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.yiv5885945327mcnImageGroupBlockOuter{ padding-top:9px !important;padding-bottom:9px !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv5885945327 .yiv5885945327mcnTextContent, #yiv5885945327 .yiv5885945327mcnBoxedTextContentColumn{ padding-right:18px !important;padding-left:18px !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv5885945327 .yiv5885945327mcnImageCardLeftImageContent, #yiv5885945327 .yiv5885945327mcnImageCardRightImageContent{ padding-right:18px !important;padding-bottom:0 !important;padding-left:18px !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv5885945327 .yiv5885945327mcpreview-image-uploader{ display:none !important;width:100% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv5885945327 h1{ font-size:22px !important;line-height:125% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv5885945327 h2{ font-size:20px !important;line-height:125% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv5885945327 h3{ font-size:18px !important;line-height:125% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv5885945327 h4{ font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv5885945327 .yiv5885945327mcnBoxedTextContentContainer .yiv5885945327mcnTextContent, #yiv5885945327 .yiv5885945327mcnBoxedTextContentContainer .yiv5885945327mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv5885945327 #yiv5885945327templatePreheader{ display:block !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv5885945327 #yiv5885945327templatePreheader .yiv5885945327mcnTextContent, #yiv5885945327 #yiv5885945327templatePreheader .yiv5885945327mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv5885945327 #yiv5885945327templateHeader .yiv5885945327mcnTextContent, #yiv5885945327 #yiv5885945327templateHeader .yiv5885945327mcnTextContent p{ font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv5885945327 #yiv5885945327templateBody .yiv5885945327mcnTextContent, #yiv5885945327 #yiv5885945327templateBody .yiv5885945327mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv5885945327 #yiv5885945327templateFooter .yiv5885945327mcnTextContent, #yiv5885945327 #yiv5885945327templateFooter .yiv5885945327mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } As soon as religion forgets about its roots in the eternal, it fails in its central task.
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Living Christs of Touch
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| Essay by Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.
June 27, 2019
If your life were ending and you were given the chance to write a few words to encapsulate its essence, what would you say? The story wouldn’t have to be historical, or literally true, but it would need to offer an authentic window into your soul and the heart of your heart.
I ask this because I am amazed with the story presented in John’s gospel to offer us the essence of Rabbi Jesus. This is the only gospel in which, as Jesus’ death approaches, he is depicted as caring for his friends by touching their bodies – no meal, a few words, and the washing of feet. Of all the possible stories John could have created to convey his convictions – a stunning miracle or a captivating oration – the gospel author simply has Jesus essentially engaging in tender and intimate touch. Inviting his friends to do the same (which is so much more than learning to imitate.)
As his prospect for survival fades and the death of his bodily self approaches, Jesus does not retreat, nor does he attack. He surprisingly reaches out. He loves – not abstractly, not theoretically. Jesus teaches his spiritual path through embodiment. The depth of his own realization manifests in the utter simplicity of his action. Being is Loving, even in the face of apparent annihilation. In Jesus, the human survival instinct, where we are driven at almost all costs to preserve our bodily self, is not destroyed. The instinct is transformed as it is subsumed into a larger seamless Reality – within John’s brief account we are offered a vision of a spiritual path for humanity that is one of a revolutionary mystic.
I recently finished reading Yuval Noah Harari’s magnificent and provocative book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harari pierces the bubble of the pervasive myth that homo sapiens reign triumphant at the summit of evolution after a rather peaceful, solitary and linear development. On the contrary, he chronicles how the dawn of homo sapiens is marred by our genocide of at least two other human species with whom we shared this earth – Denisovans and Neanderthals. Initially retreating back to east Africa after feeling their survival threatened, our ancient forebears reemerged, attacked and destroyed. Although there was some interbreeding among the various human species, detectable today in our own DNA, this was minimal. But, not only did our ancestors annihilate other humans, they were then responsible for the decimation of the majority of large mammals in Australia and the Americas (once thought to have been due to precipitous climate change).
This violent dawn of the history of homo sapiens was a harbinger of countless tragedies to come over the following millennia. Often religion, as a cultural force that binds groups together, reinforced and offered justification for the destruction of others whose presence was perceived as threatening one’s own, and one’s tribe’s survival. Touch was neither tender nor intimate – it was terrifyingly terminal.
Harari’s book is a sobering testament: Our species kills, and we destroy the lives of others readily and easily. When we fear for the survival of our bodily self, we feel compelled to retreat to find safety, or we ruthlessly attack: think Christ Church, New Zealand, or Sri Lanka, to name two recent atrocities. Our nervous system feels overwhelmed and we react out of desperation.
Apart from Harari’s historical perspective, what I’m describing is not new. But the information does highlight the significance of John’s story about Jesus. Jesus is a wisdom figure in that vein of Axial spiritual teachers (chronicled in such illustrative detail by Karen Armstrong in The Great Transformation) who has realized that another human path is not only possible, such a path is absolutely necessary. Otherwise, our species will likely not survive, and neither will so many of the other magnificent and irreplaceable creatures with whom we share this sphere.
John’s story of Jesus is the genesis of a new kind of spiritual path arising in Judaism – a revolutionary mystical path that offers homo sapiens a chance for our survival instinct not to be destroyed (which is impossible), but to be transformed by being incorporated into a larger Reality (John 17:21, “that all may be one”).
If this path is to be fruitful, then Christianity will need to discover how to form faith-communities that are sources of instinctual transformation, rather than belief-clubs that reinforce the fear and prejudice and destruction deeply rooted in our species. This is complex, and my focus is simply one questioning thread within evolution’s tapestry: why do we exist as a Christian community? Even more fundamentally, what is it that is utterly unique about spiritual communities? What do they have to offer humanity that is absolutely necessary? The answer, as far as I can tell, has to do with realizing that our love of life needs to mature into the love of Being, which includes, yet transcends, the love of our bodily self.
I believe that the one gift that a spiritual community can offer that is utterly unique, is that of being an experiential school providing an effective path for a soul to realize her true nature as a manifestation of Being. My sense is that this describes John’s community (as well as that of Thomas). John’s gospel has its own language to express this realization – Jesus comes to know himself as the Word become flesh. In John’s experience, when God speaks, the Logos manifests, and in history Jesus comes to be as the Logos. (Remember, this is poetry, not prose.)
As I unpack the poetic insight of John, the Deep resounds and the song that is life sings. Each creature is a note of the Deep’s voice. There is no gap between the Deep and the Singing. Breath is expressed in sound and sound is shaped as word. Creatures are the sounding Words of God. A spirituality of Being is a radical and revolutionary mysticism in which all gaps disappear.
Radical means rooted. Each and every creature is rooted in and as Being. We are each word uniquely shaping the exhalation (the creating flowing forth) of Being. This means that spiritual communities essentially exist that we might realize this truth of our nature, and in this realization become enraptured with the song of creating. Spiritual communities exist to invite us to fall in love with the moist breath of Being arising from our own depths – a Deep Source that never dies.
In his captivating book, Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic, Adyashanti writes in the spirit of John. He recognizes that “religion’s primary function is not about conveying ethical and moral codes”; it is “not about politics and power and hierarchy.” No, religion’s “primary function is to awaken within us the experience of the sublime and to connect us with the mystery of existence. As soon as religion forgets about its roots in the eternal, it fails in its central task.” And with that failing we are reduced to bestial destruction, with spirituality becoming a hollow shell of strident moral righteousness justifying the ego’s fears and desires to perpetuate the existence of our bodily self at all costs.
If we, as homo sapiens, do not awaken to the sublime and realize our connection with the Holy Mystery of existence, which is Being, we will not know how to touch each other, and the creatures of creation, tenderly. Without our connection with the Holy Mystery of existence, we will continue our history of the destruction of life. But, with our direct realization that the mystery of Being is our true nature, then it becomes possible for us to mature, like Jesus, into revolutionary mystics. We become no longer preoccupied with the defensive protection of our small bodily self. We develop the capacity to be open to touch and healing in the face of threat. We become – not imitators of Jesus – but living, creative, Christs, where Word touches Word, and bodily death is incapable of harming or destroying Being.
~ Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.
Read 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“. Visit Kevin’s Blog: Essential Living: For The Soul’s Journey
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Question & Answer
Q: By Helen
What do you make of St. Matthew 25?
A: By Bishop John Shelby Spong
Dear Helen,
Since the dominant narrative in the 25th Chapter of Mathew is the parable of The Judgment in which Jesus is purported to tell of that final moment when the Son of Man comes to separate the sheep from the goats, I assume that this is the content to which you are referring.
The standard of judgment that is used as the basis of judgment comes as a surprise to both groups. Neither the sheep that were to be rewarded nor the goats that were to be punished seemed to know when it was they had done or not done the determinative deeds of feeding, clothing and visiting the Son of Man. The powerful conclusion was that "in as much as ye have done" (or not done) these acts of kindness "to the least of these" who are our brothers and sisters, you have done them to the Son of Man.
It is a provocative parable. It suggests that the only way you can love God is to love your fellow human beings. The only way you can serve God is to serve the people of God's world. It points to the reality, recognized so powerfully by the prophet Amos, that the worship of God is nothing but human justice offered to God, and that human justice is nothing but the worship of God being acted out. This means that a religious system treating any human being out of a prejudiced definition, and thereby diminishing that person's humanity, cannot possibly be of God.
It means that no one can rejoice in another's misfortune. It means that in the sight of God Iraqi casualties of war are as precious in the eyes of God as American casualties of war.
This parable makes contact with that essential definition of God found in the first Epistle of John. "God is love and whoever abides in love abides in God."
I am not impressed with the reward and punishment aspects of this parable. I think they reflect a rather outdated idea of God who is involved in behavior control. I do not think people mature if they do anything for either reward or punishment. The call of God in Christ is in my mind a call to step into a new humanity, beyond tribe and prejudice and all human definition of worth and status, so that each of us might be enabled to give away our love to others without stopping to evaluate whether our love is deserved. That is the meaning of Matthew 25 to me.
~ Bishop John Shelby Spong
Published November 19, 2003
Read and share online here
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Fourth Fundamental:
Miracles and the Resurrection, Part V
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
October 10, 2007
Did Jesus literally and physically walk out of his grave, restored to life, on the third day following his crucifixion? Those who drafted the Five Fundamentals thought so and insisted that anyone who did not say a convincing “yes” to that proposition could no longer claim to be a Christian. The resurrection of Jesus in a physical, bodily form was thought of as the central miracle, the one unwavering truth to which all must adhere. It gives one a sense of how badly eroded these fundamental convictions have become in our time when we realize that no reputable biblical or theological scholar today would be willing to assert that the resurrection of Jesus must be understood as a physical resuscitation of his dead body to live again inside the life of this world. Unfortunately, most people are not biblical scholars and they do not realize that this interpretation of the Easter experience that turns it into a narrative about the three days dead Jesus literally walking out of the tomb is the product of the third Christian generation and finds its origin primarily in the late ninth and early tenth decades when the gospels of Luke and John were written. This resuscitated body was never the transformative experience that occurred at some point after the crucifixion and that convinced Jesus’ disciples that something about his life transcended the ultimate barrier of death and opened a pathway into the eternity of God.
Paul, the first writer in the New Testament knows of no resuscitated body. He does say that “if Christ be not raised we of all people are the most to be pitied.” The question is, however, what did he mean by the word “raised?” We note first that Paul always uses a passive word for the resurrection. Jesus never rises for Paul, God always raises him. God is the one who initiates the action. Jesus is the one acted upon. So the question becomes: to what did God raise Jesus? For Paul it was clearly that God raised him into what God is, that is into the eternal presence out of whom Jesus could manifest himself to certain chosen witness. In Romans (1:1-4), Paul states this very overtly. God designated or declared Jesus, to be the Son of God by the action of “the spirit of holiness” in raising him, not from death back to life in this world, but from death into God. Resurrection and ascension were two parts of the same action for Paul. Later when resurrection was changed to mean resuscitation, a means to get Jesus back into the life of God had to be developed. That is what accounted for the 10th decade narrative of Jesus ascending into the sky. When the minds of first century Christians tried to conceptualize their experience it was almost inevitable that they would in time literalize these symbols, but that was not the way this life changing experience was first understood.
A second piece of Pauline writing develops this point even further with two specific references: In I Corinthians 15, written perhaps three years before the epistle to the Romans, Paul makes it clear that resurrection had nothing to do with a physically resuscitated body. He says, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.” He talks about a spiritual body growing out of the physical like a stalk of corn grows out of a seed. He stretches vocabulary almost to a breaking point to say that resurrection is real, but it is not physical. Later in that same epistle Paul lists those to whom the raised Christ “made himself known.” That word is frequently translated “appeared,” making people think of a physical encounter when the word more closely means “was made manifest” and suggests that the viewer has had his or her eyes opened to see a new reality. It has a sense about it of infinite sight, an insight or a second sight. Paul’s list of those to whom the raised Christ was made manifest is fascinating in many ways: Cephas (i.e. Peter) is first, and then come “the Twelve.” Please note that the group identified as “the Twelve” still apparently includes Judas Iscariot. Paul dates the resurrection “on the third day” by which time it would have been quite impossible for a replacement for Judas to have been elected.
Indeed Luke says the choice of Matthias to replace Judas Iscariot did not take place for weeks. It is interesting to trace the origins of the story of the betrayal. It makes its first appearance when Paul dates the Last Supper as having occurred “on the night he was handed over.” It is the word translated “handed over,” that was later rendered betrayed, that becomes the catalyst around which the narrative about Judas Iscariot developed. Judas Iscariot does not appear to have been an original part of the earliest Christian story. There is no other reference to a betrayal in the entire Pauline corpus. It is quite obvious that Paul did not know the tradition that one of the Twelve had been a traitor. That narrative begins only in Mark. Paul’s list of “witnesses” continues with the mention of “500 brethren,” a story that has no counterpart in any gospel.
Then it moves to James who is unidentified. Is this James Zebedee, James the son of Alphaus or James the brother of Jesus?
The consensus among scholars today is that this is James the brother of Jesus, who became the leader of the church in Jerusalem and Paul’s adversary. Next come “the Apostles.” Who are they? Paul has already listed “the Twelve.” Is this a different group? Finally, Paul lists himself as one to whom Jesus was made manifest. Paul’s conversion is placed by most scholars between one and six years after the crucifixion. Paul could not have possibly seen a resuscitated, physical body. The book of Acts calls Paul’s “seeing of the Lord” a vision on the road to Damascus. While Paul himself does not mention the road to Damascus, he does talk about an ecstatic experience in which he was lifted to the “third heaven,” where he saw things that people do not normally see. Reading Paul convinces the scholars that resurrection understood as a physically resuscitated body was not an idea that Paul ever entertained. Recall that Paul wrote between the years 50 and 64.
Mark, writing in the early years of the 8th decade, never relates an account of the raised Christ appearing to anyone. He just confronts his readers with an empty tomb, a symbol of the conviction that death cannot contain him. Matthew, writing in the early to mid 9th decade takes the first step toward a physical understanding of resurrection when he portrays the women in the garden as being capable of grasping the feet of Jesus. My perception is that one cannot grasp feet that are not physical.
Two things, however, call Matthew’s accuracy in this instance into question. First, he has quite deliberately changed Mark’s narrative upon which he bases his entire gospel.
In Mark the women never see anything other than an empty tomb. Matthew has thus altered his original source. Luke, who also has Mark in front of him as he writes, follows Mark’s text accurately. In Luke the women do not see the raised Christ.
Even if one is a biblical literalist one has to face the fact that in the New Testament, by a two to one vote, this story in Matthew is regarded as an inaccurate alteration of the original text.
The second thing that calls into question the accuracy of Matthew’s story of the woman seeing a physical, raised Jesus in the garden is that in this gospel’s only other resurrection narrative it is clearly not a resuscitated, physical Jesus who meets with the disciples. It is rather a vision of a glorified Christ who comes out of the sky robed in all of the messianic symbols that were traditionally attached to the Son of Man who would inaugurate the Kingdom of God. This visionary Christ comes to give the disciples the great commandment that launched the church. It is clearly not a resuscitated body, but a transformed, glorified one. Please recall that when Matthew wrote, no account of Jesus’ ascension had yet entered the developing Christian story. When we discover that in our earliest New Testament sources of Paul and Mark there is no physical, bodily seeing of the raised Jesus, then it becomes obvious that the physicality of the resurrected body is a later development of the tradition. Mark’s women confront the emptiness of the tomb, hear a resurrection announcement given by a young man in a white robe and then flee in fear saying nothing to anyone, despite the fact that the messenger had instructed them to go to Galilee with the promise that Jesus would meet him there. Is this to be understood as the promise to meet Jesus in some resurrected, physical form in Galilee? Or is it the eternal command to return home to one’s roots if one is to encounter the holy? In time it was certainly read in the former sense, but the evidence points to the latter sense being the original meaning.
When one comes to the late ninth and tenth decades writing of the gospels of Luke and John, the seeing of the raised Lord has surely become physical. The flesh of his raised body can be physically touched. Indeed Jesus invites them to do so, maintaining that he is not a ghost since ghosts do not have flesh and blood. This raised Jesus eats, demonstrating a functioning gastro-intestinal system, he talks, teaches and interprets Scripture, demonstrating functional vocal chords, larynx and brain, and he walks with Cleopas and his friend on the road to Emmaus revealing a functioning skeletal system. The resurrection is now understood as a very physical phenomenon. Yet both Luke and John indicate that these images may be more symbolic than real since they also add very non-physical dimensions to the resurrected Jesus. In Luke, the body of Jesus can materialize out of thin air and it can also disappear in the same manner. In John, Jesus can enter the locked and barred upper room without bothering to open the doors.
To turn the conviction that Jesus has somehow transcended the ultimate barrier of death and broken its power into a literal narrative about the resuscitation of a deceased body was probably inevitable, given the human need to use words to talk about life changing experiences. There are, however, great amounts of textual evidence that this was clearly not what Easter meant originally. What then did it mean? That is my topic for next week’s column.
~ John Shelby Spong
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Announcements
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Beloved Festival, August 9-12, 2019
Tidewater Falls, OR
Beloved is a 4-Day Sacred Art, Movement, and Music Festival on the Oregon Coast. Beloved is a healing event, intended to experiment with new models for culture.
In the troubled times in which we live, people become divided against each other and can more easily feel isolated and separated from the Soul of the World. At Beloved, we become a sudden, mystical community where everyone can feel the touch of spirit while also deepening the soul of community.
Click here for more information ... |
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