[Dialogue] 7/23/20, Progressing Spirit, Roger Wolsey: A Call to Listen, Lament, Learn & Love; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Jul 23 05:22:27 PDT 2020
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A Call to Listen, Lament, Learn, & Love.
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| Essay by Rev.Roger Wolsey
July 23, 2020
Those of you who have been followers of the Progressing Spirit newsletter for the past few years may notice that it’s been quite a few months since one of my essays has been featured on this forum. While I am a member of the Board of Directors of ProgressiveChristianity.org, and have been a regularly featured contributing writer, I haven’t been asked to provide an essay for quite a while. I didn’t feel a need to inquire why. It seems that our leadership has intentionally been seeking to center and amplify the voices of women and people of color more and more. As a straight, white, male I could choose to feel slighted and offended by this – but that would be a pretty lame thing to choose. Indeed, it’d be petty and tone-deaf to the times. Rather than feeling slighted (there’s plenty of my writings already out there on the interwebs), I choose to be elated that Rev. Deshna Shine and ProgressiveChristianity.org have been adopting this diversifying, re-centering, mindset and approach prior to the recent Black Lives Matter revolution. They were discerning how best to serve this present age and anticipate its needs – well before others came on board.
It was to my surprise that I received an invitation on June 20th to contribute an essay smack in the middle of the recent uprising. Because contributing writers are asked to write our essays weeks in advance of the date they will be published, this is one of the first essays in this newsletter written during this time of social unrest. And here I am, a straight, white, male being asked to weigh in. We writers are never told what to write about – but it’d be oblivious on my part if I were to opine about some theological nuance of progressive Christianity from an academic, cerebral, intellectual manner - as if such essays are written in a vacuum without any need to be relevant to social context.
I write in the context of the twin global realities of Covid-19; and the increasing rejection of toxic masculinity, patriarchy, and white supremacy – including a growing rejection of religions which are perceived as promoting and maintaining those poisons.
It’s been said that “Eleven a.m. on Sunday morning is the most segregated time in America.” It’s not just a saying, it’s a fact. Yes, there are a few congregations here and there that are notably diverse racially (but many of the most racially diverse congregations are not diverse when it comes to diversity and full inclusion of differences in gender and sexual orientations), yet such diverse congregations are outliers. They are the exceptions.
They shouldn’t be exceptions that prove the rule. Yet, what should be the rule for the Church is full inclusion and celebration (not mere toleration) of the vast diversity of the people of God.
American Christian congregations tend to be more American than Christian. And despite the much lauded rhetoric about the “rights and liberties of all” in its charter documents, the U.S. has tended to be far more embracing of the oppressing and segregating ways of empire than it has been noble, and in any way an exemplary and promising “light before the nations.”
I already wrote about progressive Christianity and racism once before on this newsletter , what more can I as a white, Christian (albeit progressive), man say that would be of any help?
I think it’s best for me to begin with some silence…
..
…
….
…….
And then to offer some words of a black pastor and scholar who we’d do well to know about and listen to:
“Let us not rush to the language of healing, before understanding the fullness of the injury & the depth of the wound.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Let us not rush to offer a band-aid, when the gaping wound requires surgery & complete reconstruction.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Let us not offer false equivalencies, thereby diminishing the particular pain being felt in a particular circumstance in a particular historical moment.
Let us not speak of reconciliation without speaking of reparations & restoration, or how we can repair the breach & how we can restore the loss.
Let us not rush past the loss of this mother’s child, this father’s child…someone’s beloved son.
Let us not value property over people; let us not protect material objects while human lives hang in the balance.
Let us not value a false peace over a righteous justice.
Let us not be afraid to sit with the ugliness, the messiness, & the pain that is life in community together.
Let us not offer clichés to the grieving, those whose hearts are being torn asunder.
Instead…
⠀
Let us mourn black & brown men & women, those killed extra judicially every 28 hours.
Let us weep at a criminal justice system, which is neither blind nor just.
Let us call for the mourning men & the wailing women, those willing to rend their garments of privilege & ease, & sit in the ashes of this nation’s original sin.
Let us be silent when we don’t know what to say.
Let us be humble & listen to the pain, rage, & grief pouring from the lips of our neighbors & friends.
⠀
Let us decrease, so that our brothers & sisters who live on the underside of history may increase.
⠀
Let us pray with our eyes open & our feet firmly planted on the ground.
Let us listen to the shattering glass & let us smell the purifying fires, for it is the language of the unheard.
God, in your mercy…⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Show me my own complicity in injustice.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Convict me for my indifference.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Forgive me when I have remained silent.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Equip me with a zeal for righteousness.⠀⠀⠀⠀
Never let me grow accustomed or acclimated to unrighteousness.”
~ Rev. Dr. Yolanda Pierce, Director of the Center for Black Church Studies & Associate Professor of Religion & Literature at Princeton Theological Seminary (words she wrote on Nov. 25, 2014 which I discovered on June 26th of this year)
Yes. We need to begin with lament. We need to hear the winces of pain of those who are hurting. As Rabbi Goldie Milgram puts, it, “Lament is to remember where it hurts, how it got that way, to tell the journey, to honor the pain, not become the story.” Holding space for lament is sacred work and it is our holy calling at this time.
The following are words that I wrote and posted on social media (Facebook) on May 25th:
“In ordering our nation's flags to be lowered to half-staff over this Memorial Day weekend, the current president has finally given a modicum of recognition of our nation's grief.
And so I lament. Dear God I'm hurting. It's been said that "hurt people hurt people" and my heart is breaking knowing that so many of my fellow humans are hurting so deeply and hurting one another.
Yes, it's also the case that "hurt people help fellow hurt people" but let us not rush through these feelings. May we not fast-track or by-pass our grief. This is a time for us to really, and deeply, feel. Feel the hurt, feel our shock, feel grief, feel lament, feel anger, feel despair, feel angst... feel our hearts break. I think we fear feeling our hearts be broken. But that's just what hearts are designed to do. Hearts that don't break aren't being allowed to be real hearts. Let's be real hearts. Let's love, hurt, and break - knowing that only through brokenness can come true wholeness.
May the lowered flags be more than a token gesture.
May we allow seeing them to be the final log flowing through our bodies that causes our emotional dams to burst forth releasing a needed outpouring of tears.
May we lament the ongoing racism and violent white supremacy in a country which too often seems to allow law enforcement officers to disproportionally brutalize and kill its black citizens.
May we lament the completely unnecessary deaths of the (nearly now and soon to be over) 100,000 of our fellow Americans (and the many others around the world) due to horrible mismanagement of this pandemic.
May we lament the lost jobs and financial challenges faced by billions of people as they struggle to survive.
May we lament the loss of opportunities to gather as humans are meant to as social creatures, celebrating life through theater, dance, church services, weddings, graduations, anniversaries, and more.
May we lament that so many of us yearn to return to the old normal as quickly as possible instead of embracing this time as an opportunity to re-imagine who we are and can be.
May we lament the millions of lives senselessly taken in the dark pits of war.
And may we use our hoarded stockpiles of toilet paper to mop up our needed outpouring of tears so we don't flood ourselves off the face of the earth.”
While it is an understatement to say, “we’ve got our work cut out for us,” what’s being asked of us really isn’t too much to ask. It isn’t impossible. It’s not too hard. And it’s not too much to ask.
Yet, it’s not tokenism. It’s not merely posting a “black square” on social media. And it’s not just suddenly buying and wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt.
It’s being willing to date and marry people of color. ..Being willing to have a pastor who is a person of color. ..Being willing to have people of color leading our religious denominations. ..Being willing to change the way we do worship to help it feel more inviting and welcoming to people of color.
..Being willing to break bread with and prayerfully kneel next to people of color. ..Being willing to worship “with” people of color in primarily POC congregations who are offering worship online via Zoom, Youtube, etc.
..Being willing to invite black pastors to serve as guest preachers and worship leaders for primarily white congregations online – and in person when the pandemic has abated/subsided. ..Being willing to either take down images of white Jesus; or add images featuring Jesus portrayed more accurately as a person of color; and/or being willing to have an artist darken the flesh on your current paintings of Jesus.
..Being willing to do the things that would actually reduce the massive incarceration rate of people of color – decriminalize and/or legalize drugs; end private prisons which inherently seek to enact laws to help keep their cells filled; change how police departments budget their monies so that they receive more training in engaging with mental health issues, more training in de-escalation, seeking to utilize the least violent measures possible in every interaction, seeking to hold police officers accountable for breaching the public trust in harming the people they are sworn to protect (which includes persons suspected or accused of committing crimes – whether guilty or innocent);
..Being willing to have our churches and/or national government pay restitution of some sort (perhaps $10k-300k to each black citizen who has family lineage in the U.S. dating back to 1865 or earlier, etc.); being willing to engage in reparations or restitution to native Americans whose lands we stole.
..Being willing to provide universal health care that provides mental health care, and increase the number of mental health workers per capita in the use.
..Being willing take down statues of known slave holders and racists (those who are on the wrong side of the Civil War), being willing to feature people of color as the faces we honor on our currency; Being willing to center and amplify the voices of people of color; being willing vote for persons of color; being willing to fully share power with people of color; and being willing to give up some of our current power to help that power-sharing be meaningful and real.
And not just being willing to do these things – but actually doing them.
If there’s any wisdom in what I’ve written here, may it be the kind that Jesus referred to with these words attributed to him: “Wisdom is made known through our deeds” ~ Matthew 11:19
More importantly, may we make the most of this truly challenging and difficult time to be alive on this planet – by putting our faith into action in such a way that the followers of Jesus might once again be known by our love - “See how they love!”
~ Rev. Roger Wolsey
Read online here
About the Author
Rev. Roger Wolsey is a United Methodist pastor who resides in Grand Junction, CO. Roger is author of Kissing Fish: Christianity for people who don’t like Christianity and blogs for Patheos as The Holy Kiss and serves on the Board of Directors of ProgressiveChristianity.Org. Roger became “a Christian on purpose” during his college years and he experienced a call to ordained ministry two years after college. He values the Wesleyan approach to the faith and, as a certified spiritual director, he seeks to help others grow and mature. Roger enjoys yoga; playing trumpet; motorcycling; and camping with his son. He served as the Director of the Wesley Foundation campus ministry at the University of Colorado in Boulder for 14 years, and has served as pastor of churches in Minnesota, Iowa, and currently serves as the pastor of Fruita UMC in Colorado, and also serves as the "CRM" (Congregational Resource Minister/Church Consultant) for the Utah/Western Colorado District of the Mountain Sky Conference.
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Question & Answer
Q: By A Reader
Not long ago I discovered the facts provided by Rev. Spong about the Bible being interpreted in its correct historical context. It was information that I knew was the vital missing piece to my faith that I didn’t know how to find until that point. I had been trying for years to find the facts and he provided them in an accessible way besides going to a seminary school. It felt like I had been starving and finally found food. Also I understand his call to not abandon faith, but to see it in a new light. However this is easier said than done. I don’t feel too comfortable in Episcopalian services because it feels like that same old, literal view again being pushed onto the parishioners. I don’t know what my faith can be anymore and a part of me wants to give up. In the past I was constantly praying, going to church, and made faith a cornerstone of my life. Now I don’t know what to call myself, if anything, because I’m not sure what Jesus is besides a kind Jewish rabbi who was impactful to a group of Jews who wrote his life as propaganda to support their cause to add him to the list of prophets like Moses and Elijah. Should I look into Unitarian churches? I don’t know what to do. Thank you for your time.
A: By Rev. Aurelia Dávila Pratt
Dear Reader,
Reading your question, I am filled with compassion for you because the nature of your faith has shifted significantly. First, you must allow yourself space to grieve the certainties you have lost. This acknowledgment of grief is as important as any spiritual practice. But take heart! You have gained much by choosing to take hold of the reigns in your faith journey.
I can remember having similar questions about faith in my first semester of seminary. All the new information overwhelmed me, especially with regards to the Bible and its historical context. I felt like I was being tossed about in an ocean of doubt. Every new piece of knowledge was like another wave crashing over me. Meanwhile, my faith floated further and further away.
In these moments, I would remind myself that I had traded certainty for freedom, but living into this freedom took years of work and still requires continuous upkeep. It requires a non-dualistic mind, and a lifetime of wrestling. This is the life of faith: it is allowing facts, doctrine, and interpretations to inform your inner work, but ultimately learning to trust your own instincts. It is learning to embody the belief of imago dei: that you are made in the image of God and the Spirit of God dwells within you. This means you not only have permission, but it is absolutely essential to become well-practiced in listening to your Spirit. No mentor, podcast, pastor, or book can do this for you. It is the road less traveled to be sure!
Personally, two things have helped me along the way: going back and going forward. First, I have had to go back and reclaim the faith of my childhood. This is not to be confused with the faith I had at the start of seminary. I am talking about the mystical, wonder-filled, imaginative faith of my child-self, before all the indoctrination. I believe this is the posture Jesus was speaking of when he told us to be like little children. Going back to this place requires a lot of unlearning and deconstruction, but it also means we get to reimagine and create anew.
I have also needed to move forward by finding community who engages faith in a way similar to me. I cannot learn to trust myself if I lack the safe environment to do the hard work involved and the people who are committed to this work. One reality resulting from COVID-19 is that a lot of churches have moved online, making the possibility of finding this kind of community more accessible. Our church has, and you are always invited to come find us on social media if you need more support on your journey.
Finally, please take this as less of an “answer” and more of a “response.” It’s difficult to not get the answers we seek, but I take comfort in Jesus, who often answered questions with a question. It was as if he knew the life of faith couldn’t be sold so short as an easy answer. This is the kind of truth I wish to be held in. It’s not certain, but it’s free. It’s hard as hell, but it’s so, so good. I pray the same can be true for you in time. Blessings on your journey.
~ Rev. Aurelia Dávila Pratt
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Aurelia Dávila Pratt is the Lead Pastor and a founder of Peace of Christ Church. She is a licensed Master of Social Work and sits on the Board of Advocates for the Diana R. Garland School of Social Work. Aurelia is President of the board for the Nevertheless, She Preached conference and co-chair of the Religious Liberty Council for the Baptist Joint Committee. You can follow her on Instagram @revaureliajoy to keep up with her sermons and writings at the intersection of justice and theology.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Origins of the New Testament, Part II:
Dating the Jesus of History
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
September 24, 2009
In order to understand the New Testament with any real integrity, it must be placed into its historic setting. The events in the life of Jesus of Nazareth did not happen in a vacuum, nor are these events history as history is now defined. Not only was Jesus born in, shaped by and interpreted through a particular context, but also the narrative details of his life found in the gospels were not recorded until somewhere between two and three generations after his life had come to its end. Both of these facts are ignored in many church circles today.
First, we seek to fix the dates around the life of Jesus. That is accomplished by an appeal to both the remembered story of his life and to secular records that we can locate, which date other people who appear in his story. It is not an exact science but it is a trustworthy guide.
Accounts of Jesus’ birth are recorded in only two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke, and both link his birth to the reign of King Herod, who was known as “Herod the Great.” Matthew, the earliest of these two sources, weaves his story of the Wise Men around references to the reign of Herod and the anticipation recorded in the prophet Micah that the messiah will come out of King David’s line and be born in King David’s birthplace, Bethlehem. He also casts Herod in the familiar Jewish role of the wicked king who, like the Pharaoh of old in Egypt, sought to destroy God’s promised deliverer. Matthew, in effect, retells the story of Moses’ being miraculously saved from death by divine intervention, but this time it is about Jesus. This attempt to wrap Moses’ stories around the memory of Jesus is illustrative of the Jewish interpretive tradition we call “Midrash.” While these stories are messianic interpretations and not remembered history, there is still no reason to suggest that this means that the anchoring of the birth of Jesus to the reign of Herod was itself fanciful. Matthew is even more specific, suggesting that the birth of Jesus took place near the end of Herod’s reign, just prior to his death. Secular records tell us that Herod reigned in this Jewish nation from 37 BCE to 4 BCE.
We also know from historical records that, with Herod’s death, the Jewish nation was subdivided into three provinces, each ruled first by the sons of Herod and later by Roman procurators. That is the situation when the adult story of Jesus is brought to its conclusion. From both of these angles, the dating of Jesus’ birth fits with what we know of secular history.
Luke confirms this tradition when he dates the births of both John the Baptist and Jesus as occurring when Herod was king of Judea. Luke adds that this was also when Caesar Augustus was on the throne of the Roman Empire and Quirinius was governor of Syria. Secular records reveal that only Quirinius, who did not come to power until 6-7CE, does not fit this historic reconstruction. Luke appears to have inserted
Quirinius into his story to support his idea that a general taxation or enrollment was ordered in which people had to return to their family’s ancestral home, a device Luke used to explain how this birth happened to occur in Bethlehem. Once again, we observe how the historical facts in the birth story are blended into later messianic interpretations. The association of the birth of Jesus with the last year or years of Herod’s reign is, however, fairly clear in the memory of the Christian community. It is for these reasons that most scholars today date the birth of Jesus no later than 4 BCE, the date of the death of King Herod, and probably no earlier than 6 BCE. I tend to share in that bit of historic reconstruction and have adopted as “my best guess” the year 4 BCE as the time when Jesus was born. I am fairly certain, however, that his birth took place in Nazareth, as the first gospel of Mark assumes, and that the Bethlehem birth tradition is a later messianic development. It was Paul, writing to the Romans around the year 58 CE, who first claimed that Jesus was in the Davidic line and thus heir to his throne. This was the reference that ultimately gave rise to a Bethlehem birth story.
So, with the birth date fairly accurately set, we search for a way to determine the date on which the end of the life of Jesus occurred. Once again we discover that the gospel tradition is clear in associating the crucifixion of Jesus with the procuratorship of a Roman official known as Pontius Pilate. Although Pilate is not mentioned in Paul, the first gospel of Mark, written in the early years of the 8th decade of the Common Era, anchors the Passion of Jesus in the reign of Pilate so deeply that it would be hard to suggest that these two things were not deeply linked.
Pilate enters Mark’s gospel when the arrested Jesus, having been interrogated by the Jewish authorities, is delivered to Pilate early in the morning of the day of the crucifixion. Pilate receives ten other mentions in Mark’s gospel, all associated with the passion story, the last one occurring when Pilate allowed the body, now confirmed to be dead, to be delivered to Joseph of Arimathea for burial. While the historicity of this burial narrative in the newly hewn tomb in the garden of this Joseph is largely doubted, the connection between the crucifixion and Pilate is not. Matthew links Pilate with the crucifixion in nine references. Luke has twelve in number, including two pre-crucifixion mentions, one to date the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry and the other to chronicle Pilate’s role in a previous Galilean uprising. John raises the number of Pilate references to twenty-one. It is also worth noting that, in these two later gospels of Luke and John, Pilate grows into a more and more sympathetic figure, while Judas and the Jewish leadership grow more and more negative. We thus can see in the texts themselves traditions and memories changing and developing. To complete the biblical record, Pilate is mentioned three times in the Book of Acts, which is really volume two of Luke, and always in speeches attributed to the apostles Peter and Paul. There is only one reference to Pilate in the epistle I Timothy, an epistle whose Pauline authorship is universally denied and is dated in a much later period of Christian history. So, once again, without claiming more than history can validate, it seems clear that the crucifixion of Jesus was connected to the reign of a man named Pontius Pilate as Roman procurator. That being settled, we can then go to Roman records to learn that Pilate served in this post in Judea from 26-36 CE, which gives us the limits within which to locate the crucifixion. Through other means, too lengthy to go into here but leaning on narratives about his removal recorded by Josephus, a Jewish historian, we can narrow down that eleven-year span and state the high probability that the crucifixion happened around the year 30 CE. This guess could be off by some two years on either side, but it still remains the closest we can come to certainty. So our conclusion is that Jesus lived between 6 BCE and 32 CE at the outside and probably 4 BCE to 30 CE would be our best guess. His life span would thus have been 34 to 38 years.
I have no doubt that Jesus was a figure of history and am completely unimpressed by those recent writers who have tried to prove that he was a mythological figure of Jewish or early Christian fantasy based on Egyptian sources. I think the biographical notes recorded in one of Paul’s early and authentic epistles (Galatians 1:18-24) are determinative. Paul relates a conversation that he had with Peter and James, whom he identified as “the Lord’s brother,” some three years after his conversion. The early 20th century church historian, Adolf Harnack, has stated that Paul’s conversion had to have occurred within “one to six years” after the crucifixion, so this conversation to which Paul refers had to have occurred no less than four and no more than nine years after the death of Jesus. That is far too short a span of time for mythology to develop. This means that while all the details of the Jesus story are clearly not historical, Jesus himself is. So we locate Jesus in human history as having lived between roughly 4 BCE and 30 CE.
Two things become obvious immediately from this dating exercise. First, Jesus’ entire life was lived as a Jew under the domination of the Roman Empire. He was a part of a conquered and oppressed people. Rome first took over the rule of this land in 65 BCE in an alliance with the successors of the Maccabees and ruled it with an iron hand until the fall of the Roman Empire. That included a war against a Jewish rebellion that occurred between 66-73 CE which totally destroyed the Jewish nation, including Jerusalem and the Temple. While that destruction happened well after the life of Jesus, it did occur before any of the gospels were written. Scholars now believe that this later destruction of Jerusalem has shaped the memory of Jesus in the gospels far more than was once was recognized. We will look at this assertion later.
The second conclusion that this dating exercise makes obvious is that the earliest records we have of anyone writing anything about Jesus is in the works of Paul, who did his writing between 51 and 64 CE, or 21 to 34 years after the death of Jesus. That means there is a total absence and thus a total silence for at least 20 years before any single detail about the life of Jesus was written down. Even then, we need to note that Paul tells us very little about the life of Jesus and that Paul died before any gospel had been written. The gospels from which we get most of our image of Jesus were written between the early 70’s and the late 90’s, or some 40 to 70 years after the death of Jesus. This means that the gospels are not eyewitness accounts, but are rather the product of the second, third and even fourth generation of Christians. The gospels were also written in Greek, a language that neither Jesus nor his disciples spoke or wrote. We need to dispense with the idea that these books are either history or biography.
That should be enough to disestablish many of the assumptions that faithful, but not necessarily learned, people have made over the centuries about the New Testament. It also sets the stage for us to begin to examine these Christian Scriptures with fresh eyes and open minds. That is what I hope to do as this series unfolds.
~ John Shelby Spong
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Announcements
Building on the popular Call of This Moment anti-racism workshop, this second class will focus on concrete practices to build anti-racist community. This workshop will build on materials presented in the previous workshop - watch The Call of This Moment before July 22. You may purchase it here. The class will run from 7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday, July 22nd and Thursday, July 23rd. READ ON ... |
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