[Oe List ...] 9/10/20, Progressing Spirit, Lauren Van Ham: When Everything Becomes Sacred; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Sep 10 09:06:03 PDT 2020
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When Everything Becomes Sacred
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| Essay by Rev. Lauren Van Ham
September 10, 2020
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.
Hebrew Scriptures, Micah 6:8
The flower is always the bud’s undoing. Let go then. Step into the river lean into the wind let the strength of the earth rise through you. Watch your fingertips burst into bloom.
- Pavithra K Mehta
At Progressing Spirit, we get nudged and inspired to walk Jesus’s talk. In the last few weeks alone, we’ve looked at making reparations, exercising our humility, using our prophetic imagination, learning from each apocalypse and taking lessons on engagement from the late Congressman John Lewis. Thank you, Authors, Scholars, Teachers and Pastors! These weekly reads provide reassurance and stimulation – a steady reminder that we are able, that the time for engaging is now, and that we are part of a good community, caring and struggling together.
In a phone call not long before his transition to the next world, American filmmaker Ava DuVernay asked Representative John Lewis what she should do. She was feeling pulled in many directions and every issue felt important. “Ava,” he responded, “Do Everything.”
At first glance it’s comical, right? And completely unrealistic. Or borderline abusive? Thomas Merton, another non-violent peace activist wrote, “To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times.”
But when held in a different way, I feel a powerful Zen koan in Lewis’s words. Perhaps this mantra, “Do Everything,” is interchangeable with “Be Everything.” I’m thinking about the Living System, of which we’re a part. Imagine a forest, miles and miles of prairie grass roots, the mycelial web, a bee hive. In any of these there is the organism itself, and there is the larger network. The tree is itself, and it is also every other tree, as it sends messages and aid in one moment, and receives messages and support in another.
There is an incredible willingness on the part of the trees, grasses, fungi, bees, to participate in the larger picture. Then again, if they sever communal ties, life will be much harder, and quite short. In the Living System, we observe how Life reveres Life. In the colonizing or extractive system, we feel the lack of reverence. Not only is there incredible disregard for the larger network, there is fear. An unwillingness to be curious, to be expanded, to develop intimacy.
My friends and teachers at Movement Generation, an Ecology & Justice project based in Oakland, CA put it like this:
Story + Land = Place
Story + Land + Sacredness = Home
And then they add:
The colonial mind is homeless
There is an incredible willingness on the part of the trees, grasses, fungi, bees, to participate in the larger picture. Then again, if they sever communal ties, life will be much harder, and quite short. In the Living System, we observe how Life reveres Life. In the colonizing or extractive system, we feel the lack of reverence. Not only is there incredible disregard for the larger network, there is fear. An unwillingness to be curious, to be expanded, to develop intimacy.
But when held in a different way, I feel a powerful Zen koan in Lewis’s words. Perhaps this mantra, “Do Everything,” is interchangeable with “Be Everything.” I’m thinking about the Living System, of which we’re a part. Imagine a forest, miles and miles of prairie grass roots, the mycelial web, a bee hive. In any of these there is the organism itself, and there is the larger network. The tree is itself, and it is also every other tree, as it sends messages and aid in one moment, and receives messages and support in another.
In a phone call not long before his transition to the next world, American filmmaker Ava DuVernay asked Representative John Lewis what she should do. She was feeling pulled in many directions and every issue felt important. “Ava,” he responded, “Do Everything.” At first glance it’s comical, right? And completely unrealistic. Or borderline abusive? Thomas Merton, another non-violent peace activist wrote, “To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times.”
In the Living System “everything” and “everyone” is biodiversity. Biodiversity is our best defense, and it’s regenerative! While the extractive system mines and mono-crops the minerals and much needed microbes from healthy soil in order to do one thing, a biodiverse system uses the complexity of “everything” to fulfill a variety of needs like replenishing oxygen, sequestering carbon in forests, pollinating crops, and creating compost from waste.
In Hebrew scripture, the prophets arrive on the scene to disrupt the colonizing system, the extractive system. Their words call out hypocrisy and point to corruption. This was hard work then, and it’s especially hard work now, as most of us have experienced how our prophetic voice only gets us so far before we see ourselves also complicit in a very tangled system. It’s been designed that way; but it doesn’t mean we should go back to sleep. Instead, we need to return to what’s sacred.
The regenerative system puts sacredness at the center. It recognizes relationships and the labor of living as valuable. The labor of living? Yes, the energy we (humans, birds, vegetables, algae, all of us) take from the sun, and turn into flowers… or flight… or answering emails, making soup, running a marathon, singing a lullaby, facilitating a group discussion, you get the idea. The labor of living is what all of us do, and all of it holds value in the larger system. But which system?
If we are feeling stuck in place and utterly homeless, it’s a good indication that we’re in the colonizing system (Story + Land = Place). And if you’re feeling it, you’re not alone. I’m feeling it too. In my conversations with people living around the world, the unifying theme is how vital it has become to protect the Living System, to regard the sacredness of all life and to care for one another and all species in a way that reflects how deeply we need one another. Reflecting on a protected natural space near her home, author Jenny Odell describes it this way,
Our fates are linked, to each other, to the places where we are, and everyone and
everything that lives in them. …It’s scary, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. That same relationship to the richness of place lets me partake of it too, allowing me to shape-shift like the flock of birds, to flow inland and out to sea, to rise and fall, to breathe. It’s a vital reminder that as a human, I am heir to this complexity - that I was born, not engineered. That’s why, when I worry about the estuary’s diversity, I am also worrying about my own diversity - about having the best, most alive parts of myself paved over by a ruthless logic of use. When I worry about the birds, I am also worrying about watching all my possible selves go extinct. And when I worry that no one will see the value of these murky waters, it is also a worry that I will be stripped of my own unusable parts, my own mysteries and my own depths.Humans made the extractive system, and humans can un-make it. We need to contest our current systems of power and return to one where sacredness is at the center. When sacredness is the measurement of value, “everything” is not too much, but rather wonderfully, and necessarily diverse, supporting of all parts of the Living System. Like that hive of bees, we each participate in “everything” so that everyone is supported. Let’s do everything so that one day – not too far away – we are living and working in an economy that has been designed for the ones who are most excluded (the “least of these,” Matthew 25:40), so that sufficiency and generosity holds us all. Let’s do everything so that one day – this one feels more distant – we have learned how to navigate hurt and harm without prisons and police so that there can be no more prisons and police.Both of these examples might magnify the grief of the moment. And it’s very true that jumping to solutions too quickly is a form of denial, so let’s, please be honest and gentle with our grief and our anger. And then, just like the tree, sending and receiving aid and support for every other tree, let’s accept the invitation to lean in and embody what the Hebrew prophets, Jesus and many other brave change-makers have modeled. Let’s do everything!~ Rev. Lauren Van Ham
Read online here
About the Author
Rev. Lauren Van Ham, MA was born and raised beneath the big sky of the Midwest, Lauren holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, Naropa University and The Chaplaincy Institute. Following her ordination in 1999, Lauren served as an interfaith chaplain in both healthcare (adolescent psychiatry and palliative care), and corporate settings (organizational development and employee wellness). Lauren’s passion for spirituality, art and Earth's teachings have supported her specialization in eco-ministry, grief & loss, and sacred activism. Her essay, "Way of the Eco-Chaplain," appears in the collection, Ways of the Spirit: Voices of Women; and her work with Green Sangha is featured in Renewal, a documentary celebrating the efforts of religious environmental activists from diverse faith traditions across America. Her ideas can be heard on Vennly, an app that shares perspectives from spiritual and community leaders across different backgrounds and traditions. Currently, Lauren tends her private spiritual direction and eco-chaplaincy consulting practice, and serves as Climate Action Coordinator for the United Religions Initiative (URI), and as guest faculty for several schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By A Reader
I was really inspired by Rep. Alexia Ocasio-Cortez’s response to the insults of Rep. Ted Yoho, but I was equally disappointed by Yoho’s pseudo-apology. What makes a good apology?
A: By Brian D. McLaren
Dear Reader,First, for those who haven’t seen or read AOC’s eloquent, firm, and gracious response, you can find it here. And if you haven’t seen Rep. Yoho’s apology, you can find it here.Rep. Yoho’s apology really is a case study in what not to do, and I winced when I saw it, remembering times I’ve made the same tired old mistakes.He begins by touting his virtue: “I am a man of my word.” He avoids addressing Rep. Ocasio-Cortez directly, thereby increasing the dehumanization. Instead he says, perfunctorily and with no specificity, “I arise to apologize…” He minimizes the gravity of his offense, as if “abrupt manner” was the offense, and as if the offense would not have been as grave if he had called her a “disgusting f*cking b*tch” less abruptly. Then he mentions being married with two daughters and “being very cognizant of my language,” a common ploy used by men of weak character to hide behind the women in their families. He admits to “offensive language” but minimizes it by saying these words “were attributed to me by the press,” as if the whole problem is the press’s fault, and then further exonerates himself by saying his words “were never spoken to my colleagues,” and apologizes for those who misconstrued them that way — a clever but obvious dodge of the real issue, not to mention a classic act of blame-shifting.He then recalls being on food stamps when he was young, and then becomes teary in empathy for… himself! The final insult of his non-apology comes when he claims the moral high ground: “I cannot apologize for my passion, or for loving my God, my family, and my country.” Having hid behind women and poverty, he then hides behind religion, family, and the flag to defend himself. It was a truly reprehensible performance that reflects mistakes many of us have made in apologizing authentically.The best guidelines I’ve ever encountered for a legitimate apology come from V (formerly known as Eve Ensler), author of The Vagina Monologues. She recommends a four-step process for apology in her powerful book The Apology and in her TED talk, “The Profound Power of an Authentic Apology”:1. Say what, in detail, you did.2. Tell the story of what made you capable of doing what you did, not as an excuse, but as an explanation. In so doing, you show that you have done some inner work of reflection so you can address the deeper roots of your action, which makes you less likely to repeat it in the future.3. Feel what your victim felt.4. Take responsibility and make amends.So, I humbly offer this fix for Rep. Yoho, inserting numbers for the different parts of the apology, in thanks to V:I need to publicly apology to this House, and especially to my esteemed colleague, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 1) I recently called Rep. Ocasio-Cortez a filthy and dehumanizing name. There is no excuse for my action. Then, when caught, I denied it, another inexcusable failure of character. 2) I have examined myself about how I came to this place. I realize that I am an arrogant man and when I encounter a strong and intelligent woman who disagrees with me or my ideology, I want to bring her down in some way. I have never admitted or adequately addressed this toxic masculinity in myself. Now I must. 3) I can only imagine how many other arrogant and childish men my gifted colleague has had to face to get to where she is today, and I feel deep regret about adding to her pain, and the pain of other women. In addition, I regret setting a terrible example for other men, and I must change going forward. 4) I take full responsibility for my actions, and I would like to ask my colleague what it will take to make appropriate amends so I can grow as a human being and a member of Congress, and so that together, we can work for a better Congress, a better country, and a better world. I failed my colleague, this Congress, and my responsibility as a leader to set a positive example, and I am sorry.We can only imagine what a difference an apology like this could have made. May we all have the courage and wisdom to apologize authentically the next time we do wrong and cause someone harm.~ Brian D. McLaren
Read and share online here
About the Author
Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. He is a passionate advocate for “a new kind of Christianity” – just, generous, and working with people of all faiths for the common good. A leader in the Convergence Network he also works closely with the Center for Progressive Renewal/Convergence, the Wild Goose Festival and the Fair Food Program‘s Faith Working Group. His most recent joint project is an illustrated children’s book (for all ages) called Cory and the Seventh Story. Other recent books include: The Great Spiritual Migration, We Make the Road by Walking, and Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? (Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World). |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Origins of the New Testament, Part VII: Paul's Early Epistles, I Thessalonians and Galatians
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
December 3, 2009In our Origins of the New Testament series, I now turn to the epistles of Paul since he was the first author to write any part of the New Testament. My plan is to divide the authentic writings of Paul into three broad categories. There is what I call “the early Paul,” best seen through his first two epistles, I Thessalonians and Galatians; then there is what I call “the middle Paul,” best illustrated through his most familiar works, I and II Corinthians and Romans; and, finally there is “the late Paul,” best observed through the epistles known as Philemon and Philippians. Please note that these seven epistles constitute what scholars all but universally agree are the authentic letters of Paul. I will examine Paul in his various roles as pastor and as theologian. This Pauline segment of our larger task of examining the origins and makeup of the New Testament will then conclude with a brief analysis of the disputed epistles, the dispute being whether or not they are the authentic works of Paul. That list includes Colossians and II Thessalonians, which very few scholars still contend are Pauline. Then we move on to those about which there is almost no dispute at all, since these letters appear to have been written well after Paul’s death. In this category we locate Ephesians, I and II Timothy and Titus.
Most Christians are unable to discern any differences in voice, tone or content in the entire body of work that we now call the epistles, whether written by Paul or not. That is probably because we never read them as a whole and thus never get a sense of Paul’s specific thinking. We tend to hear them instead only in small snatches being read as lessons in church and with no context. My hope is that through these columns I will be able to provide my readers with sufficient knowledge of the distinctiveness of each epistle that the differences between them become obvious. It might even be exciting to enable people to become biblically literate, which would place them among the minority of Christians who are conversant with Paul’s thinking.
The first epistle that Paul wrote, most scholars agree, was I Thessalonians. It is, however, placed sixth in the epistle section of the Bible because these letters were put into the canon of scripture according to their length. Romans, Paul’s longest letter, is first, and Philemon, Paul’s shortest letter, is last. If they had been listed chronologically I Thessalonians would be first, Galatians second, I and II Corinthians third and fourth, Romans fifth, Philemon sixth and Philippians seventh. So we begin our study of Paul’s content with his first two works.
Thessalonica was the capital of Macedonia and Galatia was in central Asia Minor. The book of Acts tells us that Paul visited both of these towns on his early missionary journeys. He wrote these two epistles in the first few years of the sixth decade, probably between the years 51 and 53. At this time the followers of Jesus were still members of the synagogue. Paul came to each town as a traveling evangelist who also happened to be a rabbi. The venue for his words was thus the Sabbath service in the synagogue, though we need to recognize that in those two towns the synagogues were far removed in both miles and strictness from Judea.
Members of these synagogues were Greek-speaking Hellenized Jews, who lived as members of the Jewish Diaspora. The synagogue was thus not only a worship center for them, it was also their cultic and cultural center. Diaspora synagogues had by this time begun to attract Gentile worshipers. It was a time of great religious ferment in the Greek-speaking Roman Empire. The gods of Olympus had lost most of their appeal. The mystery cults seemed too bizarre and had not yet become established. This meant that the synagogue was more and more a place to which serious worshipers of many varieties turned. In the synagogue there was a firm conviction that God was one. The Torah of the Jews portrayed this one God as concerned about life and ethics, as well as about patterns of worship. As the Jews moved further away from their homeland many of them began to shed the more rigid aspects of their religion, and Judaism for them became more abstract, more spiritual, and less definably Jewish. Gentile worshipers were not drawn to the cultic aspects of Judaism, like kosher dietary rules, circumcision and Sabbath day observance, so these changes made it even more attractive to them.
Paul, as a Greek-thinking Hellenized Jew, was thus frequently more appealing to these modernizing Jews and the Gentile visitors than he was to the stricter Jewish members of the audience, who viewed the synagogue as their last attachment to their ancestry. In Thessalonica Paul had clearly emphasized in his preaching the messianic claim for Jesus. That role had many connotations for the Jews, but among the most compelling was that the messiah, when he came, would establish God’s eternal kingdom and inaugurate God’s earthly rule. In the service of this idea the early disciples of Jesus had been consumed with the task of connecting the life of Jesus to the messianic promises found in their scriptures. They thus searched their sacred writings for hints and clues to prove that Jesus was the expected messiah. Sometimes they stretched these texts beyond the breaking point. At the heart of the Jesus message was the claim that death had been conquered and that his followers would be transported into eternal life very soon. The Gentile visitors to the synagogue had bought this message and had formed themselves into a separate community of believers within the synagogue. They still attended Sabbath day services, but they also gathered on the first day of the week for the Christian liturgy they called “the breaking of the bread,” at which time they prayed “thy kingdom come.”
The obvious desire by Gentiles to be in the synagogue, but not of the synagogue, was more than some traditional Orthodox Jews could tolerate, so Paul and his teaching became a source of divisiveness in the various synagogues of the empire. The Orthodox Jewish believers began to attack Paul’s credentials and his reputation. The Gentile worshipers had turned from idols to the one God of the Jews, but Paul had located this God in the life of Jesus and so deeply convinced them of this that they had begun to wait for Jesus’ promised return from heaven. Clearly this was the message they had heard from Paul.
As time passed, however, the Kingdom did not arrive and they began to waver. When Thessalonian family members began to die, their despair increased. Something was clearly wrong if they died before the kingdom arrived. The bulk of Paul’s message in his first epistle was designed to assure these troubled worshippers that the dead would rejoin the living when that second coming arrived. No one knows, he assured them, either the time or the season when that second coming will occur. Paul, the pastor, thus urged them to be vigilant, to keep awake, to be sober and to put on “the armor of God,” an image that he would expand in later works.
In Galatia, the pastoral issue was a little different. The content of Paul’s message in this second epistle was that in Christ alone their salvation was assured. This had caused those who responded to that message to move dramatically away from the law of the Jews. Keeping the cultic rules of Judaism lost its urgency in Paul’s proclamation of the infinite love of God that he believed had been revealed in the life of Jesus. This seemed to Orthodox Jews to be nothing less than a prescription for moral anarchy and the obliteration of the Torah itself. So they struck back at Paul and were supported by the heavy guns of the more traditional Jewish Christians from Jerusalem, including Peter and James, the Lord’s brother. This tension erupted into the first major division in Christian history. Was the Christ figure merely a new chapter in Judaism? Was he another prophet in a long line of Jewish prophets waiting to be incorporated into the ongoing Jewish story? Did believers in Jesus have to come through the rituals and rites of Judaism in order to be Christians? This was the position that Peter and James took and defended.
For Paul that stance was a violation of everything his Christian experience had taught him. Paul had found in Jesus a love sufficient to embrace him just as he was. Paul had tried the other way. By his own confession he had sought to obey every commandment of the law in order to win salvation. That had not proved to be a path that led him toward wholeness. Religious observance never is. It was and is just another form of human slavery, another attempt to win divine favor, to manipulate the deity with good behavior. At best that approach produced religious self-centeredness, not the glorious liberty of the children of God. For Paul the battle he was fighting in this epistle was for the heart of what he believed was the Christ experience. In defense of his understanding of Christ he mounted a strong counterattack, dismissing Peter’s behavior as unworthy of the gospel and expressing a strong dislike for James, the Lord’s brother. He berated those in the congregation in Galatia who had so quickly abandoned his gospel for this new religious bondage. Galatians reveals Paul not only at his most passionate, but also at his angriest and his most human. Defending his claim to be an apostle, Paul tells us more in this epistle than anywhere else about his conversion experience, and the meaning he found in Jesus that had been the source of his conversion. When the smoke of battle cleared, Paul stood victorious and the book of Acts would later relate the story of Peter’s conversion (see Acts 10).
It is also in Galatians that Paul first articulates the unity that he finds in Christ, who obliterates the human security boundaries between Jews and Gentiles, males and females, bond and free. All are one in Christ, he asserts. Paul, as we noted earlier in this series, felt himself loved beyond anything he had imagined possible and he refused to allow that single message to be compromised. He won this battle, but it would be one that Christians would fight again and again throughout history. Perhaps it was that this message of unqualified love was simply too good to be true. Imagine a God who knows the secrets of our hearts, but who loves us anyway. That is, however, the meaning of the Christ story for Paul and, as such, it would represent a major step into what it means to be human.~ John Shelby Spong |
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