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8/11/16, Spong: The Unlikely Honored Guest at the Democratic National Convention
by Ellie Stock via Dialogue 31 Jul '18
by Ellie Stock via Dialogue 31 Jul '18
31 Jul '18
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<div style="color: #000000;font-family: Georgia;font-size: 16px;line-height: 150%;text-align: left;"><h1 style="color: #003d4a;display: block;font-family: Georgia;font-size: 34px;font-weight: normal;line-height: 100%;margin-top: 0;margin-right: 0;margin-bottom: 10px;margin-left: 0;text-align: left;">The Unlikely Honored Guest at the Democratic National Convention</h1>
<p>He was seated in the VIP box at the Democratic National Convention, held during the last week of July, 2016, in Philadelphia. He was surrounded in that reserved and exclusive seating area by the power-elite of the Democratic Party: A former President, the sitting Vice-President and the “second lady,” the spouses and children of the nominees, as well as those especially invited guests, who were uniquely and politically related to the convention’s eventual nominee. This unlikely guest was in his own way quite unique. He was a Republican, one who had been elected to a state-wide office as a candidate of the opposition party. He served as the governor of Virginia from 1970 – 1974 and was the first Republican governor of Virginia since 1869 in the last days of reconstruction. Later he sought his party’s nomination to the Senate of the United States, losing to another Republican, John Warner, who served with distinction from 1979 until he retired in 2008. The name of this mystery quest is Abner Linwood Holton. He is now, and has been since the day I first met him, an extraordinary man. People, unaware of the history of the Democratic Party in Virginia, find it strange that the man I regarded as the best governor of Virginia during the years I lived in that state would be a Republican. Let me tell you his story.</p>
<p>Linwood Holton was born in 1923 in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, a town deep in the heart of Appalachia. He was a Republican from the moment of his birth. He was also bright and ambitious. Being a Republican in Virginia in those days was to be part of a distinct minority, perhaps even an endangered one! The Democrats of Virginia were the only cohesive political force in the state. This majority party was run by Virginia’s senior United States Senator, Harry Flood Byrd, who after serving a term as governor from 1926 to 1930, effectively ran the state until he died in 1966. It was said of Harry Byrd that he and a few of his closest political advisors would sit on the porch at his home in Berryville, Virginia, and pick the candidates for every political vacancy in Virginia from governor on down. The electorate was deliberately kept small by poll taxes, which effectively discouraged both blacks and poor whites from voting. A Byrd loyalist was in every county seat in Virginia to run the party. Racism was deep and “States Rights” was a holy slogan designed to make racism seem socially acceptable. Virginia was a one party state. Frequently the Republicans would not even nominate candidates and, even when they did, no one paid much attention to them because whoever won the Democratic primary seldom even campaigned in the general election, since Republicans simply did not win in this state! Linwood Holton made it his life’s ambition to establish two-party politics in Virginia.</p>
<p>He graduated from Washington and Lee in Lexington, Virginia, and then entered the law school at Harvard University. Along the way he married a Roanoke girl, named Virginia Rogers, who went by the name of Jinks. She was the daughter of Frank Rogers, an upright, but ultra-conservative, successful and well-connected Roanoke citizen, who was the grandson of the first Episcopal Bishop in Southwestern Virginia. In his mind, the two greatest virtues were to be a conservative Episcopalian and a loyal Byrd Democrat. Jinks, the more rebellious of Rogers’ two daughters, chose to marry a Republican and a Presbyterian! Supported by this remarkable woman, Linwood began his life’s task of strengthening Virginia’s Republican Party. This party’s base, such as it was, had always been in the mountains of the western part of Virginia. As a force in opposition to Byrd Democrats, the Virginia Republican party tilted slightly leftward. There was no room to the right of the Byrd machine. The Virginia Republicans were known for their party’s efforts to improve education statewide and to develop better state mental health facilities. Linwood’s organizational efforts were so successful that in 1965 he was the Republican nominee for governor opposing the Southside, Virginia, Byrd Democrat, Mills Godwin, who had emerged as the new leader of the Democratic Party. The sickness, retirement and subsequently the death of Senator Byrd meant that the torch of party leadership had to be passed to the next generation. It is interesting that Harry Byrd, Jr., always known as “Little Harry,” who was appointed to succeed his father in the Senate, did not succeed him in the leadership of the statewide Democratic Party. Holton was defeated in that first run for the governor’s office, but he garnered a respectable total of votes and succeeded in introducing himself to the state. The day after the defeat, he began planning for his second run in 1969. The governorship in Virginia, we need to note, is limited by the Constitution to a single term.</p>
<p>National issues soon began to erode the Byrd majorities. Poll taxes were declared unconstitutional in 1964. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 opened the ballot to people of color. The feminist movement began to galvanize women into an effective political force. A national- thinking Virginia Democrat, named Henry Howell, began to build a liberal political base made up of labor unions, blacks, women and young people. His challenge to the Byrd machine resulted ultimately in his election as Lt. Governor in 1971, but he could go no farther. He remained anathema to Byrd Democrats. In the Democratic Primary of 1969, the Byrd candidate, William Battle, the son of former Governor John Battle, defeated Henry Howell in a bitter contest. The party could not heal this division, so in the General Election, Linwood Holton, supported by many of Howell’s still angry voters, rode to victory with a 65,000 vote majority.</p>
<p>In his inaugural address, Holton called for an end to Virginia’s pattern of racial discrimination and its racist politics. No Virginia Governor had ever uttered such words before. Words, however, were not enough. People looked for actions. They would follow soon.</p>
<p>In the most dramatic step imaginable, the new governor and his wife made the decision not to put their children in the church-related or independent private schools of Richmond, where all governors’ children had previously attended, but to enroll them in Richmond’s public schools which were at that time about 80% black. It was such a startling action for a Virginia politician that the New York Times covered it with a front page story and a picture of Virginia’s Governor Holton escorting one of his daughters into a school surrounded by a host of black faces smiling broadly. In a state where the official response of the ruling Democratic machine to “Brown vs. the Board of Education,” had been to call for “massive resistance to the law of the land,” a state in which some counties chose to close their public schools rather than to integrate them, here was the highest elected official in the state escorting his children into the majority black public schools of Richmond, Virginia. No action could have announced better that a new day was dawning in what had once been the capital of the Confederacy. One of those Holton children entering those public schools on that day was their oldest daughter, Anne.</p>
<p>The white population of Virginia was shocked. They believed and stated that their new governor was sacrificing his children on the “altar of integration.” Many suggested that the “inferior education” that his children would receive in those heavily black schools would cripple them for life. It was a strange argument that gave the lie to the previous white claim that all of its racially segregated schools were “separate, <em>but equal</em>.” Anne, in her early teens, would be an exemplary student. She received a fine education and upon graduation from high school would be admitted to Princeton University, from which she graduated <em>magna cum laude</em>. She seemed not to have been penalized at all in her educational achievements. After Princeton she was accepted into the class of 1983 at the Harvard Law School, from which she now holds a doctor of Jurisprudence degree. From there she went into a legal career that in time would include being a domestic relations judge and Virginia’s Education Secretary.</p>
<p>While at Harvard she met, fell in love with and married a fellow law student, who was born in Minnesota and educated at the University of Missouri. His name was Tim Kaine. She lured him back to Richmond, where his earlier life experiences, including his Jesuit high school education, his year as a volunteer missionary to Honduras and his mastery of the Spanish language, prepared him to begin his Richmond law practice as a civil rights attorney. Then responding to an expressed community need, he entered politics at the most local of levels, running for a seat on Richmond’s nine-member City Council. In a majority black city, Tim not only won that seat, but was also later elected by that majority-black city council to be Richmond’s Mayor. Two years later, in 2001 he moved to the state level, being elected Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor. In 2005, he won the governor’s office. His wife, Anne Holton, became the first person to be at one time living in the governor’s mansion as the child of a Republican governor and then a second time as the state’s first lady and wife of a Democratic governor. In 2012, Tim Kaine won a seat in the United States Senate. In 2016, with two years remaining in his first term as senator, he was chosen by the presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, to be her vice-presidential running mate. Anne Holton was there with him, waving to the crowd on the final night. As Hillary Clinton raised Tim Kaine’s hand high, former president Bill Clinton was at her side and Anne Holton was at Tim Kaine’s side. The crowd roared with approval.</p>
<p>In the VIP section of that vast Philadelphia arena sat the former Republican Governor Linwood Holton, now 92 years old, with his wife Jinks, both still vibrant and attractive, watching their daughter being introduced to the nation. There is sometimes a reward for integrity. Linwood and Jinks Holton, who would not allow their lives to be twisted by the prejudice of racism, challenged the distorting and debilitating social structures of his generation in Richmond, Virginia. Doing what is right sometimes carries with it intimations of transcendence and even immortality. To this day he remains one of my heroes.</p>
<p>John Shelby Spong</p>
<p>Read the essay online <a target="_blank" style="color: #4487cf;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;" href="http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb2…">here</a>.</p>
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<p><span style="font-size:18px">Alberto Mejia Aguilera from Mexico writes via the internet:</span></p>
<h4 style="color: #4487cf;display: block;font-family: Georgia;font-size: 22px;font-weight: normal;line-height: 100%;margin-top: 0;margin-right: 0;margin-bottom: 10px;margin-left: 0;text-align: left;">
Question:</h4>
<p>I am from Mexico and I would like to know your opinion about Liberation Theology. Do you think that this theology is still an inspiration for the struggle against the social injustice?</p>
<h4 style="color: #4487cf;display: block;font-family: Georgia;font-size: 22px;font-weight: normal;line-height: 100%;margin-top: 0;margin-right: 0;margin-bottom: 10px;margin-left: 0;text-align: left;">Answer:</h4>
<p>Dear Alberto,</p>
<p>Liberation theology was, I believe, was born in Latin America, so you should be especially proud of it. I associate the name of Leonardo Boff, primarily, with it, but there were others like the murdered Bishop Oscar Romero. It was born in an attempt to apply the principles of the gospel not just to individuals, but also to the structures of our society, which so often drive the masses into poverty. It identifies God with the poor. For those reasons it tended to be resisted in ecclesiastical circles, especially by the leaders of the Roman Catholic during the years of Popes John Paul II and Benedict, both of whom were so politically conservative that they saw it as another manifestation of Communism. I think they were both wrong in this judgment. Liberation theology, I believe, constituted a call to Christianity to see that its alliance with power, both in Europe and the new world, had corrupted the essential justice that Christianity requires.</p>
<p>Christianity was born among the poor and the outcasts. It rose to dominate society and so became the religion of kings. Liberation Theology was a necessary correction.</p>
<p>I wish you well.</p>
<p>John Shelby Spong
<a target="_blank" style="color: #4487cf;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;" href="http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb23…">Read and Share Online Here</a></p>
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<div style="text-align: center;color: #000000;font-family: Georgia;font-size: 16px;line-height: 150%;"><a target="_blank" style="color: #4487cf;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;" href="http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb2…"><img align="none" height="262" style="width: 350px;height: 262px;margin: 0px;border: none;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;outline: none;text-decoration: none;text-transform: capitalize;display: inline;" width="350" src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/b51b9cf441b059bb232418480/images/e67ac6a0-334…"></a></div>
<h2 style="color: #4487cf;display: block;font-family: Georgia;font-size: 30px;font-weight: normal;line-height: 100%;margin-top: 0;margin-right: 0;margin-bottom: 10px;margin-left: 0;text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:26px"><span style="color:#000000">Bishop Spong at the Episcopal Diocese of Northern Michigan September 10th & 11th</span></span></h2>
<strong>Schedule:</strong>
Saturday, September 10, 2016
1:00 pm at the Reynolds Recital Hall, Northern Michigan University
7:00 pm at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Marquette
Sunday, September 11, 2016
2:00 pm at the Memorial Union Building , Michigan Technological University
At each location, there will be an opportunity for Q&A and book signing.</div></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr><tr><td align="center" valign="top">
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1/25/18, Forrester/Spong: Dawning of Christ-Consciousness: From Separation to Union; Spong revisited
by Ellie Stock 25 Jan '18
by Ellie Stock 25 Jan '18
25 Jan '18
HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR
Dawning of Christ-Consciousness: From Separation to Union
Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.
........
........John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness,
........proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the
........forgiveness of sins…. And a voice came from
........heaven, You are my Son, the Beloved; with
........you I am well pleased. (Mk. 1:4, 1:11)
What is happening in the human soul when someone, such as the President of the United Sates, refers to the predominately black countries of Africa and that of Haiti with dehumanizing racist rhetoric? What is happening in the human soul when political leaders seek simplistic solutions to cultural shifts in the erection of walls? What is happening in the human soul when the U.S. President fails to condemn neo-Nazi violent demonstrations?
Unacknowledged fear withdraws the soul from intimate contact in the hope that survival is secured through separation. The soul, over time, develops a schizoid structure wherein it unconsciously pulls back from the feared “other” as the source of danger and destruction. The walls within the soul cast long, dark, shadows, dispelling the living daylight of truth.
I would like to return to a well-known story for perhaps an unlikely source of wise guidance. Familiar tales, such as the baptism of Jesus narrated in the opening verses of the Markan community’s gospel, tend to foster a fogging of consciousness. We’ve heard the words so many times there seems to be little, if any, poignancy left. What possible meaning could an encounter of two Jewish men in Palestine have for those of us involved on the spiritual journey today, where fear constructs walls casting long shadows? I believe the key lies in the realization that fear-based separation is the blindness that taunts and haunts and seduces the human heart. I understand this realization as the dawning of Christ-consciousness in the soul of Jesus.
Separation
We know very little about the early years of Jesus. But archeological and textual studies, among many other disciplines, are making it possible to develop reasonable theories. The work of biblical scholar Bruce Chilton, as mentioned in a previous column, is representative. If I understand Chilton’s thesis correctly, Jesus is not a typical Jew. This is because his paternity would have been in question: Mary is an unwed mother who has been intimate with Joseph – a legendary figure of whom we know nothing. Sexual intimacy outside of marriage is not necessarily scandalous in 1st century Judaism, but being with child without clear knowledge of who the father is threatens blood lines and the purity of the tribe. Ignorance births fear. Such a child would have been categorized as a mamzer, and removed from typical or customary forms of religious socialization, such as gathering with the other boys and men for religious instruction. In keeping with the regulations laid down in Leviticus, fear for religious purity – and the status it was believed to have secured in society and before Adonai – would have led to the separation of the tainted child. Fear motivated the withdrawal from the company of the perceived impure Jesus.
A number of scholars also propose that Jesus, at some point in his early teen years, very well could have made his way to the Essenes at Qumran, which is where he would have come to have known another somewhat legendary and enigmatic figure, John the Baptist. The Essenes were Jewish ascetics. When they surveyed early 1st century Jewish culture they perceived collusion and compromise of the faith at all of the critical fulcrums: the priestly Sadducees ran temple worship thru cooperation with the Roman authorities; Jewish daily life was a series of compromises with Greco-Roman culture; Jewish faith was rapidly deteriorating with the chosen people living less and less like serious adherents of the covenant. Survival, the Essenes believed, depended upon separation. The hills were their walls behind which they withdrew for survival.
Jesus was thus a marginal Jew – which is to say someone on the edges of dominant cultural life. He also likely came to find himself in the company of men who had chosen to be marginalized due to the spiritual corruption of the very people who had judged Jesus to be impure. (The ironies of fear-based separation never cease to abound; walls would seem to beget more walls.)
And so, the Essenes moved themselves away from quotidian Jewish life and congregated in the hills of Qumran. Here they purified themselves through ritual baths (or baptisms). Here they ate little and wore little, exposing themselves to the harsh elements so as to tame the beastly sexual and social instincts. This was a community for men only, thereby lessening the possibility of contamination and temptation. The end days were coming that would usher in the final battle, and if they were to be ready, separation from all distraction and purification of the wandering and desiring heart was absolutely necessary.
The souls of John and Jesus imbibed this Essene ascetical spirituality, perhaps for a number of years – fear-driven withdrawal in the hope of salvation through separation.
Waters of Separation or Union?
We don’t know exactly when, but at some point, both John and Jesus departed Qumran. John, however, seems to have only left the community in a geographic sense. If the biblical accounts are to be believed, he continued life as an ascetic – he ate and wore little, and he preached his baptism of repentance. John was not only not of the world, we might say, he was barely in the world. And for good reason, for according to his heart the world was a place of temptation and corruption. Essene spirituality still shaped his soul. He perceived the river Jordan as waters separating pure from impure. He proclaimed a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And the sin had to do with continued collusion and cooperation with the wayward world. Sin, in other words, was failure to remain separate.
Only because of what is to ensue can we say that Jesus’ decision to receive John’s baptism of repentance comes as a stunner. Contrary to the dominant teaching of Christianity, Jesus clearly accepts John’s invitation to understand himself as a sinner with the need to repent of his sins and enter the waters of the Jordan. But, as I understand it, Jesus repents of a very different sin than that governing the religious imagination of John. John understands sin as failure to remain separate. Jesus knows sin as the false perception of ourselves as separate not only from God, but from one another and even from our own true heart. From within the womb of Judaism, Jesus inverts the spirituality of John and births a new spiritual path of union; a path generated from trust, not driven by fear.
Dawning of Christ-Consciousness
Along the way of leaving Qumran and receiving baptism from John, Jesus begins to realize that he and the Holy Source are not separate. He begins to experience that there is nothing of impurity distancing his being from Being. This dawning realization of his true nature will come to fruition in the spirituality of the Johannine community, when this gospel speaks of Jesus and the Source as being One. A complementary fruition, I believe, is found in the community of Thomas, wherein the followers of Jesus understand that each of us is to realize the same truth as Jesus, and thereby be his twin in Christ-consciousness.
The sin, or better said, blindness, is not realizing that union is the truth of the human condition. Not only the human condition, but the condition of creation. The Holy Source is the essential nature of all that is. And more, Love, Boundless Love, is the fabric of our true and essential nature.
We can describe the rest of Jesus’ life as the gradual discovery of what it is to be a human being who lives from the truth that Love is his essence. The baptism of Jesus is a story of the dawning of Christ-consciousness: all of reality is always already One. Not One in a numerical sense, but One as being a unified whole without boundaries. Like Jesus, we are on the spiritual path of realizing how to live a life with this truth as its core: a life of emerging Christ-consciousness.
~ Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.
Read the essay online here.
About the Author
Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D. is an Episcopal priest, a student of the Diamond Approach for over a decade, as well as a certified teacher of the Enneagram in the Narrative Tradition. He is the founder of the Healing Arts Center of St. Paul’s Church in Marquette, Michigan, and the author of five books, including “I Have Called You Friends“, “Holding Beauty in My Soul’s Arms“, and “My Heart is a Raging Volcano of Love for You” and “Beyond my Wants, Beyond my Fears: The Soul’s Journey into the Heartland“.
Question & Answer
JP from the Internet, asks:
Question:
I don't understand why, for centuries the BIBLE has been and IS the inspired word of GOD. Now, for some reason, a few (and not chosen few) think it is just a storybook. It is their fault that the United Methodist church is breaking up. The BIBLE is clear on what GOD thinks of homosexuality. If you notice, the churches that are growing are not mainline liberal churches but fundamental Bible-believing churches. I was raised a Protestant Methodist.
Answer: Rev. David M. Felten
Dear JP,
Wow, growing up in the Methodist Protestant Church makes you a member of a unique and particularly tenacious group of Southerners! I understand this is a group that walked out of the 1939 Methodist merger bringing together denominations that had split over slavery 100 years prior. Your MPC ancestors were (and I believe still are) convinced that the Bible is infallible and inerrant (which is demonstrably NOT the case). It did, however, help them make a Biblical case for slavery (and the “attacks of the Abolitionists,” who “would disturb the settled order of Providence, and dissolve the connection between master and slave, that has been recognized by the great Governor of the Universe).
My guess is that the MPC probably doesn't support slavery any more (at least publicly), but back in the day, they made the same argument for slavery that I think you’re making for opposing basic civil rights for non-heterosexuals: the “settled order” “recognized by the great Governor of the Universe." I hope we can agree that God's "settled order" was wrong about slavery. According to the Bible, God's "settled order" also included the advocacy of genocide, women as property, and rampant xenophobia. I’d like to be able to say that these ideas are no longer considered acceptable, but like zombies, they don’t want to die. Sadly the've been given new credence by President Trump (who doesn’t understand why, “if we’ve got the nukes, why we can’t use them”, brags about grabbing women by the genitals, and dismisses whole countries as “shitholes.”) So, far from being embarrassing chapters we’d rather forget, we’ve still got to contend with people who think genocide, misogyny, and xenophobia are OK, but homosexuality is bad.
It begs the question: What is it about the issue of homosexuality that makes people so upset? What is it about basic civil rights for all Americans that causes people to resort to getting God involved in opposition? That's a strategy that hasn't worked out too well for God over the years. Breaking news: "God is against basic human rights." Yikes.
Look, I don’t have an answer – and neither do the poor sots who’ve been tasked with trying to keep the United Methodist denomination from breaking up over the next year or so. It goes right back to the slaveholder vs. abolitionist playbook: anti-LGBTQ advocates clinging to disreputable Bible-passages vs. those convinced that all human beings are of sacred worth (despite what a few passages in the Bible say).
You may not believe it, but I have deep respect for the Bible. I've spent my entire adult life studying it. And I'm here to tell you (as evidently one of the "not chosen") that it is indeed a storybook -- but not "just" a storybook. It contains the stories of people who have spent their whole lives wrestling with and interpreting the meaning of life. It is not inerrant. It is not historical. Its books contain stories -- stories with way more meaning than mere history. Our job is to interpret those stories for a new generation, not simply try to conform to old ways of thinking.
One of the books I recommend to people who are wrestling with some of the things it sounds like you're wrestling with is Bishop John Shelby Spong's "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism." He, too, grew up in a Southern fundamentalist denomination and has since come to a different understanding of the Bible and his faith. If you get it and read it, I'd love to correspond with you about any questions you have.
Wrestling with new ideas is never easy – especially when they seem to threaten a comfortable, established way of looking at the world. To paraphrase Harry Emerson Fosdick (a Baptist, BTW), “The enemy of Christianity isn’t change, but stagnation.” To celebrate and encourage the cessation of change will continue to drive young and old alike out of what’s left of the church.
But, if we embrace the core values of justice and compassion expressed in the Bible, we are compelled to stand with the oppressed and voiceless, accommodating the reality that the Spirit is flexing with our evolving humanity. For me, clinging to values that exclude and disrespect others is made even worse when they’re justified by out-of-context Biblical proof texting. It’s theological malpractice.
Read Jack’s book. Go sit in a quiet place and ask yourself, will God really love me more because I hate the right people? I’ll leave it to you.
Committed to Progress,
David
PS: Just to be clear, I doubt the MPC is growing (I think there are only a few dozen MPCs left, scattered across the Confederacy). And as a matter of fact, it's a myth that "fundamental Bible believing churches" are growing like crazy. Everybody's losing members -- even those wildly liberal Southern Baptists have lost a million members in the last 10 years. If you want more statistics, you can find them on the web.
Read and Share online here
About the Author
Rev. David M. Felten is a full-time pastor at The Fountains, a United Methodist Church in Fountain Hills, Arizona. David and fellow United Methodist Pastor, Jeff Procter-Murphy, are the creators of the DVD-based discussion series for Progressive Christians, “Living the Questions”.
A co-founder of the Arizona Foundation for Contemporary Theology and also a founding member of No Longer Silent: Clergy for Justice, David is an outspoken voice for LGBTQ rights both in the church and in the community at large. David is active in the Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church and tries to stay connected to his roots as a musician. You’ll find him playing saxophones in a variety of settings, including appearances with the Fountain Hills Saxophone Quartet.
David and his wife Laura, an administrator for a large Arizona public school district, live in Phoenix with their three often adorable children.
_______________________________________________
Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Connection between the Crucifixion and the Passover, Part I
The symbols of Christmas have been stored away. In Christian churches we are in the poorly defined season of Epiphany, waiting for Lent to appear on the horizon. Supermarket advertisements of seafood dishes for the Lenten diet announce Lent's arrival, but little attention is paid to it until its last week when the climax of the Christian story is relived. Holy Week includes the celebrations of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Psychologically, we are moving from the cheering crowds of Palm Sunday to the jeering crowds of Good Friday.
In the biblical narrative these final events in Jesus' life are set against the background of the Jewish observance of the Passover, which provides a clue into how the earliest Christians came to understand the meaning of Jesus' death. Whether that placement is a matter of history or is instead an interpretive liturgy is the place I want to begin this week in a series of columns that will attempt to re-interpret the founding moments in the Christian story.
Both the Passover and Holy Week celebrate death and the birth of new life and in the process, call those observing these rites to new beginnings. Both the Passover and the Passion Narrative speak of a deliverance from bondage. Passover's bondage was slavery in Egypt. Holy Week's bondage was the 'bondage of sin.' Passover related a death and resurrection experience of a nation at the Red Sea; Holy Week a death and resurrection experience of an individual. In later Christian practice, the waters of baptism, in which we are said to enter Christ's death become, when we are raised from those waters in a symbolic resurrection, the gateway to eternal life. In this manner the liturgies of Passover, Eucharist and Baptism came to be united. From as far back as our written Christian sources go the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus were set in the context of the Jewish Passover. The Passover was located in the calendar at that moment of early spring when, at least in the northern hemisphere, tiny shoots of green living things are breaking through the crust of an apparently dead 'Mother earth.' When the passion narrative of Jesus was linked to Passover this time became attached to the story of his death and resurrection.
In an earlier book, "Resurrection: Myth or Reality?" I assumed the historicity of that connection, but further study through the years has challenged this. I am now convinced that liturgical pressure and not remembered history forced the two events together. I also now believe that it was the difficulty in making sense of the death of Jesus that caused the early Christians to identify the cross with the Passover and that this in turn provided the theological lynchpin needed to understand Jesus' death as being related to salvation. This insight has caused me to rearrange in a radical way the time line of the gospels. The first step is to separate the cross from the Passover. The second step, and perhaps far more important one, is to recognize that the experience of resurrection has to be separated from the day of crucifixion not by three days, but by perhaps as long as six months to a year. That time frame would put an end to that late developing tendency to think that the resurrection has anything to do with a resuscitated body. If I can demonstrate the truth of these two possibilities then I can show that there is a different way to look at the story of the cross and to explore anew the meaning of Easter.
To open the first timeline it is essential to know exactly what the Bible says. Mark, the first written gospel (70-75 C.E.), assumes that the meal on the night before the crucifixion is the Passover meal. He portrays Jesus (14:13ff) as sending disciples in search of a man who will lead them to a large furnished upper room, where they can prepare for the celebration. Mark then chronicles in intimate detail the final twenty-four hours in Jesus' earthly life.
This stylized narrative begins in Mark 14:17 when the evangelist notes that "when it was evening," that is around 6:00 pm, the disciples gathered with Jesus for the Passover meal. That meal usually lasted for three hours or until 9:00 pm when it ended with the singing of a hymn and departure. Mark then describes seven other episodes, each of which is another three-hour segment as that fateful night unfolded. We are told that Jesus and his disciples go to the Garden of Gethsemane, where Peter, James and John could not watch with him one, two or three hours. It was now midnight. The act of betrayal is thus set at the darkest point of the night. The arrested Jesus is then dragged before the Chief priests for a trial that presumably lasted until 3:00 a. m. One quickly doubts the historicity of this episode since the Torah forbade Jewish authorities from sitting in judgment at night. Liturgy, however, can ignore that historical detail.
In the watch of the night between 3:00 and 6:00 a. m., known as "cockcrow," Mark tells us the story of Peter's threefold denial, one for each hour I would suggest. At the crowing of the cock it is now 6:00 am and Mark's text tells us right on cue (15:1) that "as soon as it was morning" the Council of the Jews led Jesus away to Pilate. This new three-hour segment includes the stories of Barabbas, the lashing of Jesus and the crown of thorns. Mark then informs us (15:25) that it was the "third hour" or 9:00 am when they crucified him. When the sixth hour came (15:33) Mark said that darkness covered the earth until the ninth hour or 3:00 p.m., when Jesus cried with a loud voice, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" and breathed his last. From 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. Mark suggests that they have time to remove his body from the cross and to bury him fittingly in Joseph's tomb. It is thus obvious that the earliest version of the crucifixion story is liturgically shaped to be a twenty-four vigil, divided into eight segments and was constructed not to tell believers what actually happened but to lead them into a remembrance of who Jesus was and the role he played in the drama of their salvation.
That conclusion is heightened by the realization that almost all of the content that Mark uses to develop his story of how Jesus died, comes not from eyewitnesses but from two primary sources in the ancient Hebrew Scriptures: Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53. From Psalm 22, Mark draws the words, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me." He described the crowd at the cross using the words of this Psalm (v.7,8). Next he tells the story of Jesus' thirst again using the words of this Psalm (v. 14,15). Then he relates the account of the soldiers dividing his garments based on this Psalm (v.18). This is clearly not remembered history. In Isaiah 53 a portrait is drawn of one called the Servant or the Suffering Servant of the Lord. Isaiah says this Servant figure "was numbered with the transgressors" (v. 12). From that line, Mark created the story of the two thieves crucified one on each side of him. Isaiah says that the Servant figure was "with a rich man in his death" (v.9), so Mark created the story of a ruler of the Jews, Joseph of Arimathea, who made his new tomb in a garden available to receive the body of Jesus. Isaiah notes that the Servant made intercession for the transgressors (v. 12), so the stage is set for Luke to expand Mark's narrative by supplying the words of Jesus' intercession for the soldiers, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). Mark has noted earlier (15:50) that when Jesus was arrested, "all of his disciples forsook him and fled," which means that we must embrace the fact that Jesus died alone. There were no eyewitnesses to record the details of Jesus' final hours so Mark's biblical account cannot be history. It is interpretive material, highly stylized and presented in a liturgical format. This clearly acknowledged data destabilizes all the claims for the historicity of the final events in Jesus' life other than the fact that the Romans executed him. Once we open this door, the possibility that the entire story of the Jesus' Passion is interpretive material, not historical memory, demands new attention.
Before moving to additional data supporting this conclusion, I need to note that in Mark, Matthew and Luke we do not have three separate accounts of the death of Jesus. Both Matthew and Luke have Mark's gospel in front of them as they write. While they both edit Mark and add to his narrative here and there, they accepted Mark's basic framework and time line. The Last Supper in all three of these gospels is the Passover meal, suggesting that the crucifixion occurred on the day following the Passover. Matthew adds an earthquake at the time of the crucifixion, and puts a temple guard around the tomb. Luke adds the story of one of the thieves being penitent (Lk 23:39-43) and gives the women, watching from afar, a bigger role. However, these are not independent corroborations of the Passover connection. Matthew copied into his gospel about 90% of Mark's content while Luke copied about 50%. Mark was the one who put the crucifixion and the Passover together. Matthew and Luke accepted that placement.
Finally, we note that the Fourth Gospel, John, is an independent source. John refers to a final meal that is characterized by a foot-washing ceremony but it is clearly not the Passover meal. John then is free to connect the crucifixion itself with the moment the Paschal Lamb is slaughtered. This meant that for John the Passover celebration would have occurred after sundown on the day Jesus was crucified. The timing is different but the connection between the death of Jesus and the Passover is no less real. In all four Gospels the story of the crucifixion is shaped by images from the Passover.
Does it make any real difference if the Passover observance was not the historical context during which the crucifixion occurred? I think it does for it breaks open the literalism of the past and drives us to explain how the two came to be related. That in turn provides a doorway into the primitive understanding of the Christ experience. We have only just begun, so stay tuned.
~ John Shelby Spong
Originally published February 2, 2005
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Peace, David
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Judy got cleaning stuff and found these four in a cabinet. Were there more than four? Who is the one in the upper left hand corner? . . .
Jim Wiegel
401 North Beverly Way, Tolleson, Arizona 85353
Tel. 011-623-936-8671 or 011-623-363-3277
jfwiegel(a)yahoo.com
www.partnersinparticipation.com
Loneliness does not come from having no people around you. But from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you. Carl Jung
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Sent from my iPhone
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1/18/18, Felton/Spong: "Mezuzah the $#!t Out of It": Fox: Q/A; Spong revisited
by Ellie Stock 18 Jan '18
by Ellie Stock 18 Jan '18
18 Jan '18
HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR
"Mezuzah the $#!t Out of It"
Rev. David M. Felten
I’m often inspired by the spiritual practices and traditions of faiths other than my own. Many of them come in handy as suggestions I can make to members of my congregation. With the exasperation many are feeling over our current political reality, I’ve had my mind on practices that could potentially help people push back the darkness and ground themselves in simple, life-affirming actions.
To that end, I bring your attention to the small wooden, metal, stone, or ceramic decoration nailed on the doorpost of many Jewish homes. Rolled up inside is a small piece of parchment on which is written several passages from Deuteronomy called the Shema, one of the definitive statements of Jewish identity. In Hebrew, Shema literally means, “hear!” or “Listen up!” and states: “Hear, O Israel: the LORD (is) our God, the LORD is one” and “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” Together, the decorative case and the parchment are called a “mezuzah” (“doorpost” in Hebrew). On passing through a doorway with a mezuzah, observant Jews will touch the mezuzah – some to remind themselves of the passages on the parchment, some to remind themselves of their Jewish identity, and some simply out of habit.
The ideal is expressed by the Jewish teacher Maimonides, who wrote: “By the commandment of the mezuzah, one is reminded, when entering or departing, of God’s Unity – and is stirred into love for God. One is awakened from their slumber and from vain and worldly thoughts… This brings one back to oneself and leads us on the right path.”
So, even as simple a task as coming into or going out of the house becomes an opportunity to remind oneself of the presence of the divine and the many blessings in one’s life. That may sound a bit strange to some – until you consider the habit among Christians of “crossing themselves.” Same idea. As Tertullian wrote, “Whatever we find ourselves doing, we mark ourselves with the sign of the cross.”
In that way, both Judaism and Christianity are “sign languages,” using simple common actions or elements to remind us of something “more.” For both Jews and Christians, wine, bread, water are all common elements that, through communal use for thousands of years, have been infused with symbolism.
But why be limited to the old stand-bys? The sacred is everywhere for us to see and experience. The challenge is to pay attention enough to recognize common circumstances and events as steeped in the “more.”
Back before the first temple was built, the Jews carried the ark of the covenant with them and set up a tent-like tabernacle in which to place it whenever they stopped along the way. Eventually, the ark was placed in the holy of holies in the Jerusalem temple and people started to think that it was only there, at the temple, where they could get close to or experience the divine. When the Babylonians destroyed the first temple, one of the greatest fears was that the ark – and therefore God – would be captured. But no one ever found it (until, of course, Indiana Jones. A lot of good that did!).
Our culture has fallen into the same trap. It used to be that people associated the church with a kind of residence of the Spirit, but no more (and it wasn’t the Babylonians fault this time). Clergy were just being honest: “No, God isn’t keeping track of how many times you show up in church.” “Really? You mean I can make my hiking trip into a spiritual experience? Great!” And so for more and more folks, church just isn’t a thing – no guilt attached. The growing demographics of “Spiritual but not Religious” and what Jack Spong calls “Church Alumni/ae” have found that they simply don’t need church to experience the Divine.
So, in the highly mobile, digitized, and de-churched society in which we live, is there still even an interest in “sacramentalizing” our every day, everywhere lives?
It’s not news to say that people are feeling stressed by the rubble of our political process and all the ugly rhetoric everywhere we look. Some of us are feeling mystified, some despondent, and others wonder (sometimes with good reason) if we’re going to survive. What to do?
I think 2015’s movie, The Martian may have a suggestion. Matt Damon plays the role of marooned astronaut Mark Watney, stuck on Mars. He looks around at his slim resources and his need to survive until a rescue party arrives and says, “In the face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option: I’m going to have to science the shit out of this.”
So let me suggest that as WE look around at what seems like slim resources and our desire to survive, we would do well to say, “In the face of overwhelming odds, we’re left with only one option: we’re going to have to mezuzah the shit out of this.”
Mezuzah?! Seriously? What does an obscure Jewish tradition of adorning doorposts have to do with anything? Don’t go getting all literal on me here. Mezuzahs are reminders – and there are all kinds of ways we can be reminded to reclaim the good, the meaningful, and the important in our lives.
Author and theologian Leonard Sweet suggests a number of specific and practical ways to mezuzah our everyday lives:
1. Mezuzah your artifacts.
In the movie, Princess Ka’iulani, the young heir to the throne of Hawai’i is taken away to boarding school in England. There she’s shown pouring out a collection of seashells from a velvet bag and examining each one. When asked why, she tells her companion that they’re “Ola shells. Ola means ‘life’ in Hawai’ian. She tells her companion, “You collect them, then attach memories to each one so you don’t ever forget. This one’s for a day I spent at the ocean with my mother and Aunt Lydia. This one’s when my mother died.” “And the other shells?” her friend asks. “They don’t have memories yet – they’re the future.”
We can mezuzah all kinds of artifacts in our lives – transforming them from trinkets to Ola, to life. When you’re vacuuming the rug you inherited from your grandmother or opening a book that has notes in the margins from a mentor – take a moment to be grateful for the influence of those people in your life.
2. Mezuzah your calendar.
Begin each day with an acknowledgement of the day’s possibilities. Whether it’s the “Good Morning, God” of a more conventional Christian or the “Good God, it’s morning,” of the more jaded among us, do something. Just take a moment to consider one thing, one person, one situation in your life with gratitude.
And what about mealtime grace? Polls say that the number of people who say grace before meals has actually increased over the last 50 years (I actually think the number of people who lie about saying grace has increased over the last 50 years). Either way, to eat is to kill. Carnivore or vegan, eating entails taking life. Why not take a moment to be grateful for the particular energy-source that makes your life possible.
You can mezuzah every aspect of your calendar. G.K. Chesterton wrote,
You say grace before meals, All right,
But I say grace before the play and opera,
And grace before the concert or pantomine,
And grace before I open a book,
And grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing;
And grace before I dip the pen in the ink
3. Mezuzah your transitions:
Think birthdays. How about making a list of questions you try to answer every year on your birthday – or on New Year’s (instead of those pesky resolutions). Write your responses down in your journal for review in the coming years:
1. What was one of the funniest things that happened to you all year?
2. What was one of the scariest?
3. To whom did you grow closer? From whom did you drift?
4. What’s the most important thing you learned this year?
4. Mezuzah your community
Every year, the Islamic Speaker’s Bureau of Arizona sponsors an awards banquet. In 2016, we were honored to hear from keynote speaker Usama Canon, founder of the Ta’leef Collective. Canon talked about the benefit of creating micro-communities of understanding and respect among people of differing faiths, ideas, and backgrounds. What is that if not mezuzah-ing our community? It may seem like a small thing, but if there are enough of us building these micro communities, mezuzah-ing our relationships, we can turn the tide of the increasingly ugly reality of the macro community, our culture at large.
Sweet suggests that we can mezuzah our relationships, mezuzah strangers, even mezuzah (*gulp*) meetings. When we mezuzah our daily lives, we’re unleashing an appreciation for the smallest, sometimes overlooked moments, artifacts, or relationships. We’re intentionally embedding daily life with meaning beyond the superficial, hum-drum routine in which so many of us find ourselves. We intentionally infuse our world with an awareness that doesn’t leave room for the fear, anxiety, and ugliness to get a foothold. Reclaim the good. Acknowledge the meaningful. Take note of what’s truly important.
So listen up! Shema! Make room for the Divine in your life. Acknowledge it with your whole heart: love the Mystery that is in you, around you, and the source of all that is.
About twenty years ago, I had the chance to go on retreat in Albuquerque with Fr. Richard Rohr. I was the only Methodist in a cohort of 125 Catholics. At each meal, about half a dozen of us were assigned to eat at Fr. Richard’s table. I got a lunch date. As a pious young Methodist, I was anticipating sitting down together and saying grace (and oh what a grace I was expecting! Richard Rohr! C’mon!) But there was nothing. Zip. Nada. Father Richard just sat down, said hi, and tucked into his meal. Later, I complained to the members of my small group: “I thought such a holy man would knock out a profound and inspiring blessing of the meal!” They laughed. “You don’t make a very good Franciscan,” they said. Why? Because ideally, for Franciscans, ALL of life is sacred. All of life is sacrament. Why set aside one segment of life (like lunch) for more acknowledgement than all the rest?
All these years later, I’m still a pitiful closet Franciscan. I still haven’t achieved that lofty level of awareness. So, I have to start with small bits, mezuzah-ing meaning into work, family, faith community, politics.
In this age of what for many of us is an endurance test of stress and uncertainty, remember: all of life can be used by the divine to reconnect us with one another, creation, and the deepest part of who we are. So, “In the face of overwhelming odds, we’re left with only one option: we’re going to have to mezuzah the shit out of this.” Get to it.
~ Rev. David M. Felten
Read the essay online here.
About the Author
Rev. David Felten is a full-time pastor at The Fountains, a United Methodist Church in Fountain Hills, Arizona. David and fellow United Methodist Pastor, Jeff Procter-Murphy, are the creators of the DVD-based discussion series for Progressive Christians, “Living the Questions”.
A co-founder of the Arizona Foundation for Contemporary Theology and also a founding member of No Longer Silent: Clergy for Justice, David is an outspoken voice for LGBTQ rights both in the church and in the community at large. David is active in the Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church and tries to stay connected to his roots as a musician. You’ll find him playing saxophones in a variety of settings, including appearances with the Fountain Hills Saxophone Quartet.
David and his wife Laura, an administrator for a large Arizona public school district, live in Phoenix with their three often adorable children.
Question & Answer
Chris from Nigeria, asks:
Question:
I want you to clarify for me certain issues that seem to me to impact our common existence. Are you in support of gay marriages and abortions? Do you think we have the antichrist and the Dragon in our midst today?
Answer: Rev. Matthew Fox
Dear Chris,
Thank you for your questions. I agree that they do impact on our common existence and our common humanity. I will try my best to respond to them.
The antichrist and the Dragon are metaphors found in apocalyptic literature. They speak to the gut and to the imagination but it would be very ill-advised to take them literally. (One should never take metaphors literally, as Paul says, “the letter kills but the Spirit gives life.”) As metaphor, one can no doubt find many applications. They are indirect ways to talk about Evil and talk about evil we should be doing; there is plenty of it to talk about in today’s world. And Evil, being spiritual, is all around and within—it is not just “out there” in others. Thus the need to be alert as all warriors need to be. The antichrist and the Dragon represent the places where injustice (and therefore Evil) reign.(1)
Regarding abortion, let me say this. I am against it in principle as I think we should always be conservative about the gift of life and seek to conserve it. At the same time I am not against people who have abortions—I have never known anyone who took the decision lightly but very often there are solid reasons to not feeling one is capable of a 20 year commitment and responsibility for a new person in one’s life. This is especially true as we have wandered as a species from extended families to more and more singular households. Of course rape and incest as well as the threat to a mother’s life may also convince someone not to bring a child to term. Though against abortion in principle, I am even more against others (invariably men and male-dominated institutions) telling a woman what to do with her body.
Is there common ground between a “freedom to choose” position and a so-called “pro-life” position? Yes, there is. (I say “so-called ‘pro-life’ because many of those who are most zealous about condemning abortion barely make any noise at all about the killing of life that happens after birth such as issues of injustice toward children as regards proper education, health care, etc.) Sometimes people forget that to have a law that allows abortion does not require anyone to have an abortion. Such a law only makes it safe for those who feel an abortion is necessary. Why is that a bad or immoral thing? People will have abortions—it has always been so. So why not make it as safe as possible? Such a law is the lesser of two evils; it saves lives.
Of course a lot of the need for abortion could be alleviated by smart birth control. To forbid both abortion and birth control makes no sense whatsoever in my opinion and the entire ideology is based on false teaching from St Augustine in the fourth century, a sexual neurotic if there ever was one. He taught that all sex was sinful because one “loses control” and must be justified by having a baby. Why? Clearly he never understood the relationship between sex and love; and sex and play; or mysticism and sex, i.e. “love without a why.”
As for gay marriage, yes, I am in favor. Love is love. My Bible says “God is love,” not “God is heterosexual love exclusively.” Why not give gay partners the same rights and responsibilities as heterosexual partners, wouldn’t that make for a healthy society? Science has spoken on homosexuality as it spoke 400 years ago about the Earth going around the sun. Homosexuality is the Copernican Revolution debate of our time. The answers are not found in the Bible but in nature, therefore in science whose job it is to study nature. (St Thomas Aquinas warned that “a mistake about nature results in a mistake about God.”)
Science has spoken: About 8% of any given human population anywhere is going to be gay or lesbian. Why should they not enjoy the stability and privileges of marriage? We have counted over 484 other species with gay and lesbian populations so homosexuality is found in nature, it is a minority, but it is not “unnatural” (except for heterosexuals and heterosexuality is unnatural to homosexuals). Creation is very diverse. Clearly God wanted it that way. Vive la difference!
In addition, indigenous peoples in America have told me that the spiritual directors over the ages to the great chiefs here were homosexual. Why? Because homosexuals bring spiritual depth to a community. The same truth is found in Celtic tribes and in African traditions as well. To worship a homophobic deity then is to deprive self and society of spiritual energy. Why do that?
~ Rev. Matthew Fox
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Matthew Fox holds a doctorate in spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris and has authored 32 books on spirituality and contemporary culture that have been translated into 69 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. 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 Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the FleshTransforming Evil in Soul and Society, The Pope’s War: Why Ratzinger’s Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved and Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest
A new school, adopting the pedagogy Fox created and practiced for over 35 years, is opening in Boulder, Colorado this September. Called the Fox Institute for Creation Spirituality it is being run by graduates of his doctoral program and will offer MA, D Min and Doctor of Spirituality degrees. With young leaders he is launching a new spiritual (not religious) "order" called the Order of the Sacred Earth (OSE) that is welcoming to people of all faith traditions and none and whose 'glue' is a common vow: "I promise to be the best lover of Mother Earth and the best defender of Mother Earth that I can be."
(1) For an in-depth discussion on Evil you might want to see my book, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh, where I take the 7 chakras of the East and compare them to the 7 capital sins of the West to develop a fresh language about evil. Too often religion has oversold “sin” and in doing so shuts down discussion and debate about Evil—as if evil did not exist (evil is far bigger than sin).
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
Leading a Conference for Black, Pentecostal, Gay Clergy
Sometimes, my wife Christine and I have the privilege of entering into an experience that is unexpected, but so moving and profound that it opens doors to new understandings.
Normally we do not schedule lectures or interviews during December. That month is dedicated to our family and to the sheer joy of being disengaged. Despite that commitment, this year I received an invitation that was so compellingly unique that we broke our rule and in mid December flew to Phoenix, to address a conference of ordained people. That in itself is not unusual. However, these clergy were first, members of the Pentecostal tradition, which is not part of my background. Second, they were African-American Pentecostals, an audience that would not normally read my books or invite me to speak. Finally they were gay clergy.
This invitation developed when a member of this group was present at some lectures I gave in Portland, Oregon. At that gathering, this young man shared with me the isolation he felt with his multiple minority statuses. As an African-American he was separated from the predominantly white churches among which he lived; his Pentecostal tradition put him into a narrowly defined part of Christianity, and his gay sexual orientation alienated him from most of the Pentecostal movement in which he had been raised. He asked if I would be available to address a national group of black Pentecostal clergy who were homosexual. I felt like Paul must have when, in the Book of Acts, he had a dream about a person from Macedonia saying to him, "Come over and help us." Paul answered that invitation positively and so did I. I am so very glad I did.
Let me say quickly that this was not an easy conference for me. My body is not trained to sway in worship. My arms do not know how to wave in prayer. Ecstatic sounds do not normally come from my mouth in church settings. I told them they needed to understand that the Jews were known as God's Chosen people, the Episcopalians were known as God's frozen people. I tried, however, to participate as best I could. I suspect I looked a bit like Al Gore in the campaign of 2000. I never did manage to clap my hands in synch with everyone else!
There were about 100 people at this conference and most of them appeared to know each other. They called their movement "The City of Refuge," a reference from the Hebrew tradition in which certain cities were set aside for those who, no matter what they had done elsewhere, were always granted welcome. These clergy, while all Pentecostal in their worship style, were members of various denominations. They used many ecclesiastical titles: archbishop, bishop, apostle, evangelist and pastor. Some had forged a relationship with the United Church of Christ, a generally liberal, congregational form of Christianity that frequently provides structure for independent congregations and community churches. Under the umbrella of the United Church of Christ, churches that almost always fail in the second generation following their charismatic founders, have a chance at longevity by finding a pool from which to choose successive leaders.
During this conference, I listened to the message of each speaker. One evangelist preached with intense fervor and personal illustrations as she worked over obscure texts from the Bible with relentless passion. She knew how to communicate with her audience and the group responded emotionally and attentively. Her themes were belonging, forgiving, and rejoicing in the Grace of God that "saved a wretch" like you and me. Some in the audience leaped to their feet to affirm a word here or a phrase there. Others uttered constant verbal acclamations. Homosexuality was not mentioned publicly but many of the participants were same gender couples and signs of their physical affection, while not ostentatious, were clearly present. Privately when they talked to me or to one another, their sexual orientation was shared. "Same gender loving couples" was a popular phrase among the delegates.
I did not come early in the agenda. I was to be a change of pace, separating those aspects of their conference with which they were quite familiar. I have no anxiety about speaking publicly since I do so much of it, but as the time for my presentation drew nearer and nearer, I felt less and less confident that I would be able to communicate with this audience. My over developed left brain and underdeveloped right brain did not seem to fit this setting. I wondered what expectations they had when they invited me and whether or not I had any ability whatsoever to fulfill those expectations. As the time approached for me to step up front, I found myself lecturing myself silently: "You cannot be what you are not. Do not try! Just be yourself. Be open, be honest, be accepting. Do what you are capable of doing. Teach, illumine, explore and stay in dialogue." The lecture must have worked for peace descended on my soul.
I was introduced with incredible grace by the conference leader, Bishop Yvette A. Flunder, a gifted female pastor, who had been chosen and consecrated as bishop of 'Fellowship 2000.' Dr. Flunder, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, was the founder of something called "Refuge Ministries and City of Refuge UCC." In her introduction she stressed the need for more education, more understanding. She spoke of the loneliness that comes with alienation. She explained something about my role in helping the Episcopal Church come to terms with the issue of homosexuality. She asked them to listen openly and not be afraid to ask questions. Then she asked the group to welcome me. They responded enthusiastically.
I decided to approach this subject autobiographically, believing that people can hear a personal story more readily than they can absorb facts. Besides, my journey was not unlike theirs. I was raised in an evangelical, fundamentalist Episcopal Church in the south. I did not know what a homosexual was. I cannot recall even hearing the word until I was 18 years old. Apparently, we did not have homosexuals in the south or perhaps it was that they were not allowed to be visible. When I finally opened my mind to that word and its meaning, I accepted the definition so prevalent in both my church and my region: If one were "liberal and kind," one viewed homosexuality as a mental illness that elicited pity and the hope of a cure. If one were "conservative and rejecting," one viewed homosexuality as an example of moral depravity deemed worthy only of conversion or punishment. I accepted those definitions for years as the boundaries inside which the debate on this subject would be conducted. In time, however, my life experiences caused me to challenge my stereotypes. I told them of the gay and lesbian people who had forced me to look again. These exemplary people lived their lives with such integrity that no one could say they were either mentally sick or morally depraved. I related to them the circumstances in which the first gay clergyperson had shared with me, the new bishop, his sexual identity; only to be told by me that he must keep it quiet as the price of his continued work in my diocese. I developed an ecclesiastical version of "don't ask, don't tell," which served well to keep my discomfort in check and to allow me to function without compromising my uninformed ignorance. Then I shared with them my study with a doctor at the Cornell Medical Center in New York where I first began to grasp a new reality that was ultimately undebatable. I learned that sexual orientation is not something one chooses, it is something one is. Sexual orientation is thus in the same category as left-handedness, hair and skin color and even gender. I learned that homosexuality constitutes a stable percentage of the human population at all times and in all places. External events or evil people do not cause it. Since it is present in the animal world one can hardly call it unnatural. My audience listened attentively and appreciatively. I closed with a simple assertion. If the words attributed to Jesus in John's Gospel are accurate, then the purpose of Christ was that all "might have life and have it abundantly." This means that anybody or anything that diminishes the life of any child of God must be declared to be evil. It is so clear to me. Racism, sexism, homophobia or any other prejudice that diminishes the life of any person, violates the deepest meaning of Jesus. One cannot be prejudiced and still be a follower of Jesus. My words were warmly received with much applause. The question period after the lecture was genuine, probing and revealing of great pain.
I heard them searching the Bible for ways to remove their sense of rejection. One could see their inner tension. They wanted to be part of the Pentecostal Christian tradition in which their lives had been nurtured. They wanted to be openly and lovingly what they knew they were. They absorbed this weekend like thirsty people who had discovered an oasis in the wilderness. Both Christine and I were embraced in their love, which melted all of the boundaries.
At the closing event of the conference, Bishop Flunder asked Christine and me if we would allow them to pray for us in their worship style. Of course we would. We were seated on two chairs and the conference delegates surrounded us, laying their hands on us wherever they could. They then blessed us verbally and at great length. Each person prayed aloud and all together. They gave thanks, asking God to be with us in all we do. They spoke in words and phrases common to Pentecostalism. Thank you Jesus! Thank you, Thank you. Thank you Jesus! Hallelujah, Amen. Praise God. Thank you Jesus. It was for us a new experience but we both felt touched by God. We might experience God differently from the members of this conference but their faith was real and their spirits were loving. When we left for the airport I found myself saying, Thank you Jesus! Thank you, thank you, Jesus.
~ John Shelby Spong
Originally published January 26, 2005
Announcements
Congratulations to the following winners of a free copy of Bishop John Shelby Spong's latest and final book Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today
Ruth P from Hays, KS
Nina C from Altoona, IA
Jo L from Lancaster, PA
Nancy P from Clinton, NC
Marily P from Halifax, ON
John M from Watkinsville, GA
In this final book of his storied career, Spong continues to integrate a rigorous scholarly tradition with the Christian faith and so offers a new approach, one that challenges Christians to explore their beliefs in new and meaningful ways.
Click here to pre-order John Shelby Spong’s final book, "Unbelievable" (available for purchase February 13th)
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In case you prefer an ebook version, or are in a remote place where it is hard to get a hard copy, the Kindle version of "Getting to the Bottom of Top" is now available on Amazon, and the generic ebook version is available from iUniverse and also on Kobo.
The paperback version is also available as a print-on-demand book from these sources as well. If you order it directly from iUniverse.com ( https://www.iuniverse.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?Book=767177 ), ICA Canada gets 25% royalty. If you order it from Amazon or another bookseller, ICA Canada gets 10% royalty. The royalties for all our Canadian intellectual property go directly to ICA Canada.
As Rob Work has pleaded for his book, it would be really nice to have reviews on Amazon. It would also be nice if you recommended it to others, including university professors who would appreciate it.
Thank you and take care,
Jo
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Re: [Dialogue] [Oe List ...] Fwd: From The New Yorker app. Article on Ophelia Dahl and Partners in Health
by jill＠jlpersi.com 14 Jan '18
by jill＠jlpersi.com 14 Jan '18
14 Jan '18
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Fwd: From The New Yorker app. Article on Ophelia Dahl and Partners in Health
by James Wiegel 13 Jan '18
by James Wiegel 13 Jan '18
13 Jan '18
Article gets at one of the life questions I wrestle with these days.
> Thirty years of experience has not made persevering any easier for Dahl. "This work feels more crushing and sadder to me than it's ever felt--you see all the ways in which you've failed to do certain things, even though there's incremental progress," she said. "I am unfailingly optimistic, though. I think to not be optimistic is just about the most privileged thing you can be. If you can be pessimistic, you are basically deciding that there's no hope for a whole group of people who can't afford to think that way." Ophelia Dahl via Ariel Levy in The Poetry of Systems, The New Yorker 12/18&25/2017
>
> I thought you would want to read A Reporter at Large: The Poetry of Systems, by Ariel Levy. For Ophelia Dahl and Partners in Health, the time to fix global health care is in between crises. http://nyer.cm/1PU0O8e Download The New Yorker Today app: http://nyer.cm/ba5wYPW
>
>
> Jim Wiegel
> 401 North Beverly Way, Tolleson, Arizona 85353
> Tel. 011-623-936-8671 or 011-623-363-3277
> jfwiegel(a)yahoo.com
> www.partnersinparticipation.com
>
> Loneliness does not come from having no people around you. But from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you. Carl Jung
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HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR
Unbelievable: Part II
John Shelby Spong
Unbelievable began its life years ago when my daughter, Jaquelin, who owns a Ph.D. degree in physics from Stanford University said to me: “Dad, the questions the church keeps trying to answer we don’t even ask anymore!” She was not hostile. It was just a matter of fact statement. The church keeps posing issues that the secular world has settled, or at least has decided to ignore. Questions such as: Who or what is God? What does original sin mean? What does it mean to say that Jesus died for my sins? Can one really believe in life after death? What does it mean to be born again? Why do we not try to grow up?
Being a bishop in the service of this institution, I have come to the conclusion that the church in large measure is dishonest. The church spends its time pretending. We have been living in that dishonesty for so long that we get very angry when someone in the church raises this issue to consciousness by saying things which most people simply do not believe. That is to treat it like it’s a scandal. The symbols of this issue are surprisingly obvious to any casual observer. Take the Christmas story for example. For a Christian to say that the virgin birth not only assumes that women do not have egg cells, which no one knew existed in the first century, but that it violates every rule of biology that we believe in the 21st century. Yet to say that the Virgin Birth is unbelievable creates a storm while the underlying details of that story are simply ignored. How many people today believe that a star, which is a mass of burning gas, can announce a human event? How many think stars are equipped with a GPS system that can guide seekers to their destination, which turns out to be a house in the “little town of Bethlehem?” That familiar story also assumes that ancient star gazers, called wise men, kept a set of camels at the ready to make a journey to where the messiah would be born, or a goodly supply of gold, frankincense and myrrh, so that they could bring him gifts. All of those details were late developing additions added to the Jesus story after the fact. By the time, those stories became part of the mythology, probably in the ninth decade, the messiah had become a supernatural person capable of doing miraculous acts, accepting death as his due, being restored to life from the dead on the third day and then ascending into the heavens of a three-tiered universe. It is story familiar to us all, but it is unbelievable! We could make the same analysis on any of the other stories of the New Testament.
We are driven by these facts to look at history. Christianity was born in the 1st century. Jesus of Nazareth was born at that time. When people began to explain the experience they had with him, they inevitably did so in terms of the world they inhabited. It was a world in which God was a being living above the sky watching over the world. When God wanted to enter the consciousness of human lives, God simply came down to earth from his heavenly home. Do we really still believe that? In time the answer was a direct “No.” We live on the other side of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. They obliterated God’s home above the sky. We are space age people, a post Hubble telescope generation. Our universe is made up of infinite space filled with galaxies of stars. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is so large that it would take light, traveling at the approximate speed of 186,000 miles per second, 100,000 years to navigate the distance from one end of our galaxy to the other. Our galaxy is, we now know, only one of literally billions, if not trillions, of other galaxies in the almost unembraceable size of the universe. There is no dwelling place for God above the sky. God has been rendered homeless for almost 600 years. That was the first step in the breakdown of the religious symbols.
We also live on the other side of Isaac Newton, who perceived the mathematically precise order in the universe. In Newton’s world there was no room for miracle or magic. God could not accomplish a rescue, control the weather or affect a cure. For Newton the familiar religious jargon no longer fit. God, with no further work to do, became unemployed.
Then there was the 19th century onslaught of Charles Darwin’s thought, who proclaimed that human life was not different in kind from any other forms of life. We could no longer say that human life was special, made in the image of God, or “a little lower than the angels.” Human life had become a product of chance — “a little higher than the apes.”
Next came Sigmund Freud, who discovered the unconscious and forced us to embrace its meaning. Then came Albert Einstein, who established the fact that time and space are both inside creation and all of our experience is relative to this world. There is no objectivity and eternal truth was a myth.
>From the time of Copernicus to the time of Einstein the forces of life have killed off all of our pre-modern concepts. We have been forced to embrace the thought of a post-modern world. Since we have no pre-modern concepts left, we ask the post-modern questions: What do we mean when we say “Our Father who art in heaven” in 2018? Do we really believe our old religious formulas? Is the church participating in a giant hoax? Is there any real hope for the institution we call the church? That institution seems to be living well beyond its shelf-life.
In the 16th century the church, feeling the insights of this new modern world, undertook a great reformation. The reformation, however, made no lasting difference. The Christian Church, both Catholic and Protestant, changed very little keeping the same Bible, creeds and liturgical forms taken as they were from the 1st, 4th and 13th centuries. The Reformation caused great upheaval, but all people talked about was authority and order, not substance. We fought the Thirty Years War with both sides trying to impose its religion on the other. The Spanish Armada was Catholic Spain’s way to force Protestant England back into the old pattern. When that reformation had run its course, the church kept repeating the formulas of the past, too little and too late. Generations later the need for reformation is still desperately apparent.
So here we are in 2018. The big issues that divide us are not being discussed publicly. We continue to do the ancient dance with pomp and circumstance, convinced that we will find meaning there. The church is dying. The pace is accelerating and no one dares to lift a voice to find a new way to talk about God. As Edna St. Vincent Millay notes in her book Conversations at Midnight: “God is dead and modern man and women gather around the divine grave and weep.” We can pretend no longer.
That is the background that I assume in this book. Is it possible for us to find a radical new way to articulate what faith means today? Can we separate the first century experience of Jesus from the unbelievable mythology that has engulfed his life and his words? That is our challenge. I am a believer without the words to express that belief, so I ask questions: Can I still be a theist? Is my only alternative to theism to be an a-theist? Is God a being, even the Supreme Being? Or is God an experience in whom we live? What is the role of Jesus? Is he a savior? From what then does he save us? It cannot be from a fall that victimized all human life. There was no perfect creation from which all have fallen, so we cannot fall from a perfection we have never possessed. Or is there another way we can speak of Christ? -How about, if not a savior, then as a as a barrier-breaker? When our world presents us with the need to transcend our differences, does Jesus call us so deeply into a humanity that is beyond tribe, national identity, gender differences or sexual orientation? Is that a new humanity for which we are destined, a new oneness inside God? Is God still a noun we hope to define or is God a verb in whom we are called to live? Do interfaith understandings start where religion ends?
There is no future for the Christianity of the present, nor is there any future in a return to the security of the past. The only way forward is to embrace a new reformed Christianity for a new world. I still define myself as a Christian, a believer, perhaps even a mystic. In this book I will spell out this new vision. It is beyond anything we call Christian today. The traditionally religious will dismiss it. It will create too large a sense of insecurity for them. The minority of believers, however, who know that there is no future in the church for them, will see that it is “change or die.” There is no place else to go but into a radically changed future, not back to the security systems of the past. There must be a whole new way toward a faith that is beyond sin and salvation, but opening to a great new vision. The choice will be clear — either a new telling of the Jesus story or the death of God. In this book I will vote to try to break the log-jam – something beyond religion, but not beyond God. I have tried to create that faith in this world. When this reformation is complete I am convinced that people will judge my work not as too radical, but as not nearly radical enough. I offer a new path. I hope some of you will claim it – a mystical Christ, free of the guilt and judgment of the past, but drawing the whole world to himself, with a promise of life. It will call us all into the meaning of life: “to live fully, to love wastefully, and to be all that each of us can be. It will be an affirmation of life, not an escape from fear. That is finally the path that Jesus lived that drew the world to him before he was surrounded with the mythical claims of the past. Let the reformation begin!
~ John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
An Endorsement From The United Kingdom
If you choose just one book of John Shelby Spong’s then choose Unbelievable. This final book is not only a summation of his life’s teaching, but a contemporary catechism that addresses the real questions and profound hesitations that contemporary women and men really do have about Christianity. Put another way, it provides in one volume the basis for a new reformation for all those who have left the church in despair or who will never darken its doors because of the intellectual non-sense and constricted life that are perceived to be required by its followers. Here is something different that asks us not to check our brains at the door, but to think deeply, “to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that we can be.”
Peter Francis, Warden
The Gladstone Library
The United Kingdom
……
Question & Answer
Joy from the Internet, asks:
Question:
There is a lot of political discussion these days about resisting Trump and other politicians that don’t seem to reflect the ways of Jesus. What do you think Jesus would do?
Answer: By Eric Alexander
Dear Joy,
Very interesting question Joy. In my study of the ministry of Jesus, he seemed to be highly focused on what he desired, and not as much on what he didn’t want. The only times he tangled with the opposition was when they confronted him, or when he was telling a parable, or when he was defending a sick or oppressed person. His message was one of a fresh vision and an inspired path forward. And I think we can learn a lot from that. I would posit that Jesus would be talking a lot more about his own vision right now for spiritual and social sanity, and not mentioning Trump or the Republicans very much at all. But I must also caveat that this is only my opinion, and of course we can never know what anyone would do, much less the enigmatic Jesus of Nazareth.
My own personal view on your question parallels a saying that is often attributed to Socrates, “the secret of change is to not focus all your energy on fighting the old, but instead on building the new.” I think those who oppose Trump should be talking about why they are a better option right now, and not just reacting and resisting. Clear vision beats resistance every time.
So although I like the “resist” slogan, and I appreciate the point of it in a tactical sense, I tend to think Jesus would lean more toward what John Lennon said … “Imagine.”
I think the most successful politicians, parties, and policies of tomorrow are not going to be those that focus so much on resisting the other person or party, but rather those which are focused on building a better thing and inspiring others toward it. It will be won by those who can most effectively rally people toward a more hopeful vision of how the world can be. And therefore the resistance will just come naturally by default, because people will be inspired in a different direction.
~ Eric Alexander
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About the Author
Eric Alexander is an author, speaker, and entrepreneur. He is a board member at ProgressiveChristianity.org, and is the founder of Jesism, Christian Evolution, and the Progressive Christianity and Politics group on Facebook. Eric holds a Master of Theology from Saint Leo University and studied negotiations at Harvard Law School, and and is author of Teaching Kids Life IS Good.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
Weeping Over the Grave of God
Part III of a series about the Tsunami
"If God is God, he is not good! If God is good, he is not God!" These words, from a 20th century adaptation of the Book of Job entitled "J.B.", were written by Archibald McLeish.
"God no longer has any work to do." A quotation from Michael Donald Goulder, Professor of New Testament Studies at the United Kingdom's University of Birmingham, when he announced in 1981 that he had become a "non-aggressive atheist."
Both the dramatist McLeish and the biblical theologian Goulder were stating that they no longer find significant meaning in the traditional way of understanding God. If God is a Being, supernatural in power, living somewhere external to this world, who invades this world periodically to answer their prayers, to accomplish the divine will, or to protect them from peril or their enemies, then God has, to these two gentlemen, become inoperative. They will no longer share in this human illusion. If there is nothing more to God than this, then they will choose to be atheists. They have articulated the religious crisis of our time. Unwillingness to believe in this theistic God seems to leave us with but the single option of embracing atheism. The theistic God, because of the great advances in human knowledge, has been rendered unbelievable. A natural catastrophe like the Tsunami brings these issues dramatically and urgently into full view.
The defenders of the traditional understanding of God try to make sense out of this tragedy by postulating a deserving guilt on the part of its victims or by telling us that the will of God in this tragedy will be made clear in time. These arguments are simply not convincing.
Let me, as a believing Christian, say it bluntly: the skies are empty. There is no supernatural parent figure waiting to come to our aid or to answer our prayers. The God, quoted as the final source of all authority, is no more. When we recognize these dimensions of our spiritual crisis, then much of the human behavior observable today becomes comprehensible.
Those in our world who are emotionally capable of laying aside the now outdated religious explanations of antiquity are called 'secular humanists.' They come in two varieties: some are stoical humanists who work for the common good and who are willing to serve the whole society. In them we see that idealism is not dead. Others, driven by their deep survival instincts, become corrupt, grasping specimens of humanity, looking out for themselves alone. If the judging God is gone, they reason, so is the ethical system that purported to reflect the will of God. They recognize no binding ethic so long as they do not get caught. They give us the Enrons, the WorldComs and the politics of greed that mark our recent history.
Those on the other hand, who are not capable of living without the security of their religious myths of antiquity, become the fundamentalists and the religious fanatics of out time. They vigorously deny their doubts and fears, and cover their insecurity by seeking to impose their particular form of religion on all others. Examples of this mentality abound in acts of terror and in the religious imperialism that we now observe in our own elections. Neither alternative offers much hope for the future. We cannot return to yesterday. We must enter the world that is being born before our eyes and engage the faith crisis of modernity.
It was a Greek philosopher named Xenophanes, who wrote: "If horses had gods, they would look like horses." This was his way of urging us to recognize that the gods of human beings also and inevitably will look like human beings. Human beings are finite and mortal so we envision God as infinite and immortal. We are limited in knowledge, so God is omniscient. We are bound to a single place but God is omnipresent. We are limited in power, but God is omnipotent. We account for this similarity between God and ourselves by proclaiming that we were created in God's image. However, the reality is that God has been made in our image. If that is true, as it so obviously is, then perhaps it is not God but our very inadequate image of God that has died. That should be welcomed insight, for any God who can be killed ought to be killed. So the first step in building a new, authentic way to think about God is to cease trying to keep yesterday's image of God alive. Divine artificial respiration is a waste of time.
We understand this rationally, but the uniqueness of self-conscious humanity is to tremble at the vastness of space and our smallness in the scheme of things. That is why we invented the parent God in the first place. We needed a sense of divine security. We would rather be 'born again' into a continued child-like dependency than to be forced to grow up and take responsibility for ourselves. It was the theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who urged us to separate God from religion. "God would have us know," he said, "that we must live as those who manage our lives without God." That is quite a challenge but that is where we are today.
Much of western religion has been predicated on a definition of human weakness. We have portrayed ourselves religiously as broken, inadequate and fallen. Our angst has created in us a need to denigrate ourselves. For centuries the church taught us that God's greatness could best be seen in response to human depravity, exhorting us to gratitude for the "amazing grace that saved a wretch like me." We are told "there is no health in us" and "we are not worthy to gather up the crumbs" from the divine table. The first step in the quest to build an authentic spirituality is to banish this negativity and recognize how incredible human life really is or can be.
When human life first emerged into self-consciousness, a creature had finally evolved who was not bound by time and space. Our minds can soar beyond our boundaries. We live inside the flow of time remembering a past that is no more, and anticipating the future that is not yet. We know something about the life force that surges within us. We recognize the power of love that enhances our life. We are aware that we can receive love, and once received we can give love away, but none of us can originate love. Love is a power that flows into us from beyond ourselves. We contemplate what it means to be unique. We have both a sense of who we are and a vision of who we want to be, which is the source of our discontent. These are the authentic parts of a God experience, which no other creature can share. Yes, we have created our image of God, that miracle working supernatural one, but we are not the authors of our experience of God. God is the name of the life within us that opens us to the miracle of transcendence. God is the name of love that comes to us from beyond ourselves. God is the ground or source of being out of which our own sense of being has emerged. Those are the moments when we discover oneness, embrace eternity and know why it is that we call ourselves spiritual beings.
What a difference this new angle of vision makes. Instead of seeing God as our judge eliciting our guilt, we begin to see God as the source of our empowerment. Instead of seeing Jesus as a divine visitor who came to rescue sinful humanity, we see him as the fully human one inviting us into his divinity, which is nothing but humanity transformed by wholeness. Instead of seeing the Holy Spirit as the source of our piety, we see Spirit as the source of expanding life. Instead of blaming God for tragedy and pain, or seeking to exonerate God from blame in an unjust universe; we accept our responsibility for building a world where every person has a better chance to live, to love and to be all that each of us is capable of being. We will use our intelligence and our ingenuity not to defend our dying God images, but to understand our world so deeply that we, not some distant mythical God, can be the needed bulwark against the natural fury of earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and drought. Instead of being angry when we are victimized by evil or destruction that we cannot control, we will work together to build a safer world. Instead of seeing ethics as following some divinely established rules to please a parent God and avoid punishing wrath, we will learn to see goodness as those actions that enhance life making all of us more fully human. This means that we will also see evil as those actions which diminish our humanity making us more willing to hate than to love, more able to destroy than to build up. Instead of seeing life after death as a time to receive divine reward or punishment we will see it as humanity merging into divinity, and finitude entering into eternity.
This coming new spirituality will not promise us security, but it will give us the ability to live in a radically insecure world with hope and meaning. It will not promise reward to entice our self-centeredness, but it will invite us to risk discovering both life's heights and depths. It will not mean that our lives are safe, but it will mean that we do not die without meaning, without communing with that which is finally real. That is where God is found for me. Someday we will recognize that the God of our past could only be God for the weak and the lost, one who could only win our loyalty by keeping us in a state of emotional childishness. Perhaps the crisis in faith through which we are going today is nothing but the adolescent pangs of a new maturity being born. Surely the God of the past must die if this new day is to arrive.
Is this enough to make us capable of living in this frightening world? Do we not still need a supernatural protective Being out there somewhere? That is the question that each of us must answer. If we are still emotional children who need a protective parent, we will continue to create whatever illusions we require to survive and we will try to force all people into our religious mold. If on the other hand we are ready to grasp a new maturity and become a new creation, then we will find in this moment in history a freeing and awesome call to be the God bearers in this world, the co-creators of life; and we will eagerly enter the next stage of our human development. It is my hope that this will be the conclusion and the vocation to which the tragic earthquake and the terrifying tsunami will finally drive our world.
~ John Shelby Spong
Originally posted January 19, 2005
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