[Dialogue] 2/23/2023, Progressing Spirit: Rev. Jim Burklo: Flipping the “He Gets Us” Script; Spong revisited

Thu Feb 23 06:50:07 PST 2023

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screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv1432919679 #yiv1432919679templateBody .yiv1432919679mcnTextContent, #yiv1432919679 #yiv1432919679templateBody .yiv1432919679mcnTextContent p{font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv1432919679 #yiv1432919679templateFooter .yiv1432919679mcnTextContent, #yiv1432919679 #yiv1432919679templateFooter .yiv1432919679mcnTextContent p{font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;}} By Rev. Jim Burklo  
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Flipping the “He Gets Us” Script
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|  Essay by Rev. Jim Burklo
February 23, 2023“We did four to five months’ worth of research. And what we found was that skeptics, and even cultural Christians, weren’t so much interested in Christians, Christianity and the Church, but they very much still resonated with Jesus.” So said Jason Vanderground, the media architect of the HeGetsUs campaign.

On TV for the Super Bowl, a major ad showed, which is also manifesting on billboards and other media outlets all over the country.  It is an effort to make Jesus look good - funded by the same fundamentalists who have trashed his reputation.  Through a dark-money outfit called Signatry and its front, the Servant Foundation, it got a huge donation from the hard-right-wing Green family, the owners of Hobby Lobby.  The campaign website funnels readers into the right-wing media universe, including “Focus on the Family”.  “He Gets Us” is fundamentalism in streetwear, co-opting social justice themes to attract people, especially young folks, into a bait-and-switch.  It aims to be a long-term, billion-dollar ad campaign.  (See a piece about this ad campaign on NPR here.) 

“There were four specific things that people want for themselves today that they see reflected in Jesus, and the top one is seeking peace,” said Vanderground. “To be able to make peace with yourself and peace with others around you, because the top pain point that people are experiencing now is toxic relationships….  But then there are three other values: approachable, compassionate, and loving all… So, even though they are not fully engaged in religious activity or institutional Christianity, that value set that Jesus represents is very relevant to people who are on the fence about what they believe when it comes to faith.”

So the campaign poses Jesus as a loving, caring, relatable peace- and justice-maker.  Its front-facing messaging is progressive-adjacent, even if its backmatter is not.  So we should make the most of it, flipping its hidden script!  I’ve been urging churches and organizations to put out messaging that moves from “He Gets Us” to “He Gets Us To”:

HE GETS US to welcome immigrants
HE GETS US to embrace other religions
HE GETS US to celebrate same-sex marriages
HE GETS US to save the earth from human-caused climate change
HE GETS US to take the Bible seriously, not literally 
HE GETS US to end systemic racism
HE GETS US to stand up for women's right to choose
HE GETS US to resist the right-wing agenda of the funders of HeGetsUs.com.

What are your creative ideas to contribute to this effort?  Send me your memes and pictures of your signs and I'll spread them far and wide in the progressive Christian movement.  And I’ll send you my portfolio of memes you can use in your social media and front-of-church messaging.

But another response is in order, as well.  And that is for progressive Christians to have a larger conversation in the public sphere about who Jesus was – and was not.

This conversation has already started – in, of all places, the very evangelical milieu in which HeGetsUs.com was formed.  Because a fair number of fundamentalists are upset with the campaign for focusing attention on Jesus the human being, instead of on Jesus as almighty, supernatural God.  The marketing wonks who put the HeGetsUs campaign together rightly determined that the best way to sell Jesus to a skeptical public was as a compassionate mortal.  “The Jesus of this campaign is nothing more than an inspiring human who relates to our problems and cares a whole lot about a culturally palatable version of social justice,” complains well-known fundamentalist blogger Natasha Crain.  Philip Ryan, a pastor in the evangelical Presbyterian Church in America, writes: “The He Gets Us campaign does not practice biblical evangelism, and it does not present the biblical Jesus. We in the PCA should be seriously concerned that our leadership is even considering cooperating with such a campaign, much less promoting and defending it to our churches.”  These objections explain exactly why progressive Christians should seize this opportunity to shift the narrative about Jesus in the public sphere.  Jesus was a stunningly compassionate human being who found divine love at the center of his being, and showed others how to be at one with that love, as well.  He was a humble human who emptied himself to serve others.  To this day, he gets us to take action –personal charity, but also political and social engagement - to make peace and justice real in this world.

So let’s make the best use of that billion dollars!  By not focusing on the supernatural divinity of Jesus, “He Gets Us” puts viewers on the very slippery slope that fundamentalists warn against – one that can deliver them into the realm of progressive Christianity.

I suggest that we work on two fronts in response to He Gets Us.  First, we take a positive approach, and piggy-back on its messaging, spinning it cleverly to invite people to visit our progressive churches and check out our media and content universe.  Next, we “out” the people behind HeGetsUs.com – and get word into the public arena about the money and the forces behind the campaign, in order to short-circuit their attempt to use the campaign to direct people into their far-right cosmos.  The fact that they actively work to hide the money and the donors behind the campaign is particularly outrageous.  I find this language on the site pretty insulting:  "Now, bear with us as we use some official language for those who care about this stuff. He Gets Us is an initiative of Servant Foundation, a designated 501(c)(3) organization with a 100/100 Charity Navigator rating."  "Those who care about such stuff"?  That ought to be everybody.  When you google Servant Foundation, the first thing you get is a Methodist foundation in Oklahoma that has nothing to do with HeGetsUs.com.  A different Servant Foundation is behind the campaign, and it is no more than a storefront for Signatry, which has funded right-wing, fundamentalist groups: Alliance Defending Freedom (an anti-gay activist group), Answers in Genesis (the six-day “Creation Museum” people), and Campus Crusade for Christ (fundamentalist campus ministries), as revealed in a video by Rebecca Watson.

The people behind HeGetsUs don’t get him.  But that doesn’t prevent us from using their campaign to help folks get who Jesus really was – and making his compassionate personality the welcoming face of our progressive faith communities. ~ Rev. Jim Burklo
Read online here

About the Author
Rev. Jim Burklo is the Executive Director of Progressive Christians Uniting, which is now organizing ZOE, a national network of progressive Christian ministries at colleges and universities.   He is the founder of Souljourning.org, providing resources for families to nurture the natural spirituality of young people.  He retired as the Senior Associate Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at the University of Southern California in 2022 and now serves as pastor of the United Church of Christ of Simi Valley, CA. An ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ, he is the author of seven published books on progressive Christianity.  His latest is Tenderly Calling: An Invitation to the Way of Jesus. His weekly blog, “Musings,”  has a global readership.  He is an honorary advisor and frequent content contributor for ProgressiveChristianity.org.  Jim and his wife Roberta live in Ojai, CA.   |

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Question & Answer

Q: By A Reader

Why do so many churches continue judging people? Their sermons so often speak of how progressive they are and profess that certain people are of the wrong - or heaven-forbid -   or non-existent belief, the wrong sexual orientation, or political alliance. Jesus didn't judge; why do many modern churches still preach this way? 

A: By Rev. Gretta Vosper
 Dear Reader,Thank you for this question, one often on the minds of liberal and progressive Christians baffled by the harsh judgments meted out by those more conservative.

The rules or laws meted out by parents, courts, religions, workplaces, and institutions, and superior court justices are all human creations. And most of them, I would be wont to argue, are created either for the protection of those affected by them or for the control of those same people. Stoplights keep me from being killed several times a day as I walk or drive in my community and beyond. Local alcohol laws keep me from drinking alcohol in public places – not that I drink. The former is for my safety; the latter is to control me. One feels good the other maybe a little arbitrary.

The interesting thing about the law preventing me from drinking in a public place is that it can be framed in a way that suggests it is about my safety. The streets, free of those who have consumed to the point of drunkenness – those who might become a problem – are safe because of the law. The law puts “a fence around” that possibility – makes it harder to consume to the point of drunkenness – by not allowing drinking at all. And that is what many of our laws do: they put a fence around the real law to keep people from accidently, or intentionally, becoming the real problem. Biblical prohibitions are often fences around other breaches that, at the time, would have been considered catastrophic.

Churches are often organized around what is good and what is bad. It’s in our genes to do so, of course. Religion was about differentiating people from one another when the other was considered dangerous. Now that there are only the rare occasions – related to cults or fundamentalist iterations of religions (think Iran, just now) – that religious adherence would mean the other was a danger to us, differentiation becomes difficult because there is no need for it. But religious institutions don’t want to melt into the melting pot; they only thrive on being different and that often means having an “evil other” to point at. Ergo, long lists of prohibitions, some based in interpretations of holy scriptures, other based only in prejudice, all maintaining privilege in a complex society.

Jesus judged plenty, by the way. We don’t hear much about that judgment in contemporary liberal churches because it is distasteful to us. But a good study would reveal that we play our own games with what we choose to say Jesus  did and was and for our own purposes, as well. In the religious world, do’s and don’ts will always be a part of the ongoing story as they have always been part of religious history.
 ~ 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 and her Blog here.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

Part IV Matthew - The Sermon on the Mount

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
October 24, 2013Jesus never preached the Sermon on the Mount! Some of the content recorded in that well-known part of Matthew’s gospel may well stretch back to the literal words of the Jesus of history, but there was never a time in the life of Jesus of Nazareth when he went up on a mountain and delivered the material we now find in chapters 5-7 of Matthew’s gospel. How do we know? We have learned to read the gospels in general and Matthew in particular with Jewish eyes. We have learned how to look into the Jewish background of the gospels and to discern the content taken out of the Hebrew Scriptures and then wrapped around Jesus of Nazareth. We have learned to recognize the Hebrew liturgical traditions, which helped to create the form and much of the content that the gospels contain.

We have escaped what I have called the “Gentile Captivity” of Christianity, which through the centuries has suggested that we either had to read the Bible literally as a historically accurate document or we were being unfaithful to the sources of our faith. The Bible, this Gentile mentality argued, was either literally true or it was not true at all and thus of no lasting value. This attitude was destined to create a biblical fundamentalism, which now comes in both a Protestant and Catholic form and which has been, I believe, the ultimate cause of the demise of Christianity. This charge, I am convinced, is true even as the fundamentalists claim they are the ones who are resisting the acids of modernity, which they believe will inevitably erode and destroy the ultimate truth of the “Word of God.” The Bible, however, is not literal history; it is not eyewitness reporting. It is a Jewish book, written by Jewish authors, telling a profoundly Jewish story about an indefinable God working in a special human life. If we recover the Jewishness of the Bible, we will be freed from both the killing fundamentalism of our time and from the rebellion against that fundamentalism that masquerades as an unbelieving “secular humanism.” Nowhere in the Bible is this truth better on display than in what we call the “Sermon on the Mount.”

First some facts. The “Sermon on the Mount” in the gospel of Matthew fills chapters five, six and seven, but it occurs nowhere else in the Bible. Does that mean that the other gospel writers, Mark, Luke and John simply ignored this moment in Jesus’ life, which Matthew proclaims was both dramatic and powerful? Or does it mean that Matthew himself is the author and creator of the “Sermon on the Mount,” and that he alone placed these words and in this form onto the lips of Jesus as a part of his carefully drawn “New Moses” portrait? It is very clear, as I have tried to demonstrate thus far in this series, that Moses was the image against which Matthew developed his portrait of Jesus. Contemporary biblical scholarship now makes it very obvious that Matthew created the “Sermon on the Mount.” The data for this conclusion is readily available. We look first at the Jewish liturgical practice of the synagogue to give content to this point of view and to this conclusion.

On the fiftieth day after the Passover, the Jews celebrated a solemn holy liturgy that went under a variety of names. It was called “Pentecost,” which simply meant 50 days. It was called the Festival of Weeks because the 50th day was the first day after seven complete weeks. It was called Shavuot because it marked the sacred moment in Jewish history when God was believed to have given the law, the Torah, to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Shavuot was observed with a twenty-four hour vigil.

We know today that God did not dictate the Torah to Moses at any point in human history. That is not how the Torah was either created or received. In fact we know that Moses did not write a single word of the Torah. Indeed, the Moses of history died some three hundred years before the first word of the Jewish law was placed on parchment by a human hand holding a quill. We know that the Torah came into being over a period of close to five hundred years from a series of sources that have been isolated and studied over the past two centuries in the academies of higher biblical learning. We also know that the entire Torah was treated with great reverence in Jewish worship centers and that well before the time of Jesus the Torah was read in its entirety in synagogue settings on the Sabbaths of a single year. We know that when the Jewish people returned from exile in Babylon during the 5th century BCE, under the leadership of Ezra, the priest, and Nehemiah, the governor, they covenanted to keep the Torah, to honor the Torah and to acknowledge Moses as the mythological father of the Torah. This devotion found its way into their annual worship life in the festival called Shavuot, observed in the Jewish calendar in the month of Sivan, which would make it fall in late May or early June in our calendar. Shavuot was a time for the Jews to give thanks for the law, thought by the Jews to be God’s greatest gift to the world. In that celebration, the worship leaders of Judaism called for the people to observe a twenty-four hour vigil in which they would recall the Sinai moment when they believed the law was given to Moses. That twenty-four hour service was divided into eight three-hour segments. For that 24-hour vigil, they created the 119th psalm. Psalm 119 was the longest psalm in the Psalter because it had to provide readings for each of the eight segments in the 24 hours. Psalm 119 was thus made up of 176 verses in 22 segments, with each segment being named after the 22 letters of the Jewish alphabet from Aleph to Taw. The content of this psalm was and is a constant hymn of praise to the beauty and wonder of the law. It includes such phrases as “My lips pour forth your praise, when you teach me your statues (i.e. law);” “Great peace have they who love your law; for then there is no stumbling block;” and “Happy are they who observe God’s decrees…those who walk in the law of the Lord.” So, once a year, the people would gather at Shavuot in solemn assembly to give thanks to God for the law and to pledge their renewed allegiance to it. Psalm 119, the psalm of Shavuot, begins with an introductory stanza of eight verses. In the first two of those eight verses, the opening word is “Blessed,” which is sometimes translated “Happy.”

The author of Matthew’s gospel quite obviously took that 119th psalm and used it as a model to create the “Sermon on the Mount.” In Matthew’s introductory stanza to his “sermon,” he made each of its eight verses begin with the word “Blessed.” Today, we call those eight verses “The Beatitudes,” but they are clearly based on Psalm 119:1-8. Then Matthew fashioned the entire sermon to be divided into eight segments in order to provide words of Jesus to be read during each of the eight three-hour segments of the 24-hour vigil of Shavuot. That is how the “Sermon on the Mount” came into being. The rest of this “Sermon” involved a commentary on the eight Beatitudes, but in reverse order, with the first commentary being on Beatitude number eight and the last commentary being on Beatitude number one.

The second thing to notice is that this “Sermon” constitutes a dialogue between Moses and Jesus, although once again the name of Moses is never spoken. This was not an attempt to be supersessionistic, that is, to portray Jesus’ superiority to Moses, but it was designed to portray Jesus as the ultimate and true interpreter of Moses. While Jesus will assert in this gospel that not one “jot or tittle” of the law was to be changed, the whole law was, Matthew suggested, meant to be internalized. By this Matthew was saying that the Torah was designed to cover not just the deeds of one’s life, but the thoughts and motives that always precede the deeds. In Matthew’s hands, the law became more than just external rules it was also aimed at governing internal motivations. This purpose was articulated by a regular refrain in this sermon: “You have heard it said of old (Moses) you shall not kill;” that was commandment number six, but I (Jesus) say unto you “that murder starts in the hatred of the human heart.” It is not enough to refrain from the act of murder, the law also requires that one deal with the anger and hostility that expresses itself in violence. This refrain was then repeated with the seventh commandment prohibiting adultery. Jesus interprets Moses to say that adultery begins in human lust, in human insecurity and in threats to the human ego. It is not enough to refrain from the act of adultery, one must, in order to fulfill the law, also deal with the lust, the sense of inadequacy that expresses itself in adultery.

The author of Matthew’s gospel was in these three chapters reaching a crescendo in his process of interpreting Jesus as the “New Moses.” He began this process by a story about Moses in his birth of Jesus narrative. He then likened Jesus’ baptism to the account of Moses at the Red Sea. He next portrayed Jesus as like Moses spending time in the wilderness, forty days for Jesus, forty years for Moses. He has wrapped Moses’ critical moments in the wilderness around Jesus as the content of the temptations. Now in this climax we call the “Sermon on the Mount,” he has portrayed Jesus as a “New Moses,” on a new mountain, giving us a new interpretation of the law of God. The “Sermon on the Mount” was thus designed to replace the 119th psalm in the Christian observance of the Jewish Festival of Shavuot.

Matthew is writing neither a biography nor a history. When Matthew wrote his gospel, the Christian movement was still a movement within the synagogue, not yet a separate movement. He was taking the life-changing experience found in Jesus of Nazareth and interpreting it inside the symbols and observances of his Jewish faith system. His Jewish audience understood that and reveled in it. Gentile Christians, blindly unaware of these Jewish traditions and of the content of Jewish Scripture with which Matthew was so familiar, did not. The Gentiles in their misunderstanding interpreted these narratives literally; that was when biblical fundamentalism was born. It is time to reverse this process. This series on Matthew’s gospel is designed to do just this.~  John Shelby Spong  |

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