[Oe List ...] 1/06/22, Progressing Spirit: Dr Robin Meyer: A New Reading With Apologies To Luke; Spong revisited

Thu Jan 6 09:35:54 PST 2022

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A New Reading With Apologies To Luke
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|  Essay by Rev. Dr. Robin Meyer
February 21, 2019Last year, at the height of the pandemic (or is this the height of the pandemic?), a clergy colleague asked me to write a new version of the birth of Jesus that might preserve the radical message of Luke but translate it into more contemporary metaphors.  I gave it a shot, and then read it to two of my three granddaughters on Christmas Eve.  It is fiction of course (but so was the original), and as we all know, when a story grows stale and sentimental by constant retelling, we can go deaf—which is the first symptom of spiritual atrophy.  This isn’t how it happened, of course.  But this is how it is always happening.      
 Luke 2:1-20
In those days, a plague had come to the land of milk and honey.  Many had died, alone and gasping for breath—wondering anew if God had died.  People wore masks and could not hug each other.  Our fearless leader told us it would all be over soon.  In fact, he guaranteed it.  Then we could start shopping until we dropped again. 

In the middle of it all, a decree went out from the Census Bureau that all legal residents should be counted so they could be taxed.  It was a regular census, and most people stayed in their own towns to be registered.  But some, who were called “illegal aliens” (even though they were all from planet earth) took the dangerous journey across the border from the town of Juarez, Mexico to the town of Bethlehem, Texas.

Among them was a roofer named Jose, and his pregnant wife Maria.  After a shotgun wedding, they decided to make the dangerous journey even though their friends tried to talk them out of it. “You are hitting the road with a pregnant woman, are you kidding?  To which Jose replied.  “We don’t just want to be counted.  We want to count.”

After crossing the Rio Grande, Maria went into labor, and gave birth to Jesus, squatting behind a trash bin that reeked of Taco Bell wrappers in the Lone Star State Park.  No one was taking notes, of course, and so the whole story would have to be invented later, like a prequel. 

Maria was not completely alone, however.  The women traveling with her acted as midwives.  They held up a blanket for privacy, while Jose tried to stay out of the way.  Then they swaddled the baby in an old hoodie and the women laid down beside Maria to keep her and her baby boy warm.  There was not a Motel Six in sight.

In that region there were cowboys, “essential workers” living in their cars and drinking tequila.  Why?  It’s not easy to work cattle without fences.  Try it sometime.  Besides, since the plague made their work dangerous, they considered quitting altogether.  And then, right in middle of doing shots they heard something.  Then they saw something—standing right in front of them—an elderly woman with short, snow-white hair and red glasses.

“Boys,” she said, with that stern confidence that elementary school teachers possess who can’t fool around.  “Don’t sleep through this.  Something big just happened down by the river.  Born to us this day in the Texas city of David, a savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” 

One of the men belched and said, “Who the hell are you darling?”  His friend grabbed him by the arm and said, “Would you just shut up and listen!  For once in your life, can you just listen?”

“Don’t take my word for it,” she said, “Go have a look for yourself, down by the river.  You will find a little brown boy there, wrapped in a hoodie and howling against the night.” 

And that’s when it happened.  That’s when the men heard music coming from somewhere, even though there wasn’t a radio station for a hundred miles and their car antenna was broken anyway.

But they heard it.  They all heard it—like a symphony in the middle of nowhere, and a chorus of voices singing, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” 

The angel with the red glasses suddenly vanished, and one of the guys said, “I think that was my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Gabriel. 

“Whatever,” his friend replied.  “Let’s go have a look for ourselves.  That is, if this piece of junk car will start.”  It cranked once, then twice, then roared to life in the silent Texas night.

When they got down to the river, the women were not at all happy to see them.  They were strangers, hobos, and had absolutely nothing to contribute to the situation.   So, the men stood awkwardly at a distance, feeling as useless as they looked.  Then they all took off their hats, which in Texas is a gesture of respect.

They had no idea what to say, because they had no idea why they were there to begin with. Finally, one of them, staring at the ground, broke the silence.

“That’s a beautiful baby ma’am.  You must be proud.  Word has it that your little boy is really going places.”

Maria said nothing.  Then the one who thought the angel was his third-grade teacher said, “We sure did hate to bother you, ma’am, but a stranger told us we had to come, maybe to ask if there is anything you need?  We think it might have been an angel, but we’re not sure what an angel looks like exactly.  So, we all agreed that, just in case it was an angel, it would be better not to start an argument.”

Maria said nothing.  She was exhausted, but she listened.  Then she did what women have done since the beginning of time when they are overwhelmed by the world—she pondered. 

Then the essential workers—those day laborers with mud on their boots and no option to quarantine—turned and got back into their car.  In a cloud of nasty exhaust, which Maria did not appreciate, they rumbled away, their red tail lights growing smaller and smaller until they disappeared into the night.  

After a long journey, they returned to the place from which they had come—to sleep it off.  But in the morning, over their cowboy coffee, nobody said a word.  Then one of them took off his hat again, followed by the others.  Finally, he said what all of them were thinking.

“This is not the same place we left.
We are not the same people we were.
Nothing is the same, or ever will be again.”

Then without another word, they agreed to work the rest of the day without their hats on. 
That night, around the campfire, they raised their glasses full of tequila and made a toast, unaware that they were about to invent communion.

 “To Jesus!”~ Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers
Read online here

About the Author
Rev. Dr. Robin R. Meyers is retired senior minister of Mayflower Congregational UCC Church, Oklahoma City, Distinguished Professor of Social Justice Emeritus in the Philosophy Department at Oklahoma City University, where he still teaches.  He is 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.”  More information is at RobinMeyers.com
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Question & Answer

Q: By Tom

One of the last books that I bought of Bishop Spong was “Eternal Life: A New Vision”.  He is quoted as saying:  “Death is ultimately a dimension of life through which we journey into timelessness”   

So, how does this journey into timelessness relate to our Christian concept of Heaven?   Is this beyond Heaven which is one of the phrases on the book cover?

A: By Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
 Dear Tom,

Thank you for your question.  When I went to visit my mother when she was dying, and after several days had to return to work so I went to her, sitting in a chair, to say my goodbye.  She said to me, “Tim, you know I am not afraid to die.”  And I said, “yes I do.  And I know why.”  “Why?” She asked.  “Because you are curious; and because you are looking forward to an adventure.”  She said, “Exactly!”  We kissed goodbye and ten days later she died.

So I think journey and adventure are synonyms in that regard.  No one I know has better named this adventure we call death and afterlife than M.C. Richards, the poet, philosopher, potter and painter, who was a good friend of mine and an esteemed faculty member for years.  I share her poem here, composed on the day she learned she was dying.  She lived in a Steiner community for handicapped adults and she contrasts patriarchal views of death to her own. 

I am Dying

Four children are singing ‘ring around the rosy’ here      
         where I am drinking my morning coffee with hot milk.
I was an English major in school—
         so many famous lines about death:
“Death be not proud”!
         Such a masculine presence—
part of our paternalistic culture—and religion.

I relax into someone’s arms.
I feel a softness as of sleep,
a gentleness that is friendly.

The children are riding their bicycles through my room,
they do not see me or the walls.

I think of Eliot’s Hollow Men
‘Is it like this,” they ask
         ‘In death’s other kingdom—
         walking alone when we are
         trembling with tenderness,
         lips that would kiss, form prayers to broken stone.’
Those lines brim with self-pity
         and accusation –
Like Thomas Hardy’s ‘The terrible antilogy of
making figments feel.’

Oh no, now is not then.
I do not feel betrayed or bereft,
         It’s more like the Chattanooga Choo choo:
the great traffic of evolution
and I am carrying my bit of being
free of agenda –
                  open to a future
Ready to experiment, be creative, serve
be beautiful, be real,
be nowhere
be no one I already know
be birthing myself
         waves and particles
backpacking in the hereafter.* 

No patriarchal self-pity here! 

About “timelessness.” All mysticism is a suspension of time.  I have often told my students, “when you can ask ‘where did the time go?’ you have just had a mystical experience.”  Timelessness and mysticism go together. Meister Eckhart talks about the “eternal now.” 

Mysticism is a taste of what is to come and emphasizes how the “eternal now” is an experience in this life, not just a promise for the future.  Francis of Assisi spoke about the “first death” and the “second death.”  We undergo a dying both in the Via Positiva of awe and in the Via Negativa of the dark night of the soul.  And Thomas Aquinas talks about the first and second Resurrection as well.

Our bodily death is our “second dying” and we are told both in Christianity and other traditions, that angels accompany us on that journey which is a light-filled one.

The actual word “heaven” carries lots of baggage with it for many people.  It is important to re-evaluate it, deconstruct it, call on the poets and artists to reimagine it so that it becomes more real again.  I am glad Bishop Spong did so and you are doing so by the question you are asking and I hope my efforts here have been some help. ~ 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 35 books on spirituality and contemporary culture that have been translated into 74 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. He has helped to rediscover Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas. 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; Stations of the Cosmic Christ; 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. To encourage a passionate response to the news of climate change advancing so rapidly, Fox started DailyMeditationswithMatthewFox*Matthew Fox, Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest, pp. 361f and Julia Connor, ed., Backpacking in the Hereafter: Poems by M. C. Richards (Ashville, NC: Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, 2014), p. 19.  |

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

Why I Wrote "Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World"

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
October 27th, 2011Several years ago, while in England, I was invited to participate on a two-hour television program hosted by Melvin Bragg, now Sir Melvin Bragg, on the UK’s ITV channel. The topic was the future of religion in general and of Christianity in particular.  There were three other panelists one of whom was Christopher Hitchens, well known then as a literary and political critic, but he had not yet published his best selling attack on religion entitled God is Not Great.

In the course of that panel discussion, Hitchens, attacking Christianity, tossed out many of his verbal grenades that would someday show up in his book. He sought to demonstrate both the inconsistencies and the contradictions found in supernatural religion as well as in the pages of the Bible.  He spoke of the damage done to human beings as a result of religious claims and biblical teaching.  To his surprise, I, as a representative of institutional Christianity, agreed quite publicly with him, citing the fact that biblical scholarship over the last 200 years has come to these same conclusions long before Hitchens discovered them. My problem with Christopher Hitchens was not his analysis, but that he obviously knew very little about contemporary Christian scholarship.  In the televised debate I sought to articulate an understanding of Christianity radically different from the simplistic version he was attacking so scathingly.

Following this debate, Christopher Hitchens was heard speaking with Melvin Bragg and criticizing my membership on the panel since I was not what he called an “adequate representative of Christianity.”  I was certainly not the “representative Christian” that he had so easily demolished in the past.  Over the years the charge of not being an adequate Christian has been leveled against me many times by conservative Catholics and Protestant evangelicals. This was, however, the first time I had been found unacceptable to an atheist! I was delighted.

That experience served as the background for writing my newest book for it seemed to me to capture the problem facing institutional Christianity in our day.  There is an enormous gap at present between the Christianity understood in the great academic centers of learning in the world and the Christianity understood by those who occupy the pews and, in some cases, the pulpits of our local congregations.  Knowledge that is commonplace in the academies is frequently heard in the pews as profoundly controversial, probably heretical, and even as an attack on all that they hold sacred.  This in turn causes critics like Christopher Hitchens to attack Christianity because they are unaware of any form of Christianity other than the literalized supernatural view that so frequently emerges in and from our churches.

This enormous gap between the academy and the pew is openly fed by ecclesiastical leaders from the Pope to the various denominational heads, who do not make it easy for the people in the pew to gain access to biblical scholarship.  They instead create and participate in a conspiracy of silence. 

They fear that the people they serve will be scandalized if they knew the truth.  The fact remains, however, that both the common theistic definition of God as an “external, supernatural being, who does miracles and answers prayers” and the understanding of the Bible as a book of authoritative divine revelation of the “Word of God” are not now taken seriously in Christian academic circles and this has been the case for almost two hundred years! Church leaders seem to prefer for their Sunday worshipers to remain in the dark. Let me illustrate this by stating some little known, and among scholars, not controversial biblical facts.

The gospels were not written by eyewitnesses.  They are the products of a time between two and three generations after the crucifixion of Jesus.  The gospels were written in Greek, a language neither Jesus nor his disciples could either speak or write.  We can find no evidence that miracles were associated with the memory of Jesus prior to the 8th decade. The stories of Jesus’ miraculous birth to a virgin did not enter the developing Christian tradition until the 9th decade. The account of Pentecost and the ascension of Jesus are 10th decade additions to the story.  Resurrection was not understood to be the resuscitation of a deceased body until the 9th decade. Paul does not seem to be aware of the story of Judas as a traitor nor does he ever refer to the narrative of his Damascus Road conversion, which was not written until Paul had been dead for thirty or so years.  Furthermore, there are no camels in the biblical story of the wise men and there is no stable in the Bible in which Jesus was presumably born. The New Testament does not agree on who the twelve disciples were or on the details of the Easter story.  That is just the beginning of facing the gap between the academy and the pew.

Let me turn to theological topics for a moment.  No biblical scholar today, post-Darwinians as they are, will defend as literally accurate either of the creation stories in the book of Genesis.  More importantly, no educated person in the 21st century believes either the astrophysical formula in which the Bible portrays the earth’s relationship to the universe or the dominant anthropological ideas that underlie the classical way in which Christians still tell the Christ story.  That familiar narrative posits an original perfection for both the world and for human life, which was presumably ruined by the disobedience of the heretofore sinless human beings, which brought about a fall into “original sin.”  That “fall,” in turn, necessitated a rescue operation, which this storyline suggests was accomplished by Jesus’ death on the cross.  How can one fall from a perfection human beings have never possessed if all of us have evolved? How can we then be rescued from a fall that never happened?  How can we be restored to a status we have never possessed? The story breaks down in a thousand ways.

Yet Protestant preachers and lay people still say things like “Jesus died for my sins” and Catholics still refer to the “sacrifice of the Mass,” as the moment when they reenact liturgically the drama of salvation and the price God required Jesus to pay to overcome the fall.  So, because we know no alternatives to this traditional formula we modern Christians either close our minds to reality in order to remain believers or we abandon Christianity because it no longer makes sense. This almost unchallenged vision of the past in turn provides fodder for the secular critics like Christopher Hitchens to attack the traditional Christian articulation as if they are the first to discover its inadequacies, revealing in the process their own biblical and theological ignorance.

It was to speak to the gap between the academy and the pew that I wrote Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World.  In this book, I seek to open the windows into Christian scholarship and to make it available to ordinary lay people.  I want to challenge the cover up engaged in by clergy who know better, but who seem to believe that truth, honesty and scholarship will “alienate the faithful.”  I want to force the religious debate into a new arena of honesty.  I want to call people to look at a new way to read the scriptures, a new way to be the church in the 21sr century.  So in this book I have walked through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, facing and revealing its contradictions and even pointing out places where the biblical text seems to endorse and support attitudes that most of us today regard as immoral. Should slaves be taught in the name of God to be obedient?  Of course not! Yet for centuries we Christians quoted Colossians and Ephesians, among other biblical sources, to perfume the indignity of first slavery and then segregation. Should wives be taught to be subservient because that was God’s plan?  Of course not!  Yet the fact is that the apostle Paul seems to think that his definition of the inferiority of women is “God given!” and on the basis of that definition we Christians have not just denied educational opportunities to women, but also refused  to allow them the right to vote until the twentieth century. Should homosexuals be discriminated against or even put to death?  Of course not, but we Christians have done that to countless numbers of gay and lesbian people and justified it by quoting the book of Leviticus.  These attitudes reflect nothing other than uninformed prejudice and are based not only on a profound ignorance of the Bible, but also of the origins of homosexuality.  Should wars be blessed and birth control condemned because of quotations from “Holy Scripture?”  I shake with rage at such conclusions!

To look at the Bible from the perspective of contemporary scholarship is to call the traditional understanding of the Bible and of Christianity itself into question, yet despite the fear that religious people feel at this prospect, to fail to do so is nothing other than a prescription only for a slower death. Why would any church or church leader choose to walk that path?

I have two audiences in mind in the writing of this book.  One is a church audience made up of people who appear to know that the old words no longer make sense, yet in the absence of an alternative still cling to the meaningless past.  The second audience is made up of those who have abandoned traditional Christianity because for them it has become unbelievable.  I want them to know that there is a view of Christianity beyond the one they have abandoned or the one that Christopher Hitchens attacks.  It has just never been introduced in the pews. My goal in this book is to take people beneath both the literal and contradictory words of the Bible and the convoluted concepts of theology to explore realms of spiritual truth present but unseen.

I believe Christianity has to do not with guilt and sin, but with increased humanity and heightened awareness; with breaking barriers that separate us from one another in our quest for survival and with calling us to move beyond self-consciousness into universal consciousness where, I believe, we touch the edges of eternity. Will this book succeed in this mission?  Time will tell, but, regardless, the need to address these issues is real and I have now made that effort.

I want to live to see a new Christianity for a new world.  Indeed I want to assist in its birth.  This book is designed to be a shot across the bow to inaugurate that campaign.~  John Shelby Spong  |

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