[Dialogue] 3/26/20, Progressing Spirit: Irene Monroe: COVID-19 And The World Community; Spong revisited

[Ellie Stock]

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COVID-19 And The World Community
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|  Essay by Rev. Irene Monroe
March 26, 2020In a responsible response to the corona virus outbreak, also known as COVID-19, church and worship services across the globe are canceled. Traditional Bible study has gone online. Sermons are watched on Zoom, and old videos of singing church choirs have popped up in my inbox. Our global engagement with one another right now is social distancing while staying connected, revealing our acts of spiritual communion. 

This pandemic doesn’t call for pandemonium, petty divisions, political wrangling, or panic buying. We are all in this together! Our collective concern should be about saving lives and not the momentary upending of our lifestyles. 

This global crisis highlights how we are bound in shared humanity. And as such, we are to take seriously medical historian and epidemic expert Howard Markel's advice: “Coronavirus is a socially transmitted disease, and we all have a social contract to stop it. What binds us is a microbe – but it also has the power to separate us. We’re a very small community, whether we acknowledge it or not, and this proves it. The time to act like a community is now.”

The act of an inclusive community is a difficult concept and lived reality to actualize. Markel’s words that we should act like a community are heartfelt, particularly in this time of polarization that we witness on local, national, and international levels. This  “us versus them” mentality” infects places like even our churches that by their very essence and ethos means community. 

For example, on March 15, I was invited to be the guest preacher at a United Methodist Church. However, I didn’t preach because of the COVID-19 warning to remain out of congregate settings, avoid mass gatherings, and maintain distance (approximately 6 feet or 2 meters). For months the senior pastor and I had been finalizing plans for me to come out to preach and celebrate with the church its upcoming 15th anniversary as a Reconciling Congregation in March. UMC Reconciling Congregations welcome people of all gender expressions and sexual orientations. In his letter inviting me he wrote the following: 

“Given the proximity of this year’s observance to the next UMC General Conference vote re: LGBTQ legislation in May 2020, it is important to us to invite a preacher who will encourage us during a tumultuous time in our relationship with our global connection and, to be honest, in our congregation’s own internal connections.” 

Just minutes after our phone call ended, my smartphone flashed the Associated Press headline: “Methodists propose split in gay marriage, clergy impasse.”  I let out a long sigh of despair, thinking, why are we LGBTQ+people of faith loving a church that doesn’t love us. On March 15, I looked forward to delivering a homily about healing our “isms.”

LGBTQ inclusion in the policy and practices of UMC has been a long contentious and exhausting battle- both nationally and globally. The proposed schism to be voted on in May at General Conference in Minneapolis would divide the nation’s third-largest denomination worldwide. While the current UMC will allow LGBTQ marriages and clergy, the impending split will create a new “traditionalist Methodist” denomination, allowing outright discrimination and denunciation of LGBTQ people in the name of God. 

“The best means to resolve our differences, allowing each part of the Church to remain true to its theological understanding, while recognizing the dignity, equality, integrity, and respect of every person,” the proposal, “PROTOCOL OF RECONCILIATION & GRACE THROUGH SEPARATION” stated. 

In the sermon I didn’t preach, I wanted to convey that it is not enough just to look outside ourselves to see the places where society is broken. It is not enough to talk about institutions, churches, and workplaces that fracture and separate people based on race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation, and not see these prejudices and bigoted acts in ourselves. We cannot heal the world if we have not healed ourselves. So perhaps the most significant task, and the most challenging work we must do first- is to heal ourselves. And this work must be done in relationship with our justice work out in the world.

In Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he was struggling to change a nation. King was disheartened to receive criticism from clergy he considered to be his colleagues and on the battlefield toward justice with him. However, King understood the interconnectedness of human life and the intersectionality of oppressions. His worldview of a global community resounds in these words: 

“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be... This is the inter-related structure of reality.”

Let us be united in this struggle together to not only heal ourselves of our indifference toward one another but to also heal a world fighting to save its life. 

We have never been where we are today as a nation, from natural disasters to terrorist attacks, hate crimes and unmentionable acts of violence, to now a health pandemic. 

In honoring the sanctity of all human life, let’s care for ourselves and each other.~ Rev. Irene Monroe
Read online here

About the Author
The Reverend Monroe does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on NPR's WGBH (89.7 FM). She is 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. A  Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist;  her columns appear the Boston LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and 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 I try 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 I aim 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’s research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website.  |

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Question & Answer

 
Q: By A Reader

It has been suggested that over ten religions have a version of the Golden Rule. For Christians it is the core of faith and transcends tradition, ritual and doctrine. In military conflict one strategy is to divide the opposing force to conquer it bit by bit. Is it possible that evil is using that strategy to keep the Golden Rule faiths separated?

A: By Rev. Aurelia Dávila Pratt
 Dear Reader,I grew up in a context where interfaith work was considered radical and borderline dangerous. Yet, it is this exact realization of the Golden Rule’s existence in such a wide variety of faith traditions that compelled me to interfaith work in my community. I have created, participated in and written about interfaith work for several years. The one truth I continue to come back to again and again is we are more alike than we are different. 
 
But, could evil be using a divide and conquer strategy on us? In many regards this could be proven true. Daily, we watch an endless stream of information and news cycles revealing a general lack of compassion for the other. A divisive spirit surely runs rampant through our society as we watch politicians and those in power manipulate our differences for their own benefit.
 
Yet, it is precisely because of the Golden Rule that I don’t lose hope. The Golden Rule is a universal reminder that we are more alike than we are different. It is true that we often utilize parts of our human nature similarly, including things like fear, suspicion, or anger. However, the same is true for what matters most: our ability to love, extend empathy, practice compassion and peacemaking. These are the kinds of things that hold divine power. They are proof of the Spirit of God living within each of us. The Golden Rule helps us to understand this truth because it helps us find the inherent goodness of each person and therefore, recognize the divine in all people.
 
So, to answer your question: Evil may try to divide and conquer us all it wants, but it won’t be able to use the Golden Rule to do it. As long as there are faithful people in every tradition speaking the truth of its message (and I believe there are!), there will always be faithful people following these wisdom teachings in their daily lives. When we not only believe, but also practice the message of the Golden Rule, we can and will overpower any force that would attempt to keep us disconnected from the humanity of one another.
 
Interfaith work is the healing work needed to bridge our various golden rule messages together. It is the perfect antidote to the division threatening to keep us from common understanding. You can read more about my thoughts on the Golden Rule and its relationship to interfaith work here.~ Rev. Aurelia Dávila Pratt

Read and share online here

About the Author
Aurelia Dávila Pratt is the Lead Pastor at Peace of Christ Church and is a licensed Master of Social Work. Her sermons and writings steer the listener toward contemplation while also boldly tackling social issues of the day. She prioritizes the work of Peace, believing it to be both a vertical and horizontal process that is disruptive and uncomfortable, but mystically healing. As a pastor, she promotes safe and creative space for all to participate in this work.  |

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited


The Origins of the Bible, Part XXIV: The Book of Ruth

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
April 2, 2020
 There are three books in the Hebrew Bible that are designated as “protest literature;” that is, they are all representative of a literary device used by an anonymous author to make a point, human or political, in a particular moment of history. The three books are Jonah, Job and Ruth. None of these books ever pretended to be literal history; the three main characters are not real people who ever lived. They are literary characters created by their respective authors to allow the drama to unfold and as such to carry a specific narrative purpose. Only one who is completely ignorant of biblical history would ever suggest that these three works were ever written to be read as literal history or as the “inerrant word of God.”

We have already looked at Jonah and Job in this “Origins of the Bible” series. Jonah is located, incorrectly I believe, in what the Jews call the “Book of the Twelve” and the Christians tend to call “The Minor Prophets.” In our consideration of Jonah we noted that, whereas modern people might signal the fictional nature of a story by beginning it with the words “Once upon a time,” the Hebrews used gross exaggeration to make the same point. So we read in Jonah of a great fish in whose belly the prophet can live for three days and three nights. In Job the exaggeration takes the form of a rich man whose righteousness was tested by God by having his life wrecked by a series of calamities that his moral character did not deserve in order to see how he will react. Those things signal the fact that these narratives are not history, but fictional stories with a powerful purpose.

Today we turn to the last of the protest books, the book of Ruth. This small, four-chapter-long story is hidden away in the Bible between the books of Judges and First Samuel. It was written in the post-exilic period of Jewish history, probably near the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, somewhere between 425 and 360 BCE. It received its present position in the Bible prior to the establishment of the house of David and the royal line of Davidic kings because it purports to tell the story of King David’s great-grandmother. That was, indeed, the whole point of the book, but to note that here is to get ahead of my story. Let me set the stage.

During the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Jewish nation went through a period of intense xenophobia, which grew out of an enormous fear that is always the mother of dislocating prejudices. The Jewish people had had to face the possibility of their own annihilation. First, they had been defeated in battle by the Babylonians in 596 BCE. Their supposedly impenetrable walls around Jerusalem, which had not been breached by an enemy for more than 400 years, had given way to the army of Nebuchadnezzar. Their holy city had been laid waste. The Temple built by Solomon around 935 BCE and believed to be the earthly house of their God Yahweh had been leveled. These traumatized Jewish people, who believed themselves to have been chosen by God and thereby promised the land they occupied, and who were also convinced that their holy homeland was not only the center of the earth but the place where heaven and earth touched, now found themselves unceremoniously marched away into a Babylonian captivity far from their sacred soil. They had thus been ripped away from everything they believed to be holy. They even wondered if they would ever again sing the Lord’s song, since it could not, they believed, be sung in a foreign land.

When some of them were finally allowed to return from exile some two generations later, around the year 538 BCE, these newly freed descendents interpreted their restoration to mean that finally God would vindicate them and proceed to establish the long-anticipated kingdom of God back on Jewish soil. Surely the end of their captivity was the sign that the kingdom was near and that God was back in charge. That, however, was not what happened. A second return around 490 BCE under Zerubbabel also did not give rise to the expected kingdom. A third return under Nehemiah about the year 450 BCE met a similar fate, as did a fourth under Ezra between 400-350 BCE. With each disappointment the hopelessness of their dreams seemed to be given new confirmation, so they raised haunting questions. Why was God not protecting them? Why would God allow the chosen people to be so badly treated with defeat and exile, and then to experience a return made up only of the bitterness of being small, defenseless and continually abused? It was a strange way for God to act, unless God was angry. So they sought to determine what they had done to infuriate their God and to bring about their fate. By the time of Ezra they became convinced that they finally understood the reason for their suffering: They had ceased to be a racially pure people. Some Jews had married non-Jews, who had polluted their pure blood and had even corrupted their true faith. This, they thought, must have angered their God and they came to believe that nothing would change until the Jewish nation purified itself. A new national strategy was thus adopted. All foreign elements were to be purged. Xenophobia set in. Husbands or wives married to non-Jews were to be banished from the land, along with any half-breed children that had issued from these unholy unions. The new Judah was to be for Jews only. This was the context in which an unknown author wrote his protest that we today call the book of Ruth. Listen to this story now from this perspective.

A Jewish man named Elimelech and his Jewish wife, Naomi, took their two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, and moved to the land of Moab. Perhaps it was a time of a downturn in the Jewish economy and work was hard to find in Judah. While dwelling in this foreign land, however, Elimelech died and the care of his widow Naomi was left in the hands of their sons. These sons, living far from Judah, then proceeded to take Moabite wives for themselves, one of whom was named Orpah and the other Ruth. Then tragedy struck again, and Mahlon and Chilion died. In that patriarchal society this left a vulnerable and economically non-viable family made up of three single women. Naomi decided that her only choice was to return to Judah, and so she urged her two daughters-in-law to return to their fathers’ families. It was a sign of disgrace for them to do so, but an older, widowed mother-in-law without sons had no way to care for these now single younger women. One of them, Orpah, agreed to do so, but the other, Ruth, declined and, in a piece of writing that has been quoted as a mark of fidelity through the ages, said to Naomi: “Entreat me not to leave you………where you will go, I will go. Where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people will be my people and your God my God and where you die, I will die and there will I be buried.”

The two of them thus returned to Judah without a male protector. It was a hazardous life in a patriarchal world. Determined to survive, they settled near the fields of a man named Boaz, who was a distant kinsman of Naomi’s deceased husband. Jewish law required that the poor be allowed to glean in the fields of the rich for enough grain to keep them alive, and so each day Ruth brought enough from Boaz’ fields to make bread to keep the two of them alive. In the process, Ruth, this foreign woman, won the admiration of her Jewish neighbors, including Boaz, who ordered her to be protected while alone in the fields and to be given access to water.

Naomi, knowing that Boaz was kin to Elimelech, was also aware of the Jewish law requiring the male nearest of kin to a deceased husband to take the widow of his departed kinsman into his care as part of his harem, so she devised a plan to confront Boaz with his responsibility for herself and for Ruth. The plan involved seduction.

At the end of the harvest there would be a celebration at which wine would flow freely. Naomi instructed Ruth to bathe, anoint herself with perfume, put on her best dress and go to the party. Ruth was instructed to see that Boaz’ heart was made merry with much wine. When well drunk, Boaz lay down on the floor and went to sleep. Ruth gave him a pillow and covered him with a blanket. Then she crawled under the blanket with him. When Boaz awoke the next morning, he found this woman at his side. He had no idea what he had done. “Who are you?” he asked. “I am Ruth,” she responded. “Spread your skirt over me for you are next of kin.” What she was saying was, “Marry me!” Boaz demurred, admitting his kinship but saying there was a nearer kinsman than he who must be given first refusal on this new wife. When this man declined, Boaz did the honorable thing and he and Ruth were married. They had a son, whose name was Obed. He in turn had a son named Jesse and Jesse had a son named David. That is where the book of Ruth ends. Ruth was a Moabite. She was David’s great-grandmother. David, the hero of the super-patriotic Jews who were at that moment purging from the land all people whose bloodlines were compromised, was himself part Moabite! David would have qualified for purging. That is why the protest book of Ruth was written. It was designed to confront the reigning xenophobia and to reveal its inherent weakness.

As the fear subsided, the xenophobia also faded. It always does. The call of God to human beings is always a call to wholeness. No one is whole when, acting out of fear, he or she seeks to diminish the worth and the dignity of one who is judged to be somehow impure or inferior by reason of some ontological difference: those whose skin color is of a different hue, whose religion is thought to be deviant and thus not true, or whose sexual orientation is not that of the majority. Ruth is a book written to protest all of the limits that human prejudice forever tries to place on the love of God.

How wonderful that such a book was included in the sacred scriptures of both the Jews and the Christians. The book of Ruth provides us with a biblical mirror into which we can stare at our own prejudices and then be led to free ourselves of them. That is why the Bible is called “Holy.”~  John Shelby Spong  |

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