[Dialogue] 11/07/19, Progressing Spirit: Jacqueline J. Lewis: A New State Religion Called Love; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Nov 7 10:50:09 PST 2019
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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv1513499527 #yiv1513499527templateBody .yiv1513499527mcnTextContent, #yiv1513499527 #yiv1513499527templateBody .yiv1513499527mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv1513499527 #yiv1513499527templateFooter .yiv1513499527mcnTextContent, #yiv1513499527 #yiv1513499527templateFooter .yiv1513499527mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } There is so much rancor and hatred in the name of religion...
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A New State Religion Called Love
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| Essay by Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, Ph.D.
November 7, 2019 I’m just back from a trip to Chicago to be with my Dad, who turned 85, and my siblings. While looking for birthday presents that would ship quickly, I was struck by the plethora of ornaments, Santas of various sizes, red accessories, and gold-trimmed dinner wear with hollies in the center. Retail Christmas was in effect, right after Halloween!!!
Although that’s annoying, I love Christmas. The Christmas story is the greatest story ever told. It's why we're still telling it two millennia later. We're telling it all around the world. The story of God who loves the world enough to come all the way down to be present in the world, not as a soldier, but as a teeny, tiny, vulnerable infant. A baby who needs to be nursed when he's hungry, who needs to have his nappies changed, who needs his blanket in order to fall asleep. He can't fend for himself; he needs a community to love him into adulthood.
This is the greatest story ever told. The same God who spoke the universe into existence; the God who blew spirit into the world; the same God who animated the Ha'adam, "the human one;” the same God who sent judges and prophets to teach and raise the people comes in history; the same God that hears the cries of God's people and rescues them from bondage-- that same God enters into a time of occupation and oppression to once again rescue the ones God loves.
God showed up in a particular time and place, in a particular politically tough time for God's people. In a particular town, God showed up, hovering over the one called Miriam. She is with child. They travel, she and Joseph, 80 miles from their hometown to the place where there is no room in the inn. It's a particular time and place and a particular kind of baby. It's a Jewish baby. The Gospel writers help us to understand, it's an African-Semitic baby. That's what Matthew's genealogy is all about. It's an African-Semitic baby, born in a scandal. "Hello, Joseph; it’s me, Mary. I'm pregnant, but God did it." I'm sorry, that's scandalous. Somebody believed it, but lots of people didn't. So, it's an unwed mother having a Jewish, poor, Israeli, Palestinian baby boy with a stepfather named Joseph who stuck around when he didn’t have to. This is the way God chose to come.
That's how God showed up. To the marginal places, to the edgy places, to the scandalous place, to the un-reputable place. That's what God chose to do, which tells us a whole lot about God, about God's preference for the edge, God's preference for the margins, God's preference for the dispossessed, the outcast, the ne'er-do-wells, the funky shepherds-- and they were funky-- finding their way to the manger where the baby's lying in the place where the cows eat. God goes there. That's God there.
This is the greatest story ever told, and sadly, this story, this amazing story of God's intervention to those occupied, those on the edges, God coming to heal the whole world--this story has been hijacked by empire and co-opted by greed.
What do I mean by hijacked by empire? As soon as Constantine sees the cross in the sky and makes Christianity the state religion, it's empired. The church mirrors the world, rather than critique it, or call it to a higher consciousness. The church blesses oppression and derision as a way to convert people to a religion that is so far removed from faith in the God who is simply called Love. Let's watch the crusades march across Europe and torture Muslims to be Christians. Let's exterminate Jews because they're not Christians. That's what I mean by hijacked by empire. Neither that brown, Jewish baby in the crib nor the man he grew up to be demanded allegiance to power and greed. He didn’t ask for Christian armies to destroy the world in the name of God. I'm talking hijacked by empire.
And what do I mean by co-opted by greed? Who is that little white, shiny baby on the Christmas cards with sparkling snow cascading on his blond, haloed head? I don't mean any harm, white people, but really. Have you been to Israel? There might be one blonde baby in the whole state. What happened? How did this story get commodified? How did Europeans get to be in the center of it? How did shopping get to be the main event in so many so-called Christian spaces? God came to the margins, my friends. God came to the powerless, to the poor, to the disenfranchised, to the ones overtaxed and overburdened. That's where God chose to show up.
We only have a Christmas to celebrate because Mary and Joseph took their little Jewish baby to Egypt and were welcomed there. That's a poor, brown, homeless, refugee baby. How in the name of Jesus can we cage migrating children, profit off the suffering of migrating people, and build jail cells to enlarge the coffers of the prison industrial complex? How in the name of the brown one, the poor one, are brown and black people dying from state-sanctioned violence? How dare we not welcome the stranger when it was the stranger who taught us how to love?
We need to get back to the story. If we go back to the story, if we skip the Christmas cards, if we skip the tinsel and go back to the story, we find there the meaning of life. Love comes all the way down and puts on baby flesh. That’s Love in the manger, wrapped in little Afro-Semitic baby flesh, swaddled in bands of cloth. That's Love in the manger, needing a mommy and a daddy and a village to hold it. That's Love in a manger needing us to raise Love, to make Love everywhere.
There is so much rancor and hatred in the name of religion, in the name of Jesus, in the name of God. What if this story is not about running up our credit cards to buy things people don’t want or need, and is actually about a bold new religion simply called Love? What if Love were the state religion?
When the baby grew up and was asked, "What does it mean to be faithful? How do we do this?" That rabbi, that African-Semitic rabbi said, "Love God with everything you have, and love your neighbor as yourself." Love God with everything. Love your neighbor as yourself. In other words, Love, period. I think Jesus was saying that everything else is commentary. Everything else.
So, we are on the way to the Christmas holiday. People of many faiths and people of no faith will put up a Christmas tree, and stimulate the economy with the purchases of gifts. I’m not saying don’t buy a tree or gifts, I am saying let’s get back to the story. Let’s reclaim the story of God loving us enough to come as us to change us. Recall when asked to explain what love looked like, Jesus told the story of a so called other—A Samaritan. Even more striking is God chose to come as an “other,” someone outside the power structure of Rome, to teach us how to love the outsider in.
I serve this amazing congregation in the East Village of New York—Middle Collegiate Church. I came to study Middle Church and its leadership when I was earning my PhD at Drew University. I wanted to understand how to disrupt the racial inequities and tensions in our nation by building the beloved community. My dissertation became a book, The Power of Stories: A Guide for Leading Multiracial and Multicultural Communities . I also wrote a book with my husband, John, called The Pentecost Paradigm: Ten Strategies for Becoming a Multiracial Congregation . On any given Sunday, I wish you could see what I see from my pulpit. We are Black, White, Asian, Hispanic and Indigenous. We love everybody. We look all kinds of different ways. This is what is required of us. This is the religion that's simply called Love. This is the religion of Yeshua ben Joseph-- Mary's boy, Joseph's baby.
When asked how to do this thing called the way, Jesus said love God, neighbor and self. You are not required to speak any particular language. You don't have to say any particular creed. You don't have to come from any particular ethnicity or race. Your culture doesn't matter. Your gender doesn't matter. Your sexual orientation doesn't matter. All that matters, that you love God with everything and love your neighbor as yourself. He means love, period. Love, period. Love, period. Love, period. ~ Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, Ph.D.
Read online here
About the Author
Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, Ph.D. is the Senior Minister of Middle Collegiate Church in New York City. She is a nationally acclaimed activist, author, public theologian, and organizer of an anti-racist multicultural movement of love and justice. She has been featured in The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and on The Today Show, CBS, and MSNBC. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By A Reader
Was Jesus’s treatment of women radical enough to call him a feminist?
A: By Rev. Irene Monroe
Dear Reader, The human picture of Jesus and his relationship to women we may never know. However, the Christological depiction of Jesus in the Gospels shows an itinerant rabbi whose ministry was inclusive, intersectional, and iconoclastic. Jesus ministered to women, the physically challenged, the poor, and all of society’s outcasts, meaning the damned, the disenfranchised, and the dispossessed. He exhibited pro-feminist male sensibilities that violated the gender norms of his day. For example, in Luke 13:10 - 17, Jesus healed an infirm woman on the Sabbath, which was prohibited in Judaism. Another example is John 4:1-42, when Jesus talked with the Samaritan woman at the well. In this pericope, Jesus did three things unconventional and disturbing to the status quo of the day:
In public, Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman knowing she had five husbands and was presently cohabiting with another man.
Jesus asked to drink water from the bucket of a Samaritan at a time it was perceived to be ritually unclean because of the schism between Samaritans and Jews.
In verses 21-26, Jesus and the Samaritan woman discuss theology that was solely the province of men.
Women, unquestionably, were a part of Jesus's ministry. Sources suggest that Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna assisted in bankrolling his ministry. Each of the gospels states that women were the first Jesus revealed himself to as a resurrected Christ. Mary Magdalene traveled with Jesus and his disciples as one of his followers, and was a witness to his crucifixion, burial, and resurrection.
However, a different Jesus appears in Matthew 15: 21- 28 when Jesus calls a Canaanite woman a dog. For any feminists, Jesus’s remarks are both troubling and problematic, and calling a woman a “dog” is no minor insult even in the 1st Century.
Nonetheless, there continue to be various hermeneutical spins on this text. Some feminists suggest Jesus was expressing both ethnocentric and misogynistic sentiments. It was quite common for 1st Century Jews to call Gentiles “dogs.” Feminist apologists contest that Jesus’s remarks to the woman were testing her faith. I suggest the woman’s boldness of not cowering to Jesus was a catalyst for Jesus to examine the true meaning of his all-inclusive ministry.
This scripture still leaves me scratching my head. One bad incident, if out of character, doesn’t erase Jesus's ministry. However, I wonder when I read this Matthew pericope, which Jesus was present- the human one or the Christological one? Thank you for your question. ~ Rev. Irene Monroe
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Irene Monroe is an ordained minister. She does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on WGBH an NPR station, that is now a podcast, and a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS. Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists. She is a Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist in cities across the country and in the U.K, Ireland, Canada. She writes a column in the Boston home LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and Opinion pieces for the Boston Globe.
Monroe stated that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As a religion columnist she tries to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Because homophobia is both a hatred of the “other” and it’s usually acted upon ‘in the name of religion,” by reporting religion in the news she aims to highlight how religious intolerance and fundamentalism not only shatters the goal of American democracy, but also aids in perpetuating other forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, classism and anti-Semitism.” Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College Research Library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website. |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
Christian Art: Reinforcer of a Dying Literalism
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
May 21, 2008
I did not realize how thoroughly biblical literature has shaped Western civilization until I took a course offered by The Teaching Company entitled “Great Artists of the Italian Renaissance” taught by Professor William Kloss of the Smithsonian Institution. I was certainly aware that almost all Western art up until the Renaissance had religious themes and biblical scenes as its primary content. What I did not embrace was that during this time the vast majority of people could neither read nor write. This meant that the only way they could visualize the content of their religious traditions was through paintings or pictures. It was for this reason that the walls of churches were regularly decorated with paintings of biblical stories. These paintings focused primarily on the life of Jesus. Depictions of the Passion of Christ, with graphic portrayals of Jesus’ suffering, are commonplace. To keep religious fear at high levels and to make control of the behavior of the masses easier, there was also an emphasis on the chilling paintings of the Last Judgment complete with the devil, eternal flames and the torments of the damned. The reason that the “Stations of the Cross” were either painted or hung on church walls was to allow the faithful to envision the meaning of Jesus’ death, about which most of them would never read. With few people actually knowing the content of the Bible and certainly with no one sharing a modern critical view of biblical scholarship, the paintings of Christian artists determined for many the way the Christian story was communicated.
What we need to recognize is that when artists painted Jesus scenes from the Bible they also assumed the first century view of both life and the universe that was reflected in these gospel writings. Heaven and God were just above the sky of a three tiered universe, deeply and closely related to this world. One thinks of the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel painted by Michelangelo, which shows the finger of God all but touching the finger of Adam. Angels are treated by these artists as important heavenly beings, who come to earth not only with divine messages, but also to inspire human achievement. These angels are presumed to have the ability to care for holy individuals like Jesus of Nazareth. So Christian art portrays an angel announcing his birth to Mary, flying above his manger at birth, attending his needs at baptism, guiding him in the temptations, hovering around his cross at his crucifixion, opening his tomb on the day of resurrection and, finally, accompanying him as he ascends into heaven. The medieval world lived with a clear sense of a heavenly realm just above the sky and it was the common assumption that there was always maximum contact between the two realms. Jesus’ parables were treated by these artists as literal events.
This was particularly true of Matthew’s parable of the last judgment and Luke’s parable of the Good Samaritan. Matthew was a particular favorite of the artists of the late Middle Ages. Such a well known artist as Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio did a whole series of Matthew paintings. Matthew’s medieval importance seemed to stem from the fact that this book was placed by the church fathers at the front of the New Testament and in that pre-critical time was believed to be not only the earliest gospel, but also to be literally accurate. Caravaggio’s painting entitled the “Inspiration of Matthew” shows him with an angel telling the evangelist exactly what to write, a sign of the commonly held belief that Matthew’s gospel contained inerrant revelations directly from God. It was not a human work. Another Matthew portrait actually showed the hand of an angel physically guiding the hand of Matthew so that every word of the text was not just divinely inspired, but divinely written. These artists captured the cultural view of the literal accuracy of the texts of the gospels. This view remains unchallenged in the minds of many to this day.
Contradictions in the texts between two of the gospel writers seemed not to bother the artistic world. This was especially true in the popular portrayal of the nativity stories. A stable as the place of Jesus’ birth was a fixed item in the world of medieval art. The stable was assumed to be populated with a variety of animals, sheep and cows in particular. A star was frequently placed in the sky above the stable and wise men on camels were sometimes portrayed as among those present at the stable to worship and present their gifts. These items are of particular interest to me because not one of them is biblically accurate in any literal sense. People did not embrace then, as indeed many do not now, the fact that there are two quite disparate and highly incompatible accounts of Jesus’ birth in the New Testament, the earliest one in Matthew and the other one written some ten or so years later in Luke. These birth narratives have been hopelessly blended in the common mind and even filled with imaginary details. This process was aided in no small measure by the great paintings of Christian history.
The facts are that in Matthew’s first and earliest version of Jesus’ birth there is no journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem because Matthew assumes that they live permanently in Bethlehem, in a specific house, so well identified that a star can actually stop over that house and bathe it in its light. So in Matthew there is no stable, no stable animals and no manger. Matthew’s story also gives us no angels, no shepherds, no circumcision and no presentation in the Temple. Matthew does tell us that Jesus and his parents fled to Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod, returning to their Bethlehem home only when Herod’s death made it seem a safe thing to do. As a matter of fact, there is also no mention of camels in Matthew’s gospel as the means of the wise men’s locomotion. Tradition and Christian
paintings, not Matthew, have put the camels into the Christian memory bank.
In Luke’s second nativity story the details are quite different. Luke has no star and thus no wise men to follow that star. There is still no stable even in Luke. The stable is a fantasy creation of storytellers. Luke mentions only a manger, literally a feeding trough, and around that word our imaginations have built the stable. Luke makes no mention of the presence of animals at Jesus’ birth, because there was no stable in which to house them. People hearing this for the first time are so convinced they will argue until they actually read the text. There is also no innkeeper in these narratives who offers the “expecting” couple a barn, despite the fact that this character shows up regularly in our pageants. The angels appear in the Bible to Mary in Nazareth and they appear to the shepherds in the field, but nowhere in those familiar texts does an angel ever appear at or near the manger. None of these facts have stopped the artists of Christian history from blending tradition, fantasy and mythology into their paintings. One should not be surprised that those paintings were viewed as literally accurate events of history.
The Virgin Mary was also a popular subject of medieval art and the imagination of the artists built the Marian tradition quite in opposition to biblical facts. Neither Mary nor Joseph receives a single mention in the writings of Paul (51-64 CE). In Mark, the earliest gospel, the name of Mary is mentioned only one time (6:3), and then by a critic of Jesus who wonders at the source of his learning, “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary?” he asks. Mary’s name is never mentioned again in the only gospel the Church had until the 9th decade. The myth of Mary is a late developing tradition. Mark did refer once to “the mother of Jesus (3:31-35),” but she is portrayed here as believing Jesus to be out of his mind and, with her other sons and daughters, tried to have him put away. It was not a flattering portrait, yet this was the only image of the mother of Jesus in the first gospel to be written. In Mark’s gospel she is not mentioned as being present at either the crucifixion or the resurrection. The mother of Jesus was also not present at the cross in the second gospel of Matthew or in the third gospel of Luke.
Only in the 10th decade work of John did she finally get placed at the scene of the crucifixion. The Fourth Gospel had Jesus commend her to the care of the “Beloved Disciple,” who, we are told in that text, took her immediately to his home. Even in the Fourth Gospel, however, Mary is not present when Jesus died nor did she have any hand in taking him from the cross. One would not know that from Christian art. Her grief at the cross was conveyed in thousands of paintings. She was pictured cradling his deceased body in her arms in the popular Pietas and most recently in Mel Gibson’s biblically falsifying motion picture, “The Passion of the Christ.” Facts do not seem to matter when a painting is made or a motion picture is produced.
It is the power of these images that makes it so difficult for modern Christians to escape a culturally imposed literalism. Stained glass windows in churches across the world encourage it. Paintings in the great museums of the world assert it. Liturgies shaped primarily in the 13th century reinforce it. The familiar hymns of the Church imaginatively reenact it (“Here betwixt ass and oxen mild, sleep, sleep, sleep, my little child,”) In the universe that we inhabit there is no heaven located just above the sky from which angels can travel constantly to make divine pronouncements. The world portrayed in Christian art and in regular ecclesiastical usage quite frankly no longer exists. When the essence of our faith is portrayed as relevant only inside a world that to us does not exist, one cannot help but wonder whether or not that faith can have any future. It does not unless we are able to lift whatever the essence of Christianity is out of the world in which it was first articulated, then translate it and finally cause it to be heard in the accents of the world of our knowledge and experience. That is the Christian task. There are grave doubts, I submit, as to whether we have the ability to accomplish this task since our great artists have so powerfully reinforced our cultural literalism. ~ John Shelby Spong |
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Announcements
The Alchemy of Our Collective Wisdom and Power
November 16th, Plymouth Church, Seattle, WA
At a time when the world appears to be cracking and we are dealing with hopelessness and despair on many fronts. At a time when we come face to face with the reality of failing systems and the insecurities that they bring… it is at this time, we believe in us. What is before us requires the wisdom, courage and compassion of women and men of all cultures and walks of life working together. We know that collectively we have within us, the wisdom and power to create a world where we thrive.
Honoring Seattle for igniting the spark that would become the epic movement of our time… inspired by The Dalai Lama’s Seeds of Compassion 10 years ago, we now bring an event that invites us to listen carefully to what’s next, self-discovery and moving compassion into action. READ ON ...
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