[Oe List ...] 11/17/2022, Progressing Spirit: Brian D. McLaren: Losing My Place in the Winner’s Inner Circle; Spong revisited

Thu Nov 17 06:59:53 PST 2022

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Losing My Place in the Winner’s Inner Circle
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|  Essay by Brian D. McLaren
November 17, 2022I was sitting at my computer answering emails the other day and seemingly out of nowhere, a realization about myself crept up my neck and into my consciousness. The realization was not flattering, but it has proven surprisingly persistent, helpful, and effective at drawing me deeper into contemplation.I grew up in a tiny Protestant sect known as the Plymouth Brethren. We had some beautiful qualities as every group does. We also punched above our weight by introducing some of the worst ideas in the history of Christian theology: the rapture, for example, which we gave the world in the 1830s. (You’re welcome.)Church historians would categorize us as restorationist, sectarian, and fundamentalist. But in our own eyes, we were a holy minority, a faithful remnant in a “church in ruins,” a biblical oasis in a religious wasteland of divided, lukewarm, misguided “denominations.”By the time I was a teenager, I saw problems with our elitism. I felt (to borrow a metaphor used by one of the few charismatic writers in our tribe) like I was swimming in a tiny tide pool. Our elders were the classic big fish in small ponds, and I longed for the tide to come in so I could swim in the wider ocean and find brighter lights to learn from.In my twenties and thirties (which coincided with the 1970’s and 1980’s), that’s what happened. I “graduated” from a Fundamentalist tide pool to the larger Evangelical bay.Many will find this surprising, but for someone like me, raised in fundamentalism, becoming Evangelical was a step into a more open - even liberal - form of Christianity (which proves the old adage that everything is, to a degree at least, relative).When I became Evangelical, I was joining something broader, bigger, and more respectable. If not the ocean, Evangelicalism provided a bit more theological oxygen and room to swim. In the Evangelical community, I heard people talk about three streams (Evangelical, charismatic, and liturgical) that were coming together in one big river. One pastor said, “We’re Evangelical in the pulpit, liturgical at the communion table, and Pentecostal in the pew.” We were combining the best of all worlds, in my understanding at the time.We were drawing from a rich, broad history of faithfulness under the banner of Biblical Christianity or Historic Christian Orthodoxy.In the 1980’s and 1990’s, I could see that our Evangelical community was growing. We had more and more mega-churches. We had more and more radio and TV stations. We had huge conferences. We had lots and lots of publishers and a steady stream of books. We even had a Church Growth Movement to help us manage our spiritual success. Meanwhile, the liberals - liberal being the primary epithet in my new Evangelical vocabulary - were declining, plummeting toward shrinking and wrinkling, death, and irrelevance. I clearly had joined a winning team with a heroic past and a bright future!What’s not to like about that?But by the mid-90’s, I could tell things were going south. Literally. It felt like we were being taken over by Southern Baptists, the Assemblies of God, and other expressions of Twentieth Century Southern Christianity. It felt like a resurgence of the same elitism and narrow-mindedness I had tried to escape by leaving the fundamentalism of my childhood.I see what was happening more clearly now, in hindsight: yes, our numbers were growing, but our theology was constricting.Around that time, a pastor friend, the son of a famous charismatic megachurch leader, surprised me when he said, “Remember, Brian, charismatics are just fundamentalists with different practices.” Yes: I had indeed left one form of fundamentalism. But I had made a lateral transfer, into a different form of fundamentalism with different practices. I felt like a refugee who had fled an authoritarian regime to build a new life in a land of freedom, only to discover that my new home was succumbing to the authoritarianism I was trying to escape.I didn’t want to leave Evangelicalism, but I felt it was leaving me. And there was profound grief in leaving. And here’s the realization that hit me as I sat at my computer: A major part of the grief of leaving was the grief of losing my place in what felt like a majority (moral or otherwise). I was losing my identity as a member of something big, shiny, proud, and successful.It was as if I had moved from a cramped 2 bedroom apartment into a sprawling, well-appointed McMansion, and now, I was losing my place in that prestigious zip code.I have been sitting with that grief for a few days now, and it is helping me understand how others feel … Mainline Protestants were part of America’s most successful form of Christianity until the tide began to turn in the late sixties and early seventies, and now, they are no longer the successful majority.Roman Catholic immigrants were part of the dominant church in Europe and Latin America, only to be a minority in many places in the US. White people have felt themselves part of a secure and dominant majority … and now, are seeing that identity slip away.I’m writing these words right before the 2022 midterm elections, and you’re reading them right after … and depending on how the elections go, Democrats and progressives or Republicans and conservatives will to feel demoted from majority/winner to minority/loser status. And whoever loses will have a pool of grief to process.The same will be true for people who believe in democracy and want to fight climate change if election deniers and climate change deniers gain ascendency. Those of us who have been in the struggle for women’s equality, racial equality, and LGBTQ equality might similarly feel displaced … knocked out of the inner circle and winner’s circle, and displaced to the margins where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.Grief, psychologists tell us, inspires a variety of responses, including the Big Four of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression. Sitting at my computer the other day, I realized that these emotions have had a big role in my life, as I processed my shifting religious status and identity.Sometimes, as the Big Four do their work on us, a new feeling arises: acceptance — not that I am happy about my new status, but that I acknowledge that this is the new reality. I accept my new status and I stop denying it, or feeling angry and depressed about it, or thinking I can somehow bargain my way out of it. My self-talk changes: Things did not turn out the way I hoped. I am in a place I did not want to be. To the degree I can accept that reality, I can make meaning in it and begin to imagine how to build a new identity in this place, how to live a meaningful life in this new reality.I do not want to return to the elite remnant mindset I grew up observing in the fundamentalism of my youth. But now, in my sixties, I realize the allure of being in the inner winner’s circle has lost its appeal, whether it’s in a big pond or a small one.The wisdom of St. Wendell of Berry is taking hold in me. (See his “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.)I realize I would rather lose among a minority in a struggle for what I believe in than win with a majority in a vain struggle for “the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay.” I find myself willing to “listen to carrion.” In what seems to have died and failed, I begin to “hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come.” (In this light, see Steve Bell's powerful song, "In Praise of Decay," here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0CEM5IylwM.)I see why Wendell Berry's Mad Farmer counseled us to “expect the end of the world” and be joyful even “though [we] have considered all the facts.”For this is what it means, I am coming to see, to “practice resurrection.”~ Brian D. McLaren
Read online here

About the Author
Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. A former college English teacher and pastor, he is an Auburn Senior Fellow and a leader in the Convergence Network, through which he is developing an innovative training/mentoring program for pastors, church planters, and lay leaders called Convergence Leadership Project. He works closely with the Center for Progressive Renewal/Convergence, the Wild Goose Festival and the Fair Food Program‘s Faith Working Group. His most recent book is Faith After Doubt.  He is the author of the illustrated children’s book (for all ages) called Cory and the Seventh Story, The Great Spiritual Migration, We Make the Road by Walking, and Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? And his newest book, Do I Stay Christian?. He is a popular conference speaker, a frequent guest lecturer for denominational and ecumenical leadership gatherings, has written for or contributed interviews to many periodicals, including Leadership, Sojourners, Tikkun, Worship Leader, and Conversations, and is a frequent guest on television, radio, and news media programs.  |

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Question & Answer

Q: By A Reader

How can I help my fellow parishioner who, after a long and debilitating health issue, is struggling with feelings of anger and disappointment with God and is feeling abandoned, or unloved by God?

A: By Dr. Carl Krieg
 Dear Reader,Whether trying to help someone else, or trying to help oneself, it helps to realize that we are not alone in our bewilderment about suffering and that others have agonized over the same problem. The New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, facing the “problem of evil”, ie, the issue of undeserved suffering, turned his back to Christianity and became agnostic. Robert Duvall, in his 2003 movie, Open Range, lost one of his cowboys in an ambush. When asked if he wanted to offer a prayer to God at the funeral, Duvall responded, “I don’t want anything to do with that son of a bitch.” Job, of course, is the embodiment of the ultimate innocent sufferer. Most readers don’t realize that there are three parts to this book: prologue, epilogue and main poem, the last being the first written. The image here is of a man ravaged by physical and social torment. His friends try to sooth his confusion and frustration, but his anger at God finds no comfort as he shakes his fist at the heavens and demands that the All Powerful come down and be tried in court. Readers of this poem in later years were so upset by Job’s reaction that they added a softener, a prologue and epilogue that cast the whole scene as a wager between God and Satan wherein Job remains faithfully patient and so is rewarded manifold. Not the original story. You may remember the “solution” of the poem, where God does indeed answer Job and speaks out a whirlwind. “Where were you when the foundations of the earth were created…?”, which, of course, is no answer at all. When we remember that the voice is a literary gimmick and not the actual voice of God, it becomes clear that when confronted with the question, “Why do the innocent suffer?”, Job’s answer is, “I don’t know. I just don’t know”. Shaking her fist at the heavens my very own mother couldn’t wait to meet God and give him a piece of her mind. Dismay at innocent suffering in the world creates in us an unremitting anger with a God who permits such to happen. The problem arises when we assume that god is both loving and omnipotent. If a loving god can stop suffering and chooses not to, what kind of god are we dealing with? For myself, I answer the question on two levels, the immediate and the long range. In the context of current suffering, we need to get away from the idea that god can fix everything. No prayers for a new bike, a victory at a game or in a war, no cure for that which is presently incurable. God is not omnipotent. That’s one of the lessons we learn from Jesus: the way the divine is related to the world is not through the brute force of intervention, but through the persuasive power of love. This perspective necessitates that we forgo the notion that Jesus violated the order of nature by walking on water and turning water into wine. God does not intervene to prevent innocent suffering.The long term perspective is different. When it comes to how we view the universe, we have three choices: the cosmos is immoral, meaning that the devil rules, so to speak, or it is amoral, meaning that suffering comes and goes with no meaning and no cause for dismay, or the universe is moral. The morality of the universe means that the undeserved suffering and death of an innocent two year old, for example, is not the end of the story, that somehow, some way, some time, God makes it all right. The referred to persuasive power of love is not a mushy sentiment but rather a statement about the essence of the universe. That, of course, is a statement of faith, but a statement to the contrary is, for me, not acceptable.Struggling with health and loss is painful, but also mitigated when we realize that we are not alone and that others share our confusion and our pain. God also shares our pain in the here and now, a God in and with us, not presenting miraculous cures, but beyond our understanding assuring us that love will win the day.~ Dr. Carl Krieg
Read and share online here

About the Author
Dr. Carl Krieg received his BA from Dartmouth College, MDiv from Union Theological Seminary in NYC, and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of What to Believe? the Questions of Christian Faith,   The Void and the Vision and  The New Matrix: How the World We Live In Impacts Our Thinking About Self and God. As professor and pastor, Dr. Krieg has taught innumerable classes and led many discussion groups. He lives with his wife Margaret in Norwich, VT.  |

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

Birth of Jesus, Part XIV
The Old Testament Antecedents in Luke's Story of Jesus' Birth

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
May 16, 2013In order to understand the birth narratives found in Matthew and Luke, we need to embrace the fact that there is no way these stories were intended to be regarded as remembered history or as narratives that were literally true. That must be stated clearly. This means that there never was a star in the east or wise men who followed it. There never was a heavenly host of angels who sang to hillside shepherds. There never was a miraculous birth.

These stories are memorable, engaging and fanciful, but neither Matthew nor Luke believed themselves to be recording something that actually happened at the time of Jesus’ birth. They knew that they were creating narratives in which they used symbols to interpret the adult experience the community’s leaders had had with one named Jesus of Nazareth. The proof of this is realized when we discover how much stories from the Hebrew Scriptures rather than eye witness accounts were used to provide the content of their birth narratives. Matthew’s story of the wise men, for example, was originally the creative work of an imaginative preacher, who combined Isaiah 60 with the story of the visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon (1 Kings 10) with some other illusions from the story of Balaam and Balak (Numbers 22-24).

When we turn to Luke’s story, we discover that time after time he drew on accounts in Genesis with other toe-dips into such sources as the books of Daniel, Exodus and Malachi. It is an exciting adventure to unravel this biblical mystery story.

Luke’s narrative begins with the birth of John the Baptist and one knowledgeable of the Hebrew Scriptures will immediately see here a familiar Jewish story. First, the parents of John the Baptist are introduced. Their names are Zechariah, a priest of the order of Abijah, and Elizabeth, a “daughter of Aaron,” who was both the brother of Moses and the first high priest of the Jewish nation. Both Zechariah and Elizabeth are described as righteous people, who “followed the laws of God in a blameless way.” They were now elderly, childless and thus without an heir. This, in a typically patriarchal way, was blamed on the woman, who is called “barren.” No one knew anything in those days about low sperm counts. Readers familiar with the book of Genesis will recognize this story as a retelling of the Genesis story of Abraham and Sarah prior to the conception of Isaac.

Then the story of John the Baptist unfolds. Zechariah’s division of the priesthood was on duty to perform the sacred functions in the Temple. By lot, the opportunity to burn the incense in the Holy of Holies fell to him. This was considered a moment of intense meaning and high honor. A multitude of people waited outside for this ritual to be completed. People are always drawn to moments when mystery fills the air. Inside, however, Zechariah was delayed by what we are later to learn was a revelatory vision. An angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing on the right side of the altar of incense. Typically, Zechariah fell away in fear. The angel spoke telling him not to be afraid that his prayers for a child had been heard and that Elizabeth would bear a son. This son, the angel says, will accomplish great things working “in the spirit and power of Elijah.”
Zechariah is incredulous. “How shall I know that this is so? My wife and I are well advanced in years.” In Genesis, Sarah was said to have been 90 years old and “past the time of women.” Identifying himself as Gabriel, the angel gives Zechariah a sign. “You will be unable to speak until the child is born. That too elicited Jewish scriptural memories. In the eighth chapter of Daniel, Daniel also had a vision of the Angel Gabriel in the Temple and following this vision he was commanded not to speak. These stories are been replicated.

This episode took up so much time that the crowd of worshipers began to wonder what was happening. What went wrong? When Zechariah finally appeared and was unable to speak, their wonder was greatly enhanced. They speculated that he must have had a vision, but its content was not disclosed to them. Zechariah then completed his priestly duties and returned to his home. There, we are told, Elizabeth conceived and hid herself for five months, while she rejoiced that the Lord has “taken away my reproach among men.”

Assuming that this story is not history, we ask why was it that Luke decided to name the parents of John the Baptist Zechariah and Elizabeth. Names are always clues in interpretive tales. There are a number of Zechariahs in the Hebrew Scriptures, but the most important one is the prophet, whose work is recorded in the “Book of the Twelve,” also called the minor prophets. Zechariah is the next to last book in the Old Testament followed only by the book of Malachi. Malachi is not the name of the author of this book, but is rather a Hebrew word that means “my messenger.” “Malachi” is thus a nameless voice whose task is to be the messenger, who “prepares the way for the coming of the Lord.” The book of Malachi relates this messenger to Elijah and, as we noted earlier, the angel says to Zechariah that the promised child will come “in the spirit and power of Elijah.” If John the Baptist is thus to be identified with Malachi, the nameless messenger who prepares the way for the Lord, then why not signal that fact by giving John’s father the name Zechariah, the name of the immediate predecessor of Malachi? Luke sends a message with this name. It was not accidental.

What then about his mother Elizabeth? That is a little more difficult, but not impossible to demonstrate. There is a clue in Luke’s text where Elizabeth is said to be “a daughter of Aaron.” There is only one other Elizabeth in the entire Old Testament, where the name is written not Elizabeth but Elisheba. That single Elisheba is the wife of Aaron, which also makes her a sister in-law to both Moses and his sister Miriam. Miriam plays a major role in the story of the Exodus and a song of triumph is attributed to her after the successful crossing of the Red Sea.

Is Luke going to pattern the family of Jesus after the analogy of the family of Moses? I believe he does and this conviction opens up Luke’s interpretive genius. Be aware first that in Hebrew, Miriam, when translated, would be “Mary.” Next note that only in Luke in the entire New Testament is there any sense that Jesus and John the Baptist are kin. In the 14th century, John Wycliffe suggested they were cousins. The sole hint of relatedness is found in the story that Luke tells of the Annunciation by Gabriel to Mary when she learns that she is to be the mother of the Holy Child. In that annunciation, Gabriel uses these words: “your kinswoman, Elizabeth, in her old age, has also conceived a son and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren.” If Luke’s analogy for Elizabeth was Aaron’s wife, Elisheba, and if Aaron’s sister Miriam was to be Mary, then Elizabeth and Mary were going to be the mothers of these two promised children; one, the first born destined to be the forerunner, and the other, the second born, the messiah. They would then have clearly been first cousins.

Luke then has Mary, pregnant with Jesus, go into the hill country of Judah to visit her “kinswoman,” Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist. Here one other interpretive experience occurs. There is a fetal salute. The baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaps to salute the baby in Mary’s womb, which means that the issue of priority is settled before the birth of either. What in the world does that mean?

When the gospel of Luke was written there was obviously tension between the Jesus movement and the John the Baptist movement. That tension is reflected in the book of Acts. Jesus originally was a follower of John. John had baptized Jesus according to the first three gospels. It was only when “the Baptist” was imprisoned that Jesus broke forth as a leader in his own right. Some of Jesus’ disciples had come to him after having been disciples of John. So the disciples of Jesus felt a need to establish the priority of Jesus. Luke accomplishes that by suggesting that there had been a fetal salute that established Jesus’ superiority. From where do you suppose Luke got the idea for that story? Again we turn to the Hebrew Scriptures.

There is only one other story in the entire Bible in which a baby leaps in its mother’s womb in a way that meaning is attributed to that action. It too is found in the book of Genesis. In chapter 25 Rebekah, the wife of Isaac was pregnant. When the baby leaped in her womb, she went to an oracle to help her understand what this leaping meant. There she was informed that she was having twins and that the meaning of the fetal leap was to establish the fact that the first born of the twins, who would be named Esau, would actually serve the second born of the two, who would be named Jacob. Luke takes this Genesis story and transforms it. Jesus and John the Baptist are not twins but they are kin, he suggests. John was the elder by six months, Luke tells us. In this case the elder of the two, John, was to be the servant of the second born, Jesus, like the first born Esau was destined to be the servant of the second born Jacob. John, who was to prepare the way for Jesus will later be made to say about Jesus: “He must increase, I must decrease.” Luke grounded the John the Baptist story in the Hebrew Scriptures. The vision in the Temple and the inability to speak came from Daniel. The post-menopausal pregnancy comes from Abraham and Sarah. The superiority of Jesus to John, as well as their kinship, comes from the story of Jacob and Esau.

Luke is mining the Hebrew Scriptures to portray Jesus’ birth. One cannot understand the birth narratives unless one sees their connections with the Hebrew Scriptures. We will continue this study of Luke’s birth narratives when this series resumes.~  John Shelby Spong  |

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