and inoperative assumptions out of which they so frequently have arisen. It is, for example, difficult to address questions about prayer, God or miracles until some time is spent clearing out the intellectual debris about what prayer is not (adult letters addressed to a Santa Claus-type God), or what God is not (a supernatural parental Mr. Fixit in the sky), or what miracles are not (divine intervention to rescue us from peril). When I hear someone talk about the miracles that they believe have happened in their lives, I wonder if they have ever stopped to think about the hundreds of thousands of people who lived in similar circumstances where there were no miracles.This long and roundabout introduction is designed to warn my readers that, if this series of columns on the miracle stories found in the Bible is to be worthwhile, I will have to prepare the ground to give us the context in which the real issues can be addressed. Only then can appropriate understandings be formed. I intend to go slowly into this process for the theological implications that are involved are serious. I will be happy if I can lead my readers to at least one new insight in each column as I pursue this topic periodically through the coming fall.I begin by challenging some common but uninformed ideas. Most people assume that the Bible is filled with stories of supernatural happenings and miraculous interventions. Yet in the whole of the Bible, miracle stories are found in only a very small number of places. Indeed there are only three cycles of stories in the entire biblical drama that contain widespread accounts of supernatural miracles.
First, miracles are encountered in the Moses-Joshua narratives in the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) followed by the Book of Joshua in which Moses’ successor is said to be able to act with the power of Moses. It is too early in this study to draw any conclusions about connections between the miracles attributed to Moses and those attributed to Jesus, but we might note that Moses is mentioned in the gospels 37 times, in the book of Acts 19 times, in the Pauline epistles 8 times, in non-Pauline epistles, especially the Epistle to the Hebrews, 13 times and once in the book of Revelation. That at the very least gives us some sense that the two narratives were not completely separate from each other.The miracles attached to Moses are almost all nature miracles and some of them are quite bizarre. Moses, for example is said to be equipped with the ability to turn his staff into a snake, to stick his hand into his tunic and to pull it out filled with leprosy and then to return it to his tunic in order to pull it out clean. These were signs supposedly given him by God so that he could successfully negotiate the release of God’s people from slavery in Egypt. When these miracles proved to be inadequate for that task, Moses’ power over nature was heightened into the stories of the plagues that were inflicted on Egypt, beginning with turning the Nile River, the lifeline of the Egyptian economy, into blood and ending with the killing of the firstborn male in every Egyptian household on the night of thePassover. Nature miracles continued to mark the life of Moses after the Exodus from Egypt with the splitting of the Red Sea being the best known. There were also the stories of the miraculous raining down from heaven of bread called manna upon the starving Israelites in the wilderness and the miraculous flight of quail to provide “flesh to eat” that would balance their diet.It is interesting to note that in each of these miracle stories, Moses was the instrument of God’s supernatural power. That power did not reside in him. It is also worth noting that some of those Moses stories reveal a use of supernatural power that would, by our standards today, be declared to be acts of immorality. The enemies that God seems to hate are the same ones that the people of the Jewish tribe hate.The plagues inflicted by an angry God, are designed to destroy the lives of those who are the enemies of the tribe for which this God is the tribal deity. That is simply not worthy divine behavior. The biblical portrayal of God as passing through the land of Egypt indiscriminately murdering the firstborn male in every Egyptian household on the night of the Passover, needs to be named for the immoral act that it is. So my study leads me to challenge the assumption that if something is described as a miracle it is necessarily either good or moral.Joshua, Moses’ chosen successor, was also said to have been endowed with Moses’ same God-given power, so nature miracles also appear to mark his life. Two of these miracles are quite well known. First Joshua, like Moses, splits a body of water so that the people of Israel could pass through it on dry land. This occurred in Joshua’s invasion of the land of Canaan. Following that “miraculous” crossing through the flooded Jordan River, Joshua then proceeded to rout in battle the Canaanites, whose ancestors had lived on that land for literally hundreds of years.The Bible provides Joshua with the moral pretext that God had promised Abraham that this land would be the possession of his descendants. If such a promise were given, it would have been about 1850 B.C.E. Joshua is dated about 1200 B.C.E. So for some 650 years no one had told the Canaanites that they were squatters on Jewish land! That is obviously not a God the Canaanites would have had any interest in worshiping.However, Joshua was not through with nature miracles for just a few chapters later in the book that bears his name, Israel is at war with the Amorites. Israel is winning the battle, but the sun begins to sink in the west and that will provide the Amorites with sufficient cover of darkness to escape death at the hands of the Israelites. So Joshua prayed to God and God stops the sun in the sky, the first recorded instance of daylight-saving time, for the sole purpose of allowing Israel to slaughter more of their enemies. Is that an appropriate divine intervention? Could the Amorites ever worship so vindictive a deity? If we defend the literal occurrences of the supernatural, then we have to face the question as to whether God-sanctioned actions might sometimes be evil. That is a conclusion few people entertain when they think of the miraculous.The second series of miraculous biblical accounts is found in the Elijah-Elisha cycle of stories recorded between I Kings 17 and II Kings 13. Once again, we note that these are primarily nature miracle stories. Elijah is portrayed as having the ability to call down fire from heaven to ignite his sacrifice in a duel with the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel after which Elijah calmly beheads them all. Later, Elijah uses this heavenly firepower to burn up his enemies. Both Elijah and Elisha are said to be able to manipulate the forces of nature sufficiently to produce a drought. Both Elijah and Elisha have stories told about them in which they too are able to split the waters of the Jordan River to walk across on dry land.Healing miracles, however, do make their appearance in the Bible in this Elijah-Elisha cycle. These two prophets are also said to be the first people in the Bible who have the power to raise the dead back to life. Elijah, like Moses, exercised enormous influence on the development of the sacred story of the Jews and this influence is seen in the fact that Elijah’s name receives mention 27 times in the gospels, once in a Pauline epistle and once in the epistle of James.So long before the time of Jesus, we discover that miracles are not something unknown in the Jewish faith story, but that they are limited to the two major heroes of Judaism, Moses, the father of the law and Elijah, the father of the prophetic movement as well as their immediate successors. When we do turn to examine the miracle stories attributed to Jesus, we find that they fall into three categories: nature miracles, healing miracles and raising the dead miracles, and that each category has been previously introduced into the biblical story in these two earlier cycles of miracle stories. Some intermingling of these three traditions would not be surprising.A second popular assumption that needs to be questioned, arises when we realize that it was not until some 40 to 70 years after the earthly life of Jesus came to an end, that the gospels were written. They are not eyewitness reports. Can we find any evidence of miracles being associated with Jesus before the gospels were written? The fact is that we cannot. There are no miracle stories in Paul who wrote between 50 and 64. Had Paul never heard of this tradition? Had he heard about it and dismissed it as not authentic? Was the miracle tradition added to the memory of Jesus well after the fact? Giving at least some credibility to this latter possibility, we note that there are no miracle stories in either the Q document or the Gospel of Thomas, which are the only other two sources that at least some scholars think might be earlier than the gospels.For now I ask you simply to absorb these facts and to entertain these questions. It is too early for conclusions.Nothing has yet been proved. An argument from silence is not a strong argument. However, if Paul had no need to buttress his claims for the presence of God as the operative force in the life of Jesus, at least I think we might suggest that the power of Christ was not originally attached to his ability to do miraculous acts. That raises the possibility that miracle stories were added to the memory of Jesus for some purpose other than that they were recordings of things that happened. We will revisit this possibility again before this series is complete.That is as far as I can go this week. I hope the discussion is beginning to intrigue my readers.~ John Shelby Spong |
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