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I started several documents and all of them feel... bleh. The truth is that I just don’t have much to give right now. I feel a small bit like the woman who threw her last penny into the offering pot in the temple. This article is my penny, this column is the offering pot, the readership is the Temple. Because this is the most precious penny I have at the moment, I trust it will rattle with some power as it hits the sides of this offering pot. Regardless of the resonance this is all I have right now, so here I am to give it.  *******************  I have an incredible group of friends from seminary. If everyone had the chance to transform under the witness of other souls who were also transforming, I think the world could very well change for the better. I learned the most about growth, community and the work of the Spirit by being in relationship with the folks I met during seminary. Among the many individual dynamics, there is a special group that is dear to my heart. We are five in total and we’ve moved from friendships into chosen-kinships. Each of us is friends with one another separately, and now something bigger-than-friends when we’re together. We met the first day of orientation in August 2011. Each one similarly eager and overwhelmed by the path we had just started down.   Over the course of our three years in the MDiv program we learned so much about ourselves and one another. I’ve noticed that a common priority among us is that of humanity. We seem to ask a lot of questions like “How do I remain human under the pressure of life?” Or, “How do I keep my humanity intact and resolve this conflict with another person who has deeply hurt me?” And, “How do I keep track of myself and authentically honor the truth of this grief filled moment?” We were, and continue to be, full of questions; often it seems like none of them are easy to answer.   With nothing to ponder but the nature of one’s soul, and how to efficiently wash laundry, buy groceries, and read all of the 15 assigned readings for Dr. Cone’s intro to Systematic Theology course, we found ourselves being squeezed into the tippy top portion of our scattered minds. Suddenly, one of the fiercest of us five was wise enough to notice this cerebral overload. I was stunned at her observation. I genuinely thought I was simply on a harsh learning curve that, if mastered, ended with success in the theological academy. If we could muscle through, find a way to rock with it, we’d be “successful”. But, because of the grace provided in community, I came to the conclusion that I was just trying to keep my head above the water in a sea that could drown the fiercest swimmer. And, I was no fierce swimmer. After one of our fellow colleagues had a nervous breakdown and took a leave of absence, I soon learned from second year, and PhD students that each incoming class had at least one causality, “it just seems to be the way it goes,” the veterans would say.   Horrid.   Yet, also kind of logical. So much of the reality of higher education is imbalanced and unwell. It made little sense that we were pulled to this program by spiritual means yet now we were becoming talking heads, just like the ones we were prompted to critique in our assignments. How did these authors make this work? Why, in the name of all things holy, were casualties needed for this path? Who the hell were we that someone should need to be sacrificed for the rest of us to “make it”? So much for “liberal theology”. ALL we did was think! Then, write, read, talk about what we read, re-read what we wrote, and pray that we could finish all the reading, and that no one would know when we didn’t.   So, there we were, collectively suffering in our over analytical minds, hungry for practical spirituality, and the space to try it on for ourselves. The soon to be Dr. Knowles is a great friend of Wisdom Sophia, one whole facet of Sophia herself. In the throes of it all she suggested that we have a Movement Ceremony to attempt to bring ourselves into balance. She wrote to us saying something to the effect of “I need a sacred way to become embodied again. How about we dance together?” She decided on two themes and asked that we each send her songs that speak to the themes. She curated our submissions into a playlist. We gathered in a large room in McGiffert Hall (RIP McGiffert), lit some candles (sorry Mr. Maloney) and we danced.   By the time the playlist ended some cried, some laughed, all stretched. We arrived back to ourselves, even if for just a moment. Then, we sat down to integrate this renewed sense of being and we had good fun guessing who sent which song. It was everything we didn’t know we needed.   The gift of Dr. Knowles was so great that this group of five has kept the Movement Ceremony alive all these years. When any of us is feeling that we’re past due for this sacred space, we write to the group and initiate the planning for the next Ceremony. These are the best worship services I have ever been to. We don’t know who sent in what song, we just know that of all the songs in all the music libraries, this is the most important one to someone in this circle. A sacred song, something set apart, an arrow to point us back to the roots of our feet to practice being balanced humans again. We get to accept one another’s medicine. We get to see how each of us has changed, or stayed the same. We get to witness group dynamics evolve and stretch. Each time we gather a miracle of some kind takes place. Our last Movement Ceremony was no different. We gathered in November 2020 with the help of the Zoom gods. Another one of the fiercest in our circle submitted a song entitled “Get Free” by the artist Mereba (I invite you to search for this song on whatever platform you find your music). It has become the prayer I pray over myself and the one I pray for others.   Typically, I begin the month of January by reflecting on the previous year and getting clear about what I want to focus on in the new one. I find it wildly challenging to do that in 2021. My mind is full. I’ve got grief on back log. I, like many others, am living on Zoom and use so much hand sanitizer that I’m pretty sure my blood alcohol content remains just shy of the legal limit despite the fact that I haven’t imbibed once since Rona arrived. What I’m getting at here is that I feel a deep, deep need to find my body in this time. To come down from the colorful conspiracy theories that plague my social media timelines. To tap out of the stream of trending words and catchy tiktoks. To get back to the roots of my feet and find the heart level for connecting again.   To leave you, I invite you to “go ahead and get free”. Movement Ceremonies have been a space of getting free for us. I invite you to try it for yourself. Here are the steps: 1. Invite a few beloved and open-hearted people in your life to a Movement Ceremony (a designated time to dance, stretch, lay still, do sun salutations, be in your body authentically-uninterrupted). 2. Suggest a theme for the song submissions and have your people reply only to you with their song choice(s). This makes room for the fun guessing game after should you so choose to engage in that part. Some themes we have used are: - “Vision for the future” - “Inspiration to make it through the unknown” - “Exploration of the old and new” 3. Gather the songs on a platform of your choice, be sure that everyone will have access to the list. Spotify is a great option if anyone in your group has a subscription, you don’t need an account to listen to the playlist once it’s made (when in doubt about the best way, ask Dr. Google or Nurse YouTube). 4. Schedule the Movement Ceremony, join the video chat to enjoy the playlist together, or just to meet up after and debrief, whatever feels best. 5. Get free (move).   Whatever you have left to give to others right now, even if it’s nothing, is the perfect amount. Do what you can to stay in your body, it’s precious. Take good care of yourself and the people you’re close to. ~ Toni Anne Reynolds Read online here About the AuthorMinister Toni Anne Reynolds is committed to singing flesh onto the bones of the Christian tradition by incorporating recently found texts of the ancient world into liturgy, sermons, and poetry. Toni’s Christianity forms a holy trinity with the psychological medicine of Tibetan Buddhism and the eternal Life found in Yoruba traditions. Balanced in an eclectic faith and focused in theology, Toni’s ministry offers a unique perspective on life, theology, and spirituality. | | | | | | | | | | Question & Answer   Q: By A Reader I was on a Zoom social with a few friends recently. They are of various races, but mostly black. I am white and good friends with them all. I used the n-word, repeating what one of my black friends said. I was told I was wrong for using it. My black friends use it a lot and around us all. Why was I wrong for using it? A: By Rev. Irene Monroe  Dear Reader,The language we use in our daily lives has a direct impact on how we interact with others.  This is especially true with the words we use for race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, etc. In this political climate hate speech is becoming common use. And, there has been an uptick of the use of the n-word, even from the mouths of people one would not expect.  For example, when the word slips from the mouths of race conscious allies like Bill Maher -comedian, political commentator of HBO political talk show “Real Time with Bill Maher” in 2017 - a lot of shock and hurt was felt.  When responding to his guest Senator Ben Saase of Nebraska’s question,“ Would you like to come work in the field with us?” Maher mockingly replied, “Work in the fields? Senator, I am a house n—er.” Nowadays it’s often difficult to discern in some instances if the n-word is being used as an epithet or a term of endearment. The confusion illustrates what happens when an epithet like the n-word, once hurled at African-Americans in this country and banned from polite conversation, now has a broad-based cultural acceptance in our society. The notion that it is acceptable for African Americans to use the n-word with each other yet it is considered racist for others outside the race to use it unquestionably sets up a double standard. And, because language is a public enterprise, the notion that one ethnic group has property rights to the term is an absurdly narrow argument. Moreover, the fact that African Americans have appropriated the n-word does not negate our long history of internalized self-hatred. Shortly after Maher dropped the word many on Twitter chimed in defending him stating he used a modified n-word, meaning it ended in an “a” rather than a “r.” Many today argue the meaning of the n-word is all in how ones spell it. By dropping the “er’ ending and replacing it with either an “a” or ‘ah” ending the term morphs into a term of endearment. However, I contest you cannot conjugate the n-word because it is firmly embedded in the lexicon of racist language that was and still is used to disparage African Americans. Moreover, many slaveholders pronounced the n-word with the “a’ ending, and in the 1920’s many African Americans use the “a’ ending as a pejorative term to denote class difference among themselves. In my opinion, our use of the n-word speaks less about our rights to free speech and more about how we as a people - both white and black Americans - have become anesthetized to the damaging and destructive use of epithets. Reclaiming racist words like the n-word neither eradicate its historical baggage nor its existing racial relations among us. Rather, it keeps the hate and hurt alive.  ~ Rev. Irene Monroe Read and share online here About the Author The Reverend Monroe does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on NPR's WGBH (89.7 FM). She is a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS. Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists. A Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist; her columns appear the Boston LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and the Boston Globe. Monroe states that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As a religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College’s research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website.   | | | | | | | | Please continue to send us your feedback… we are listening. We aim to give voice to many different perspectives that are relevant and inspiring along this spiritually progressing path. We are not here to tell you what to believe or how to act. We are here to support your journey, to share and learn together.Thank you for being a part of this community - join us on Facebook! | | | | | | | | | | | | | | As a non-profit ProgressiveChristianity.org relies heavily on the good will of donors. We want to continue to bring you the messages of progressive Christians via our Progressing Spirit Newsletter; however, the fact is, the cost of a subscription goes towards paying our authors. We therefore rely your generosity - specifically, if you are in a position to contribute to our efforts, we would be grateful for your donation.    Help keep ProgressiveChristianity.org/Progressing Spirit online and going strong - click here to donate today! * Another way to support us is to leave a bequest in your Will and/or Trust designating us a beneficiary.  | | | | | | | | Bishop Spong Revisited   Origins of the New Testament, Part XXIII: Matthew and the Liturgical Year of the Synagogue Bishop John Shelby Spong May 13, 2010 In one of my earlier columns on the gospel of Mark, I sought to demonstrate that it was the liturgical life of the synagogue that formed the organizing principle in the first gospel to be written. What Mark had done was to provide Jesus stories appropriate to the synagogue celebrations from Rosh Hashanah (the John the Baptist story) to Passover (the crucifixion story). Rosh Hashanah, however, comes in the mid fall of the year and Passover comes in the early spring, so the gospel of Mark only covered six and a half months of the twelve month year, leaving out the five and a half months that separate Passover from Rosh Hashanah. There was, therefore, a desire after Mark’s gospel appeared to fill in that blank space with additional Jesus material, which soon became an imperative need. Within about a decade, Matthew wrote the first expansion of Mark and aimed his story at the disciples of Jesus who worshipped in rather traditional Jewish synagogues. Luke wrote the second expansion of Mark and he aimed his story at the community of Jesus’ disciples who worshipped at synagogues that were made up of dispersed Jews and those Gentile proselytes, who were beginning to be drawn into the synagogue community. Recall once again that the split between the church and the synagogue would not occur until near the end of the ninth decade, so when Mark and Matthew were written, and maybe even Luke, Christians were still synagogue worshipers calling themselves “the followers of the Way.” If one has ever wondered why Mark is so much shorter than the other two shortest of the gospels, the answer is quite simply that he wrote a Jesus narrative to provide material only from Rosh Hashanah (in October) to Passover (in April), or for just six and a half months of the calendar year. Matthew and Luke were longer because they both stretched Mark to cover a full year.When Matthew, like Mark, correlates the crucifixion with the Passover (Matt. 26-27), he signals that the core of Mark will remain intact in his gospel. Like Mark, Matthew has also correlated the transfiguration with the festival of Dedication (Matt. 17:1-8), the harvest stories, including the Parable of the Sower, with the festival of Sukkoth or Tabernacles (Matt. 13), and Jesus’ teaching on fasting, cleansing demons and curing sicknesses with Yom Kippur (Matthew 12). When, however, Matthew comes to Mark’s correlation of John the Baptist with Rosh Hashanah, he has a problem. The baptism of Jesus by John was the first event in Jesus’ ministry according to Mark, but Matthew must cover five and a half months of Jesus’ story before he comes to Rosh Hashanah. In Mark the baptism of Jesus had inaugurated his ministry, but Matthew could not save that story for five and a half months. How Matthew managed this dilemma is fascinating.Matthew follows Mark by having the baptism of Jesus come as the first event in Jesus’ adult life so he uses this material early in his story. He begins his gospel with a genealogy and the story of Jesus’ miraculous birth, which fills chapters one and two. Then he uses the John the Baptist story in chapter three, which means it had to come long before the seventh Jewish month of Tishri, where Rosh Hashanah is celebrated on Tishri 1. So when he gets to Rosh Hashanah in late September or early October, the baptism narrative material that Mark used as his Rosh Hashanah story has already been related. So what does he do? He uses a trick that has been frequently employed by the motion picture industry (think of Cecil B. DeMille!) and employs a “flashback.”In chapter 11 of his gospel, at the time when Rosh Hashanah rolls around, Matthew reintroduces John the Baptist, who is now in prison, by having him send a messenger to Jesus. “Are you the one who is to come (that is the messiah) or do we look for another?” the messenger inquires. Jesus does not answer directly, but refers him to a passage in Isaiah 35, a passage regularly used in the synagogue at the observance of Rosh Hashanah. “How will we know when the Kingdom of God is about to dawn?” the prophet is asked. To this query, Isaiah responds: The signs will be that the blind will see, the deaf hear, the lame walk and the mute sing. To this litany of signs Jesus adds other things that demonstrate his messianic claims: “the lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised up and the poor have the gospel preached to them.” It is the Jewish Rosh Hashanah, or New Year theme. Then Jesus moves on to speak about John the Baptist in glowing terms. It is a perfect Jesus story to be used in the observance of Rosh Hashanah.There is one other Jewish festival that Mark, with his truncated six and a half month format, had simply ignored. Fifty days after the Passover, the Jews celebrated Shavuot or Pentecost, as they called it, a name that simply means “fifty days.” On this day, which would usually fall each year in late May or early June, the Jews celebrated the moment in their history at which time God gave the law to Moses on Mount Sinai. Shavuot was normally observed with a 24-hour vigil. The longest psalm in the Psalter, Psalm 119, was written to be used at this vigil. It is both a hymn to the beauty and power of the law and it is long enough to provide material for the entire vigil. Psalm 119 opens with an eight verse introduction, the first two verses of which begin with the word “Blessed.” Then there are eight segments of three stanzas each, designed for use at each of the eight three-hour sections of the 24-hour vigil. To provide an appropriate Jesus story that demonstrates the theme of Shavuot was the agenda that Matthew faced. Look now at how he did it.At exactly the right time in the year, assuming that Matthew was stretching Mark’s six and a half months out to twelve, we find in Matthew’s gospel three chapters, 5, 6 and 7, what we call “The Sermon on the Mount.” Here, Matthew portrays Jesus as the new Moses going up to a new mountain to deliver a new interpretation of the Torah. Matthew patterns this sermon after the Shavuot Psalm 119. He opens with an eight-verse introduction in which each verse, not just the first two, begin with the word “blessed.” We now call these eight “blesseds” the Beatitudes. Then in the rest of the sermon, Matthew provides a commentary on each of these beatitudes, in reverse order from eight to one, which in effect supplies the Christian content for the eight three-hour segments of this 24-houor vigil. It is a perfect fit.In the body of the sermon the contrast is between Moses and Jesus with the Ten Commandments a major part of the focus. “You have heard that it was said by men of old — You shall not kill.” Jesus is quoting Moses since this is the sixth commandment. Then, to set the contrast, he says, “But I say unto you” and sets himself as the interpreter of Moses by driving the law from external behavior to internal motivation. Murder finds its genesis in human anger and human insults, he says, so to stop murder one has to deal with the anger that precedes it. Jesus does the same thing with commandment number seven. Adultery, he says, starts in the lust of desire that grows out of our insecurity, and until that is addressed, adultery is all but inevitable. Jesus then takes the summary of the law, which commands us to love our neighbor and he drives it so deeply into life by defining our neighbor as including even our enemies. Matthew constructs the Sermon on the Mount in such a way as to drive the Torah to a new level of inward motivation. When the Sermon on the Mount was over (7:22-23), Matthew said “the crowds were astonished at his teaching.” His authority was confirmed. It was authentic, that is it was not the secondary type of authority that came by quoting the scriptures, which was the method employed by the Scribes.Covering Shavuot also completed the last festival of the synagogue year. To provide Jesus material to carry the worshippers from Passover, where Mark had told the story of the crucifixion, to Rosh Hashanah, where he had told the story of Jesus’ baptism, Matthew had to front end load Mark. Look again at exactly how he did it. Matthew added the genealogy and the birth story to fill up chapters one and two. He used the story of John the Baptist baptizing Jesus to introduce Jesus to the public as Mark has done, but he has expanded that story by including some of the content of John’s preaching. In chapter four, he has taken Mark’s two verse account of the temptations in the wilderness and included in it the content and full descriptions of the three temptations and indeed of exactly how Jesus responded to each. Then he adds the Sermon on the Mount in chapter 5-7. When Matthew gets to chapter 13, he has finally caught up with where Mark was in chapter 4. From that point on, the two gospels track very closely together.Matthew has expanded Mark’s content to give the worshipping disciples a sufficient supply of Jesus stories to enable them to cover the entire year. Now when we read it closely, we begin to discern another Matthean interpretive tool. He has woven his Jesus story around the biography of Moses, the greatest hero in the Jewish world view and clearly Matthew’s model. Next we will pull the analogy of Moses out of Matthew’s text and raise to our consciousness his editorial genius. From the story of the wicked king who tried to destroy the great deliverer at birth to likening the crucifixion of Jesus to a new exodus not from physical slavery, but to the slavery to sin, Moses is clearly in the background of Matthew’s Jesus story. The New Testament is quite exciting as soon as you dismiss a literal meaning and begin to discover the interpretive meaning that each gospel writer sought to convey. ~ Bishop John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | Announcements Compassionate Integrity Training Compassionate Integrity Training  is a resiliency-informed program that cultivates human values as skills, so we can thrive as individuals and a society within a healthy environment. Stating January 12th online for 10 weeks.  READ ON ... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |