June 2016 - Dialogue - lists.wedgeblade.net

6/09/16, Spong: Charting a New Reformation, Part XXV – The Seventh Thesis, The Resurrection (concluded)
by Ellie Stock via Dialogue 09 Jun '16

09 Jun '16

HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR Charting a New Reformation Part XXV – The Seventh Thesis, The Resurrection (concluded) Paul was the first, perhaps he was also the most important, but he was not the only witness to the resurrection of Jesus in the biblical narrative. To complete our story and to validate anew a different concept of resurrection, we turn briefly to the other narratives. Be warned, surprises await us even there. Mark, the earliest gospel, has no account of the risen Christ appearing to anyone at any time within its pages. This fact surprises many. It also bothered the early Christians, who kept wanting new endings to Mark’s gospel to cover up this rather glaring deficiency. If, however, the denial of a physical resuscitation of the body was not a deficiency in the Easter story, but an insight, as I am convinced it was, then those later editors were revealing only that they did not understand what the original resurrection story was all about. The process of the literalization of the Easter experience had clearly already begun. Mark portrays some women coming to the tomb of Jesus at dawn on the first day of the week. They are consumed with their worldly fears. We are told that the thing they were discussing on their journey was how they would be able to remove the great stone that had been placed at the mouth of Jesus’ burial cave. Presumably, in their minds, the stone had to be removed to let them in and in the mind of the gospel writer, to allow Jesus to come out. When they arrived, to their relief, they found the stone already removed. A young man was there; he was dressed in a white robe. He was not an angel. Perhaps he was a liturgical functionary. I have worn a white robe on many occasions during my career without being mistaken for an angel. Perhaps this narrative reflected a developed liturgy. The role this young man played in the Easter drama was simply to make an announcement: “You seek Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him. Go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee, there you will see him.” The women flee in fear, Mark says, and they say nothing to anyone “for they were afraid.” That is all there is to Mark’s original story of Easter. How strange a narrative it is if resurrection ever meant the resuscitation of a deceased body, but these words point clearly to the fact that this is not and was not what resurrection originally meant. You will see the meaning of resurrection, the messenger seems to say, when you return to your homes and go about the business of your life. Resurrection, you see, was not just something that happened to Jesus, it was also something that happens to and in each of us. For us it is a subjective understanding, not an objective truth. We will see him, the promise of Mark’s messenger seems to say, when our eyes are open to the meaning of God found in the midst of life, in the expression of love and in the courage to be. That is, we are resurrected when we learn that God is present when we live fully, love wastefully and become all that we are capable of being. Easter thus functions in a number of ways. First, it opens our eyes. Second, it calls us to open the eyes of others and to enable them to live, to love and to be. It is in the authenticity of our humanity that the boundary between life and death is transcended. The first gospel so very clearly does not say what most of us have always thought and been taught that it says. About a decade after Mark, the second gospel, Matthew, was written. Matthew has Mark in front of him as he writes and he borrows extensively from Mark. He, however, does several other things also. Matthew magnifies the miraculous and closes all of the loopholes that he believes Mark has left open. So Mark’s “young man dressed in a white robe” becomes, in Matthew, a supernatural angel in translucent clothing. The message of this angel has become much more supernatural: “He has risen from the grave. He will go before you to Galilee. There you will see him.” Matthew’s women are faithful, far more than they had been in Mark. They go at once to tell the disciples what they have seen and heard. They are rewarded for that faithfulness by Matthew with an appearance of the risen Christ. This is the first narrative of a resurrected Jesus being seen by anyone in the entire Bible. It is the 9th decade. Some find that fact amazing when they hear it for the first time. Matthew then relates the details of what had been in Mark only the promise of a Galilean appearance to the disciples. To the surprise of many fundamentalists, however, it is not a vision of a resuscitated body. Examine the text closely. Matthew’s disciples are physical; they are bound to the laws of nature. They have to climb the mountain. Jesus on the other hand is quite unbound, he comes out of the sky. He has been raised into the meaning of God and since God was still thought of as living above the sky, Jesus must come from above. Please note the clear distinction in this narrative. Jesus is not a victim, he is a victor, glorified and already endowed with heavenly power. He speaks. His words would later be called the “Great Commission” – Go into all the world, preach the gospel and Lo, I am with you always. Was this a missionary charge to go convert the heathen? Not a chance! There was no institutional church at that time that felt the need to gain converts! The risen Christ was saying rather, go beyond your boundaries, your fears, your lines of security, learn to give yourselves away and know that you are part of who I am. We cannot now be separated! It is a different message of Easter from the one about which we have previously been told. Next Luke writes, about a decade later. By this time, literal minds have begun to do their “falsifying of the message” work. The messenger in Mark, who became an angel in Matthew, has now become two angels in Luke. The body of Christ has become unmistakably physical. Luke’s resurrected Jesus eats, he drinks, he walks, he talks and he interprets scripture. Yet he also seems to be able to materialize out of thin air and later to de-materialize into thin air. The symbols are confusing. He becomes so physical that they feel his flesh and bones to make sure he is not a ghost, but then they begin to wonder how he will ever escape the limits of this life. The conclusion begins to grow that if he has been bodily restored from death, back into the physical life of this world, then somehow he must also be able to be bodily removed from the earth since his eternal destiny is to be with God. Those were the assumptions that made the story of a physical ascension necessary. We will examine the details of this ascension narrative when we reach the next thesis. Finally, to complete our sweep of the four gospels, we move on to John. The Fourth Gospel, as it is called, has four resurrection stories, framed in two pairs. The first pair begins with Magdalene’s discovery of the empty tomb. She goes at once to report this to the disciples, who apparently are close by. Their concern is not with the possibility of resurrection, but with the suspicion of grave robbery. Peter, we are told, together with the one called only “the disciple whom Jesus loved” ran to the tomb. They entered it. It was quite empty, only the grave clothes remained. No body appears to anyone. Peter is perplexed, but we are told that the “Beloved Disciple” believes. Belief in the resurrection is thus born in the Fourth Gospel, not in the vision of s resurrected body, but in the realization that the boundaries of death have been broken. These two disciples then return to their place of hiding. Magdalene lingers at the tomb weeping. Jesus, now we are told, appears to her alone. She does not recognize him, thinking him to be the gardener. He speaks her name. Her eyes open with new understanding. She sees. She rushes to embrace him. “Do not hold me,” Jesus is quoted as saying. Do not cling to this body. That is not what resurrection is about. “I have seen the Lord,” Magdalene is quoted as saying. John’s first pair of resurrection stories is complete. The scene then shifts to the other disciples. Two almost identical stories are now told, covering a period of eight days. In the first of these stories, Thomas is absent. In the second Thomas is present. The disciples see at once, but the absent Thomas does not see and remains apart from their faith. Jesus then appears eight days later. This time Thomas is present and he too sees. In response he makes the ultimate confession of faith. You, Jesus, are “my Lord and my God.” Jesus responds with what was surely the reason those two stories were included. “Thomas, have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” The Easter experience in the New Testament, contrary to what we have traditionally been taught over the years, is not about bodies walking out of graves. It is far more profound than that. It is about God being seen in human life. By “God” I do not mean a supernatural, invasive God, who violates the laws of nature in order to invade time and space. I mean a transcendent dimension of life appears into which all can enter, an experience in which life is expanded, love is unlimited and in which being is enhanced. I mean the God whose presence and power calls us all into our essential oneness, our universal consciousness, our interconnectedness. We are part of who and what God is. God is not a noun we are compelled to define, God is a verb that we are invited to live. There is a difference and it is in that difference that resurrection is both experienced and entered. That in the last analysis is what resurrection is all about. John Shelby Spong Read the essay online here. Question & Answer Mike McConnell Mike McConnell from Port Elizabeth, South Africa, writes: Question: Having been a “seeker” for most of my life and enrolling full time for a theology degree once (thankfully stopped after six months), your books in particular (and those by Marcus Borg) have finally enabled me to decide where I stand. Thank you most sincerely for your courage and insight. I have two questions – perhaps the first is more of a comment. I am happy that people may choose to believe whatever they wish. I’m aware, however, of a “restrained anger,” perhaps more of a frustration, within me about the role of the organized Christian Church, past and present and with those who simply “follow like sheep.” I seldom show this and am sensitive to people’s right to do and be whatever they wish. It has to do, of course, with what I see as the tragic “misdirection” that was adopted, though often/sometimes in “good faith.” I’d hate to become a “nouveau fundamentalist.” Second, I have been working on calling God “something else” because I want to try and escape the traditional “baggage” that goes with the name. This is quite hard being close to my 70th year now and brought up, until a few years ago, as a “traditional Christian,” but it seems important to me. I understand God to be “divine” or “the essence” of everything; to be the “connectedness” of all things; to be the power and influence that we cannot and should not fully understand. I see that God is in me and all things and must rather be “let out” than “let in,” as I was brought up to believe. I’m not sure that I qualify to be called “Christian” any more (which does not concern me). I attend a Sunday gathering that acknowledges and respects all faiths and we use Jesus, amongst others, as an important source for furthering the “Kingdom of God,” the “here and now.” I’d really appreciate any comment on this – perhaps I’ve “gone overboard,” but it seems just right to me! Answer: Dear Mike, Thank you for your letter. The deeper we go into the meaning of faith, the more questions we have and the less pleased we are with the performance of the Christian Church of yesterday. Of course, the Christian Church has abused its primary message. Anti-Semitism, the Muslim-hating series of Crusades, the endorsement of slavery, segregation and apartheid as legitimate behavior for Christians, the legitimization of wars of conquest and the denigration of women have all infected our world with the approval of the church. We could say the same thing about other religions, political movements and even the practice of medicine. All of us walk through and live in history and are compromised by it. The fact is, however, that the journey continues and consciousness rises. In regard to your second concern, how to understand the word “God.” I share with you the difficulty. I see myself as a committed believer – even a “God-intoxicated” person, but every attempt I make to define God ends in failure. I now no longer try. I experience God, I do not define God. This means that even when I try to define or explain my experience, I wind up failing. Those regular readers of this column, who are walking with me through the series entitled “Charting a New Reformation,” surely know this by now. I do not think that the pathway into faith for me comes by finding the lowest common denominator and seeking to be inclusive of all faiths and committed to none. I very specifically identify myself with the Christ path and seek to walk deeper into the Christ experience. I literalize no part of that story, but believe that if I go into it deeply enough, I will find the universal truth buried within it. I can respect the place to which you have arrived, but I cannot share it. I will continue to walk the Christ path. I hope those committed to other faith traditions will continue to walk their paths until all of us transcend our limits and come into a new unity at the depth not the surface of our faith. Then the real religious conversation can begin. Thank you for writing. John Shelby Spong Read and Share Online Here Announcement The Summit: World Change Through Faith & Justice   June 22nd - 24th, at Galloudet University, Washington DC - The Summit is a gathering of 300 Leaders committed to changing the world through faith and justice. The 2016 Summit will focus on the intersections and implications of race in all of our justice work.

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by ICA International via Dialogue 05 Jun '16

05 Jun '16

Enjoy catching up with what is happening in ICAs across the globe.....If you wish to SEND a report...send to your ICA contact person OR...go to the members section on the ICA International website Please click the link below for the June 2016 issue of the Global Buzz Global Buzz Report: June 2016 or copy and paste this URL into your browser's address bar http://globalbuzz.icai-archives.org/7dayreport-16/2016-06-01.php ICAI Communications

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6/02/16, Spong: Charting a New Reformation, Part XXIV – The Seventh Thesis, The Resurrection (continued)
by Ellie Stock via Dialogue 02 Jun '16

02 Jun '16

HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR Charting a New Reformation Part XXIV – The Seventh Thesis, The Resurrection (continued) Last week, we explored the Pauline corpus of the New Testament in order to learn what Paul meant when he wrote that “God raised Jesus” to the “right hand of God.” This was the concept for which Paul used the word “resurrection.” It is quite a different concept from what this word has come to mean in Christian history. Before we leave Paul we have to take seriously a list he included in I Corinthians, which he wrote around the years 54-56 CE. Here Paul states that the Christ, who was raised into God at his death not into a life of flesh and blood in this world, nonetheless “appeared” to the people on this list. To what kind of experience was Paul referring in this part of his work? The first thing we note is that the Greek word translated “appeared” was “ophthe” (ωϕθn). It is the same word used by the Septuagint translators to refer to the God who “appeared” to Moses in the burning bush in Exodus (3:2). It is also the word from which we get our term “ophthalmology,” the science or study of seeing. We are so used to reading the Bible literally that we may need to pause and ask what kind of appearing or seeing is this. Was the appearance of God to Moses in the burning bush an objective seeing? If others had been present would they have seen what Moses saw? If Moses had possessed a smart phone equipped with a camera, could he have photographed the God who appeared during this experience? Is there a difference between sight and insight, between sight and second sight? What did Paul mean when he posted his list of those to whom the raised Christ “appeared?” For clues we examine his list. “He appeared first to Cephas,” Paul said. In the mind of Paul, it had been Cephas-Peter, who was the first to see. Then Peter appears to have opened the eyes of the other members of the apostolic band so that they too could see. How did that happen? This language seems to me to speak of a different kind of seeing from simply having a scene become visible before our eyes. It speaks of a breakthrough, a new understanding of the act of putting together things that had never been put together before and thus of assuming that the new combination formed a new insight. Was the resurrection of Jesus something like this? Did the tragedy that embraced the life of Jesus and led to his crucifixion get reinterpreted or understood in such a new way that it opened doors to life never before imagined? Can evil be transformed and be made good simply by ending its consequences? There is a powerful story in the book of Genesis (chapters 37-50) that suggests this possibility. The brothers of Joseph, angry at what they perceived as their father’s favoritism toward Joseph, resolved to remove him from their lives. First, they placed him in a hole from which he could not escape. They would leave him there to his fate, which was surely death. Then they saw a caravan passing by and decided to profit from their evil by selling their brother as a slave to this traveling band of people, who were Midianites in one version of the story, Ishmaelites in another. Twenty pieces of silver was the agreed upon price. As Joseph was carried off in chains, presumably never to be seen by his brothers again, they planned a way to explain his loss to his and their father by suggesting that he had been eaten by wild animals. This was what they told their grief-stricken father, Jacob, when they presented him with Joseph’s multicolored coat, the sign of his special status to his father, but now drenched in an animal’s blood, which they themselves had applied. In the course of history, however, sometimes overt evil is but the prelude to life-giving insight. Joseph, the slave, ultimately gained the respect of his owners and the opportunities he received from them opened door after door to him until he had risen to become a ruler in Egypt, second only to the Pharaoh. In that capacity he oversaw the storage of grain to prepare for a famine that he was sure was coming. When it came, starvation became rampant throughout the region and even included Joseph’s brothers. Hearing that grain was available in Egypt, they took their money and grain sacks and traveled to Egypt in the hope of buying sufficient food to survive the famine. Here they confronted Joseph in his position of authority, holding in his hands, as he did, the power of life and death over them. They did not recognize him, but the story says that he recognized them. He now held full authority over those who once had sold him into slavery and who had meant to destroy him. Would he finally gain his revenge? Or would he absorb this pain and return it to his brothers as love? This was Joseph’s choice. In this story love won out and because it did, life was enhanced — Joseph’s life and the lives of his brothers as well. In another part of the Hebrew Scriptures a portrait was painted by an unknown prophet that we call II Isaiah. This portrait was called “the servant,” sometimes “the suffering servant.” The servant was created to be a symbol of the people of Israel. II Isaiah drew this portrait when he returned from exile in Babylon in the 6th century BCE, filled with the hope of re-establishing his defeated nation, raising up their destroyed city of Jerusalem and rebuilding their demolished Temple in order to reclaim their messianic calling to be the nation through which the nations of the world would be blessed. When this prophet arrived back at what he called his homeland, however, the devastation that greeted him was all encompassing. He sank into depression as he came to believe that there was no future, no resurrection for his defeated and now destroyed people. How long he remained in depression I do not know, but when he emerged, he sketched a new vocation for Israel that was rooted, not in victory, but in defeat; not in power, but in weakness. It forms perhaps the holiest writing in the Hebrew Scriptures. The vocation of the Jewish people, he suggested, was not to win, not to achieve power or even nationhood again, but rather to live in such a way as to absorb willingly the world’s hostility, to drain from people their anger, accepting it and returning it to them as love. The servant, a symbol for the nation, was to be a willing victim, one who would be “rejected, despised, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” He was to make the people whole by accepting their abuse, never returning it in kind, but responding to it only with love. That ancient portrait, drawn by this unknown prophet, became the one which the followers of Jesus saw lived out in him. Was Peter the first to see this? Was he the one who saw in Jesus a life not driven by survival, but by the love that enabled him to give his life away? Did this vision enable him to see God in a new way, not as the almighty one, the heavenly father or the judge of the world, but as the Source of Life, expanding their understanding of what it means to live; the Source of Love, freeing them to love beyond their boundaries and their fears without the expectation of gaining love in return, and as the Ground of Being giving them the courage to be all that they could be and, in the process, freeing others to be all that they could be? Was this the vision of God that they saw in Jesus, who called people beyond the barriers of tribe, race, ethnicity or gender? When he was victimized by those to whom he only offered love, when he died forgiving, loving, freeing, is that when they saw that God was in him? Was resurrection the ability to see that Jesus had taken his humanity to a new dimension and had now stepped into the being of that which they called divine? Was it a step from self-consciousness into a universal consciousness, into an awareness of the oneness of all things? Is that how Peter’s eyes were opened? Is that the vision to which he then opened the disciples’ eyes and then the “500 brethren” at once? Was not the next step to open the eyes of James, the Lord’s brother, and then the apostles — that is those sent out to all the people of the world? Finally is that the resurrection message that embraced the self-loathing Paul, who believed that “sin dwells in my members” causing me to “do the things I do not want to do and fail to do the things that I want to do?” Was the resurrection the power that transformed Paul from the one who said of himself: “O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?” When Paul’s eyes were opened to see what Jesus meant, then we hear him say: “Nothing in all creation can separate me from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, my Lord.” Is that not the transforming experience of resurrection? Resurrection, I now believe, was not a physical act. No formerly deceased body ever walked out of any tomb leaving it empty. Resurrection was, rather, a moment of new revelation that occurred when our survival-driven humanity could transcend that limit and give itself away in love to others, including even to those who wish and do us evil. This was a new “seeing” of both God and of life. How great was this experience? God and human life can flow together. Every limit on our humanity can be broken. Jesus lives. We have seen the Lord! That is what changes lives. That is what changed the way we understood God and even the way that we understood and understand worship. That is what resurrection means. It is an ongoing, life re-ordering process, not an event that happened once in history a long time ago. The Lord is risen – He is risen indeed. This ancient salute that greeted Easter day did not mean that Jesus had been raised back into our limitations, but that he opened to us access into the meaning of God, as the power to free us to live, to love and to be. How badly have we misunderstood the message of Easter. How limited has been our vision of resurrection. The last enemy to be destroyed is death and with its destruction, we learn that God is one and all of us are part of that oneness. John Shelby Spong Read the essay online here. Question & Answer Diane McBain via the Internet, writes: Question: Having read the question and your spot-on answer of December 31, 2015, I find the questioner evoked a question for me. Homo sapiens may not be the highest form of physical life in the universe, therefore, could the divine be as intimately a part of a space alien as a human? In my own thinking, I would have to say “yes,” it is possible and even likely. Perhaps the question is unanswerable at this point in time, but humans most often consider themselves to be the highest form of evolution in the universe, yet we do not know if there might be higher forms of physical and divine life possible. Answer: Dear Diane, You raise a possibility beyond the scope of present human knowledge to answer, yet I think you are moving in the right direction and I would walk the path you are walking for the only way to move into a living future is to be open to new truth, which always challenges the way things are or seem to us to be. The motto of the seminary I attended was: “Seek the truth, come whence it may, cost what it will.” There is also a possibility that a discovery of tomorrow will illumine a possibility unheard of today. The problem with historic Christianity is that in the 4th century, the church decided to adopt creeds. Creeds assume that the truth has been and can be captured in words. Once that decision is made, the world is divided into true believers and heretics. The fight between the two is never edifying. It is the heretics who always counter the orthodoxy of the past and open believers to new possibilities in the future. The church needs more heretics and we need to listen to them with openness rather than with fear and negativity. The fact is that yesterday’s heresy has a way of becoming tomorrow’s orthodoxy, and the pattern has been repeated time and again. Reformation never comes from the institutional center; it always rises from the fringes. Heresy is like the hammer, orthodoxy is like the anvil. Without the pounding of the hammer, the anvil will become dead, set and unchanging. Without the anvil of tradition on which to pound, the hammer would ultimately become destructive. No one can be both hammer and anvil, but every hammer needs an anvil and every anvil needs a hammer. It is the relationship between the two that is essential to the truth, and the search for truth is, I believe, the essence of Christianity. It is too bad that rarely in the life of the church do hammers and anvils appreciate each other. John Shelby Spong Read and Share Online Here Announcements Irvine United Congregational Church Celebrating 25 Years as Open & Affirming Irvine United Congregational Church is radically inclusive, declaring to neighbors and strangers alike, "No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here." We celebrate the Creator’s diversity as we worship God and grow in our faith. On Sunday June 12th there is a celebration of the 25th anniversary of becoming an Open and Affirming church. Special guest preacher will be Fred C. Plumer, there will be an open conversation with questions and answers at the gathering in Plumer Hall after the service.

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