HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR Wakey Poem Sermon Rev. Roger Wolsey “P” is for Poetry To better help people understand the difference between liberal Christianity and progressive Christianity, I’ve referred to what I call the “The 11 Ps of Progressive Christianity“: * Postmodern * Passionate * Poetic * Prophetic/Political * Prayerful * Practical/Practice/Praxis/orthoPraxy * Paradoxical * Pro-LGBTQI * Peaceful/Pacifist * Panentheistic * Pluralistic. It is the third of those three that I intend to convey at this time. Over the years I’ve put forth the following assertions: “..Christians rightfully honor and celebrate Jesus as a unique and fully incarnate (poetically speaking) manifestation (poetically speaking) of God. We are devoted to him, we cherish him, we revere him, we are endeared to him. But we pray to the God Jesus prayed to, not to Jesus. Being a Christian is putting our trust and reliance (having faith) in the way, teachings, and example of Jesus (that was informed and inspired by the Hebrew prophets before him) and to live with holy boldness as we seek loving and just right relations with ourselves, our neighbors (near and far), all of Creation, and with God.” Nov. 2, 2013 “People today know that theology is poetry – and that it provides meaning – not facts.” – May 14, 2015 “The trinity is a beloved Christian poem of who God is to us. But poems don’t literally define things. Like all art, and theology, they point to what is beyond them.” – May 21, 2015 Fr. Richard Rohr wrote: “All language about God is necessarily symbolic and figurative. ..The Bible uses metaphors for God, such as rock and shepherd. Jesus describes himself metaphorically as the bread of life and the light of the world. The Spirit is portrayed as breath and wind. God is not literally a rock or an actual shepherd on a hillside somewhere, yet we need these images to “imagine” the unsayable Mystery.” – January 11, 2017 And I put it even more simply as “The Bible is poetry. All theology is. The sooner people realize that, the fewer arguments and the less conflict we will have.” Dec. 6, 2017 Granted, a case could be made that this last remark is a bit overstated, but I let it be clear that cases supporting it can readily be put forth as well. Bottom line: progressive Christians are called to error on the side of multi-valent interpretations understandings instead of on the side of legalistic and exclusivistic ones. I’m going to share a “spoken-Word” slam poetry sermonette that I preached about this time last year. It is as true now as it was then – frankly, even more so. You may notice the other “10 Ps” infused within. Wakey-Wakey! “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…” What in the dickens did he know? What did he know? He knew what time it was. That tale of twin towns was the time right before the French revolution and all that led up to it… Do we know what time it is? I said do we know what time it is? Some of us thought we did. We thought it’s the time of the dawning of the idyllic age of Aquarius. We imagined we’re entering a utopian new age of “higher consciousness” We dreamed it’s the era of ever-integrating, spiritually elitist spiral dynamics where people deemed “green” are “more evolved” than those deemed orange, blue, red… and so on! ,,,, Ain’t nobody got time for that! And we fantasized a rise of “Indigo Children” – a new generation of super sensitive more fully evolved humanity present among us! Yeah right. The past 8 weeks [12 months] have shown us who we really are and what time it really is. On the left and on the right – we’re a bunch of freaked-out Henny Penny Chicken Little’s running around with our heads cut off hollering, “The sky is falling!, Abandon ship! It’s the end! Let’s move to Canada!” All 9 Enneagram types have regressed to our respective stress and fear states — and brother — that ain’t good. ‘Cause if we’re stressing and act out of fear we manifest the monsters that we loathe and despise. Our demons become self-realizing prophesies and none of us look like the beautiful souls we really are. Instead, of intentional deep thinking about what time it really is, we react pell-mell! — Pell-Mell: “In disorderly confusion; rushed with reckless haste. “The contents of the sacks were thrown pell-mell to the ground” Like a hyper-reactive human pinball game with deadly consequence… Pell-mell — we react to the xenophobic rhetoric and scapegoating of Jews and allow them to be sent off to be gassed Pell-mell – we attack a naval fleet in Hawaii Pell-mell – we drop atomic bombs on cities in Japan Pell-mell — we create the modern state of Israel Pell-mell – we commandeer Palestinian lands and bulldoze Palestinian homes Pell-mell – we wage war on Israel with volleys of rocks and rockets. Pell-mell – we fly planes into buildings in New York killing 2,977. Pell-mell — we invade Iraq without just cause resulting in 251,000 deaths Pell-mell — we create ISIS to fill the vacuum of leadership that invasion caused Pell-mell — we react assuming the worst about black citizens who might be criminal suspects, shooting first and asking questions later. Pell-mell — we ambush innocent cops as vigilante justice for what other cops in other states did to black citizens saying, “if black lives don’t matter, then neither do blue!” Pell-mell – we rally for white supremacy without white robes and hoods in Charlottesville, and pell-mell – we ironically don we now our black masked apparel seeking to punch Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in the face Pell-mell – we shoot hundreds of country music fans in Vegas, and Pell-mell – we buy AR-15s in record numbers and stocks in bump-stocks skyrocket like never before!] Pell-mell – we elect a human-aggravated blowhard who pledges to unleash more coal-burned global warming gasses into the sky Pell-mell – we fricken frack turtle island and threaten our aquifers with oil, gas, and fracking fluids containing chemicals they still won’t name. Pell-mell – we focus all of our energy to prevent one pipeline from being constructed … as an Indian-headed token wooden Burning Man nickel so that we can absolve ourselves from not saying a damn thing about the other pipelines that are being planned and constructed during the time we’ve been virtually standing with Standing Rock with our armchair activism – and as a palliative pill that helps us sleep at night after taking our sweet time to provide clean water to the people of Flint! The lead sinkered sacrifice of a population of mostly black fellow citizens – mitakuye oyasin (mitakia wahsan) “all our relations”- – on our watch! On our watch… on our watch… tic toc tic toc ….zzzzz …But it’s not time to sleep people. It’s time to wake-up! It’s time to get woke! Getting woke means gaining perspective – historically and spiritually. It’s time to get historical perspective – seeing that at 240 years, we’re but a teenager within the global family of nations. It’s time to wake up to see that our collective torrid twitter tantrum is an adolescent rebellion. Teens do dumb stuff. They push limits, test boundaries, and act impulsively – with brains that aren’t fully developed. Their frontal lobes haven’t thickened to put a needed check to their hormonal outbursts and eruptions. The global community looks on with dismay – but they aren’t freaking out. They raise their eyes and roll them. They’ve seen it all before. Over the centuries, they’ve seen imperial young bucks flex their muscles, thump their chests, and strut around like cocky red bulls in a china shop with impetuous arrogant swagger saying that they’re Number One & that God Bless Whateverica has a special hard-on for them. The world wise web knows that we learn and grow through the dynamic process of * thesis * antithesis * synthesis. Thesis – learning the cultural norms, values, and conventions that are presented Antithesis – rejecting those norms, values, and conventions Synthesis – reinterpreting norms, values, and conventions in new ways, with needed adjustments, on our own terms in our own ways that make sense today. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. And are we ever in the midst of antithesis. We, changed our clocks back for Daylights Savings Time and then we pell-mell voted to set progress back 50 years or more! And it’s time to get spiritual perspective – seeing that we don’t have to view chaos as unwelcome or to be avoided. Seeing that chaos is an essential part of real authentic life. We don’t need to numb and distract ourselves with television or drugs of choice to take the constant edges off — instead we can own and shred the edge! we can learn to be with it we can grow toward being a less anxious presence we can learn to calmly tread water amidst the chaotic floods we can learn to relax, float, and breathe though we’re surrounded by the dangerous derelict debris of political, economic, and environmental train-wrecks we can learn to see that “this too shall pass” we can embrace Sojourner’s truth that “Hope is believing in spite of the evidence — and watching the evidence change.” I’ve seen things of great value lost – We don’t know what we have until it’s gone … get found again – and then transform into something entirely different and unexpected. “No one saw that coming!” Can I have a witness? We can learn to see that we can help hope’s evidence change by applying the theory of Spiritual Relativity You know it right! E = ??? … E= MC2! E – the Energy to do what it takes to move us into action toward health and transformation M – the MASS of US! The collective all of us. Combined we have mass – critical mass. The people together shall not be defeated! C – the constant. What’s the constant? C is L. The constant is Love — and squaring it is redundant – just a poetic flourish. And we have enough of it to inspire and move us from freaked … to fine. and C is also G — God. God is love. And there’s no fear in love. And nothing can separate us from the love of God. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below— (Romans 8:38-9) Nor a trumped-up bragadocious oligarchical ginger white-bred Corinthian leather wrapped, faux-wood veneered alt right administration! Love is what defines us we were born in love we live in love we die in love and rest assured love is where we’ll find ourselves whatever may happen after that! We weren’t given a spirit of fear or timidity but of power and love (2 Tim 1:7) Sometimes love is tough. And when you’re trying to raise a teenager- it’s time for tough love and logic. Our self-parenting love calls us to set boundaries and provide a container where we remind ourselves that there is such a thing as facts and facts matter There is such a thing as lying and telling the truth matters There is such a thing as nepotism, good ‘ol boy cronyism, and Richy Rich oligarchy and plutocracy – and they’re to be resisted! There is such a thing as Civil Rights There is such a thing as the rule of law There is such a thing as science There is such a thing as global warming There is such a thing as good stewardship of Creation There is such a thing as grace There is such a thing as God And when we aren’t perfect in love, when we do fear, when we forget about perspective, energy, hope and love, may we take turns reminding each other of who and Whose we are. We have the time. The time is now. Like Jesus’ mother Mary, let us ponder these things in our hearts and may we know when it’s time to become great with child and know when it’s time to give birth to who we really are — and grow past our adolescence into the full maturity of God’s people – God’s grown-ass men and women. Amen. ~ Rev. Roger Wolsey Originally preached Dec. 4, 2016 at Wesley Chapel, Boulder, CO [Updated Dec. 11, 2017] Read the essay online here. About the Author Rev. Roger Wolsey is an ordained United Methodist pastor who directs the Wesley Foundation at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is author of Kissing Fish: christianity for people who don’t like christianity; The Kissing Fish Facebook page; Roger’s Blog on Patheos “The Holy Kiss” Question & Answer A Reader from the Internet, asks: Question: What does the Advent season call us to do in troubled times? Answer: By Rev. Irene Monroe Dear Reader, A Trump presidency is what I can best depict as a “disastrous opportunity,” because it encourages an intersectional dialogue as well as activism against potential erosion if not dismantling of decades-long civil rights gains. Americans on the margins have the most to lose in a country pivoting away from their full protections and participation in a multicultural democracy. However, while I am nervous I am also reminded of the 1960’s. During the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960's, "the voice of one crying out in the wilderness" was the clarion call for justice. The voice that was heard articulated the trials and tribulations of black suffering under an unyielding reign of white supremacy in the United States. One voice in the movement was occasionally heard more loudly than others: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who represented African Americans' collective voices crying out in the wilderness of America's racism. In the inimitable rhetorical style of the African-American jeremiad tradition, King's voice crying out in the wilderness of American racism is most remembered from his "I Have a Dream" speech. Like John the Baptist, who prepared the way for Jesus' public ministry in this gospel, the force and the momentum of the Civil Rights movement prepared the way for King's ministry. And like the way that John the Baptist's public preaching is most remembered and revered in this gospel where he quotes the prophet Isaiah, King, too, quoted the same words of the prophet Isaiah. Standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, speaking to a crowd of over 200,000, he said, "I have a dream that one day . . . 'every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plains, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.'" King saw America "in the wilderness" in that time when life was divided along a color line into distinctly black-and-white terms. And the wilderness experience of the 1960's for us Americans was due to racism. As a geophysical reality, the wilderness was the U.S. South. And the South represented a place unsuited for human habitation. It was a place of danger, inhospitality, marauding Ku Klux Klansmen, and ongoing chaos. During the time of King's address, the Southern states had long systematized a peculiar brand of justice with its "separate but equal" laws that allowed for separate drinking fountains, restrooms, restaurants, hotels, etc. The South was a place where the entire country could watch African Americans being subdued by blazing-water hoses or being charged by aggressive German shepherds on national television. But at night, when no one was watching, the Ku Klux Klan rode through black neighborhoods to burn their property and/or them, brandishing fire and terror as symbols of white supremacy. However, racism did not just situate itself unabashedly in the South, it also colored life in the North, albeit differently and less visibly. And although segregationist practices directly violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, the federal government exerted little to no effort to enforce these amendments -- in either North or South. The wilderness, therefore, functions as multiple sites, and it can heal us as a people -- both the oppressed and the oppressor. The wilderness should not be seen as a permanent place in which one resides or into which one falls and gets stuck, but rather as a place of transition and growth, where radical transformation can take place. It should be used as an interpretative lens to look at reality from an involved, committed stance in light of a faith that does justice. The wilderness is where you see the face of the damned, the dispossessed, the disinherited, and the disrespected, and know that is your starting place. And for those in the wilderness, it is a space where liberation begins. The wilderness gives you the agency to effect change on your own behalf. It offers an oppositional gaze from which you can honestly critique the oppressive structures in society that keep us separated from who and what we are as the body of Christ. Advent invites us to journey into the wilderness. It does not invite us into the wilderness to put us on a road without signposts or a road map; instead, Advent invites us to journey into the wilderness as a shared experience of struggle, discovery, enlightenment, community, and liberation. It is only in a shared wilderness experience that the "voice of one crying out in the wilderness" becomes many and is heard. The Silence Breakers are the TIME person for 2017. It started with one voice that is now many and a worldwide #Me Too movement speaking out against sexual harassment and assault. ~ Rev. Irene Monroe Read and share online here About the Author The Reverend Monroe is an ordained minister. She does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on WGBH (89.7 FM), a Boston member station of National Public Radio (NPR), that is now a podcast, and a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS (NECN). Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists (Boston) - Detour Monroe’s a Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist. Her columns appear in cities across the country and in the U.K, Ireland, Canada. Monroe writes a column in the Boston home LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and Opinion pieces for the Boston Globe. Monroe stated that her "columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As an religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Because homophobia is both a hatred of the “other ” and it’s usually acted upon ‘in the name of religion,” by reporting religion in the news I aim to highlight how religious intolerance and fundamentalism not only shatters the goal of American democracy, but also aids in perpetuating other forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, classism and anti-Semitism.” 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. _________________________________________________ Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited The Meaning of the Christmas Myths It is a beautiful time of the year. The celebration is in full swing. The symbols, some sacred, some quite secular, mingle in the market place: Bethlehem and the North Pole, the Angel Gabriel and Rudolf, the Heavenly Host and Santa's reindeer, crèche scenes and Christmas trees. It is also a season in which light hurls back the darkness of the winter solstice. Christmas captures our imaginations as few things ever do. Unfortunately the religious minds of our generation believe that these traditions can be protected from erosion only if they are literalized. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The deepest meaning of this season can never really be understood until literal claims have been laid aside. Jesus' birth was not something that occurred on a silent and holy night in the little town of Bethlehem. No star announced his birth and no angels sang of peace on earth. These mythical details rather embody a beautiful and eternal human dream that we enter symbolically year after year. Let me briefly analyze the data. Bethlehem as the birthplace of Jesus was a late developing part of the Jesus story that did not appear until the writing of the Gospel of Matthew in the 9th decade of the Christian era, when people began to claim that since Jesus was the anticipated messiah, he had to be the heir to the 'throne of David.' That idea carried with it the assumption that this future leader had to be born in the "City of David." The early Christians found scriptural authority for this claim in the prophet Micah, an 8th century BCE figure, who had written " But you O Bethlehem, who are little to be among the clans of Judah, but from you shall come forth from me one who is to be the ruler of Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days." Matthew had the scribes of Herod quote this text to the Wise Men as he directed them to Bethlehem. So important to Matthew was Jesus' royal lineage that he opened his gospel with a long genealogy, that we call the 'who begat whom' chapter, to document this claim. So Matthew tells his readers that Mary and Joseph actually lived permanently in a house in Bethlehem. It was such a specific house that a star could stop and shine directly on it to guide the wise men to their destination. It was a house that Matthew says they had to abandon when informed in a dream that their child was at risk from King Herod, who like the Pharaoh of old, was destroying Jewish male babies in an attempt to wipe out the promised deliverer. It was a house to which this family could return from Egypt when they heard that Herod had died. It was a house they abandoned once again when they learned that Herod's brother, who was equally dangerous, was now on the throne. This time they fled to Galilee and that, Matthew implies, is how Jesus just happened to grow up in Nazareth and why he became known as a Galilean and a Nazarene. Matthew's myth of Jesus' birth presents him as a new Moses, so that as God once led the chosen people out of Egypt, so God could now lead the chosen messiah out of Egypt. This narrative so clearly serves Matthew's apologetic purpose that it cannot be confused with history. The overwhelming probability is that Jesus was born in Nazareth, which is the clear assumption in Mark, the earliest gospel. Matthew, who had Mark before him when he wrote, is the one who altered the tradition. Luke, writing near the end of the 9th decade or perhaps even early in the 10th decade (88-93 CE), treated the developing Bethlehem tradition quite differently. Like Mark, Luke is quite clear that Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth. However, he too must address the growing idea that Jesus, as messiah, is the heir to the Royal line of David. So Luke seeks to temper his story of Jesus' Nazareth origins (which were becoming too humble a place of birth for so great a person) to accommodate the Bethlehem tradition. His literary device for doing this was a census that he dates by saying it was ordered by Caesar Augustus when Quirinius was governor of Syria. This census, by which "all the world was to be enrolled," required, according to Luke, that every male person must return to his ancestral home to be registered. This meant, said Luke, that Joseph had to go to Bethlehem, a 94-mile journey from Nazareth, for he was of the house of David. So Joseph just happened to be in Bethlehem when his wife delivered her first-born child. Through this accident of history, Luke argues, the scriptures were fulfilled in Jesus. It was a very ingenious solution indeed since it enabled Luke to combine Jesus' obvious Nazareth origins with the fantasies building around Jesus, proclaiming him the Messiah born in the city of David. The most preliminary study will reveal, however, that the story is not history. Luke and Matthew, for example, both say that Herod was king at the time of the birth of Jesus. Since secular records reveal that Herod died in 4 BCE, this means that Jesus had to be born before this date. Luke then says that the enrollment, ordered by Caesar, came when Quirinius was governor of Syria. Secular records, however, reveal that Quirinius became governor of Syria in 6-7 CE, by which time Jesus would have been at least 10-11 years old. History begins to wobble visibly. Luke's theory required that this worldwide enrollment had to occur in the male person's ancestral home. This was the strangest literary wrinkle of all and would have required a massive dislocating migration. David, who had 300 wives, died about the year 960 BCE. Luke was asserting that all of the descendents of King David, whose number some 960 years later must have been legion, not only had to know this ancestral detail about themselves but they also had to make their way back to Bethlehem. This was a time in which human longevity made three generations a century normative, so we are talking about 27-30 generations of keeping family lines alive. To my knowledge no one, in that time when there were no birth or death certificates, to say nothing of marriage licenses, was that deeply into ancestor worship. It is also of interest that the genealogies of Jesus in both Matthew and Luke do not agree in almost any detail, including which of King David's sons constituted the royal line: it was Solomon says Matthew, Nathan says Luke. No one knows who Nathan is but if a man had as many wives as David, certainly one of his sons might have been called Nathan, or anything else for that matter. These genealogies also disagree on who Jesus' grandfather was: Jacob, says Matthew, Heli, says Luke. A final note that makes Luke's story clearly not history is that on this journey to Bethlehem Joseph was said to have taken his wife, who was "great with child." Why? To be enrolled? Women were not counted in a census, or registered for tax purposes. Women also did not normally travel. Given the mode of transportation available in that day, walking or riding a donkey, what man in his right mind would take an eight months plus pregnant woman on a 94 mile walk or donkey ride, that would normally take seven to ten days and in a world with no restaurants or hotels? One woman biblical scholar, on reading this observed, "Only a man who had never had a baby could have written such a story." No, the Bethlehem birthplace of Jesus is not history. It is part of the later developing mythology that gathered around the origins of Jesus. A person as significant as Jesus was believed to be when these later gospels were written could not have had an ordinary birth; so Matthew and Luke, 50 to 60 years after the crucifixion, freed their imaginations and created these miraculous tales that form our Christmas stories. Once the mythical content of the Bethlehem birthplace is established, all the other details of these birth narratives fall as literal history. Ancient astrologers did not follow a star announcing the birth of a Jewish king, especially one that no one recognized as a king until well after his death. Recall that Matthew says later that this king was also a carpenter's son. Nor do angels sing to hillside shepherds, propelling them on a similar journey to search for a baby. Luke gives the shepherds only two clues. The baby would be wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. We do both the Bible and human scholarship a grave disservice when we try to literalize and make history out of these interpretative myths, created by the second or third generation of those who were the disciples of this Jesus. No reputable biblical scholar in the world today, Catholic or Protestant, treats these narratives of Matthew and Luke as history. It is time the church said that publicly. Why do we then keep these stories and repeat them every year if they are not factually true? That is usually the question of an adult who has had his or her fairy tale religion shaken. The answer is simple. Truth is so much bigger than literalism. The meaning of Santa Claus, who receives his greatest joy by giving gifts to children, is not dependent on there being a literal fat elf dressed in red who lives in a place to which we can never go. Some human experiences are so large, so real, so life changing and so defining that the words used to describe those moments must break open the imagination if they are to capture this kind of truth. That is what myth does. That is what the biblical stories of Jesus' birth are all about. There was something present in this Jesus, they said, that opened human lives to new dimensions of reality. Human beings could never have produced what we have experienced in Jesus. In him, they exclaimed, we believe that we have met eternity breaking into time, transcendence entering the mundane, the divine in the life of the human. If that is our experience with the adult Jesus, then his birth must have been marked with heavenly signs that drew people to him. That is what these stories are trying to say. Our task is not to master the details or to pretend that myths are history. It is rather to enter the experience that caused the myths surrounding his birth to be born, to be transformed by that life and to become a new creation through that experience. If that occurs, these early Christians were saying, we too will see the star of Bethlehem, hear angels sing, and like the wise men and shepherds of old, begin our journey toward the mystery and wonder of God. Bethlehem, the symbolic town where God and human life come together, is finally our human destiny. That is the meaning of Christmas. ~John Shelby Spong Originally published December 22, 2004 Announcements Why Christianity Is No Longer Believable – And How We Can Change That Pre-order John Shelby Spong’s final book, "Unbelievable" Five hundred years after Martin Luther and his Ninety-Five Theses ushered in the Reformation, bestselling author and controversial bishop and teacher John Shelby Spong delivers twelve forward-thinking theses to spark a new reformation to reinvigorate Christianity and ensure its future. ................