[Oe List ...] 10/01/2020; Progressing Spirit: Rev. Deshna Shine: Time to Be Radical; Spong revisited

Thu Oct 1 08:15:25 PDT 2020

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Time to Be Radical
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|  Essay by Rev. Deshna Shine
October 1, 2020Growing up in the 80’s and 90’s, in Southern California, I used the term “rad” quite a bit as a child and teen. Back then, it seemed like many things were rad. That shirt, that movie, that trip, that song… rad was like something extra cool. It meant “not normal or boring.” “Radical dude!” the surfers would say about a huge wave.

That word lost its power as the 80’s and 90’s faded and thank goodness, because it’s actually way cooler than we gave it credit for back then. And it is time that we reclaim it. Ok, maybe not “rad” but I refer here to being rad. Namely, radical.

Often when we think of radicals today, we think of religious extremists or we associate a negative connotation with it. But the word radical actually means far-reaching fundamental transformation. And fundamental transformation is exactly what we need today, individually and collectively.

It is time for us to embrace our radical nature. Once we allow our radical nature to fire up, we can enter into three important phases of radicalness: radical acceptance, radical transformation and true radical inclusion. We can shift the fundamental nature of our way of being, individually and collectively. We can be far-reaching and thorough. This is the epitome of Jesus’ story and many other sacred stories. Isn’t it what we need today?

Jesus was a radical and his embodiment of Christ’s nature radically transformed those who followed his teachings and were impacted by his life.

A perfect and classic example of this is the story of Zacchaeus (Luke 19). Zacchaeus was known to the Jewish people of the time as a sinner and a traitor. His family was Jewish and many believed he sold his soul to Rome to exact taxes from his people. When Jesus came to his town of Jericho, Zacchaeus heard the news of his arrival. Hundreds of people gathered to hear Jesus teach. The crowd was so large that many people couldn’t see. Since Zacchaeus was “short in stature,” (also read “small egoic self”) he ran ahead of the crowd and climbed up into a sycamore tree to have a better view of Jesus. The sycamore tree is a symbol of regeneration and rebirth and my hunch is that it was intentionally chosen for this story for that reason.

I can imagine the eyes rolling as his Jewish neighbors sneered “Always taking the best seat, always being selfish…” I have heard that voice come from my own mouth plenty of times, so I know it well.

“He’s so short he has to climb a tree to see our teacher,” they laugh and say loudly enough so that Zacchaeus can hear them.

Disgusted by the traitor (out there), we snort and shake our heads. But what does Jesus do? Does he point out Zacchaeus’ sins as an example of what not to do? Does he laugh alongside? Does he ignore the sinner? Turn his back? No.

He stops what he is doing, calls to Zacchaeus and says, “Hurry and come down, for I must eat at your house today.” Zacchaeus beams with joy, but the crowd grumbles some more and murmurs in complaint that Jesus "has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner." Imagine that moment, if you will.

Put yourself in the position of Zacchaeus. Decades of tax collecting, of people complaining about him, of family pleading for him to change his ways, of calling him a traitor and a sinner.  He was despised. They called him corrupt, so maybe he should just be corrupt. And yet, in that moment, the Beloved teacher turns to him and asks to be a guest in his home. Jesus changes his plans and sits down at the table with someone whom everyone thought was a lost cause.

Zacchaeus has a few of options here — pride and arrogance or acceptance and transformation. We don’t know what Jesus said or didn’t say to Zacchaeus during that meal, but we do know that his heart was so softened, that he accepted the error of his ways and resolved to change. Zacchaeus promised to give half his belongings to the poor and pay back, from his own pocket, four times as much to anyone he had cheated!

However, it can’t end in a promise or resolution. What’s more damaging is claiming a radical change with our words, posts, or tweets, but never actually changing who we are. That’s why spiritual abuse persists under the guise of transformation. Being saved is not transforming. Being the radical change we wish to see is.

How many of us can embrace the radical transformation that Zacchaeus did? How many of us, flawed humans, would give half of our belongings away and truly shift our thinking, beliefs, or feelings? How many of us are willing to see ourselves for who we really are? How many of our churches are willing to give back that which we have stolen? To dedicate half of the budget toward reparations? When we are faced with an opportunity for radical transformation, most of us shy away, turn our chin up in pride, self-doubt, and run away in fear. Change is frightening. Radical shift is foundation shaking.

Radical acceptance opens the door for radical transformation.

Giving away half of your things is radical. Repentance is radical. Reparations are radical. Middle Church in NYC, created a series of popular antiracism workshops and then dedicated $100,000 of the income from the workshops to Black Lives Matter education toward reparations. The United Church of Christ has paid off over $12 million dollars in medical debt of low income families, in cooperation with other non-profits, and is speaking out against the systemic injustice in the healthcare system that disproportionately affects Black and Indigenous peoples. A United Methodist Church in Ohio is returning 3 acres of land to the Wyandotte Nation. The mission church in the middle of a cemetery was built two centuries ago with $1,333 and First Nations people’s labor. Deeding the three acres of land back to the Wyandotte Nation is a small but powerful acknowledgement of the suffering its members endured when the government made them leave their land and the part the church played in the stealing of those lands. It also acknowledges them as our siblings who have worth, a radical concept. These are just some examples of what happens when we move past the guilt, shame and fragility that keeps us in avoidance and denial and into radical acceptance of our debts, our sins, and the error of our ways.

The story of Christ calls each of us toward this radical acceptance and transformation. It is the epitome of Jesus’ story -- to be reborn and to begin to see the sacred in all.

When I look at my life, it is easy to see that my greatest as well as most common suffering is rooted in my resistance to reality, my resistance to what is. Just one example is that it took me years to come to terms to the reality of my marriage. I kept thinking, if just these few things would change… if I could change this part of myself, or if he was different in these ways. I tried everything. I tried denying parts of myself. I tried getting my ex to change aspects of himself. We tried being open, we moved, we fought, we cheated. I tried couples counseling. I tried being the perfect wife. Nothing changed. And I suffered and I rebelled and I got reckless. He got angry, resentful, distrustful and more stubborn. I avoided the truth because I was terrified. I was terrified to lose my family and terrified to hurt the people I loved the most. Then one day, after years of struggle, denial, and a growing sense of self hatred, it just hit me. Reality hit. And it came in the most simple moment.

It was a beautiful Sunday and I, normally being the family planner, wanted desperately for my husband at that time to be the one to plan a fun family outing. He kept saying, “I am up for whatever!” After years of being with someone who would always go with the flow, I was yearning for him to be different, to take the reins and make a plan.

I told him, “I am tired and not feeling so great, can you please make a plan for today? I am open!”

He turned around and asked our then 9-year-old, “What do you want to do today?!”

Ugh, my stomach churned. In my mind, I thought, No! You! I need you to decide! Out loud, I said, “Stop trying to figure out what we want. Stop trying to please us and look inside! What do you want? If you could do anything today, what would it be? Just tell me, I won’t get mad.” I wanted so bad to see the authentic him.

He looked worried. I was definitely on the edge and we were entering into dangerous territory. “Anything?” He asked tentatively.

I smiled in encouragement. “Yes.”

“Ok…” he gulped and finally said, “I just want to go to the bar, drink a beer and watch the football game.”

My heart dropped in every sense of the phrase. This was so far from what I wanted, so far from my own heart, that I was in a moment of shock. How could my partner be so different from me?! How could he want something so entirely opposite of what I wanted?!

I would have done nearly anything else on that beautiful day. I wanted to be with my family and to have some adventurous outing together. A picnic at a new park, a hike, a visit to the museum. Rob a bank! Anything other than being inside a dingy dive bar and watching men run around in tights, chasing a ball, wearing some team jersey that changed cities as many times as the money changed hands. I burst into tears.

My ex looked at me, so confused and distraught. He didn’t want to hurt me. He definitely didn’t want to disappoint me again. “You said to be honest!” he cried out. I balled. Deep heart-wrenching grief surged through me.

It had hit me. I was no longer blind. He wasn’t going to change. I wasn’t going to change. This was exactly who we are. And there is nothing wrong with it. All my anger left me. All my resistance dissipated.

He stood there holding me as I sobbed. “I am just a boy, babe, you know that.”

You are right, I thought. This is who you are. And all these years, I have been complaining about it, putting you down, and trying with all my effort to get you to be someone you are not. On top of that, I have been trying to be someone I am not. Some other wife would have run upstairs, grabbed their 49’ers jersey and called a babysitter. “Let’s go honey! I can’t wait to order some fries and wings!” Someone else would have said, “Go ahead babe, we will go to the park and meet up with you later. Have fun!”

Instead, for years I had drenched the relationship in guilt and denial. I was resisting reality and dragging my denial like a 1000 pound steel ball connected to my ankle. I blamed and I blamed. I tried so hard. I tried some more.

When I saw and accepted both of us as we are, I saw and accepted the marriage for what it was, and that huge weight lifted. It did not make anything perfect and easy, but it uncovered the truth. And it made it impossible to stay. It was the first step on the long and scary path to radical acceptance of myself and what I want and need. With it came the hardest letting go I have yet to experience, the radical acceptance of my shadow, repentance, deep grief and the slow painful process of transformation and rebirth. I am still re-birthing, but I am no longer blind.

Carl Rogers wrote: “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”

The Christ Consciousness is there, within you to say, slow down. What is really happening here? Name it. Accept it. See it simply as it is. You are afraid. You are lonely. You are angry. You have erred in your ways. This is hard. This is scary. You are so sad. You can change. I see you. I see you. Just as you truly are — broken, lost, blind, trying so very hard. And I love you and welcome you. The Amazing Grace is there to say, pause and open your eyes for you have been blind. Come down from that tree, I want to dine with you today.

For Zacchaeus, once he accepted himself as he was, he saw the truth, the reality. He awakened. Then he was able to transform. In the presence of the Christ Consciousness, he saw himself as he truly was: radical worth, radical love. He turned from his previous ways of being and began to repair the damage he caused.

Radical acceptance is not condoning or agreeing, or staying when you aren’t happy. It is not fixating or focusing on the past or just doing nothing. Radical acceptance is not forgiveness, though it often leads to authentic forgiveness (including of ourselves). It is not ignoring a broken situation or spiritual bypassing.

Radical acceptance is looking at reality as it is and removing the cover, to see things as they are, to reveal the truth. It is seeing the fundamental racism that exists systemically across this globe for what it is and how deep it goes… so that we might transform it. It is seeing the failings of the modern-day church for what they are, identifying our part within that system; removing the cover of pride and ignorance and denial to see the truth, so that we can radically shift how we live together and how we serve each other. It is seeing a corrupt system which we continually buy into and fund.

But most importantly, it is seeing all human beings as suffering and worthy of love just as you are. Just as Jesus saw Zacchaeus. Be that voice for you, so that you may be that voice for others. So that you may see others with the eyes of God.

What could happen if we progressed in this journey? Would we become more like the teacher, and more able to call out that radical transformation in each other? Our churches? Our communities?

Being a follower of the teacher Jesus compels us to live radically different than the culture around us. That’s hard. How can we move past fragility into radical acceptance? How can we repent and commit to reparations? How are we being called to radically transform, so that we might transform this broken world?~ Rev. Deshna Shine
Read online here

About the Author
Rev. Deshna Charron Shine is Project Director of ProgressiveChristianity.org's Children's Curriculum and is an ordained Interfaith Minister. She is an author, international speaker, and a visionary. She grew up in a thriving progressive Christian church and has worked in the field for over 13 years. She graduated from UCSB with a major in Religious Studies and a minor in Global Peace and Security.  She co-authored the novel, Missing Mothers. She was the Executive Producer of Embrace Festival. She is passionate about sacred community, nourishing children spiritually, and transforming Christianity through a radically inclusive lens.  |

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Question & Answer
 Q: By Darrell
A friend of mine recommended the book, “The Case for Christ,” by Lee Strobel. Have you read the book and if so, is it a good read?

A: By Rev. David M. FeltenDear Darrell,Thanks so much for reaching out about the veracity of Strobel’s book. Here are some things you might want to consider about The Case for Christ (and Strobel’s agenda):  

Strobel claims to be an objective journalist who uses the well-established methods of investigative journalism to arrive at his conclusions. However, his argument is more propaganda than journalism. He only interviews the proponents of one kind of Christianity: the most traditional and orthodox of Evangelical leaders. Many of these high-profile apologists criticize or outright dismiss (or lie about) the theological perspective of mainline Christianity as heresy (or Strobel misrepresents their opinions for his own purposes).

Strobel outright ignores the work of contemporary Biblical scholarship in seminaries like the one I attended (Boston University) and negatively skews the views of the scholars who have influenced me and become my mentors – many of whom were a part of “The Jesus Seminar,” “Living the Questions,” and other efforts to promote contemporary Biblical scholarship outside of academia. Strobel doesn’t interview a single one of them (carefully avoiding all but a few hand-picked academics from mainstream institutions of higher learning). So, right out of the gate, he’s misrepresenting himself as being objective, undermining his claim to have “made a case.”

Some of the things he points to as “evidence” are just plainly silly. The only scholars/pastors who agree with Strobel’s perspective are those who have isolated themselves in a dogmatic bubble and refuse to deal with modern scholarship, archaeology, history, and literary criticism.

For instance, Strobel claims that the Gospels are “eyewitness” evidence written by the actual apostles. Nobody who actually reads the texts and takes them seriously can believe this. Yet Strobel enthusiastically defends the perspective of those who misrepresent and distort the text.

Case in point: Strobel’s sources deny the obvious textual evidence that the Gospels were written many years after the fact by, in some cases, people who clearly had never been in Palestine (and could not possibly have known Jesus personally). The “synoptic problem” (where it’s clear that Mark was written first and Matthew and Luke copied from him) is dismissed. The existence of the “Q” gospel is disregarded altogether. Never mind that the Gospel of John is all out-of-whack with the other Gospels: different orders of events, different theology, Jesus in ministry for a different number of years, Jesus’ message being completely different than in the Synoptic Gospels, etc. Despite being glaringly obvious, the people Strobel consults for his “proof” just ignore it all.

Overall, Strobel only goes to people who will tell him what he wants to hear. In regard to “historical” evidence, Strobel finds a person who totally ignores the vast majority of historians and scholars to support his “case.” Take the story of the Roman census as recorded in the beginning of Luke; there is no evidence outside of or anywhere else in the Bible that would support this event as historical. Likewise, there is no evidence that Matthew’s story of children being massacred by Herod ever happened. But somehow, Strobel is able to twist this information in his favor. It’s never mentioned that Matthew’s Gospel has Mary and Joseph living in Bethlehem (with no need to travel from Nazareth for Jesus’ birth). So, it’s clear from reading the text alone (I know, I know – reading the Bible is such a pain!) that Matthew made these stories up. They’re stories. But Strobel doesn’t like that, so he finds a person who will tell him what he wants to hear so he can include it as “evidence” in his “case.”

Strobel also spends a lot of time laying out the typical Evangelical arguments for how we know that Jesus is “actually” God incarnate and how we know that the literal, physical resurrection of Jesus actually occurred — but the details of why this is problematic will have to be the topic of another column.

If your friend is a casual Christian (and by that I mean someone who goes to church, is convinced that Jesus died for him, and tries to be a nice person), then I can see how “The Case for Christ” would be a book in which they find comfort and assurance. However, if a person is sincere about taking the Bible seriously and actually following Jesus’ teachings, then I think The Case for Christ is not only unhelpful, but misleading.

Because there are so many outright lies and misrepresentations in the book, I find it excruciating to read. It makes me sad that it is as popular a book as it is – but a lot of people just want to have their childhood beliefs affirmed and don’t want to think too hard about religion.

As an alternative, let me suggest another “introductory” kind of book that completely changed my outlook on faith and my approach to ministry, Marcus Borg’s: Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. It definitely makes its own “case,” but for a much more credible and relevant Jesus.

Thanks for inquiring about the Strobel book. I’m always happy to make my own “case” for why Strobel should be thrown out of court.

~ Rev. David M. Felten

Read and share online here

About the Author
Rev. David M. Felten is a full-time pastor at The Fountains, a United Methodist Church in Fountain Hills, Arizona. David and fellow United Methodist Pastor, Jeff Procter-Murphy, are the creators of the DVD-based discussion series for Progressive Christians, “Living the Questions”. A co-founder of Catalyst Arizona and also a founding member of No Longer Silent: Clergy for Justice, David is an outspoken voice for LGBTQ rights both in the church and in the community at large. David is active in the Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church and tries to stay connected to his roots as a musician. You’ll find him playing saxophones in a variety of settings, including appearances with the Fountain Hills Saxophone Quartet.  |

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

The Origins of the New Testament, Part X:
Resurrection According to Paul — I Corinthians

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
December 24, 2009The first written account that we have of the Easter event in the Bible — Paul addressing the congregation in Corinth around the year 54-55 — gives us material that is both scanty and provocative. In order to understand his meaning fully, we need to cleanse our minds of the traditional Easter content found in the gospels. When Paul wrote, no gospel existed. Indeed Paul died without ever knowing that there was such a thing as a gospel. To go where this column needs to go I must not allow myself to be influenced by ideas of which Paul had never heard. So to understand what resurrection meant to Paul I seek to put myself and you, my readers, into the actual frame of reference that was present a generation before any gospel had entered history.To show how thorough this purge is we need to be aware that there is in Paul’s writing no hint of a special tomb in a special garden owned by one named Joseph of Arimathea, no account of a stone that had been placed against the mouth of this tomb, no mention of either a messenger or an angel making the resurrection announcement and no reference to women coming to the tomb at dawn on the first day of the week, bringing spices to anoint him. Paul has no narrative detail such as the setting Matthew employs on a mountaintop in Galilee, which enabled the raised Jesus to give the divine commission. He reveals no knowledge of Luke’s narrative of the two disciples walking to the village of Emmaus who are overtaken by a stranger, who turns out to be Jesus, or of John’s narrative that focused on a resurrection appearance with Thomas absent, his subsequent doubt and his later ecstatic words, “My Lord and my God.” Paul only provides a list of those to whom he claims this raised Christ was manifested. In Paul, there are no supernatural signs accompanying either Jesus’ crucifixion or his resurrection. Paul knows nothing about the supposed darkness of the sun from 12 noon to 3:00 p.m. on the day of the crucifixion, of which all the gospels take notice. He mentions no earthquakes, no Eucharistic context for the resurrection and no cosmic ascension, all of which play a large role in the various gospel narratives. If these things were part of the original Easter story then we must conclude that Paul was either not interested in or aware of them, or we must raise the distinct possibility that these traditions were not part of the original Christian story but were developed after Paul’s death and thus are not historical at all. As these realizations dawn, the traditional reading of the resurrection stories, as if they are literal recollections, begins to fade as realistic possibilities. Paul thus provides us with the earliest glimpse we have into primitive Christianity and it is quite revealing, even troubling, since it challenges what has become “common Christian wisdom.”When Paul finally gets around to listing the key witnesses to whom, he asserts, the raised Christ had made himself “manifest,” we enter a world of mystery and intrigue. Even Paul’s list calls most of our pious Easter conclusions into question.Was the resurrection of Jesus a physical event that took place within the boundaries of time, an event that could be documented as a literal, observable, historical occurrence? I do not think so. Paul actually asserts in the letter to the Romans (written some four years after I Corinthians) that it was in the resurrection itself that God “designated” Jesus to be “the Son of God.” By the standards of the Nicene theology of the 4th century, Paul was thus a heretic, for he asserts that God raised Jesus into the status of being the divine son only at the resurrection. This attitude would later be called “Adoptionism” and was condemned by a future church council as an “impaired” understanding of Jesus. Our study, therefore, begins to force us to probe a far deeper mystery, that is the nature of Jesus, himself.When Paul gets around to listing his witnesses, he begins with Cephas. Cephas was the Aramaic nickname for the disciple whose given name was Simon. Tradition suggested that Jesus had called him “the Rock.” The word for rock in Greek is “petros,” so Peter was his Greek nickname. The word for rock in Aramaic is “kepha,” so Cephas became his Aramaic nickname. Paul always called Peter “Cephas.” There is nothing unusual about Cephas being listed first. Simon was generally regarded as the head of the disciple band, but one wonders whether this was a reading back into history of the role that Simon played in the life of the early church and thus in the resurrection drama. We will never know for sure, but the primacy of Peter is a note present throughout the gospel writing period. In Mark, the messenger of the resurrection says to the women, “Go tell the disciples and Peter.” Peter is the one portrayed as making the confession that Jesus is the Christ at Caesarea Philippi. Peter is the one for whom Jesus says he will pray that “when you are converted, you will strengthen the brethren.”Next on Paul’s list is “the twelve.” The designation “the twelve” is fascinating for two reasons. First, while the number twelve for the disciples is a constant in the gospels, they do not agree on who constituted that body. Mark and Matthew have one list. Luke and Acts have another. John does not ever provide a list of the twelve but he refers to people not on any other list, like Nathaniel, whom he portrays as clearly at the center of the Jesus movement. It is quite possible that the number twelve was a more important symbol than were the actual people who constituted the twelve. The second fascinating thing about Paul’s use of the designation “the twelve” is that Judas is clearly still one of them. Paul quite obviously had never heard of the tradition that one of the twelve was a traitor. The betrayal involving Judas Iscariot thus also appears not to have been an original part of the Christian story. When Judas does appear in the gospels, he is a literary composite of all of the traitors in Jewish scriptures, which hardly suggests that he was himself a person of history.Next Paul says that the raised Jesus appeared to “500 brethren at once.” There is nothing in any later gospel that provides any clue as to the content of this claim. An early 20th century New Testament scholar sought to establish a connection between the appearance to these 500 brethren at once and the Pentecost experience described in the book of Acts, but that is a huge stretch! This strange list will get even stranger as it gets longer.Paul moves on to say that next the raised Jesus appeared to James. Who is this James? Is he James, the son of Zebedee; James, the son of Alphaeus; or James, the brother of the Lord? Those are the three “James” included in the pages of early Christian history. By a process of elimination, James, the brother of the Lord, appears to be the probable one. James, the son of Zebedee, was killed by King Herod in the early years of the Christian movement, according to the book of Acts (12:1). James, the son of Alphaeus, is a total unknown, never mentioned again in any Christian writing that we can locate beyond this inclusion on the list of twelve disciples. James, the brother of Jesus, however, was a major player in early Christian history. It is this James at whom Paul directs his anger in the Epistle to the Galatians. It is this James who appears to have been the leader of the Christians in Jerusalem when Peter departed on his missionary journeys. It is this James who insisted that Gentiles had to become Jews first before they could become Christians. The weight of scholarship suggests that this is the James to whom Paul is referring. The idea that Jesus had no brothers and sisters was born in a much later period of history, when the attempt was being made to prove that the mother of Jesus was a “perpetual virgin.” Mark, the first gospel to be written, refers to Jesus’ four brothers by name (Mk. 6:3): James, Joses, Judas and Simon. Mark further states that Jesus had at least two sisters, neither of whom in that patriarchal world was deemed worthy of naming. So the intrigue deepens.The next name on Paul’s list only adds to that mystery. “Then,” says Paul, “he appeared to all the apostles.” Who are they? He has already mentioned the twelve. This must be a different group. Paul was not given to vain repetition. A distinction between “the twelve” and “the apostles” was clear to Paul, but it had disappeared by the time of the gospels.The final name on the list is the most fascinating of all. “Last of all,” Paul writes, “as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.” Paul was making the startling claim that he too had been a witness to the resurrection and that his resurrection experience was identical to the experience that everyone else on his list had, except that his was last.How much later would “last” be? The early 20th century church historian Adolf Harnack made a study of this and came to the conclusion that the conversion of Paul could not have happened any earlier than one year or any later than six years following the crucifixion. No one has challenged that finding. If that is accurate, as I believe it is, then we have to conclude that Paul understood the resurrection very differently from the way it is portrayed in the later gospels. For Paul, the resurrection was not an act of a dead man walking out of a tomb and back into the world. It was not the physical resuscitation of a three-days-dead body. A resuscitated formerly deceased body does not wait around for one to six years to make another dramatic appearance. Even St. Luke recognized this when he placed the ascension of Jesus forty days after the first Easter, at which time, he states, the appearances ceased. Resurrection thus clearly meant something different to Paul in the early years of the Christian Church. By the time the gospels were written (71-100 CE) the idea of resurrection had evolved until it had become quite physical and stories were told about the resurrected Jesus walking, talking, eating, drinking and interpreting scripture in a physically functioning, resuscitated body. That, however, is clearly not Paul’s understanding. What, then, did the resurrection mean to Paul? Can we ever recover that original meaning of Easter? We can try and I will seek to do that in next week’s column.~  John Shelby Spong  |

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