[Dialogue] 7/22/2021, Progressing Spirit: Rev Jim Burklo: If God Is Love…; Q/A Gretta Vosper; Spong revisited

Thu Jul 22 07:51:53 PDT 2021

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If God Is Love…
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|  Essay by Rev. Jim Burklo
July 22, 2021
One of the many ways to read the Bible is to view it as God’s autobiography.

So here I offer a “Cliff’s Notes” of that story – heavily influenced by the depth-psychological, mythical interpretation of the scripture offered by Carl Jung in his “Answer to Job”: 

“I started out as the creator of the universe: a guy beyond the sky who breathed the cosmos into existence.  I was a human-like entity with unlimited supernatural powers.  I created the universe because I was lonely.  I needed a companion.  Sure, I had angels and archangels and cherubim and seraphim all around me, but they praised me and fawned over me so much that I couldn’t really connect with them as friends.  So I formed the world and put a human on it – someone I could talk to.  Someone who would worship me but also be real with me.  At first, it seemed like Adam and I were going to hit it off.

“But Adam wanted companionship with someone at his level.  He wasn’t happy – I could tell.  So I put him to sleep, pulled a rib out of him, and turned it into a woman.  

“That worked for a while, but it didn’t take long before the two of them got ambitious.  Taking walks with them in the Garden of Eden was nice for all three of us, but they wanted more.  They wanted my superpowers.  So they ate from the Tree of Knowledge, and that’s when the trouble got started.  I didn’t like how uppity they were getting, so I kicked them out of the garden and made them work for a living, thinking that would wear them out so much that they wouldn’t be so ambitious.

“It is hard to be friends with someone who is not your equal.  This was a problem that I couldn’t seem to supernaturally work my way out of.  I wanted real companionship, but not competition. 

“Sure enough, they got good at agriculture and started amassing surpluses of food, and their offspring created cities and civilizations.  They got good at building things – like the amazing Tower of Babel.  I was impressed, but also threatened, again, by how close they were getting to my heavenly realm.   So I had to bring them back to earth by confusing them with different languages, so it would be harder for them to cooperate and do god-like things.

“It was a nice try, but it didn’t do the job.  People created more and more elaborate civilizations and were so focused on the pleasures they had created for themselves that they were beginning to forget about me altogether.  I got really angry about it and decided to wipe the earth clean and start over again.  I picked out one family to build a big boat and put pairs of animals on it, and then flooded the whole earth.  After the flood, Noah re-populated the earth and things were better for a while.  I got more respect and people seemed humbled.

“But of course they just went back to their old ways again after a while.  This time I tried to take a more subtle approach.  I entered the souls of certain people called prophets, who spoke on my behalf to correct the proud and evil ways of humanity.  Occasionally this tactic worked, but mostly the people ignored or persecuted the prophets while they were alive, and only showed them respect after they were dead and gone.   I was losing interest in human beings, just as they were losing interest in me.  I felt lonely and frustrated.   

“But there was one human who gave me joy:  Job.  He followed my commandments and worshipped me with all his heart, but he was also refreshingly honest with me.  With Job, I felt like there was hope that I could have a meaningful relationship with humanity. 

“Satan served as my special investigator in my heavenly court.  He saw that I was happy with Job, but he knew I’d been burned by people time and again.  Satan told me that we ought to test Job to make sure his faithfulness and goodness was real.  I reluctantly agreed.

“The miseries that Job endured in this time of testing were dreadful.  He lost his family, his wealth, and his health.  It hurt my soul to hear him crying out to me for mercy.  He knew that my treatment of him was unjust, and he told me so.  And he was right.  I tried to shut him up with a long diatribe about my mighty gloriousness.  But neither he nor I found any satisfaction in it.  In the end, we restored to Job his family, wealth, and health.  But the test left both of us traumatized. 

“For millennia I felt guilty about what I had allowed to happen to Job.  It made me re-think this whole business of divinity.  Being supernatural was over-rated.  I created the universe in the first place because I wanted a loving relationship with somebody.  But love requires vulnerability.  Job was vulnerable.  I was not.  Being supernatural got in my way. 

“So I decided to become a human being – a mortal.  In Jesus, I experienced everything that Job enjoyed and suffered.  It was wonderful and it was awful.  After the torture on the cross, after the tomb, there was no going back.  I gave up omnipotence and omniscience, and settled for omnipresence.  Three days later, I emerged from the tomb… reduced to nothing more – and nothing less – than pure unconditional love. 

“Love is all that is left of me.  I can’t fix things.  I can’t force things.  I can’t control things.  All I can do is invite, attract, and welcome.  All I can do is exude kindness and compassion, and hope that all beings will be drawn to me.  And as they take me into their hearts and treat each other with love, humbly releasing puffed-up pride, I experience overwhelming joy in our companionship.  My cosmic loneliness is gone. 

“Just as people must do, I had to give myself up to find the love I was so desperate to have.  For eons I suffered loneliness and frustration, and in turn caused humans to suffer from unrealistic expectations of what I could do for them.  I really wasn’t very good at being a supernatural divinity because I was so preoccupied with my own jealous rage.  I’m sincerely sorry about all that, dear humans.  Getting down to your level gives me infinite empathy for all you go through.  I don’t want religion to make life any harder for you than it already is.  So from now on, know me as love - so that I can know you, and you can know me, fully.”

If supernatural divinity died on the cross, and if God is no more and no less than love, what are the consequences?

If God is love, then God is a verb.  If God is love, then God is something we do.  If God is love, then Christianity is all about practicing it.  If God is love, when we truly, unconditionally love someone, God is in that relationship, blessing it.  If God is love, then God is extremely powerful.  But love is not directive.  Love does not force anybody to do anything.  If God is love, then God is omni-attractive, but not all-powerful and not all-knowing. 

If God is love, then prayer becomes the contemplative experience of that love through compassionate awareness of all that is.  If God is love, then worship awakens us to it, and fills us with praise for it.  Through billions of years of cosmic unfolding and evolution, we mortals have come into being for the purpose of reflecting awe and wonder back at the universe.  We’re here to let our jaws drop in amazement at each other’s existence, and to be wonderstruck with loving attention toward all that exists.  When we are in this state of awe, we are doing God.  We are practicing God.  We are communing with each other and with nature through God. 

If God is love, then the church is a school of love, and Jesus is our teacher.  The lessons are simple, but the practice is hard.  So we gather together to help each other love as best as we can.  If God is love, attracting and not directing, then the Bible is our language of faith, rather than being a fixed and final rule-book.

So let us interpret the Bible and the Christian tradition through the lens of these three words in 1 John 4:8:  “…God is love.”  

~ Rev. Jim Burklo

Read online here

About the Author
Rev. Jim Burklo is the Senior Associate Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at the University of Southern California.  An ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ, he is the author of seven published books on progressive Christianity, with a new one coming out soon:  Tenderly Calling: An Invitation to the Way of Jesus (St Johann Press, 2021).  His weekly blog, “Musings”, has a global readership.  He serves on the board of ProgressiveChristiansUniting.org and is an honorary advisor and frequent content contributor for ProgressiveChristianity.org. 
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Question & Answer

Q: By Bert

In your recent Question & Answer dated March 25, 2021, you mentioned being an atheist. This term has too many diverse meanings. I don’t believe in the Greek God Thor and don’t expect him to change the weather for me. Does that make me an Atheist? Gods of Mythology come down to earth from heaven and literally fight your battles. I don’t believe in any of the Gods of Mythology, not even the Christian three-part God that was invented in the fourth century under Roman Caesar Constantine. All religions seem to have Gods that are “God in the image of man”. But I do believe in life after biological death. I do believe in a source of creation that lies outside the time-space continuum and therefore is not observable by the scientific method. The source of creation is infinite and undefinable, so calling it a God is just too limiting. I am not comfortable with calling myself an Atheist since that often implies belief in no life after biological death. How do you define an Atheist? 

A: By Rev. Gretta Vosper

Dear Bert,

Thanks for this important question. Your reflections on the gods you don’t believe in remind me of Richard Dawkins’ comment in his book The God Delusion: “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” But it seems to me that your concern is not so much about the gods contrived of the human mind, or even about why I use the word “atheist”, but about those things that we cannot yet, and may never, answer: what is the source of all that we experience and what happens to it and to us when our lives end. That, my friend, I do not know.

Still, my answer to the question “How do you define an Atheist?” is quite simple: An atheist is someone who does not believe in any gods. They are of two types: those who do not believe because there is no proof and who would believe should such proof be provided, and those who would not believe in either case. I am the former, a position known as “weak atheism.”

I did not identify as an atheist until bloggers in Bangladesh were being assassinated for doing so. It seemed important to me that those of us who enjoy the privilege of believing whatever we choose identify with those whose governments purport to protect them but refuse to do so. Subsequently, my congregation sponsored one of those Bangladeshi bloggers as a refugee; he’s been in Canada for two years with his family. Welcoming them was one of the most significant undertakings and greatest joys of my ministry.

I do not believe we continue to exist beyond death, but what we do lives on, as you well know. When I am required to describe what the term “god” means to me, I describe what it is we have the privilege of creating between us: beauty, forgiveness, love, kindness. It is the power of that, distributed throughout all our relationships that brings us courage in times of fear, strength in times of defeat and loss, and challenges us to love when hatred would seem the more rational response. When we die, those to whom we have given these strengths in relationship continue to hold them, continue to draw on them. We live on, sewn into the fabric of their being by what it is we have shared with them. This is why it is so important that we love extravagantly, wrestle with the hurt we’ve experienced until we find our way to peace and then live out that peace, and why we must call one another to right relationship with self, others, and the planet. Each time we do any of these things, we strengthen that thing so many refer to as “god”. I just don’t use the word for all the reasons you’ve noted: it simply makes no sense to use such a limiting word for a reality too impossible to define. 

~ Rev. Gretta Vosper

Read and share 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. Visit her website here.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

Facing Hard Choices in the 21st Century. It’s Either Hogs or Hines!

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
January 12, 2011
In the last half of the 19th century a country doctor named Edgar Hines lived with his family that included two sons, Edgar jr. and John Elbridge in Oconee County, South Carolina, near Clemson University.  Edgar Hines, Jr. went on to become an outstanding doctor.  John Elbridge Hines grew up to become the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church and probably the outstanding world leader in religion produced by the Episcopal Church in the 20th century. 

Bishop Hines was graced with a unique ability to see issues as they emerged in the life of our society while they were still embryonic.  He then acted to address them before they became major crises and thus while action was still possible.  This prescience is what I believe is the unique gift of those who Christians have called prophets.  Prophets have never been predictors of the future, as biblical literalists like to contend.  They are, rather, the discoverers of the future as it is being born, because they know how to read the contemporary signs of the times.  Bishop Hines was this kind of prophet.  During the urban riots of the 1960’s in America, while typical politicians were calling for the imposition of “law and order,” John Hines was walking the streets of our erupting cities in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Harlem, Detroit, Cleveland and Newark, talking to the people who lived there, listening to the rage, the sense of hopelessness and despair that was fueling the outbreaks of violence and discovering how out-of-touch with these human issues the institutional forms of Christianity really were.  Then, in acts of powerful and courageous leadership, he called the Episcopal Church to re-order its priorities to put human need before institutional security; to recognize that Christian mission also meant empowering the powerless.  From his study of history John Hines demonstrated the profound lesson of human civilization, namely that powerless people are always exploited people.  This insight signaled to him that by empowering the powerless ones an effective blow against exploitation is being struck.  He illustrated this insight in Christian history by pointing to the treatment of the powerless ones, whether they were people of color, women or homosexuals, all of whom have been exploited not only by western people, but also by professing Christians.  John Hines laid these ideas before the church he headed and his church responded to his leadership with the boldest initiative I have ever known a religious institution to undertake.  They began to fund as a primary part of this church’s ministry a program that would give powerless people the power to determine their own future. Of course, it was controversial!  Of course, dislocation resulted!  Of course, establishment values and establishment people were threatened.  Yes and of course, they struck back, withholding their contributions, demanding that the church “stick to religion” and “quit its involvement in politics,” as if Christianity had ever in its history been a religion that tended to the “things of the spirit” and not to the call to give life to all and to give it abundantly.  It was probably the most glorious chapter in the history of the Episcopal Church.  Yes, our church lost members and it lost financial support, but it discovered its integrity and the realization dawned on us that the Church will die of boredom long before it dies of controversy. 

John Hines was then and is now my ultimate ecclesiastical hero; he was and is my ultimate role model.  A photograph of him sits before me at my desk until this very moment.  It has been there for years.  He was the first person with whom I talked when I was elected Bishop of Newark in 1976.  I later worked to get his biography published so that his kind of leadership would never be forgotten.  The Biography was entitled Granite on Fire and was written by Ken Kesselus.  Until John Hines died, hardly a week went by that we did not talk on the phone.

I asked John Hines on one occasion to help me to understand how a lad could grow up in the little town of Seneca, South Carolina, known for its fundamentalism in religion and its conservatism in politics, and become a world leader in religion battling for the human rights of the victims of our culture’s prejudices.  He responded by telling me a story about his father, Dr. Edgar Hines, who, in addition to his private medical practice, had also been appointed the County Health Officer for Oconee County, South Carolina.

Dr. Hines, he said, became aware of the health risk to the people, caused by the fact that in that poor farming region, people kept hogs in their fenced-in backyards, where the ground water in the wells was susceptible to infiltration by diseases carried in the feces of the pigs, making an outbreak of cholera a distinct possibility. This impending danger caused him to propose to the county commissioners the passing of a county ordinance, which would require the housing of pigs to be located a sufficient number of yards away from human dwellings.  For the people of Oconee County, South Carolina, this was an unheard of and unappreciated interference on the part of government in the private lives of these farmers and they struck back with fury.  The county commissioners, far more responsive to the votes of these disturbed citizens than they were to the warnings of a country doctor, refused to pass such an ordinance. Dr. Hines then informed the commissioners that without such an ordinance, he could no longer be responsible for the health of the people and was thus prepared to offer his resignation.  This was no idle threat for doctors in the 19th century in rural South Carolina were scarce and replacing Dr. Hines would be almost impossible.  In the face of his threat, the county commissioners agreed to a reconsideration of their vote at the next official meeting.  It was the primary county-wide topic of conversation before the re-consideration meeting occurred.  The local newspaper trumpeted the debate with a headline on page one of the weekly paper “It’s either Hogs or Hines.” When the meeting was finally held, the hogs won by a 3-2 vote.  Dr Hines resigned.

Within six weeks, the daughter of the chairman of the county commissioners contracted cholera and died.  An outbreak of cholera spread throughout the county creating a major health crisis.  Shortly thereafter the Commissioners reversed their decision and pigs and humans were legally separated by a sufficient distance to minimize future epidemics.  It was from this childhood memory that Bishop Hines came to understand that the role of the prophet is to understand life so deeply that you can see a crisis before it develops and step out to meet or even to divert it while there is still time.

I though of this principle and of John Hines as well on two occasions recently.  One had to do with the debate on whether or not to allow the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire as the law that inaugurated them called for them to do.   Over the next decade these tax benefits for the wealthiest 2% of our population will add more than a trillion new dollars to our national debt.  To sustain these tax benefits, the United States will inevitably have to borrow the money from either China or Saudi Arabia.  That reality raises to the level of the inevitable the fact that somewhere down the road this nation runs the risk of bankruptcy.  This in turn means that this momentary enrichment of the few will inevitably result in long term disaster for the entire nation.  To sweeten this irresponsible tax bill and thus to gain sufficient liberal support to pass the measure, additional tax benefits for unemployed people and a drop in payroll taxes for the middle class were also approved. 

At the same time that this tax bill was being debated, a bi-partisan task force, headed by Democrat Erskine Bowles, the former chief of staff to President Clinton and Republican Alan K. Simpson, the former senator from Wyoming and a major party leader, were confronting the Administration and the Congress with the impending fiscal disaster facing this nation if the skyrocketing deficit is not brought under control.  Their bi-partisan report called for a radical revamping of America’s tax structure, closing all of the loopholes, which are used primarily by the rich to lower their tax obligations.  This would mean, if adopted, ending many exemptions that are “sacred cows” like mortgage interest and charitable contributions.  It would mean the lengthening of the years one must work to be eligible for social security; as well as tempering the amount of social security the very wealthy are allowed to receive.  It would mean cutting defense spending that still represents an out-of-bounds percentage of the national budget.  The report of this commission could not get enough votes from its own members to require Congress to take up their proposals.  Please note that the vote to require Congress to take up this report did not require that they pass any of its provisions, but only that a consideration of this report and its recommendations would be forced on our elected officials.

The second occasion in which John Hines insight came to my mind occurred when I continued to hear right wing people condemn climate change warnings as something coming from “neo-fascist environmentalists.”  They maintain that climate change, which they continue to call “global warming,” is a myth that can be dismissed with every winter storm.  At the same time, the melting of the Arctic ice cap has not only threatened the polar bears with extinction, but has set off international competition for the oil that might become accessible if new passageways through the Arctic are opened up.  At the other end of our planet in Antarctica, a New York Times feature in December warned of the decline and possible extinction of its penguin population whose food supply has been disrupted by the melting ice caps.  The choice the leaders of this nation face today is between doing only what we are now doing for the sake of immediate profits or to face the reality of the coming environmental crisis and to act responsibly to divert it.

Our way of life is at stake in the out-of-control national debt.  The life of our planet is at stake in the environmental crisis. Yet no alarm bells are being sounded nationally.  Dr. Edgar Hines, where are you now that the nation and the world, not just the people of Oconee County, S.C., need you?   Where is your successor in our country today?

~  John Shelby Spong
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