[Dialogue] 5/24/18, Progressing Spirit: Vosper: So what happens now?; Spong revisited

Thu May 24 07:20:20 PDT 2018

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So what happens now?

 Essay by Rev. Gretta Vosper on May 24, 2018

For six years, I spent an invigorating half hour (or more) every Tuesday morning sitting across the table from one of Canada’s most outspoken evangelical leaders, Charles McVety. Dedicated microphones were wired up between us and we explored issues on the “Culture Wars” segment of Toronto’s most popular morning talk show. I was often asked by my own supporters, away from the show, how I could bear to have a conversation with Charles whose views were framed with a stalwart biblical literacy and shared with a vehemence that sparked in the space between us. But when the mics were off, we enjoyed a repartee that allowed us to laugh and enjoy one another moments after our flying epithets had done their work and lured the listening public to their telephones.
Our host was the brilliant John Oakley who navigated the issues of the day with a deft hand, lifting up whatever tidbit he knew would cause the greatest reaction among his listening public and “light up the board”, so to speak, with callers eager to applaud or call out either Charles or me. At the end of each session, I would not have been able to tell you if John’s perspective aligned with mine or with Charles’; he was an artist in his craft.
Though Charles was nimble in the creation of epithets, one of them was used more frequently than others. If you’re able to make the sound “’k” crackle with intensity without sending spit flying from your mouth, you’ll be able to replicate the way in which Charles tossed the term “Christless Christian” at me. As the leader of an evangelical Christian academy with locations in Toronto and in Korea, Charles was devoted to his Christ and decidedly antagonistic to any other idea of what Christ might mean if it wasn’t exactly as he imagined it. But then, I doubt I ever really gave him an understanding of what Christ meant to me; he simply knew that I was a critical thinker and, I suppose, imagined the dissolution of my belief in anything he understood Christ to be in the work of such a thinking process.
As I write, Easter lies behind us by a few weeks. Traditionally, across all iterations of the Christian faith and as understood by most of non-Christians, Easter is clearly understood to be the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus. What that actually means to any one iteration of Christianity or any one person within it, is considerably less clear.
For some people, like Charles, the Easter story means that, after his crucifixion and burial, Jesus was resuscitated and returned to bodily form. For others, it means there was a transformation that took place after Jesus’ death and which, in some inexplicable way, returned Jesus to life in a sort of mystical manner. Others believe that Jesus is momentarily reconstituted in the sacrament of the Eucharist, whole and hanging on the cross, in order to be laden with each week’s accumulation of the peoples’ sins on Saturday night or Sunday morning. Some hold “Jesus” and “Christ” as separate before and after resurrection realities, each entitled to its own exploration and understanding. Still others believe that the biblical witness to resurrection, though it may not point to any physical reality or even mystical apparitions, simply proves that something powerful must have happened, even if we cannot possibly comprehend it.
I’m going to go with the last “explanation”, if we might even call it that. More, I think, it is an excuse conjured to provide for the lack of an explanation. It allows us to argue our allegiance to Christianity without having to come up with an answer to one of the most ambiguous claims in human history. It literally excuses us from accountability. Many of my progressive colleagues will sneer at such an assertion, arguing that to reduce the mystery of the resurrection to an excuse is to deny the many splendid contemporary explanations of this mystery, all of which point to a deeper, richer understanding than all the others. Let them sneer.
At a homiletics festival in Orlando many years ago, I hurriedly copied down Marcus Borg’s memorized answer to the question, “Who was Jesus?” He’d been preparing for a talk show and was worried that he would have too short a time to share his understandings so he took on the task of creating a concise explanation, laboring over it to bring it to a concise perfection. As it turned out, the host never asked him the question. But not wanting all his work to have come to naught, he shared it with the eager crowd at that year’s festival. Once back home, I typed it out and posted it on a bulletin board at West Hill United Church, the congregation I serve, where it remained for many years.
True to Marcus’ acute and rigorous intellect, it deconstructed traditional understandings and offered in their place a number of starting points from which our explorations might take off. In less than forty-five seconds. The man – Borg, not Jesus – was an intellectual miracle himself.

[Jesus] was a peasant, which tells us about his social class.  Clearly, he was brilliant.  His use of language was remarkable and poetic – filled with images and stories. He had a metaphoric mind.  He was not an ascetic but world-affirming with a zest for life, and there was a social-political passion to him like a Ghandi or a Martin Luther King.  He challenged the domination system of his day.  He was a religious ecstatic, a Jewish mystic, if you will, for whom God was an experiential reality, and as such, he was also a healer.  And there seems to have been a spiritual presence around him like that reported of St. Francis or the Dali Lama.  And I suggest that as a figure of history, he was an ambiguous figure; you could experience him and figure that he was insane, as his family did, or that he was simply eccentric, or that he was a dangerous threat. Or you could conclude that he was filled with the spirit of God.[i]

Clearly, Marcus was handing us a gift: the accumulated effort of years of scholarship processed with an intimate appreciation of the power Jesus had wielded over centuries of Christianity. He spoke of Jesus, not of Christ, but it was as though he was inviting each of us to find our own Christs behind a man who, for Marcus, was very human, and very real.
And, I expect, most of us left that lecture in awe of Marcus if not also of the human Jesus he described. Too, I think we left grasping to hold onto the many questions Marcus’ description had raised for us, and the challenge of grafting a “post-critical-naivete Jesus” onto the pre-critical understandings held by many members of our diverse congregations. The record of Jesus is scanty and contradictory, the result of decades of oral transmission. It is terribly subject to the overlay of our own personal assumptions and expectations, as Albert Schweitzer warned us it would only ever be. One has only to consider the wealth of the Vatican, Jesus’ most globally-recognized posthumous marketing team, and the man’s arguments against the accumulation of wealth for one’s own purposes to see the ease with which our prejudices have laid Jesus at our own feet rather than the other way around.
So what of the resurrected “Christ”? What can we do with that?
While at theological college, I worked my way through countless understandings of who or what the Christ was to many Christian apologists – scholars writing to prove Christian claims correct – whose works we were required to engage. Added to that were the many compelling arguments made by more contemporary scholars, including Marcus Borg, that worked their way into my own understanding. In the end, I think I became a classic “something must have happened” believer, perhaps because cobbling together the myriad arguments into a cohesive and substantial whole was simply a feat to which I was intellectually unsuited. Some will undoubtedly say that recognizing that ineptitude is the beginning of understanding; it is only when we leave behind the record and the arguments that we can ever really “experience” Christ. But that argument is, for this rational thinker, equally unsuited to the task; the story needs an anchor, and that anchor, if it is to mean anything at all, must be grounded in what we know to be factually true, how we understand those facts, and where our experience takes us, given that knowledge. I have been soothed in my pursuit, to a remarkable extent, by art historian, Thomas de Wesselow’s arguments in The Sign: The Shroud of Turin and the Birth of Christianity. I can feel Marcus, Dom Crossan, perhaps even Bishop Spong cringing when I say that, but I leave you to explore it and consider its challenges to our patchwork understandings. Perhaps Thomas is to the resurrection story what Northrop Frye was to biblical studies: a scholar bringing the tools of an entirely different discipline to bear on our most treasured artefacts.
For me, the best way for me to express the concept of Christ emerges from my accumulated understanding in the same way that Marcus’ Jesus emerged from his. I cannot extricate one or another source of that understanding; to do so would be like taking one blue piece of glass and using it to explain the incredible impact of the windows at Coventry Cathedral, created from the shards of windows shattered in the bombing attacks during the Second World War.  Christ is embedded in me as a compulsion to live out my humanity, in my time and in my way, as humanly and humanely as possible. That sounds repetitive, but years of reflection, reading, and the detritus of life that gathers in the human heart, have left me with those few words. It means sacrificing my own privileges, many of which have accumulated as the result of a globalized Christianity, to the scathing rebuke of those who do not share in those privileges. It is, as many would say, the work of following “the Way” of Jesus, as if we could ever really construct what that way might actually be with any more uniformity than is realized in the quest for the historical Jesus.
But I am made unease by these assertions. I suspect you know why. Using the exclusive lexicon of Christianity makes our work meaningless to more and more people. Contrary to the assertions made by Mike Pence that Christianity is on the rise, statistics prove otherwise. And alongside them, mirroring Christianity’s downward trajectory, speed the levels of voluntarism, philanthropy, civic engagement, and the critical mass required to maintain social democracies that see all life as sacred – by which I mean, so significantly crucial to the earth’s story that we cannot risk losing or desecrating it, even and especially if we don’t yet or never do understand it – and so work to engage, protect, and embrace it. We lose more than our congregational health when our numbers decline; we lose any hope of being what liberal and progressive Christianity has modelled as “Christ” in the world.
And so, as you know, I eschew the language of traditional Christianity (and liberal, and progressive) and work, instead, to model and inspire others with how it is we might live, loving and celebrating life in its many guises and wrestling with the innumerable challenges that doing so presents. All the while, I remain confident that while it may be the least popular way, it remains the only way to reduce Christianity to its most essential truth – that we must love one another – and tell that story to a new and very precarious world.

~ Rev. Gretta Vosper

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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.

[i] Marcus Borg, Lecture, Homiletics Festival, Orlando, 1998

Question & Answer

Q: Via a Chinese server at a neighborhood Chinese restaurant

Would you like the menu for Chinese people?

A: By Rev. David M. Felten

At first, this question may not seem to have any bearing on theology or spirituality – but bear with me. I think it’s a great metaphor for one of the biggest challenges facing Progressive Christianity.
Not long ago, I was travelling and stopped in at a neighborhood Chinese Food restaurant in Las Vegas. It was out-of-the-way and quiet. As the server handed me the menu, I asked, “What do you do well here? What would you recommend?” He looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.
“Recommend this?!”, pointing at the menu. “I don’t like any of this. I’m from China – and as a Chinese person, I can’t stand any of this Americanized Chinese food: Kung Pao Chicken, General Tso’s Chicken…(he shudders).”
“Wow,” I said. “Thanks for your honesty. Can you tell me what you’d recommend out of this food that you can’t stand? Anything here close to what you’d really get in China?”
“No, no, no…” he trailed off. Then his face lit up with an idea, “Would you like the menu for Chinese people?”
I said, “There’s a separate menu for Chinese people?”
A few moments later he returned with a different colored menu emblazoned with Chinese characters. When I opened it, the selections were in Chinese with brief English translations. Among the entrees, I couldn’t find one thing that was the same as the “American” Chinese food menu. I asked again, “Anything you’d recommend from this menu?”
My server proceeded to gleefully describe his favorite dishes – one of them “just like they make in Shanghai.” His recommendations were amazing. Who knew that sautéed pickles with string beans and garlic could be so delicious?
As I was enjoying my Shanghai dumplings, it dawned on me: this whole “secret-menu-for-the-in-crowd” is exactly what goes on in many of our churches. Most of our “customers” are perfectly happy with the dumbed-down, sugared-up “American” Christianity that is on the menu at most of our conventional churches. They have no idea that there’s a completely separate menu for those who are looking for something more authentic and true to its origins.
Isn’t that what we’re trying to do by exposing people to the study of the Historical Jesus? When we engage in studying history and the critical study of the Bible, we’re trying to get back to what following Jesus looked like before the creeds sent Christianity off into a theologically high-fructose, MSG-laced coma. It might taste good in the moment, but it’s not authentic. Plus (stretching the Chinese Food metaphor to the breaking point), you may feel full when you leave the restaurant but are left feeling empty soon afterwards.
Anyone who’s eaten with me knows I’m not an insufferable foodie. But I do like to try new things, especially if it connects me with a broader appreciation for cultural differences and the varieties of the human experience. But if you’re like me, you’ve been called an arrogant elitist (and worse!) for simply trying to expose people to the reality that there’s “another menu.” Preferring their familiar sugar-laden Orange Chicken to anything more authentic, they don’t even want to know there’s an alternative menu. But for me, once you know there’s a whole new world of theological flavors and cultural insights available just for the asking, there’s no going back.
So, get out there pastors, preachers, and layfolk! If you’re at a church that is stuck clinging to the saccharine “Americanized” theological menu, start putting together an alternative menu. Start with some simple appetizers (that Genesis has two creation stories written by different authors at different times that were never meant to be sequential) and work your way up to the more sophisticated entrees (questioning the physical resurrection, opposing substitutionary atonement, etc.).
Ask people the theological equivalent of, “Would you like the menu for Chinese people?” and start walking them through the options. Remind them that this is a menu of choices, not the ultimate determination of one’s eternal salvation. They can stick with the familiar and remain blissfully content with their “Americanized” Christianity OR they can be liberated to begin a theological adventure that will expand their horizons and deepen their experience of the Divine.
So, “Would you like the menu for Chinese people?” Open up a new world of honesty, authenticity, and an appreciation for the variety of the human theological experience.
~ Rev. David M. Felten

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About the Author
Rev. David M. Felten is a full-time pastor at The Fountains, a United Methodist Church in Fountain Hills, Arizona. David and fellow United Methodist Pastor, Jeff Procter-Murphy, are the creators of the DVD-based discussion series for Progressive Christians, “Living the Questions”.
A co-founder of the Arizona Foundation for Contemporary Theology and also a founding member of No Longer Silent: Clergy for Justice, David is an outspoken voice for LGBTQ rights both in the church and in the community at large. David is active in the Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church and tries to stay connected to his roots as a musician. You’ll find him playing saxophones in a variety of settings, including appearances with the Fountain Hills Saxophone Quartet.
David and his wife Laura, an administrator for a large Arizona public school district, live in Phoenix with their three often adorable children.

Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

On Death With Dignity

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong on August 23, 2005

 Late last month I joined with other religious leaders, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish, to file an amicus curiae brief with the Supreme Court of the United States on behalf of the State of Oregon in the case of Alberto Gonzales, Attorney General v. the State of Oregon. Specifically, our
brief asked the Supreme Court to uphold the decision made by the Ninth Circuit Court in 2004 that ruled that former Attorney General John Ashcroft had acted inappropriately when he intervened to block Oregon’s legal practice of physician-assisted suicide. The State of Oregon created this right for its citizens in two separate referendums, setting assisted suicide inside the framework of tightly controlled guidelines, based entirely on the desires of the patient. Attorney General Ashcroft in initiating his suit has claimed that the federal law known as the Controlled Substances Act gave him the authority to take this action. The State of Oregon responded immediately in a countersuit, accusing him of both the inappropriate use of that act and an improper utilization of federal power. The Ninth Circuit Court ruled in favor of the State of Oregon. Before John Ashcroft resigned as Attorney General, he appealed that decision to the Supreme Court. That Court agreed to hear the appeal although now Alberto Gonzales, Ashcroft’s successor, is the name attached to the case. The case should be heard this fall in the first session of the Court since the resignation of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
The amicus brief, drawn up by the Washington law office of Jones Day, actually quotes me in the latter part of the document. Even more importantly, it quotes from the Task Force on Assisted Suicide adopted in 1996 by the convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark. This report stated the conviction of the majority of the convention’s delegates that physician-assisted dying “can be  theologically and ethically justified” when a terminally ill person “makes a voluntary and informed choice after all reasonable means of ameliorating his or her suffering have been exhausted.” A full copy of the report of the Task Force can be read by going to  http//www.dioceseofnewark.org/report.html. I still marvel that this report has achieved such influence in the life of our nation.
I remember that moment in the life of the Diocese of Newark as if it were yesterday. It was the finest debate over which I presided in all of my 24 years as the bishop of that remarkable community of faith. The convention that received and acted on this report was made up of approximately 600 people: 150 of them were ordained priests, 450 of them were lay people elected by their respective congregations to represent their churches at this diocesan gathering.
The task force that drafted the report was co-chaired by the Reverend Dr. Lawrence Falkowski, who, prior to his seeking ordination, had been a professor of political science at Louisiana State University, and Dr. Mary Hager, a professor at a small liberal arts college in New Jersey. It represented a year of intense study by many people. The members of this task force conducted open hearings on this issue in various locations across northern New Jersey. When its final draft was complete, it was distributed widely among all our churches and discussed at gatherings of the people of the diocese in separate congregational meetings as well as in nine pre-convention convocational gatherings. Copies were also handed out to the media, including print, radio, and television in both New York and New Jersey. This issue created great energy, and there was a high level of anticipation prior to the meeting of the decision-making diocesan convention. No one could argue that this report came as a surprise.
On the last Friday afternoon in January, the co-chairs introduced the report to the convention with a full presentation to move its adoption. That motion was then referred to an open hearing, which gave every delegate the right to speak for or against it before the report was to be brought to a final vote the following day. It also gave the Task Force members the right to make any last minute changes to the report before the formal vote would be taken.
The next day, the resolution was brought from the open hearing and placed on the floor for adoption. The final debate now began in earnest. Individuals spoke movingly and emotionally about their own experiences with loved ones who had been kept alive beyond the point where they had a shred of personal integrity or dignity left. They referred to excessive bills that had to be borne by survivors in what was a hopeless battle simply to prolong not life but existence. It was noted in the debate that these were very modern issues, since a century ago the persons being discussed would have died whether they wanted to or not since neither the technology nor medical expertise to keep them alive existed. The advances in medical science, stretching life expectancy to levels our grandparents could not imagine, were applauded. Some delegates sought to find that point where medical science ceases to expand life and acts only to postpone death, wondering if the former can be cheered and the latter resisted.
Those in opposition spoke about the sacredness of life and whether human beings had the right or the capacity to make life-and-death decisions. Many expressed concern about what was called the slippery-slope argument. If this practice were made legal then what would follow? Would greedy heirs hasten the deaths of their parents in order to gain their inheritances earlier? Would doctors, weary of giving care, abdicate their responsibility to save life and become the destroyers of life? Would hospitals and health management organizations seek to enhance their bottom line by dispatching costly patients who had outlived their resources?
This debate lasted for three hours. Amendments were offered. They had the effect of making clear what the report was designed to say. The final authority in every end-of-life decision was unequivocally to be that of the patient, in person if possible, by an advance directive if not. It was stated that the person the patient loved and trusted most must be empowered to make the final decision if illness rendered the patient incompetent to decide. Even then the voluntary nature of this decision was stressed. No one should ever be forced to end his or her life without one’s own consent. Steps were taken to guard against a precipitous act that might be regretted later or to allow depression, which so often accompanies sickness, to be the cause of premature death. The medical diagnosis had to be firm that the disease was incurable. This meant that the choice was not about whether one was going to die, but about how and when and under what circumstances death would occur. It was about whether a breathing cadaver is a living being. It was about having a chance to be with those you love most while you can still enjoy their company. It was about shortening the agony of both patient and family alike when the situation was hopeless. It was about death being used as a way of affirming life. It was about whether our Christian faith allows us to make decisions for ourselves as mature people, as co-creators with the God of life.
Finally, the debate ended, the question was called, and the vote was taken. More than two-thirds of that assembly of deeply committed Christians said that physician-assisted suicide could be a Christian option under carefully outlined circumstances. A new consciousness was born in that gathering on that day, and it is still growing. It is deeply gratifying for me to see the words of that group — the first assembly of any church in America to vote to accept physician-assisted suicide as a stated value of Christian people — included in this brief before the Supreme Court of the United States.
The Court will weigh many factors. Its members will address the limits on federal power to overturn state-endorsed procedures, which have been affirmed by a significant majority of that state’s voters. They will determine who has the right to make end-of-life decisions. Is it the patient, the nearest of kin, the physician, the Supreme Court, the insurance companies, or the politicians? Between the 1996 report of the Diocese of Newark and the current appeal to the Supreme Court, this nation has witnessed the Terri Schiavo case, in which politicians sought to overrule Ms. Schiavo’s own directive, her husband, her doctors, and the courts. In that case, a woman, brain-dead for more than a decade, had been kept alive artificially, with a feeding tube inserted into her stomach, while religious leaders and politicians sought to force her husband to violate her stated intentions. Representative Tom DeLay and Senator Bill Frist rushed a bill through Congress for the President to sign after a midnight flight from Crawford, Texas, to Washington. Polls indicated that a vast majority of the people of this nation recoiled at this spectacle. Now this issue will be before the highest court of the land. The Oregon law has been carefully crafted. In that law the potential pitfalls have had strong guards erected against them. Oregon citizens have used these provisions very sparingly since they were made the law of that state. They obviously wanted this law as a legal option even if it were destined to be seldom used. So do I. That is why I have joined this fight before the Supreme Court.
I believe both that life is sacred and that death is a natural part of life. I believe that I should have the right, if possible, to determine how and when I die. I believe a good death is a tribute to a good life. If I am told that I have a terminal disease and that the pain can be managed only by the use of drugs that will prohibit my being able to see the smile of my wonderful wife or to know the touch of her hand, then I want the right to end my life in her embrace, saying “I love you” while I still can. I have trusted God and my wife during my life. I must be able to trust both in my death. I hope the Supreme Court will uphold my right to die with dignity.
~  John Shelby Spong

Announcements

THE WALTER E. ASHLEY
MEMORIAL LECTURE SERIES

The Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III

June 8th & 9th
 Hendersonville, NC 

Dr. Moss is part of a new generation of ministers committed to preaching a prophetic message of love and justice, which he believes are inseparable companions that form the foundation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As Senior Pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, IL, Dr. Moss has spent the last two decades practicing and preaching a theology that unapologetically calls attention to the problems of mass incarceration, environmental injustice, and economic inequality.

Click here for more information ...                        

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