[Oe List ...] 10/28/2021, Progressing Spirit: Rev. Roger Wolsey: Loving the Earth is Essential; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Oct 28 05:49:27 PDT 2021
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Loving the Earth is Essential
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| Essay by Rev. Roger Wolsey
October 28, 2021Our planet is not well. That’s an understatement. The Earth is in a state of crisis. Human aggravated global warming/Climate Change is a real and present danger. The frequency and severity of storms, flooding, and wildfires around the world is increasing. We Are to Blame. “Human activities have caused the world's wildlife populations to plummet by more than two-thirds in the last 50 years, according to a report from the World Wildlife Fund.” Globally between September 2020 and February 2021, 12.5 million people were displaced by adverse impacts of climate change, the annual average exceeding 20 million. Such displacement leads to increased human conflict including war.
One of the reasons that I’m an advocate of progressive Christianity is its emphasis upon caring about the Earth that we live on. Unlike most other forms of the faith, progressive Christianity values the environment as part of our seeking to honor God and is committed to ensuring that we do our best to ensure a healthy plant for our children’s children to live upon.
Indeed, a case can be made that Climate Change is the single most important moral matter of our day as all of the vital matters of social injustice can only be addressed if there is a sustainable planet upon which we can address them. Talk about inter-sectional.
As a somewhat prominent progressive Christian writer I’ve been asked “Why do you continue to be a Christian?” - given that I don’t believe that all Christians need to believe in certain things that many have come to believe are “expected” for Christianity. I don’t believe that all Christians need to believe in a literal virgin birth, in a literal devil or hell, a literal physical resurrection, that Jesus is literally God, that Jesus performed literal miracles (violations of the laws of physics), or that Christianity is the only or best way for humans to connect to God, etc. Notice, I haven’t overtly stated whether or not I happen believe in those things, I stated that progressive Christianity doesn’t require adherence to such beliefs.
I increasingly identify as a Christian mystic or as “a mystic who happens to be a Christian.” The mystics of the world’s religions tend to have more in common with each other than they do with the more conventional members of their respective traditions. In other words, I don’t really feel a need to be known or thought of as a Christian. That said, being a part of an established lineage matters to me. I seek to follow the way, teaching, and example of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus (and the faith that centers him) is my love language and I seek to grow and develop in my faith in communion with fellow devotees to the way of love exemplified by Jesus. If anything, my commitment to continue to serve the Church has amplified. My sense of calling has been redoubled, and part of that is an increased awareness of the importance of my work as a Christian writer. There are 2.6 billion Christians in the world and inspiring as many of them as possible to take stewardship of the planet – Creation care – as being essential to Christian discipleship, is the most important thing I can be doing with my time left on the planet. The planet needs it. I feel strongly that this is WJWD – what Jesus would do.
Which brings us to an important matter – to what extent is the study of Jesus helpful in getting people to care about the environment?
Are we progressive Christians engaging in eisegesis – forcing our agenda onto Jesus and Christianity – rather than truly adhering to the actual teachings of Jesus?
Preaching about the environment and caring for God’s good green earth wasn’t exactly a top priority or emphasis for Jesus. I don’t think there’s any passages in the “red letters” attributed to Jesus where he is telling people to become environmentalists. Some scholars have suggested that Jesus truly felt that the world as we know it would end either within his lifetime, or within the lifetime of his first followers. To the extent that’s true, there isn’t much incentive to take care of the Earth or try to ensure it’s in good shape for future generations.
And, despite the wishes of certain vegetarians, there’s really no evidence to go around saying that “Jesus was a vegetarian – and that he wants us to not eat meat.” Jesus hung out with fishermen, and served fish to people on several occasions, and, as a faithful Jew, he ate lamb at Passover meals. A story has Jesus driving demons pulled from a man he healed into a herd of pigs which then jumped off a cliff. His parable known as “the prodigal son” features a celebrating father calling his servants to kill a fatted calf (veal) as part of that celebration.
Moreover, Jesus seems to imply that humans are of greater worth and value than the other critters “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (Matthew 6:26) and he goes on to suggest there’s no reason to worry about the future “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” (v.34)
Yet, if we look at the full constellation of his teachings we can find several very good reasons to believe that Jesus would bless and want us to step up our efforts to take care of this planet.
It is clear that Jesus was highly familiar with the agrarian culture he resided in. Many of the stories he told and analogies he used demonstrate someone who was highly aware of botany, farming, animal husbandry, and even meteorology. He employed such references as he knew his followers were aware of those things too.
When he interacted with a wealthy man (Mark 10:17-31) he implied that following the basics of the faith is foundational to experiencing eternal/abundant life and experiencing God’s kingdom. Jesus referred to the 10 commandments, but it’s fair to assume that he also meant to assume following God’s very first commandment to humanity – taking care of God’s creation found in the creation myth at the beginning of the Book of Genesis was also a given (Genesis 1:26-30).
Jesus actively called for people to repent from their loyalties and addictions to the way of worldly empire, and to instead shift to living simply in relational communitarian community. This way of living, sharing of wealth, resources, and property, tends toward having a low carbon footprint.
Furthermore Jesus was a Jew, and the Jewish understanding of salvation (“wholeness/well-being/healing”) is about the societal/collective just as much, if not more, than it is about the personal; and the same is true for its emphasis on the here and now – not just whatever happens after we die. Caring for the environment we live in is consistent for providing both societal and personal salvation.
Finally, if nothing else, Jesus was someone who was a radical of love. He called people to expand their sense of who to consider as being “their neighbor” - e.g., persons left for dead on the side of roads, Samaritans, tax collectors, and Roman soldiers. Jesus called us to even love our enemies – including those actively harming us. Jesus called for increasing our circle of care – realizing that everyone on the planet is our brother, sister, and sibling, and seeing that everyone is our neighbor. It is thus entirely consistent for us to work with and expand that teaching to include the rest of Creation in our circle of care – to start seeing the otters, deer, cow, ducks, bats, bugs, ponds, rivers, oceans, land, aquifers, and sky as being our siblings and neighbors too. This isn’t colonialist appropriation of the animist views of native Americans. This is valid, relevant, and appropriate exegeting and interpreting of our scriptures for our current context. Considering the planet that we live upon to not merely be “a stage” for us to temporarily use and abuse – but rather, embrace as a being for us to actively love – is a game-changer.
Many progressive Christians have come to reject the theology of supernatural theism and instead embrace the view of God via panentheism – i.e., fully immanent within all Creation as well as being fully transcendent from it. Many of us embrace Tillich’s view that God is “the ground of all being” and this jibes well with the mystic view of the Apostle Paul – that God is “the One in Whom we live, and move, and have our being.” (Acts 17:28) If those are our beliefs and understandings, then let’s behave accordingly. If we view the Earth as imbued with, and indeed part of, God - as being sacred and Divine - then we should practice what we preach and truly take care of the Earth and its environment as a priority.
Progressive Christians also do well to learn from womanist and feminist theological perspectives. We also do well to consider the insights of Creation Spirituality.
As Jesus put it, what we fail to do to “the least of these” we fail to do to him. (Matthew 25:45) We’re failing to love God by failing to reduce the spewing of global warming gasses. By engaging in such polluting of the atmosphere and aggravating global warming, we’re also “causing the little children on the planet to stumble” and not be able to thrive as God intends for them to do. (Matt. 18:6)
Jesus may not have called for us to care about having long lifespans, but he did call us to live faithfully. Living faithfully in 2021 means not just giving lip-service to Creation care. It means more than just switching to LED light-bulbs. It means listening to prophets such as Greta Thunberg and getting all hands on deck to shut down as many coal and natural gas burning power plants as quickly possible, and replace them with as many solar, wind, hydro, and even nuclear power plants as quickly as possible. It means reducing our consumption of red meat. It means reducing our driving and switching over to electric vehicles. It means shifting away from global consumerism and adopting a more regional economy. It means these things and much more.
As a member of the Board of Directors of ProgressiveChristianity.Org (formerly The Center for Progressive Christianity) I’ve been part of the ongoing work of continually revising the “8 Points of Christianity” they created decades ago. Our most recent iteration – yet to be posted – has within it a tenet overtly emphasizing seeking the sustainability and well-being of our planet.
May God bless us as we become evangelical in spreading the good news of Creation Care, “Green Church,” and calling for people to repent from our addictions to behaviors that harm the planet.
~ Rev. Roger Wolsey
(cover art: “Birth of a Planet” by Amanda Sage)
Read online here
About the Author
Rev. Roger Wolsey is a United Methodist pastor who resides in Grand Junction, CO. Roger is author of Kissing Fish: Christianity for people who don’t like Christianity and blogs for Patheos as The Holy Kiss and serves on the Board of Directors of ProgressiveChristianity.Org. Roger became “a Christian on purpose” during his college years and he experienced a call to ordained ministry two years after college. He values the Wesleyan approach to the faith and, as a certified spiritual director, he seeks to help others grow and mature. Roger enjoys yoga; playing trumpet; motorcycling; and camping with his son. He served as the Director of the Wesley Foundation campus ministry at the University of Colorado in Boulder for 14 years, and has served as pastor of churches in Minnesota, Iowa, and currently serves as the pastor of Fruita UMC in Colorado, and also serves as the "CRM" (Congregational Resource Minister/Church Consultant) for the Utah/Western Colorado District of the Mountain Sky Conference. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By A Reader
How do you deal with the suffering we experience as humans?
A: By Rev. Deshna Shine
Dear Reader,A wild-woman would say: There is no right or wrong way to deal with suffering, just effective and ineffective. There is often something positive that comes out of suffering, especially when we approach our suffering in an effective way. By effective, I mean, we feel it fully, we take time to process it and we maintain a sense of temporality.
Everything is complex and sometimes things that seem “bad” or hard, challenging, frightening, un-grounding, unknown, or tragic in the moment lead to amazing things later that we can not predict. Sometimes, the suffering in the moment leads to evolution down the line that may not even be noticed or seen.
My heart feels the suffering on this planet. I can literally close my eyes and tap into the immense grief, fear, and desperation that is being experienced out there. But I can not hold the whole weight of the world. I wouldn't last long. So, I practice beaming my light into the hearts of the souls around me near and far. I lean into the practice and ask that light to travel farther. How far can my love go? How wide can this blessing be?
Nothing is permanent and everything changes. So in times of suffering, I remember: this too shall pass. And in times of bliss and abundance, I release, because: this too shall pass. I walk the middle path. Aware of the Darkness within. I send it to fight my battles when I am too sad or tired. And always, I seek to grow my Light. Each person I pass is an opportunity to bring light or to alleviate a bit of their suffering. Each breath is a gift, so I slow down time by being present with my breath, the ground I walk on, the people I am crossing paths with, the trees that breathe with me, the air the fills me, the water that nourishes me, the food that sustains me, the cats that need me, my daughter who sees me, my Beloved who frees me.
I deal with suffering by feeling it with all my being and reminding myself that I am held by a loving supportive Presence. I transform my suffering into empathy. I journey into the Darkness and allow myself to be a fully authentic complex human being experiencing a training ground for the evolution of the soul. Suffering is an opportunity, an invitation to surrender into Spirit and to release control. ~ Rev. Deshna Shine
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Deshna Shine is Project Director of ProgressiveChristianity.org’s Children’s Curriculum. She is an ordained Interfaith Minister, author, international speaker, and 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 served as Executive Director of ProgressiveChristianity.org, Executive Producer of Embrace Festival and has co-authored the novel, Missing Mothers. Deshna is passionate about sacred community, nourishing children spiritually and transforming Christianity through a radically inclusive lens. |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
Examining the Meaning of the Resurrection
Part IV: What is the Meaning of Three Days?
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
June 23, 2021First, we asked who stood at the center of the Easter experience and Peter emerged from our study as the one in whom the meaning of resurrection dawned. Then we asked “where” Peter and the disciples were when Easter broke into their consciousness and our study led us to the primacy of the Galilean tradition over the secondary Jerusalem tradition. Now we come to the “when” question. When did this experience occur? Here we begin to confront the unpredictable quality of the familiar symbol: “the third day.” Did the experience of resurrection dawn in Peter on the third day after the crucifixion? If the “third day” is to be treated as a literal measure of time that would place “resurrection” on Sunday as Paul asserts in I Corinthians 15. Recall that this is the first biblical reference to the time of the resurrection. Mark, however, the author of the first gospel to be written (70-72), changes that time reference from “on the third day” to “after three days.” These are conflicting traditions that do not give us the same day. “On the third day” would place the dawning of the resurrection on Sunday, the first day of the week. “After three days,” however, would place it on Monday. While the two phrases sound similar, the two traditions result in contradictory conclusions.
The more wobbly of the two time references appears to be that of Mark. At least, we note that both Matthew and Luke had Mark in front of them when they wrote their gospels. Each of these authors actually wrote expanded versions of Mark, but when they came to Mark’s threefold reference to “after three days,” they each changed it, Mathew changed all three of Mark’s “after three days” references to read “on the third day,” while Luke changed two of Mark’s references and simply omitted the third. Why can they not agree on what seems like so small a matter? What, we wonder, is driving this changing time measurement in the early years of Christian history? I suspect it had to do with liturgy more than with anything else. The first day of the week, or Sunday, was celebrated as the day of the resurrection by the early Christians and so liturgical pressure appears to have driven the memory of the experience. If resurrection were to be observed on the first day of the week then the first awareness of it must have occurred “on the third day.” If the date of the crucifixion was Friday, the third day had to be Sunday.
The deeper question, however, is what was the experience called “resurrection,” which they were describing? Was it an event that occurred inside history? The earliest references to resurrection that we have in the Bible do not, as we have noted previously, seem to think so. Paul, while listing those who are witnesses to the resurrection, never gives us a single narrative detail, yet he includes himself on that list even though his conversion seems to be no earlier than one year after the crucifixion and no later than six years. Later writings in the Pauline Corpus suggest that Paul saw resurrection and ascension as two parts of the same act with neither of them lying inside the bounds of history. For Paul, resurrection clearly did not mean being resuscitated back into the life of this world. It meant rather being raised into the life of God. How can we locate an event in the life of God within the framework of time and space in which human life is lived? So what seems to be described in these early writings in terms of a time reference is not the reality that happened to Jesus, whatever that was, but the time in which a new realization emerged in the minds of the disciples. That does occur within human history. The third day became a synonym for that emergence.
Even that, however, does not clear up the problem. If one insists on reading the gospel narratives literally the actual the time between the burial of Jesus and the resurrection is never more than 36 hours. That is but a day and a half, not three days. The burial occurs shortly before sundown on Friday, which would be about 6:00 pm. From 6:00 pm on Friday until midnight on Saturday is six hours. From midnight Saturday to midnight Sunday is twenty-four hours. From midnight Sunday until dawn or 6:00 am is six more hours. Put them all together and the best you can get is 36 hours, a day and a half. The symbol “three days” appears to at best a kind of shorthand description, not a real measure of time.
Then we go to the gospel narratives themselves and look for additional clues. We are surprised to discover that the first gospel to be written never relates a story in which the risen Christ appears to anyone. Mark’s gospel ends at Chapter 16 verse 8, where the messenger directs the women to tell the disciples that they are to go to Galilee and, there in their home region, they will see the raised Jesus. In response, however, Mark tells us that “the women fled in fear and said nothing to anyone.” If we then proceed to literalize the words of the messenger that the disciples must return to Galilee if they wish to see the raised Jesus, we need to observe that Galilee is a seven to ten day trip from Jerusalem, which means that there would be no resurrection appearance inside the three-day frame of reference.
When we come to Matthew, the problem is the same. Matthew contradicts Mark and says that the women actually saw Jesus and “held his feet” in the garden on the first day of the week. Mark says that the women only saw the messenger and they fled in fear. Luke, written a little later, agrees with Mark. In the third gospel the women do not see Jesus at dawn on the Easter. So it is two to one against Matthew being accurate.
Interestingly enough, Matthew later does describe an appearance of the risen Christ to the disciples in Galilee, but it would have to have occurred after the disciples had returned to Galilee or at least seven to ten days later. Perhaps even more important in this first described appearance of Jesus to the disciples, the Jesus who appears is the already ascended, glorified Lord from heaven, who comes to them out of the sky. This is more a vision of the triumphant Son of Man than it is a narrative about a resurrected body!
The time references become even more mysterious in Luke, who portrays the risen Christ as appearing on Easter evening to Cleopas and his traveling companion in the village of Emmaus in the context of a Eucharistic meal. This Jesus, however, seems to have the ability to materialize and to dematerialize at will. When these Emmaus travelers return to Jerusalem to share what they have experienced, they are greeted by the disciples who proclaim that the raised Jesus “has appeared to Peter,” but no details, other than hearsay, are given. Luke then goes on to assert that Jesus himself appeared on a number of occasions over a period of 40 days and that finally all resurrection experiences ceased with the ascension.
The Fourth Gospel’s witness is also fascinating and confusing. The risen Christ appears only to Mary Magdalene in the garden on Easter morning and there forbids her to touch him for “I have not yet ascended to the father.” By Easter evening, however, that ascension has taken place and any reluctance to any one touching Jesus has disappeared. Jesus then enters their presence in a transformed state. He is able to walk through locked doors to gain access to the disciples and there to breathe into them the gift of the Holy Spirit. He then disappears and does not return until “after eight days,” which, according to the way the Jews counted time, would be the first day of the second week. On this occasion, however, Thomas is present. Thomas then acknowledges him as “my Lord and my God.” At that point John’s gospel appears to end. There is, however, an epilogue attached to the apparently completed corpus of the Fourth Gospel. This epilogue seems to describe events that were weeks, perhaps even months later, when Jesus appears again, but this time in Galilee where he commands Peter to “Feed my sheep.”
So to return to our question: when did resurrection dawn in the hearts and minds of the disciples? Was it on the third day after the crucifixion? Was it after three days? Was it seven to ten days after the crucifixion when the disciples had returned to their Galilean homes? Was it month’s later when they had actually picked up the pieces of their lives and reentered the fishing trade? These are our options.
I think there was a significant amount of time – probably no less than six months, no more than one year – between the first Good Friday and the first Easter. There had to be time to allow the followers of Jesus to come to an understanding of how a crucified one could still be the messiah. They had to have time to overcome what they believed was the condemnation of the Torah, which pronounced one “cursed” who had been hanged upon a tree. They had to have time to come to the radical new understanding that the life of God can be experienced through a dying man on a cross. They had to have time to search the Hebrew Scriptures to find messianic images where through weakness and death, God could still be seen as life and love.
So, in answer to the question “when,” my suggestion is that Easter dawned some six months to a year after the crucifixion. My third clue thus falls into place. Next we look at what was the context in which the meaning of resurrection moved into human awareness. That is the “how?” question and to that question I turn next week.~ John Shelby Spong |
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