[Oe List ...] 7/12/12, Spong: On Baptizing Hadden
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Jul 12 08:43:23 PDT 2012
HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR
On Baptizing Hadden
It is a rare treat in the life of a bishop in general and in the life of a retired bishop in particular to participate in a pastoral act like a baptism. It normally has to come at the invitation of a family member or a very close friend. Seven years ago I married a couple, the groom of which had been such a friend, growing up together with my stepson Brian and, therefore, very close to my wife Christine, close enough indeed that all of his life he had called her “Mom.” When he became engaged to a lovely young woman named Cushman they asked if I could perform their marriage ceremony at a summer chapel, named All Saints by the Sea on the coast of Maine. His family had spent every summer season of his childhood vacationing on this lovely island. I accepted this invitation and so I shared in that transition moment with them and their respective families. When this couple’s first baby arrived it seemed important to them for me to baptize this young lady at the same summer chapel in Maine. It is a church that is open only in the summer season and to which worshipers can and do arrive on Sundays both by boat and car. I agreed to do so and back to Maine we went for this happy occasion.
Preparing for this baptism I read over the baptismal liturgy from my church’s prayer book and I embraced once more just how antiquated and even offensive some of its language still is. I began to wonder how a child being baptized would hear those words, if that child had the ability both to listen and to understand. If in the baptismal service we had the ability to allow the child to speak in reaction to those words, I wondered what she might say. With my imagination engaged I decided that for the sermon at this service I would try to frame just how this baby might react and respond to the words being used in the church’s baptismal liturgy. The result of that exercise follows:
TO THE MEMBERS ALL SAINTS BY THE SEA CHURCH IN SOUTHPORT, MAINE
Dear Friends:
Today, July 1, 2012, I was baptized in this church. My family and friends gathered from as far away as Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, Vermont and New Jersey to be present for this occasion. It was a happy day for me – and I hope it was for others of you who attended.
Let me tell you, however, that it was also a strange day in many ways. In that baptism service you said some words that sounded pretty weird to me. You asked my parents and godparents to renounce some things in my name. They had to renounce the world, the flesh and the devil.
How can you renounce the world when it is July in Maine – the sky is blue, the sea is calm, the temperature is moderate and the world seems to be wonderful?
How can you renounce the flesh when it is through the flesh that we experience the world – our fleshly eyes see its beauty, our fleshly ears hear its sounds, our fleshly taste buds enable us to savor the wonders of the sea? With our fleshly arms we embrace one another and with our fleshly lips we kiss those we love. Who among us really wants to renounce the flesh?
How can you renounce the devil? Is there a real creature with horns, tail and pitch fork who is responsible for all that is evil? Is that not some form of projection? We can’t even agree on what color the devil is – at Duke University they think of him as blue, but if you are a hockey fan in New Jersey we think of him as red! For me to renounce the world the flesh and the devil sounds like I’m being programmed to be a nun! Is that really your intention?
You also said in the baptismal liturgy that you were baptizing me for the forgiveness of sins. I’m not old enough to have done much! So what are my sins? I have never robbed a bank; I have not committed adultery; I have not been willfully disobedient or talked back to my parents. I understand that babies can sometimes be inconvenient, but are we sinful? Someone once said that all babies are born with loud speakers on one end and no sense of responsibility on the other, but does that make us blameworthy?
Let me suggest to you that what you have done in the baptism service is to literalize some ancient biblical stories and you have drawn some conclusions from those stories that I suggest you might want to revise and even to challenge. One of those biblical stories was about how God created the world in just seven days. That story emphasizes that God created a perfect world, so perfect that when God finished God looked out on all that God had made and said: “This is a good world.” Human beings were part of that goodness and that story goes on to say that we human beings were created “male and female” in God’s image. Why would one be called evil when we are created in God’s image?
That story also states that when the work of creation was ended, God not only pronounced it good, but also complete – so complete that God could take a day off and that is how the Sabbath was created. It is hard to understand why one should be asked to renounce the world that God pronounced complete. Is there something profoundly wrong with the baptismal liturgy?
There is a second story in the book of Genesis, however, in which the biblical writers sought to account for the presence of evil. They did not understand that in the biology of every living creature there is a drive to survive. It is that drive that makes life appear to be self-centered. If survival is my highest value then I will organize my life around my survival agenda. I will not always be consciously aware of this drive, but it will always be present. One strategy we human beings seem to use to accomplish this is build ourselves up by tearing someone else down. This destructive behavior is not rooted in something sinful; it is rooted in our biology. That is the source out of which prejudice arises; that is the source of religious persecution. That is the reason we are prone to hate and fear people who are different. Evil does not originate in human misdeeds. It is not, as this second ancient story says, something we do because one of our ancestors was disobedient and ate of the forbidden fruit, which resulted in our banishment from the Garden of Eden. It was out of this story, however, that we developed the strange idea that human life is fallen, sinful, evil, distorted and broken. I must tell you that it sounds very strange to me to listen to a worship service in church that tells me over and over again how evil I am, that I am a miserable sinner, that I am not worthy to gather up the crumbs under the divine table, that there is no health in me and that I must spend lots of time in church begging God to have mercy on me. How many times does one have to beg God to have mercy in a Sunday service? How many times do you have to tell me that I am fallen, infected with original sin? Have you ever known anyone to be helped by being told how terrible they are? Why do you think God’s greatness is affirmed by denigrating our humanity?
You can’t even sing about how amazing God’s grace is without reminding yourselves that God’s grace is amazing only because it saves a wretch like you or me. Am I a wretch? Are you wretches? Is that what Christianity has come to.
Perhaps we have distorted our faith story far more than most of us realize. Did Jesus come to make us religious? Did he come so that God could control our behavior through guilt? Is guilt ever life-giving? Does guilt help to make us religious? Can religion save the world? There is lots of religion in this world today, but is not most of it distorted? Have you not heard of religious wars, religious persecution, the Inquisition? Have you not observed how religious Catholics and religious Protestants react to each other in Ireland or how religious Shiites and religious Sunnis react to each other in Iraq?
I do not think that Jesus came to make us righteous either. People who are very, very moral and very, very righteous seem to know a great deal about judgment, but almost nothing about loving.
Jesus also did not come to give us the “True Faith” – to make certain that our religion is better than any other, that my faith is the only true faith, my church the only true church and that no one can come to God except by my pathway. People who think that they have the “True Faith,” always seem to put their wagons in a circle and start shooting at those with whom they disagree.
In John’s gospel Jesus suggests a very different purpose that perhaps the framers of the baptismal liturgy somehow missed. Jesus says: “I have come that they might have life and have it abundantly.” That is, I believe, what Christianity should be all about – giving life. So as I identify with this faith tradition today in baptism I ask you to help me to become fully human, help me to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that I can be.
May I suggest that this is the church’s vocation and therefore your vocation. Your task is to give abundant life, and not only to me, but to every person who is a child of God.
Thank you for listening to my letter and thank you for loving me just as I am.
Hadden Charlotte Brinegar
And because she is a good little Episcopal girl she ends her letter with AMEN.
Has the time to come to bring the liturgy of baptism into dialogue with all that we now know about human life? I believe it has.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
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Michael from Hamilton, New Zealand, writes:
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This is not a question, rather a message of appreciation of what you have achieved for one family. My wife and I were hugely encouraged and relieved to read your book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism after it was published. I have attended most of your public lectures in Hamilton. As a Methodist Lay Preacher for 50 years and also a Presbyterian elder (for reasons of geographic location, I have been involved with farming all my life), I used to struggle with much of the doctrine I was taught. I was, however, fortunate to have clergy of progressive thinking to stimulate and encourage the questions. However, the main point of this note is to tell you that my 97 year old mother is still probably the most radical member of our family. Each of your newsletters I print in a bold 20 font so she can read them. At 90 she said, I am glad to have lived this long because I keep learning more and more. In the 60’s she was the first to read J. A. T. Robinson with the encouragement of our then minister Rev. Dr. (now Dame) Phyllis Guthardt. During World War II, she and my father were persecuted for their Christian pacifist stand, so she knows what fires of faith mean. Today, I received an e-mail from one of our sons who is a PhD in engineering, was NZ young manager of the year some years ago and was recently made redundant when the government dept he headed was amalgamated with another. His comments reflect I believe many of our younger generation, in Richard’s case he has found a church where his intelligence and leadership skills are appreciated and his beliefs stimulated. Your newsletter he refers to is the one concerning Barabbas. I send these on to all of my family.
“Always a delight to read and see what a truly clear mind and impeccable scholarship can bring to scripture. I always feel like slapping my head and crying “How obvious, when Spong lifts the scales from my eyes. Thanks for keeping me in touch with someone (like you and Mum) who makes me proud to call myself a Christian.” - Love, Richard
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Dear Michael,
Some time ago when I was being interviewed on a radio station in Johannesburg, South Africa, the interviewer asked me what country I would most look forward to visiting again and I replied without hesitation, New Zealand. We have been there on nine different occasions and treasure the friends we have in that country, starting with one who is almost a national monument, Dr. Lloyd George Geering, who was one of the original voices of progressive religious thought in the world and who paid for it by being put on trial for heresy by the Presbyterian Church in New Zealand. Dr. Geering was exonerated, but the Presbyterian Church was revealed as so limited and closed-minded that it has never been the same since.
New Zealand surely has it share of small-minded religious zealots and one of them follows me around when I’m there and hands out tracts to those attending my lectures so that they will be able to resist “the onslaught of the Devil.“ I am sure that he thinks he is serving God and the cause of truth, but any God who has to be defended by that kind of person is clearly sick unto death.
New Zealand’s Anglican clergy have also included some great leaders. I think of Paul Reeves, David Coles, Dean Peter Beck of Christ Church and Glynn Cardy, the vicar of St. Matthew-in-the-City in Auckland. There were, of course, other Anglicans who will die of boredom long before the courageous ones die of controversy.
When I think of New Zealand, I think of things like beautiful landscapes, Kiwi fruit and Kiwi birds, ripe avocadoes picked off the tree and spread on toast for breakfast, the Franz Joseph Glacier, the Abel Tasman Park, the Milford Track, a wonderful international religious leader in the world council of Churches, named Dr. Brash, now deceased, and his two children, Don and Lynn, now themselves impressive adults and last but not least two of our closest personal friends, Geoff Robinson, the voice of New Zealand, and his wonderful wife Liz, who is a theological rebel with a cause.
Thank you for your letter and please give my love to your 97-year-old mother.
~John Shelby Spong
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