[Oe List ...] 11/03/2022, Progressing Spirit: Rev. Jim Burklo: Time to Take a Stand; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Nov 3 05:54:51 PDT 2022
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Time to Take a Stand
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| Essay by Rev. Jim Burklo
November 3, 2022The Big Lie has settled the question of whether or not politics belongs in the pulpits of progressive churches in America. We’ve got no choice but to speak out and take a stand for the Democrats, because the Republican Party has devolved into a cabal that is undermining the institutions upon which our religious freedom depends. We have to be partisan for a nonpartisan reason: the survival of democracy is at stake in the November election.
The question is not whether we should do our part to save it. It’s how.
Yes, we run the risk of trouble with the IRS if our churches explicitly endorse candidates in an election. But there are a thousand ways to get the message across, loud and clear, without running afoul. Here’s one: “The truth will set you free, as Jesus says – and it will keep you free if you vote for democracy in November - and not for the denial of the outcome of a free and fair election.”
Our contribution to saving democracy is to employ the language of faith in its defense, and to urge progressive candidates to do the same.
“…if we truly hope to speak to people where they are at – to communicate our hopes and values in a way that’s relevant to their own - then as progressives, we cannot abandon the field of religious discourse... others will fill the vacuum…” Senator Barack Obama, “Call to Renewal Keynote Address”, 2006
Voting itself is an act of faith. In his wise book, Reverence, the philosopher Paul Woodruff muses that "voting is irrational." The outcome of an election is extremely unlikely to be determined by whether or not I vote. So why do I still fill out the ballot and mail it in? It's a ceremony, says Woodruff. A liturgy we use to affirm the spiritual value of the dignity and worth of our common humanity. It dramatizes and reinforces the conviction that your word and mine have no less weight than the voices of the rich and the famous. Those of us who vote do so religiously - quite literally.
So ask your friends and family members, or in a ritual in worship, asking parishioners: "With which hand will you be voting on November?" Take that hand and hold it with yours, and say: "May love (or God) guide your hand to vote for the common good!"
Spread this ritual far and wide! Social psychology tells us that this kind of physical, ritualistic commitment results in a greater propensity to follow through on it.
Faith has always been part of public discourse. From its founding, America's public life bubbled out of a spiritual fountain, taking form somewhere between Deism and “mainline” Protestantism. Generally, politicians employed faith language that stayed out of the weeds of sectarian dogma. Martin Luther King spoke for the highest ideals of the nation when he compared the civil rights struggle of blacks to the exodus of the Jews from Egypt to the Promised Land. It was an inclusive spiritual message that resonated with people across religious boundaries.
Such expressions of spirituality by progressives went into eclipse in 1980's as the Republican Party entered into a coalition with Christian fundamentalists. It was a political wedding of the business elite with white cultural conservatives in the Bible Belt. Political candidates were subjected to grilling about their doctrinal purity. Horrified by such divisive language, many Democrats abandoned religious rhetoric altogether, for fear of being associated with a weird religious fringe. Theological conservatism does not and never did equal political conservatism, but political progressives lost sight of this fact.
George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist, argued that “people vote their identity, they don't just vote on the issues, and Democrats don't understand that.” Lakoff explained that conservatives do a much better job than liberals in expressing their morality – twisted as it is - in blunt, emotionally-charged terms. Until progressives learn this lesson, they will have a hard time motivating their natural constituencies not only to vote for them, but to vote at all. People vote on the basis of inspirational morality and identity, and spirituality and religion are central to both.
“I do think the Democratic Party has for far too long been hesitant to talk about the
things we deeply believe and value, ... Many public policy positions have their foundation
in religious beliefs that we hold dear.” So said former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, an ordained Methodist pastor.
So let’s put our faith rhetoric to work between now and November. Here’s how:
Despite the remarkable religious and spiritual diversity of America, despite the decline in religious affiliation and participation, the people of this country are still deeply attuned to rhetoric that springs from the Jewish and Christian traditions. Creatively employ Judeo-Christian imagery and brief references to Bible stories, poetry, proverbs, and parables that express universal values of compassion for the vulnerable, fair-play, respect for differences, social justice, and social inclusion. You do not need to indicate the source of the phrase or quotation. In many cases, leaving out the source is best, to avoid alienating non-religious people: religious people will recognize the quote from scripture. Avoid making reference to passages that focus on doctrine, dogma, or details of belief.
Liberally use spiritual adjectives, while being conservative about the use of religious nouns: “We gather with divine gratitude” is an alternative to “We thank God”. This evokes spiritual values in a way that feels gentler to the many Americans who are “burned-out” on organized religion.
Occasionally employ imagery and short references to scriptures and traditions of other faiths, again focusing on passages that reflect universal values. Again, in many cases it may be best not to tell the source of the quotation.
Know enough about the Bible to know what’s not in it. For example: Jesus said nothing at all about abortion or homosexuality. “Give a man a fish and he’ll be hungry tomorrow, teach a man to fish and he’ll never be hungry again” is not in the Bible. There is nothing in either the Hebrew or Christian scriptures that supports the idea of unregulated free-market capitalism: in fact, charging interest is forbidden according to the Old Testament.
Code terms inspire certain audiences while remaining “off the radar” for others. Theologically progressive Christians, and many other religious people, primarily situate themselves in the “mainstream” culture. We use jargon specific to our faith, but mostly only in the context of our faith communities. However, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians often use “code” language publicly to mark their identity as a distinct subculture in contrast and often in contradiction with the “mainstream” culture. Subgroups within evangelical and fundamental American Christianity use different subsets of this code. Using this code language in public rhetoric can be powerful in making an emotional connection with people who are part of this subculture, while signifying little for those who aren’t. Here’s a list of evangelical “code” terms:
God laid it on my heart… I have a heart for (the needs of the elderly, etc)…Let’s invoke a hedge of protection…I have discerned …I have a word of the Lord for you on that (an interpretation of scripture, or an opinion that feels like it came from God)…Let’s love up on people (“We need to love up on our school teachers,” etc)…Let’s get prayed up (common in African American churches)…Let’s press into God (“Let’s press into God in prayer for….”)…Afterglow (after a spiritual moment)…Bathe it in prayer (“Let us bathe this decision in prayer,” etc)…Missional imagination (“My missional imagination is activated for making health care available to all Americans,” etc)…Walk the aisle, pray the prayer….Blessed and favored….Name it and claim it (popular in “prosperity” churches)…Christ-follower (rather than Christian)….Set me on fire (for a cause, for a mission)….Put on the armor of God …Iron sharpens iron…Freedom in Christ…Wonder-working power (of the blood of Christ – from an old hymn)..
Let’s lose our inhibitions about politics in the pulpit, and religion in public discourse. Because if we don’t speak out directly, we’re taking a stand nonetheless - in silent complicity with the destruction of democracy.~ Rev. Jim Burklo
Read online here
About the Author
Rev. Jim Burklo is the Executive Director of Progressive Christians Uniting, which is now organizing ZOE, a national network of progressive Christian ministries at colleges and universities. He is the founder of Souljourning.org, providing resources for families to nurture the natural spirituality of young people. He retires as the Senior Associate Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at the University of Southern California in September 2022. An ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ, he is the author of seven published books on progressive Christianity. His latest is Tenderly Calling: An Invitation to the Way of Jesus . His weekly blog, “Musings”, has a global readership. He is an honorary advisor and frequent content contributor for ProgressiveChristianity.org. Jim and his wife Roberta live in Ojai, CA. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By A Reader
How can congregations help their clergy who are facing their own stress and burnout?
A: By Rev. Gretta VosperDear Reader,Thank you for this important question. Unbeknownst to my colleagues and readers on Progressing Spirit, I have been on medical leave for the past two years. The initial reason for my leave was addressing issues related to long-term use of a medication prescribed to reduce the severity and frequency of migraines, but once on leave, it became very apparent that I was also struggling with the impact of high levels of stress over a long period of time. It was hard to unwind in any measured way; once out of the fever-pitch of congregational life, I slammed to a halt.
Congregants are not like co-workers who might identify signs of stress and burnout when they see a colleague struggling. Colleagues interact with each other more regularly and get to know what “normal” means for one another. Congregants, however, aren’t that familiar with “normal” when it comes to their ministers, usually seeing them when in a “role”: presiding at various services, each requiring a different “presence”; providing pastoral care in a variety of situations – crisis and otherwise; leading meetings or being at meetings where they’re expected to maintain a neutral perspective; acting as negotiator, straddling their dual responsibility to both congregation and an ecclesial body. Add the expectation that pastors not become too familiar with congregants or exhibit favouritism, and it can be difficult to detect signs of discomfort, stress, or struggle.
First and foremost, clergy want their congregations to succeed, even and especially when the church is up against the challenges of declining membership, aging buildings, changing demographics, and financial demands. Because that success is so deeply rooted in us and often (unhealthily) tied to our sense of identity, we are quick to to sacrifice our needs for the congregation.
DON’T LET US.
Here are some ways to help us help ourselves:
- Establish a committee whose responsibility is the health of the pastoral relationship. It supports the clergy and acts on their behalf in interactions with the Board or Council, seeking time off, scheduling study leave, negotiating salary changes, etc. Ensure that those on the committee understand their role as one of support as well as oversight
- Build a better board for the congregation, one that provides support for the congregation’s needs thereby reducing the tendency to rely on clergy to manage everything
- As volunteer numbers dwindle, reimagine the work of the church to accommodate the decline; refuse to allow the minister to cover off the programming or duties that volunteers once managed
- Relieve clergy of the responsibility of finding pulpit supply for any absences including vacation, illness, and sabbaticals
- Insist clergy take all their vacation time, wherever possible, in large chunks to provide a period sufficient to unwind and reconnect with their own spirituality
- Build paid sabbatical periods into the pastoral contract and ensure clergy schedule them as regularly as has been set by the denomination or those in the congregation familiar with sabbatical leaves
I wish you, and your clergy, the best in caring for one another into a rich future together.~ Rev. Gretta Vosper
Read and share online here
About the Author
The Rev. Gretta Vosper is a United Church of Canada minister who is an atheist. Her best-selling books include With or Without God: Why The Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe, and Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief. She has also published three books of poetry and prayers. Visit her website here and her Blog here. |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Birth of Jesus, Part XII. Making Sense of the Wise Men
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
May 2, 2013Having now described the miraculous birth of Jesus in chapter one of his gospel, Matthew turns next to his account of how the birth of Jesus was divinely “rolled out” to bring it to the attention of all the people of the world. His vehicle for this is to tell us a story of magi who follow a star that moves across the sky. This star, they are purported to believe, will lead these wise men to discover the meaning that Matthew has found contained in the life of this Jesus. Was this narrative the product of someone’s historical memory? Of course not! That is never the source of powerful interpretive legends. Matthew went, rather, to the Hebrew Scriptures, which were his traditional source for material, in order to tell his story of Jesus. In those scriptures he found all the elements he needed to weave together the familiar narrative that we now know as the story of the “three wise men.” So, following Matthew’s example, I invite you to come with me to look deeply into these Hebrew Scriptures.First, let me direct your attention to a passage in Isaiah 60, which calls to its readers thusly: “Arise, shine, for your light has come.” The point that Matthew was seeking to make in the entirety of his gospel was that in Jesus of Nazareth that light, which was destined to interrupt this world’s darkness had in fact arrived. Please note the universal quality of the star, which serves as his symbol of this light. A star is visible to all the people of the world. A star is trans-national and it has the mystical power, he believes, to draw all nations toward its light. “Following a star” is a familiar mythological reference to seeking the fulfillment of one’s dreams. The birth of Jesus was exactly this for Matthew. The light of God dawned in the darkness of the entire world. Kings, Isaiah asserts, will therefore “come to the brightness of your rising.” In Matthew’s creative mind, the wise men begin to emerge out of the shadows as he is inspired by this passage. Isaiah goes on to say that these kings will come “on camels.” Then he says they “will come from Sheba” and guess what they will bring? Gold and frankincense, says Isaiah. Does that not begin to sound just a little bit familiar?There are always among us, however, those who are religious literalists. So inevitably they will ask: “But where is the myrrh?” To get only two out of three gifts of the wise men from this text hardly makes a conclusive case. That is correct, but let me take you back to this text from Isaiah (60:1-6) and ask you to read it again, but this time even more carefully. The Isaiah narrative states: “Those from Sheba will come.” Sheba? Can you not hear the Jewish minds seeking connections by ranging over the entirety of their Jewish history? Matthew is telling us of kings “who will come to the brightness of God’s rising” that he is certain will occur in the land of the Jews, which is due, he believes, the homage of the world. He is proclaiming Jesus to be that new king of the Jews. The word “Sheba” in the text then immediately reminds him of another celebrated occasion in Jewish history when another royal visitor came to pay homage to another king of the Jews. So, back into his memory of the scriptures he goes until he brings forth the story of the Queen of Sheba visiting King Solomon (I Kings 10:1-13). Reading that story he discovers that this queen also comes with camels, bearing gifts. The author of II Kings tells us that these gifts consisted of gold, precious stones and spices. That text emphasizes the spices. It was, the text says, “an abundance of spices” that the Queen of Sheba brought, wagonloads of them, to be specific. The only spice familiar to the people of the Middle East at this time was myrrh, a sweet smelling resin derived from a bush. The Jewish people used it first as a deodorant. Cleanliness and personal hygiene were in short supply in that day. Myrrh tempered the body odors of the time. Secondly myrrh came to be used as the spice of death. The Jews did not embalm their dead. They simply wrapped the deceased body in a cloth or shroud and then filled the shroud with sweet smelling myrrh to drown out the odors of death and decay. Burial was not postponed for very long in that time and place. So, out of the Hebrew Scriptures, Matthew discovers a text in which a light shining in the darkness attracts kings on camels to come to that light and that these kings bring gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. The essential elements of the story of the wise men are thus found in the Jewish Scriptures.The three gifts, which Matthew has the wise men bring to the Christ child, were also symbols used by this gospel writer to introduce the adult Jesus to his readers. Gold was a gift appropriate to offer a king. “Born a king on Bethlehem’s plain,” says the hymn writer John Henry Hopkins (1820-1891), who more than anyone else put the story of the wise men into the life of our culture with a hymn known and loved by all. Because Jesus was perceived as a king, the hymn continues by having one of the wise men say: “Gold I bring to crown him again.” Matthew was thus introducing Jesus at the beginning of is gospel as the expected messianic king, who was “heir to the throne of David,” and destined to be born in David’s city of Bethlehem to a virgin and her betrothed. No, there were no birth records that he could have searched for corroboration. This is not researched history; this is a Jewish interpretive legend, a fact that Matthew’s original readers would surely have understood.Frankincense was thought of as a gift to be offered to a deity, so the hymn writer can say: “Incense breathes a deity nigh.” The Hebrew Scriptures contain 129 references to incense used in worship. It was supposed to be pleasant to God’s nostrils. It was to be burned in the Temple. The Torah is filled with references to incense. In Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament, this prophet suggests that the sign of universalism is that “in every nation incense shall be offered to my name.” So with the symbol of incense Matthew signals the divine presence that would be met in Jesus.Finally, Matthew adds myrrh to the gifts brought to Jesus at his birth. The gospel of Mark, on which Matthew was basing his story and to which he was adding for the first time a birth narrative, had devoted about 40% of his gospel to the passion story of Jesus. He had begun the account of Jesus’ final week with the narrative of Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem. He then traced the details of his last week, which was to culminate in his crucifixion, burial and resurrection. For Matthew it was to be through the death of Jesus that his meaning was to be revealed. So he felt the need to signal this climax by introducing his death into the story of his birth. That is exactly what the presence of myrrh in the story of the wise men does.Perhaps we can now understand what Matthew was trying to tell us in the story of the wise men. He begins his gospel by saying, in effect, let me tell you the story of Jesus, who was born to be the king of the Jews and who in that role was to reveal the presence of God in human form through his crucifixion and the subsequent resurrection, which was to serve as the transformation of death itself. He does this by turning Isaiah 60 into a narrative of magi or kings coming on camels to the place of Jesus’ birth and bringing with them the symbols of Jesus’ kingship, Jesus’ divine nature and Jesus’ death.I suspect, and this is obviously just a guess, that behind this story lay a sermon, preached in a synagogue by a follower of Jesus, learned in the Hebrew Scriptures. I suspect that this sermon was delivered on the Sabbath when the lesson, taken from the latter prophets, came from Isaiah 60. His sermon was an interpretive story. Both he and his audience in the synagogue knew that his sermon was never meant to be thought of as literal history. When Christianity moved out of its Jewish womb and into the Gentile world, however, a vast ignorance of the Jewish Scriptures became a mark of the Christian Church. That was when they no longer saw the connection between the stories told about Jesus and its Hebrew antecedents. Having no other frame of reference, with which to interpret the gospel narratives, these Gentile Christians simply began to literalize the stories. They did this through their art, in sermons, in their hymns and in their liturgy. Rescuing the Bible from this kind of fundamentalism is now one of the necessary steps that Christianity must adopt on its pathway to survival in the 21st century. Being able to see the Jewish antecedents of these stories is the first major step in accomplishing this task.A few more facts that are frequently missed need to be noted by the readers of this gospel, so let me point them out. There is no mention of camels in Matthew’s story of the wise men. Camels are only mentioned in Isaiah 60. Nowhere in Matthew are the wise men said to have been three in number. We read that into Matthew’s story from the list of three types of gifts that the wise men were supposed to offer. The text of Matthew says that “opening their treasures, they offered him gifts (note the plural) of gold, frankincense and myrrh.” It does not say one gold gift, one frankincense gift or one myrrh gift. Finally, read Matthew’s story carefully and you will see that the wise men came to a house in Bethlehem over which their guiding star rested. In that house lived Joseph with Mary and her baby. There was no stable. There was no journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem to be enrolled. There was no census ordered by Caesar Augustus when Quirinius was governor of Syria. Those are details from a later source and one that we have blended into Matthew’s story. Our task thus far is to see Matthew’s original birth of Jesus story in its own integrity. This was the first story of Jesus’ birth ever to be written and it did not enter the Christian tradition until the 9th decade! About ten years after Matthew’s first birth narrative a second and quite different birth story would be added to the tradition by a gospel writer we call Luke. To his narrative we will return when this series resumes.~ John Shelby Spong |
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