[Dialogue] 10/03/19, Progressing Spirit: Vosper: No, This Isn’t for You; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Fri Oct 11 11:55:20 PDT 2019
Computer issues the last couple of weeks...sorry for the delay...Ellie :)
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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7336294376 #yiv7336294376templateBody .yiv7336294376mcnTextContent, #yiv7336294376 #yiv7336294376templateBody .yiv7336294376mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7336294376 #yiv7336294376templateFooter .yiv7336294376mcnTextContent, #yiv7336294376 #yiv7336294376templateFooter .yiv7336294376mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } Okay, that was harsh.
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No, This Isn’t for You
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| Essay by Rev. Gretta Vosper
October 3, 2019
Okay, that was harsh.
In my last column, I challenged you to wrestle with the change I believe is desperately needed as we come to accept the reality of our world as it will be during and beyond climate disaster. I didn’t talk specifically about that world, but the images we’re seeing on the nightly news or on our Facebook feeds keep me awake at night. They challenge me to challenge you, to consider how you might respond within whatever communities you find yourself.
I’m going to assume you’re with me on this. If not, I’ll point you to the decision made by the Editorial team at The Guardian, one of the world’s most widely read and respected sources of news and opinion. The Editorial team decided that using the phrase “climate change” was no longer a realistic referent for the trauma already experienced by human communities and ecological systems as a result of our failure to address rising global temperatures. Things have already changed; we are now in the place of crisis and disaster. The Guardian’s Editorial team recognized that the dramatic changes to the world’s climate that we are now seeing are the greatest threat to our human community we have ever faced. So, I need to do what I can now, even as everything I once thought was “normal” is shifting and disappearing beneath my own feet, as well as the feet of my children and their children. I hope you see the urgency of this work, too.
I wrote, in my last column, about communities of faith and the influence they have had on our civic engagement. Note the past tense of that sentence: “the influence they have had.” Because the liberal faith communities in Canada are on the brink of death[1], my article sought to warn my American readers of the things I believe led to the disappearing act of your northern neighbours’ church demographic. I warn you not only because you continue to see multiple generations in your worship gatherings, but because I believe you still have a chance to strengthen their impact within the communities they serve and beyond. Canadian churches are well past the seismic political and social impact they once had. American churches are not, though the evangelical right seems significantly more engaged than liberals. Perhaps it is time you caught the attention of the media, believe me, it can be done.
Practicing … that thing we don’t do
It is a sad thing to close the doors of a church. Hard as it is for the congregation’s members, however, the event has a far deeper, though often unseen and uncalculated, impact on the health of the community in which that congregation was practicing its increasingly irrelevant faith. As churches age and weaken, their focus necessarily turns toward survival and away from the world outside their doors. Not that they stop doing important missional and justice work, maybe offering a food bank, a clothing swap, or setting up a kids’ homework program. What churches stop doing as they shrink is serious evangelism.
Say what? “Serious evangelism”? I’m writing for those who would station themselves on the progressive side of liberal and for whom evangelism is practically a dirty word, if it is heard at all within their congregations. As liberal Christians, we’ve long avoided such language, going so far as to deconstruct and apologize for the roots of our evangelical missions to foreign lands and the Indigenous peoples of our own.
Take a breath. I’m not suggesting you reclaim the word. Remember, I’m the person who thinks that coming up with new definitions for old words has very likely been the death knell of liberal Christianity. So, don’t come up with a shiny new definition for evangelism that makes it feel right for you. Leave it with the old, stinging, and offensive meaning it already has. What I want you to embrace isn’t the word, it’s the spirit of what the evangelical movement was and remains about: a call to the radical transformation of one’s life. That is something we can get our heads around; we don’t need the word “evangelism” to do that.
Assumptions: hidden in plain sight
Still, I use the word “evangelism” because I want to ground what it is I am calling you to within the foundations of our faith tradition. The word “evangelism” helps make that link. If we think about it, Jesus spoke to a world not unlike the one we are struggling to understand now. The power differentials, the injustices imposed on the poor by the rich, the assumptions of privilege: all these things are part of our day to day lives just as they were part of the day to day realities against which he spoke. Most of us, like those in power in Jesus’ day, simply assume these assumptions without much critique: I live in a home I own; I drink my coffee strong, with cayenne, and whenever I want it; I could have a dog, or three if my husband would agree to it; he shops for groceries where and when he wants; I drive 20 minutes up the road so I can buy eggs from a no-kill farm; we can read whatever books we want, listen to music we enjoy, and vacation wherever we choose, all without restriction.
We are not the downtrodden to whom Jesus’ message was electrifying. His message was one of radical transformation, something many of us no longer presume important in our lives. Perhaps we are so privileged that the cataclysmic message of Jesus to his time has become – y.a.w.n – boring. It takes effort to consider our privilege and its impact on the lives of others, at home or elsewhere in the world. It takes an even greater effort to consider the impact our privilege has on the lives of those not yet born but who will live in the world our privilege bequeaths them, along with all its “sham, drudgery, and broken dreams.”[2] We can choose to add to those broken dreams, or, with a little of our own dreaming, mitigate the damage our privilege currently promises.
In my previous article, I challenged those of you who are not clergy to do the work of creating communities of resilience that do not rely upon – or even use – the language and liturgical traditions of your church heritage. Only through engagement that looks n.o.t.h.i.n.g like church will those who have never considered becoming church attendees have the privilege of experiencing what made you church converts: falling in love with being together. I wrote about why being together is so important to our social well-being, to the work we will have to do in the future, to our relationships, which are, above all, the most sacred of our human undertakings.
No, don’t change anything; just be courageous
I know, I was harsh. I told you that almost everything you loved about church would have to go. That’s not entirely true. You can keep everything exactly as it is in your own gathering, just don’t expect to add to your numbers because that isn’t where these people will find one another. You do not need to change anything about what you love about church; you do need to accept the fact that nothing you love about church will bring together those who have yet to find out what falling in love with being together means, does, and feels like. They have to mix and taste that magic elixir on their own terms. Dance it in their own space. Sing the songs they want to sing. Find what makes them cry in public and lets them feel good about doing so. You just have to get out of the way and let it happen. Or be courageous enough to test ideas, be wrong, test more, and so on until they – not you – find one another.
In reality, this has little to do with you, personally, and everything to do with the vast amounts of space and money your church has at its disposal or can access and mobilize. Provide space; pay for secular facilitators; give them prime time access; let your leaders teach the beauty of community leadership; share your best gluten-free vegan chocolate chip cookie recipes; let secular music be played at the decibel level your sound system was built for. Love what emerges, even and especially if it isn’t what you expected; we love our children even when they become people we don’t really know.
Give. Give. Give. Allow. Allow. Allow. For the sake of those who need to find one another. That they might fall in love and find, in the loving, radical transformation and the courage it takes to face the brave new world we have created.
Afterword
This was not the article I had intended to write. My brain took over my fingers and punched out a different article than the one I had considered. So, I am sharing, here, a few of the song that had emerged as I did my lead up to the actual writing.
I meant to provide some resources about setting up a secular gathering at which those who do not want to go to church might find a place of resilience and growth – might fall in love with being together. I promise to do that in my next article. In the meantime, listen to some of these songs, all of which are available online and none of which have ever likely been sung or danced to in a church (except at West Hill). Play them loudly. Very loudly. And if you dance, well, all the better. If you cry, all the better still.
Bon Jovi, Love’s the Only Rule
Keala Settle, This Is Me
Sarah Bareilles, Brave
Andra Day, Rise Up
U2, One
Queen, We Are The Champions
~ Rev. Gretta Vosper
Read 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.
[1] Evangelical churches are on the decline too but their mission is less focused on the state of the world so I don’t consider them allies in this work. [2] Max Ehrmann, Desiderata, Copyright 1952. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By Joyce
“I'm curious where the idea came from that if a person commits suicide that person does not go to heaven. I don't recall anything in the Bible saying that.”
A: By Joran Slane Oppelt
Dear Joyce, Thank you for your question. You won’t find this idea anywhere in the Bible.
The earliest argument (using biblical justification) against suicide was in St. Augustine‘s fifth century book, The City of God. His reasoning came from the commandment, “thou shalt not kill.” Simply put, because this commandment didn’t mention the “neighbor“ he understood it to include the self.
He also referenced the arguments made by Plato in the Phaedo (On the Soul) regarding Socrates’ suicide while awaiting execution. While Socrates made explicit arguments for the idea of an afterlife and the soul’s immortality, he expressed that suicide should be forbidden except under extreme circumstances because the body does not belong to man, but to the gods. The act itself is still debated as one of either cowardice or self-determination.
Suicide is commonly seen as a result of disconnection, isolation and abandonment. It’s regarded as the last best option for those who feel they’ve run out of choices. It’s seen frequently in the hopeless and the outcast. It shocks families and communities because people rarely talk about having these thoughts. They carry them around, like burning embers, until a hole is created that cannot be filled.
Suicide then turns that aching hole into an all-consuming force. It tears into an unsuspecting family or community as if a bomb has gone off, leaving only a smoking crater. It is a black hole that suddenly opens in the midst of a small village, swallowing everything in its path, including the light. There is no escaping the feeling of anger or betrayal (at God or loved ones) or the “selfishness” of the act. Family and community are left to caress the raw, frayed edges of that gaping hole. And, over time, the hole eventually gets smaller. But it never closes completely.
The soul may live on after death, but a suicide will leave the surrounding souls darkened, colored and bruised (and a trail of generational pain in its wake).
First and foremost, don’t let any priest or philosopher (including myself) decide for you what suicide is or isn’t – or whether your soul will live on when your body has taken its last breath. That is for you to determine, through the formation of your faith.
And, Joyce, I say this last part as someone who every day gives thanks for the anonymous hotline staffer who somehow convinced my now teenage son to muster the courage to talk to his parents instead of ending his life at 11 years old. I am now blessed with a life where I can turn to see him, talk to him, and hold him (sometimes too tightly). That life was nearly a fantasy.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, talk to someone. Literally anyone. Your story isn’t over. You are not yet out of choices. You are not alone.
~ Joran Slane Oppelt
P.S. The National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1 (800) 273-8255. They also provide free anonymous chat at https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/.
Read and share online here
About the Author
Joran Slane Oppelt is an international speaker, author, interfaith minister and award-winning producer and singer/songwriter. He is the owner and founder of the Metta Center of St. Petersburg and Integral Church – an interfaith and interspiritual organization in Tampa Bay. Joran is the author of Integral Church: A Handbook for New Spiritual Communities, Sentences, The Mountain and the Snow and co-author of Order of the Sacred Earth (with Matthew Fox) and Transform Your Life: Expert Advice, Practical Tools, and Personal Stories. He currently serves on the board of Creation Spirituality Communities and has spoken around the world about spirituality and the innovation of religion. |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Origin of the Bible, Part III:
Breaking Open the Books of Moses The Torah
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
April 2, 2008
The Bible began to be written, relatively speaking, only a short time ago. When one considers the fact that the universe is some 13.7 billion years old and the birth of the planet Earth can be reliably dated between four and a half and five billion years ago, the beginning of Bible writing near 1000BC is very recent. Scientists now date the appearance of human life on this planet somewhere between two million and 100,000 years ago, depending on how one defines human life. The beginning of civilization is placed by anthropologists about 15,000 years ago. The person we call Abraham, who is regarded in the Bible as the founder of the Jewish nation, is generally dated about the year 1850BC. Yet the earliest strand of continuous material in the Bible appears to have been written in the 10th Century BC, making it a relatively late arrival on the scene. People have been trained by the Bible itself to think that the biblical story begins at the moment of creation. Bishop James Ussher of Ireland, using the Bible’s “inerrant words” and dates, asserted that creation actually occurred on 23rd October 4004BC. One of his later contemporaries, James Lightfoot, added the note that it was at 9am GMT! If we want to analyze the Bible, first we need to comprehend the fact that the earliest part of the Bible to be written was only about 3000 years ago, between 950 and 1000BCE. That fact alone immediately introduces a note of radical relativity into the biblical assertions of many people.
Next comes the realization that if Abraham lived around 1850BC and the earliest written part of the Bible is after 1000BCE, then everything that we learn about Abraham in that story had to have been passed on orally for about 900 years or through as many as 45 generations before entering written form. That knowledge forces us to embrace the fact that this biblical story cannot be historically accurate, but has the character of folk tale and myth in which the facts of history are all but lost inside the developing tradition. Abraham might well not even have been a Jew. He was identified with the shrine at Hebron. Isaac, who is described as his son, was identified with the shrine at Beersheba and Jacob, called his grandson in the Bible, was identified with the shrine at Bethel. Their identifications with specific shrines opens up the possibility that these three patriarchs may originally have been unrelated Canaanite holy men, whose lives were later intertwined and interpreted as the founding generations of the Jewish people to provide justification for the Jewish invasion of this land that occurred around 1250BC. The purpose of these patriarchal tales in Genesis was to establish the Jewish claim that they were only taking over this land that God had promised to their ancestors hundreds of years earlier. As rational claims these things make no sense, but as propaganda they constituted then and still do now powerful influences in human history.
Other facts about the biblical story are even more threatening to those who treat the Bible magically and who pretend that in its words both historic accuracy and literal truth have been captured. Moses, who is an even more pivotal person in Jewish history than Abraham, lived some 300 years before the earliest part of the Old Testament was written. This means that we must embrace the fact that everything attributed to Moses in the Bible, including the Exodus from Egypt and the giving of the Law at Sinai, are sacred traditions that passed through oral transmission for as many as 15 generations before achieving permanent status in a written form. How much did these crucial Moses stories grow in that oral period? Did the Red Sea come to replace the Sea of Reeds as the center of the splitting of the waters story? Did the discovery of the droppings of the Tamarisk tree in the wilderness, with its white flaky residue lying on the ground, give rise to the story of God raining heavenly bread called manna down on the hungry Hebrew people? Did an eruption of burning natural gas in that oil and gas rich desert give rise to the story of God’s call to Moses at a burning bush that was not consumed?
What was the process through which the community’s code of laws, including the Ten Commandments, went before they settled into the familiar form that we find in Exodus? Is the number “ten” for the commandments more important than the content of the ten? Is the fact that the Bible contains a multiplicity of versions of the Ten Commandments an attempt to explain the biblical story that Moses broke the clay tablets containing the Ten Commandments when he saw that the people of Israel had forsaken the God who had brought them out of Egypt for a Golden Calf and that he, therefore, had to return to Sinai to get a second version? How much of the story of Exodus is history and how much of that narrative has been bent to conform to the developing liturgy of the Passover that was designed primarily to let the Jewish people observe the moment of their national birth liturgically? None of these were questions that could be raised until the idea that the Bible is not an eyewitness account of ancient history was both faced and accepted. With each new discovery the Bible began to be viewed as a quite human book that needs to be examined critically and not as the divinely-inspired literal word of God that was inerrant because it had been revealed by or even dictated by God on high.
In the late 1800s, a group of scholars in Germany led by Professors K. H. Graf and Julius Wellhausen began to study rigorously the details of the first five books of the Bible – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. These books, called the Torah or the Books of Moses, constitute the most sacred part of the Hebrew Scriptures and were traditionally required by the Jews to be read in their entirety on the Sabbaths of a single year in the synagogues of the Jewish world. These scholars began to apply to these texts the insights of literary criticism. To do this, they had to set aside the claims that these works constituted the “Word of God”, or that they possessed some magical relationship with truth. The results were salutary and more than anything else opened the doors to a new academic interest in the Bible itself.
Analyzing these texts carefully, these scholars discovered that there were many observable differences that could be noted which led them to the conclusion that the Torah consisted of several strands of what had once been independent material. One strand referred to God by the name Yahweh, or at least by an unpronounceable set of consonants that were written as YHWH and it called the holy mountain of the Jews Mt. Sinai. Another strand of material called God by the name of Elohim and it called the holy mountain Mt. Horeb. A third strand of material reflected life in the Kingdom of Judah in the 7th Century BC. Still another strand appeared to be dated during the time of the Exile and perhaps even later. When they began to separate these strands from one another, other insights became available. The material that called God YHWH appeared to be centered in Jerusalem for it extolled the institutions identified with Jerusalem, such as the King, the High Priest and the Temple. It reflected that period of Jewish history in which the nation was undivided and was ruled from Jerusalem. The strand that called God Elohim reflected the values of the northern part of the land of the Jews that achieved independence from Jerusalem rule in a rebellion led by a military general named Jereboam against the newly crowned Jerusalem king named Rehoboam, who was, the Bible tells us, the son of Solomon and the grandson of King David. That rebellion, which occurred around the year 920BC, was successful and brought into being a new Jewish state called the Northern Kingdom, or Israel.
Ultimately, this new nation had its capital and worship center in the city of Samaria and traced its Jewish roots back primarily to Joseph, whom it called the “favorite son” of the patriarch Jacob. Joseph was said to be the child of Jacob by his favorite wife Rachel and his father was said to have endowed him, among other things, with a coat of many colors. The patriarch Joseph in this narrative of the Elohist writer was always juxtaposed to his older brother Judah, who remained the dominant ancestral figure of the Jewish people whose life centered in Jerusalem. Judah was the son of Jacob by Rachel s older sister ‟ Leah. According to this story Jacob had been tricked into marrying Leah instead of Rachel by their father Laban. Only by marrying Rachel’s older sister did Jacob also manage to win Rachel as his second wife. Leah was described in this text rather cruelly as being unloved and even as having eyes that popped out of her head like those of a cow. This Elohist document was designed on many levels to counter the claims made by the tribe of Judah that they were destined to rule over these northern ten tribes. In the service of this theme the Elohist writer went so far as to assert that Judah betrayed his younger brother Joseph by selling him into slavery for twenty pieces of silver. In time, however, Joseph was said to have used this act of treachery to save all of his brothers, including Judah, from death by starvation, which he did by taking them down into Egypt, where they remained for 400 years, eventually falling into slavery, from which Moses would ultimately lead them to freedom in their “promised land”. As these strands came to be viewed as quite different stories written to reflect quite different times in history, these scholars began to recognize that they had cracked the code of biblical origins. The first five books of the Torah were not written by Moses or indeed by any single author. They were a composite of written materials that had been blended and intertwined into a single story over a period of as much as 500 years. Biblical scholarship had taken an enormous leap into modernity. The old claims, held so tenaciously for so long by so many, were shaken to their very foundations. The era of critical biblical scholarship was being born.
We will return to this brief overview later and develop each of these four strands of the Torah in much greater detail, so stay tuned. ~ John Shelby Spong |
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