[Oe List ...] 12/01/2022, Progressing Spirit: Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers: Holy Envy; Spong revisited

Thu Dec 1 07:12:29 PST 2022

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!important;padding-bottom:9px !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv2669403322 .yiv2669403322mcnTextContent, #yiv2669403322 .yiv2669403322mcnBoxedTextContentColumn{padding-right:18px !important;padding-left:18px !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv2669403322 .yiv2669403322mcnImageCardLeftImageContent, #yiv2669403322 .yiv2669403322mcnImageCardRightImageContent{padding-right:18px !important;padding-bottom:0 !important;padding-left:18px !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv2669403322 .yiv2669403322mcpreview-image-uploader{display:none !important;width:100% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv2669403322 h1{font-size:22px !important;line-height:125% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv2669403322 h2{font-size:20px !important;line-height:125% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv2669403322 h3{font-size:18px !important;line-height:125% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv2669403322 h4{font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv2669403322 .yiv2669403322mcnBoxedTextContentContainer .yiv2669403322mcnTextContent, #yiv2669403322 .yiv2669403322mcnBoxedTextContentContainer .yiv2669403322mcnTextContent p{font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv2669403322 #yiv2669403322templatePreheader{display:block !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv2669403322 #yiv2669403322templatePreheader .yiv2669403322mcnTextContent, #yiv2669403322 #yiv2669403322templatePreheader .yiv2669403322mcnTextContent p{font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv2669403322 #yiv2669403322templateHeader .yiv2669403322mcnTextContent, #yiv2669403322 #yiv2669403322templateHeader .yiv2669403322mcnTextContent p{font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv2669403322 #yiv2669403322templateBody .yiv2669403322mcnTextContent, #yiv2669403322 #yiv2669403322templateBody .yiv2669403322mcnTextContent p{font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv2669403322 #yiv2669403322templateFooter .yiv2669403322mcnTextContent, #yiv2669403322 #yiv2669403322templateFooter .yiv2669403322mcnTextContent p{font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;}} By Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers  
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Holy Envy
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|  Essay by Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers
December 1, 2022For the last six weeks, my congregation in Norman, Oklahoma, has been reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s wonderful book, Holy Envy:  Finding God in the Faith of Others.  In it, she tells the story of teaching Religion 101 (an introduction to world religions) to students at Piedmont College in rural north Georgia.  With her customary eloquence, and seen largely through the eyes of her students, she describes the experience of teaching Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam—as well as Christianity—to young people who live in the lower swells of the Appalachians in a two-stoplight town with sixty-two churches.  They go to school in what Flannery O’Connor once called “the Christ-haunted South.”  There is one Buddhist temple nine miles away, but no synagogues or mosques within an hour’s drive.

What she experienced time and time again was what she calls “holy envy.”  Referring to herself in the third person, she begins by talking about what teaching the course did to the professor.  “When she taught Judaism, she wanted to be a rabbi.  When she taught Buddhism, she wanted to be a monk.  It was only when she taught Christianity that the fire sputtered because her religion looked so different once she saw it lined up with the others.  She always promised her students that studying other faiths would not make them lose their own.  Then she lost hers, or at least the one she started out with.”

What happens over the course of the semester is described with Taylor’s trademark combination of honesty and tender-heartedness.  She wants more than anything for the students to have an experience of seeing God through the eyes of faith traditions they know nothing about by studying those traditions, but also through the experience of field trips—four of them, to be exact.  One to a Hindu Temple, one to a Buddhist Monastery, one to a Reformed Jewish Temple, and one to a mosque, all in Atlanta.  The real learning happens on those field trips, as the students react in both fear and wonder to the religious diversity that is now impossible to ignore.

In my own congregation, we decided to take the very same field trips, and although we are all adults, the experience was transformational.  On a balmy October evening, we pulled into the parking lot of the Hindu Temple of Oklahoma City, a fantastically improbable building set in a neighborhood of red brick ranch houses, looking like nothing we had ever seen before.  We took off our shoes, and inside was a room full of ornate statues of gods.  We were welcomed by a wonderful priest named Dr. Archara Vada.  He taught us about Hinduism for an hour and a half and had the most endearing laugh, more like a joyful giggle.  “So many gods, so little time,” I quipped as we wandered about, remembering my Church of Christ upbringing where no graven image was ever to be found or tolerated.  The deities were voluptuous, some with multiple arms and legs raised in sacred dance.  Some gods had fruit offerings nearby, so the priest could offer prasad—a ritual in which food that has been offered to the Lord is now offered back to us.  In the church, we call it communion.  Dr. Vada explained that Hindus see all these statues as Icons of the Divine, not as idols.   There are many routes to God in Hinduism, and people get to pick and choose their path.  Christians could learn a lot from the trust and freedom this embodies.

Our second field trip wasn’t a trip at all but a Zoom class on the Basics of Buddhism from teachers at the Dharma Center of Oklahoma City.  I have a lot of closet Buddhists in my church (and may be one myself).  Here is a faith that focuses not on what God can do for us but on what we can do for ourselves to reduce suffering by taking responsibility for the working of our own minds, avoiding ignorance and attachment to impermanent things which will never provide happiness.  Instead of belief being essential, as it is in Christianity, belief is optional.  What is required is that you walk the way and decide for yourself what is true.  Our church begins worship with a Tibetan singing bowl, and I long ago came out as an ordained non-theist.  Our dependence on God as a heavenly vending machine has created spiritual infants who are now fiddling while the earth burns.  “It’s all in God’s hands,” they say.  No, it isn’t. 

Our third field trip was to the Reformed Jewish Temple in Oklahoma City, where I have enjoyed close friendships with the rabbis for nearly four decades.  “A liberal Christian is the best friend a Jew can have outside the faith,” one rabbi said to me.  They don’t want to convert us, and we don’t want to convert them.  But our relationship with our nearest neighbor, as Dr. Taylor put it, is hard to confront and even more painful to be honest about.  Studying Judaism not only makes it possible to understand the Jewish Jesus but also reminds us how far we have come from a religion of Jesus to a religion about Jesus.  This not only led to our divorce but to centuries of anti-Semitism that is baked into our gospels and our hymns.

I grew up believing that the Jews had simply missed their opportunity to recognize the messiah when he was right in front of them.  Now I realize that Jews are not antagonistic about Jesus but have their own list of authoritative scriptures about the Messiah, and Jesus just doesn’t qualify.  He was a good teacher and a compassionate human being, but as a messiah (who would restore Jerusalem, rebuild the temple, and usher in a reign of peace), he failed.  Throw in the Trinity, and it becomes one of those “irreconcilable differences” that mark all divorces.  One God means one God, not three.

Our experience in the Temple, however, was wonderful.  We were warmly welcomed, taught how to read our worship book from back to front (the Hebrew way), included in the reading and interpretation of the Torah ceremony, and then fed afterward.  Listening to the melodic intonations of Hebrew helped us remember that this is what Jesus grew up hearing.  We left with Holy Envy.

Our last field trip was to the mosque at the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma, where my parishioners met their favorite Imam of all time, Imad Enchassi, chair of Islamic studies at Oklahoma City University and a one-man crusader for correcting misconceptions about Muslims in the deeply red state of Oklahoma.  As a child, Imad grew up in Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut and witnessed a massacre by a radical Christian group, even as his favorite teacher was a Catholic nun.  “God exposed me to so much hatred and violence so that I could be a voice for love and peace,” he told us.

For an hour and a half, he explained our deep connections to Abraham, how Muslims revere Jesus and Mary, but who also understand the story of Hagar and Ismael differently than Jews and Christians.  But most of all, he lamented how difficult it is to be Muslim in America since 9/11.  Dr. Taylor said this made ordinary Muslims “shadow bearers” for people with no wish or will to explore their own shadows.  Her class had visited a mosque on the Friday following 9/11 and heard the Imam explain why those who hijacked the planes exposed the falseness of their claim to being Muslim.  Again, the welcome was unconditional, and the sharing was gracious.  More Holy Envy.

The last “field trip” is to revisit our own churches and try to see them as an outsider might as if sitting in a pew for the very first time.  A good teacher should be asking us real questions.  How did we really get the collection of sacred writings we call the Bible?  Why do two of the gospel writers tells completely different infancy narratives about Jesus, and two tell no birth stories at all?  If nothing resembling the canon appeared until the fourth century, then what were early Christians reading?  And why does Mark have two endings, one with women running frightened from an empty tomb and another that posits snake handling as a test of faith?

Most of all, let’s be honest about how gracious we would be if our Hindu friends, or our Buddhist friends, or our Jewish friends, or our Muslim friends came to visit us.  Has the exclusivity of our developed doctrines made it impossible for us to learn from each other, much less accept each other?  Why do we think we have the market cornered on God, and why is our view of the sacred so body-averse and so obsessed with sins of the flesh?  Most of all, why has our religion made so many of us so judgmental, so tribal, and so violent? 

Here is my heartfelt suggestion.  If you are looking for a way to reset your approach to interfaith studies, may I suggest doing a book study on Holy Envy and then taking the field trips that go with it?  It is a transformative experience that will change the way you see the world of faith and your neighbor.  Dr. Taylor ends her book with a story about discovering the Church of the Common Ground, which meets in a public park in the heart of downtown Atlanta.  They have no building, but their welcome is as wide as the sky.  That may be the church of the future if the walls of the old one don’t kill us as they tumble down.  Love thy neighbor, and learn from them, but don’t try to convert them.  They have too much to teach us.~ Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers
Read online here

About the Author
Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers is pastor of First Congregational Church UCC, Norman, Oklahoma, and retired senior minister of Mayflower Congregational UCC church, Oklahoma City.  He is currently a Professor of Public Speaking and Distinguished Professor of Social Justice Emeritus in the Philosophy Department at Oklahoma City University.  He is a fellow of the Westar Institute and the author of eight books on religion and American culture, the most recent of which is, Saving God from Religion:  A Minister’s Search for Faith in a Skeptical Age.  A feature-length documentary chronicles his work on behalf of Progressive Christianity in Oklahoma (americanhereticsthefilm.com) and more information is at RobinMeyers.com.  |

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Question & Answer

Q: By A Reader

I consider myself a good person and I want to remain a church-going Christian but I find that living a Christ-centered life can be a difficult struggle - is the struggle worth it?

A: By Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
 Dear Reader,Is the struggle worth it, you ask? I think that life is always a struggle and especially when one commits to including one’s conscience along the way.  Jesus never said life was easy, nor did he say, “Blessed are the comfortable.”  He did say, “Blessed are those who comfort others” however. As for being a “church going” Christian, it depends very often on what the church or assembly stand for and how they do it.  I often find myself somewhat bored going to church—too much reading and being read at, too little silence or simply listening to being and not words. Sometimes I find myself yearning for some silence and meditation but instead I get song after song after song being read from books.  One wonders if the liturgists ought not to consider this news Rilke offered us  over 100 years ago, “the work of the eyes is finished now.  Go and do heart-work on all the images that are imprisoned within you.”More heart work, less eye work.  I suspect this is one big reason that many young people avoid church and seek out yoga or other spiritual practices that are body-based and more than reading and eye-based.  One yearns for some deeper experience than can occur strictly in the light—for some acknowledgement therefore of mystery and darkness and silence.  Of the Apophatic God, the God who is “superessential darkness” (Eckhart) and not just the God of Light.Consider for example these teachings about the value of silence (including group silence):“Nothing in all creation is so like God as Silence.” (Meister Eckhart)“I feel closer to what language cannot reach.”  (Rainer Maria Rilke)“Language cannot do everything—
chalk it on the walls where the dead poets
lie in their mausoleums.” (Adrienne Rich)“O silence, golden zero
Unsettling sun
Love winter when the plant says nothing.”   (Thomas Merton)“This word is a hidden word
and comes in the darkness of the night.To enter this darkness, put away
all voices and sounds
all images and likenesses.For no image has ever reached into the soul’s foundation
where God herself
with her own being is effective.”  (Meister Eckhart)“Yet no matter how deeply I go down into myself
my God is dark and like a webbing made
of a hundred roots, that drink in silence.”  (Rainer Maria Rilke)“In this temple of God in this the divine dwelling place, God alone rejoices with the soul in the deepest silence.  There is no reason for the intellect to stir or seek anything, for the Lord who created it wishes to give it repose here.”  (Teresa of Avila)I think following Christ is less of a burden when we give silence and nothingness its due.  As the Taoists put it:“Tao is beyond words
And beyond things
It is not expressed
Either in word or in silence.
Where there is no longer word or silence
Tao is apprehended.”Substitute the word “Christ” for Tao and this teaching works equally well.  (See Matthew Fox, Original Blessing, pp. 132ff) ~ Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
Read and share online here

About the Author
Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox holds a doctorate in spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris and has authored 40 books on spirituality and contemporary culture that have been translated into 78 languages. Fox has devoted 45 years to developing and teaching the tradition of Creation Spirituality and in doing so has reinvented forms of education and worship (called The Cosmic Mass). His work is inclusive of today’s science and world spiritual traditions and has awakened millions to the much-neglected earth-based mystical tradition of the West. Among his books are A Way To God: Thomas Merton's Creation Spirituality Journey; Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Times; Hildegard of Bingen: A Saint for Our Times;  Order of the Sacred Earth; The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times; and Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic – And Beyond; Original Blessing; The Coming of the Cosmic Christ; The Coming of the Cosmic Christ; A Spirituality Named Compassion; Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality.
To encourage a passionate response to the news of climate change advancing so rapidly, Fox started DailyMeditationswithMatthewFox.org  |

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

Part II: Introducing The Fourth Gospel
Tales of a Jewish Mystic 

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
June 6, 2013When writing the opening chapter of my soon-to-be released book, The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic, I felt the need to issue a warning to my readers. This warning needed to go in two quite different directions. There will certainly be those who think of themselves as “traditionally religious people,” who may well be scandalized by the content of this book. It will present them with ideas about the Bible about which they have never heard. There will also, however, be others, who are what I describe as members of the “Church Alumni Association,” those who have long ago given up on organized or institutional religion, who might actually be intrigued to hear a gospel being talked about in a different way. They might be fascinated to learn of the actual origins of the Fourth Gospel. This gospel was certainly not thought of as “the literal word of God” by its primary authors. I say “authors and editors” because this gospel was not ever a single volume that dropped from heaven in a completed form and divided into chapters and verses, as most church teaching has suggested over the centuries. Scholars now believe the Fourth Gospel was written in layers over a period of close to 30 years and by more than one primary person. The academic debate is not about whether there were multiple authors, that is assumed, but about how many there were. In this volume, I will identify only three Johannine layers or primary editorial revisions. If there were more than three, and no less a person than Raymond Brown argues for five, then some of them would have had to have been in the oral period rather than additional written sources and, as such, are much more difficult to isolate. Allow me to sketch the three layers I can identify briefly.

The earliest written layer of this gospel appears to date from the mid 70’s, which makes it a near contemporary to Mark. It reflects the shaping influence of the life of the synagogue on the community’s memory of Jesus. It recognizes that the Christian faith was born as a movement within the synagogue and thus is deeply and consistently Jewish in its frame of reference. In this strand of John’s text, we can see, feel and experience in its background, the high holy days of the Jewish liturgical year. Here we touch what might be called “primitive Christianity” as the disciples of Jesus, all of whom were Jews, sought to incorporate Jesus of Nazareth into the faith of their fathers and mothers. That was a process that had happened many times in the past as Judaism grew and developed. The fact is that in the Jewish experience, one prophet after another from Isaiah and Micah to Amos and Zechariah had been added into the Canon of the Jewish Sacred Scriptures. Judaism was an expanding not a static religious system. Jesus’ followers believed that he had brought to Judaism something new and fresh, but nonetheless, something consistent with their ongoing faith story. That incorporation of Jesus into Judaism is seen in this layer of the Fourth Gospel primarily in the way that they sought to show him as the fulfillment of the expectations of the “law and the prophets,” or indeed, as “that prophet of whom Moses spoke.” At its earliest level, the Fourth Gospel was and is a profoundly Jewish book.

The second editorial layer that has been discovered in this book seems to date from the mid to late 80’s of the Common Era. This was a time in the history of the Christian movement of exacerbating tensions between the followers of Jesus, who came to be called “Revisionists” and the leaders of the synagogue, who called themselves the “Orthodox” or right-thinking party. This growing negativity ultimately resulted in a fracture when the orthodox leaders excommunicated the followers of Jesus from the synagogue. This occurred around the year 88 of the Common Era. In a major revision of this gospel that occurred at this time, we see rising hostility and elements of what we now call anti-Semitism clearly creep into the text. Hostile words pass between the two groups. The Johannine text begins to call the enemies of Jesus simply “the Jews.” Those using this term pejoratively were, interestingly enough, also Jews. They meant the “Orthodox” party, whom they perceived as the enemies of those who follow Jesus. Before the split, the two groups had been engaged in what each thought was a battle to determine the true direction that Judaism was being called to travel. They were struggling with each other, as it were, for the “soul” and the future of Judaism.”

The third major editorial revision that is clearly visible in this gospel comes after the reality of this excommunication began to set in. This would place it in the mid 90’s. Up until this time, the whole thrust of those Jews, who were followers of Jesus, was to portray him as the fulfillment of the hopes of the Jews, based on the messianic scriptural images. He was a new and expanded version of such Jewish heroes as Moses, Samuel, Elijah and the Servant figure of II Isaiah. Now, however, they had been cast out of that Jewish context and they had to rethink their understanding of Jesus, for loyalty to Jesus had carried them beyond the boundaries of Judaism. This freed them to look at him in a new context, perhaps a post-Jewish context; the boundaries of Judaism no longer restrained them.

This was the time when, as I shall seek to demonstrate, they began to define Jesus according to the thinking of the 1st century school of thought known as “Merkabah or Jewish throne mysticism.” This mystical approach was still related to the faith of the fathers and mothers, but it was free of all “limits and all boundaries.” Mysticism always transcends the barriers that religion creates and presses its adherents toward a universalistic understanding. This was the time when, under the guidance of this form of Jewish mysticism, the next major editor of the Johannine text began to speak of Jesus’ “oneness with God.”

I am now convinced that this editor never intended the words he chose to use in this revision would ever to be read or understood in terms of the language of “incarnation.” That was a fourth century idea that would later be imposed on this gospel by the likes of Athanasius and the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. He certainly was not writing an apologia for Jesus as the “second person of the Holy Trinity.” His words, however, did open this gospel to these possible interpretations and, following the development of the creeds at Nicaea and beyond, this theology was attached to the Fourth Gospel so firmly that it is still the primary lens through which the gospel of John is read today. So the oneness with God, found in Jewish mysticism in the first century, came to be understood as the external deity invading the flesh of human life.

It was in this final editorial revision I am now convinced that we begin to get the language in the Fourth Gospel that has Jesus say: “I and the Father are one” or “if you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” This is also when the holy name of God, “I AM,” began to be placed on to the lips of Jesus and the “I AM” statements became part of the gospel: “I am the bread of life;” I am the “living water,” I am “the gate,” the “vine,” the “good shepherd,” the “way,” the “resurrection” and the “life.” This is also, I now believe, when the prologue identifying Jesus with the “word of God” spoken in creation, was added to the text of John. In that prologue the suggestion was made that the “word of God” met in Jesus was preexistent and had been part of God since the foundation of the world. The Jews felt the same way about the “wisdom” of God and the prologue to John is based on a hymn to wisdom found in the book of Proverbs.

Under the skillful quill of this third major editor, the mysterious presence of God in the life of Jesus was given a new form. This mystical oneness also signaled for its Jewish readers that this book was never intended by its author to be read or understood literally and, indeed, would never lend itself to a literal understanding. The clear idea that this gospel was never to be read as if it were literally true will be the source of the scandal that traditionally religious people will feel as they read these pages. That will, however, also be the source of the “intrigue” that those who have stepped outside all formal religious structures might feel as they realize that the Christianity that they have rejected is not at all what Christianity was intended to be.

So, in my opening chapter, I outlined some of the things that would produce these dual responses, of both scandal and intrigue. Readers who might be in either of these groups will discover in this book such sentence as these: “In all probability, none of the sayings attributed to Jesus in this gospel were ever spoken by him,” that “none of the miracles called “signs” and attributed to Jesus in this gospel, ever actually happened,” that “most of the characters who populate the pages of this gospel are literary or fictionalized creations of the author and were never real people who actually lived,” and “that the language of an external deity entering into the flesh of our physical existence, which shapes the way most people still inform both their understanding of Christianity and the way they read this gospel is not even close to what the writers of this gospel intended.”

So reading this book will be for some people an adventure leading to a radically new understanding of Christianity, while for others it will be a blasphemous book that constitutes an absolute attempt to destroy what they mistakenly believe to be “biblical truth.” I will live with both responses. For me it is the result of years of study and it represents an honest attempt to discover the essential Christian understanding, which has for centuries been smothered under the presumed authority of creeds, which are in turn under-girded by either the unbelievable claims of an inerrant Bible or the distorted infallibility claims of an inflexible church hierarchy. While surely some will call this book an attack on Christianity itself, I call it an attempt to rescue the Christ experience from the increasingly dated and unbelievable explanations that through the ages we have wrapped around Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, I see this book as an essential building block in the development of what I have called “A New Christianity for a New World.”~  John Shelby Spong  |

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