Reading
- from John Shelby Spong’s book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die.
‘We believe in God….’
Beginning with these words, the corporate faith of the Christian Church finds expression in the phrases of what it calls the Apostles’ Creed. That “we” who “believe in God” is made up of many individuals. I am one of them.
I define myself above all other things as a believer. I am indeed a passionate believer. God is the ultimate reality in my life. I live in a constant and almost mystical awareness of the divine presence. I sometimes think of myself as one who breathes the very air of God, or, to borrow an image from the East, as one who swims in the infinite depths of God’s inescapableness.” I am what I would call a God-intoxicated human being.
Yet, when I seek to put my understanding of this God into human words, my certainty all but disappears. Human words always contract and diminish my God awareness. They never expand it.
The God I know is not concrete or specific. This God is rather shrouded in mystery, wonder, and awe. The deeper I journey into this divine presence, the less any literalized phrases, including the phrases of the Christian creed, seem irrelevant. The God I know can only be pointed to; this God can never be enclosed by propositional statements.
The words of the Apostles’ Creed, and its later expansion known as the Nicene Creed, were fashioned inside a worldview that no longer exists. Indeed, it is quite alien to the world in which I live. The way reality was perceived when the Christian creeds were formulated has been obliterated by the expansion of knowledge. That fact is so obvious that it hardly needs to be spoken. If the God I worship must be identified with these ancient creedal words in any literal sense, God would become for me not just unbelievable, but in fact no longer worthy of being the subject of my devotion. I am not alone in this conclusion. Indeed, I am one of a countless host of modern men and women for whom traditional religious understandings have lost most of their ancient power. We are that silent majority of believers who find it increasingly difficult to remain members of the church and still be thinking people. The Church does not encourage us in this task. That institution seems increasingly brittle and therefore not eager to relate its creeds as a set of symbols that must be broken open so that the concept of God can be embraced by new possibilities.
Postmodern people who know the depths of human interconnectedness, who understand psychological wounding and blessing, cannot be moralistic in the way that these traditional creedal images of judgment have always assumed.
I do not believe that the Christological formula was set for all time… I believe that we Christians must … once again do the hard work of rethinking and redefining the Christ experience for our time and in words and concepts appropriate to our world. I would even favor the reopening of the debate between Arius and Athanasius on the nature of the Christ. I also support efforts to reexamine and perhaps even to transcend the trinitarian compromise, if those now-literalized words prove to be no longer capable of leading us into the experience of God toward which they originally pointed.
I am increasingly unimpressed with what people call “orthodox” Christianity. It has become a kind of religious straightjacket into which all Christians must be bound or face expulsion from the faith community by those who think of themselves as the true believers. To be called an orthodox Christian does not mean that one’s point of view is right. It only means that this point of view won out in the ancient debate.
I am convinced that the future of the Christian faith rests not on reasserting those words of antiquity, but on our ability to refashion the symbols by which Christianity is to be understood in our time. This would include rethinking its creedal patterns in the light of contemporary understandings of the world.
Search For Meaning – Trudi Olivetti
I grew up attending a Congregational church in Springfield, MA with my family. I was an enthusiastic participant throughout high school. I enjoyed the youth group, the discussions with our dynamic assistant minister, and many of the services. But the thing I remember most clearly from that long experience is not anything that was said, no expressed creed, but the sensations from the annual Christmas Eve service: the sound of the "Pastoral Symphony" from Handel's Messiah and the smell of the beeswax candles
we held.
My mother was raised as an Episcopalian, and sometimes I went with her to Christ Church Cathedral in Springfield, to sit in that vaulted space and hear that very fancy organ and choir. I enjoyed the ritual, the intoned chants, even the recited liturgy from the Book of Common Prayer. I was intensely interested in all this, but I have come to realize that what was "religious" to me was the poetry, the music, whatever expressed an idea of the sacred in a metaphorical or indirect way. Even though this awareness was for me
completely associated with Christianity, I have known for a long time that the experience of the sacred cannot be exclusive to one religion, that the myths and poetry of all faiths contain a revelation of truth at their core. That is why I am here.
Last June, along with a large group from our church, I attended the General Assembly of the UUA in Nashville. One thing that impressed me about the experience was the diversity of spiritual orientation. Most unexpected was the presence of UU's who regard themselves unabashedly as Christians and those who frankly acknowledge their Jewish Heritage. The UU Christian Fellowship and the UUs for Jewish Awareness came together to sponsor two lectures delivered by Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong. Joan will have
much to say about him shortly, but I want to tell you that the experience of hearing him speak was bracing, mind-bending and joyful.
Spong's argument, drawn from two of his many books, is that the entire Bible is composed of Jewish sacred stories. It is a written illustration of the special way in which Jewish stories are told, by means of layering and retelling the same God story, in different settings, for successive generations. This tradition of expanded storytelling, which exists in the Old Testament, is continued in the New.
Bishop Spong explains that, although the Gospels were written by Jews, after a certain point, only Gentiles were interpreting them. And the Jewish sacred story idea had been lost. The significant thing about this loss is that Christians began to ask the questions "Is it true?" "Did it happen?" In other words, they began to interpret the scriptures as history and literal fact, which has led, over the centuries, to rigid fundamentalism or vehement unbelief. Spong maintains that these are not the relevant questions to ask. The Bible needs to be reclaimed as stories with deep metaphorical content, artistic portraits and myths, with the same truth and wonder as is present in any work of art that moves us and illuminates our path.
I don't like to say directly what I believe. My reluctance always creates tension between me and my fundamentalist brother and sister-in-law. We do not speak the same language at all about religious matters, partly because what always seems to be required with them is a chapter and verse contest – I don't have the expertise. And it always feels to me that my plain prose is not eloquent enough to express my deepest beliefs. It seems to diminish the shining mystery of that truth which is ineffable. That is why the message of Spong appeals to me. I like his idea of reclaiming the bible, particularly the New Testament, as metaphor. It is a spiritual resource that has been lost to us, and would be of special value to those of us who grew up in the Christian faith, whether or not it was a positive experience.
Meditation – Two Poems by Romilda Wilder (Member of the church)
The Sixteenth of February, 1990
They were people in photos
Names and faces of people in that community—
Unitarian Church of Arlington
I wanted to be part of that community
But felt I shouldn’t
Until I could give myself to it
more often
more deeply
When I sit in that in that church, I feel I belong.
I don’t know the person on my left
I don’t know the person on my right
The back of the head in front of me belongs to a person
whose face I don’t recognize
whose name I don’t know.
Strangers.
But I do not feel strange
in the midst of these strangers.
I feel at home in this place
so far from my beginnings.
This is my community
I know it is
I need this community
And this community
Needs me.
A familiar hymn tune
But different words!
I can sing these words and mean them!
And I think of the thousands of times
As a child
As a teenager
As and adult
When I stood in the midst of people
whose faces were familiar
whose names I knew
Yet I felt strange.
There I stood
Year after Year
Hymnal in hand
Lying
Opening my mouth
To sing words I didn’t mean
Words I couldn’t mean
No matter how hard I tried.
Do you know the joy of being able to
tell the truth
with your songs?
The comfort of being home
even among strangers?
Hello, building—
I know you.
Hello, strips of color on the walls—
I know you.
Hello, dear Rubinesque woman in grey—
I know you, too.
Hello, familiar hymn tune—
I know you
by memory
And at least I can sing words I mean
and learn to know them
by heart!
Finally, I am home!
The Third of March, 1990
Sometimes there is a place inside of me
(In a quiet place that isn’t hard to reach
But requires much of my soul’s energy)
A knowing
About myself
And others’ selves
About hearts and hurts
About joys
So full they cause bursting
of body and mind.
In that same place there is
A lack of knowing
Of only guessing
At what might have been
And what could be.
This is the place that pushes me to
Read and watch things
About the holocaust
About wars
About child abuse
About death and dying.
This is the place that pushes me to
Listen to
Bach and mozart
And older people
And children.
This is the place that sends me messages about
Hugs
and Peace
and Touch
And Silence.
I’m not afraid to go to this place
Inside of me,
But there are times when going there
Takes me so far inside myself
I am filled with an awe which comes as close
To fear as anything can.
This is the place where I can go to dance
Without inhibition
Where nothing keeps me from moving
in any direction
Where I am never too large
And never too small.
And I’m wondering
If perhaps this place is what they call
God.
Sermon: “Change Agents in the Church:
A Series on Contemporary Voices for Reform”
2. Bishop John Shelby Spong
Many of you here today moved away from Christianity – away from membership in Protestant or Catholic churches – away from the traditional, even orthodox, religious teachings of your families.
So, here we are once again, at Christmas, that BIG enveloping holiday which points the whole world to Christianity’s central story, the birth of Jesus Christ, the Savior, the Messiah.
For Unitarian Universalists, there’s always some degree of discomfort with participation in Christmas. Most of us just sit back and enjoy the sensuous parade of pleasures that come along with the theology. Not to be taken seriously! A sweet story, surrounded with a panoply of secular delights.
For many years, this church has included as part of its annual family Christmas Eve service, our children re-enacting the Christmas Pageant. We have a manger with hay spread on the floor, up on this platform, along with cardboard donkeys and pigs that the children made in their RE classes. We have our own UU angels and shepherds. The 6- or 7-year-old boys wear long robes tied with ropes, their sneakers showing beneath the robes. They carry sticks that serve as shepherd staffs, which turn out to be great things to fiddle with when the whole things goes on too long, which usually happens 2 minutes into the Pageant. But they always remember to look up and point (if not all exactly in the same direction) when the Narrator says the shepherds looked up to see a very bright star in the sky.
Several little girls come in dressed as angels complete with homemade wings and haloes. Their hands are held together as if in prayer. Some haloes tip, some shoelaces are untied, some angels need to scratch an itchy place from time to time. Children are awfully cute, and we love watching them play the parts.
And, in true Unitarian Universalist fashion, our narrator makes sure to add this phrase to the story: “Some people believe…….” We participate and enjoy, and yet, at some crucial point, we distance ourselves.
Bishop John Shelby Spong tells us that this is also happening to many Christians these days.
And in order to win back those who have placed themselves in exile from the church – including himself – he wants to change the church.
He wants Christians to distinguish between the authentic Jesus tradition and the church’s theological development that has expanded the Jesus image beyond the one eyewitnesses could ever have recognized.
He sounds the alarm that “unexamined faith or a religious system that does not confront the real issues of credibility will never endure.”
And, he reminds us that the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century was an attempt to reformulate the Christian faith for a new era, but it was really, instead, an internal battle over issues of Church order. Because he’s looking for a reformation that goes much, much further, he says: “The time had not arrived in which Christians would be required to rethink the basic and identifying marks of Christianity itself. It is my conviction that such a moment is facing the Christian world today.”
Wow! David and Goliath!
Some of you know of Bishop Spong’s work. I thought that this time, now, right before Christmas, and here in a group of Unitarian Universalists, would be a really good time to get to know him better. He is an interesting link to Christianity for us, in this new millennium, for we are rational people who are operating outside of Christianity, and he is a rational person who is operating inside Christianity. Trudi and I were talking yesterday morning, and agreed that Bishop Spong seemed so much like a Unitarian Universalist, except for the fact that we left the traditional church, and he has chosen to remain in it and fight to reform it.
I can almost see him way back there during the first century, in those decades after Jesus died, getting together with all those Church “Fathers” to share the nature of the religious experience that surrounded the person of Jesus of Nazareth and try to articulate it. They were forming the basic theology of the new Christian Church. They would decide the nature of God and the nature of Jesus, and they would establish church dogma.
Bishop Spong would have sided with Bishop Arius, who at the time argued for “One God,” -- the unity of God, -- and, that Jesus was fully human but filled with the spirit of god. Arius was considered a heretic, and those who espoused his ideas later on – the Aryans – were early predecessors of those who would later adopt the name, “Unitarian.”
Spong is one of the new heretical voices for reform in today’s church.
John Shelby Spong, scholar, author, and bishop, is the most published member of the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church in the United States. He is author of 14 books, and over 90 published articles.
Born in 1931 in Charlotte, North Carolina, he was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1952, and received his Master of Divinity Degree in 1955 from the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia. He received honorary Doctor of Divinity degrees. He served as rector of Episcopal churches in Durham, and Tarboro, North Carolina, and in Lynchburg and Richmond, Virginia. In 1976 he was consecrated bishop, and served in the Diocese of Newark, New Jersey. Bishop Spong is now retired and is Scholar in Residence at Harvard University.
Let me give you a fast picture of this radical postmodern bishop – just by running through some of his book titles.
· Living in Sin?: A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality
· Born of a Woman: A bishop Rethinks the Virgin Birth and the Role of Women in a Male-Dominated Church
· This Hebrew Lord: A Bishop’s Search for the Authentic Jesus
· Resurrection: Myth or Reality?: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Easter
· Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes
· Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture.
In 1998, Bishop Spong attended what is called the Lambeth Conference in England, where the international Anglican Communion meets once every ten years. He became the focus of controversy at that meeting by proposing that gay and lesbian Christians be ordained in the Anglican Church.
He said that at that meeting, the effective leaders were clearly the representatives of the evangelical wing of the church. After a vote, Homosexuality was condemned as “non-scriptural,” and the cause of women priests and bishops was set back. Spong was deeply upset to see that yet again the conservatives were appealing to a literalized reading of the ancient biblical text to solve in a definitive way contemporary, complex moral issues. He saw it as an end to building, in our time, a modern and relevant Christianity.
He reflected on his Lambeth experience in an article titled, “Christianity Caught in a Time Warp”: “I need to say that if this expression of evangelical Christianity is to define the Anglican Communion of the future, I do not want to be part of it. I regard this expression of the religious right as an irrational, hysterical stage in the death throes of Christianity. If we cannot reassert the Anglican genius that reason must be an equal factor with scripture and tradition in shaping the Christian message in every generation, then Christianity as we know it is doomed. The Lambeth Conference convinced me completely that my call for a new reformation in the church is right on target and it showed me exactly why it is that Christianity must change or die.”
That is the title of his recent book that I read from earlier -- “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” He has said that it’s the end of his career summation of everything that he’s said and done and taught and stood for. I recommend it highly!
OK! In many ways, Bishop Spong is one of us. He’s a religious liberal who proactively supports liberal causes for Social Justice. As I know the wider Unitarian Universalist picture, and also the membership in this church, I’d say that’s where we are and what we do, also.
He does not accept the Bible’s authority, literally, as the word of God. He sees the Bible as a particular type of metaphorical human-made storytelling which fit into the limited knowledge and language resources available to people of that time. We agree there!
He finds fault with the basic Christian creed that people say by rote but which when examined he says, yields nonsense in terms of today’s understanding of the world.
I’ve heard newcomers to our church say things like that many times.
He rejects theism, which is a belief in an external, supernatural God. He calls it “an inoperative premise.” Many of us would agree.
We’ve had this God debate several times in Unitarian circles over a long period of time. The Transcendentalists, in the nineteenth century, brought into Unitarianism an awareness that God is not removed but within all of life -- within each person and within nature. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Humanism entered Unitarianism and set off the “god or no god” debate. God lost.
Spong speaks to what he calls “Believers in Exile,” even referring to them as “Postgraduate Christians.” Many of us here would agree that we UUs are postgraduates of traditional religious faith and practice, whether that be Christian, Jewish, or something else. And some of us are indeed what Spong calls “Believers in Exile,” those who need religion to speak to them in the contemporary context we now live in, intelligently, incorporating current knowledge, and in which they can still experience the sacred.
I think Spong has a significant message for Unitarian Universalists today. He speaks within the framework of the Christian Church, and yet, if we look deeply into some of what he is saying, we know we are having the same debate, once removed.
Let me tell you more about his ideas about God and then I’ll tell you how I see a similar thread among us now.
For Spong, the question he is dealing with is “Is it possible to be a Christian without being a theist?’ And for us, the question might be, “Is it possible to be a Humanist and to be spiritual at the same time?” They are reverse sides of the coin, but it is one coin.
I think we rational religionists are asking for the same thing – we want a mature spirituality without parking our minds at the door.
Spong wants to open up other avenues for exploring God…beyond theism.
He says that “believers in exile are forced to face the fact today that all Bibles, creeds, doctrines, prayers, and hymns are nothing but religious artifacts which were created to allow us to speak about our God experience at an earlier point in our history. But history has moved us to a place where the literal content of these artifacts is all but meaningless, the traditional definitions inoperative, and the symbols no longer competent pointers to reality.”
A lot of us would agree with what Spong says. That’s why we came to a Unitarian Universalist church in the first place. But the big difference is that Spong still speaks about getting to a God experience that is meaningful to individuals, and, up until recently Unitarian Universalists wouldn’t have expressed it quite like that like that, and they probably wouldn’t have used the word God.
But, you get into Spong’s ideas about God, forgetting the word itself, and, by golly, it’s an idea that has found favor right in this very sanctuary.
Here I quote his words, again: “…it is necessary to pose the religious questions not by pretending we have a source of divine revelation, but by looking at the human experience in a different way. Is there a depth dimension to life that is ultimately spiritual? If so, what is it? Is there a core to both our life and the life of the world that somehow links us to a presence we call ‘transcendent’ and ‘beyond’ (or, I might add, “larger than ourselves”) and that yet is never apart from who we are or what the world is? If so, what is it? Is there a presence in the heart of our life that could never be invoked as a being but nonetheless might be entered as a divine and infinite reality? If so, what is it? If we could open ourselves to such a reality, become intensely aware of it, and have both our being and our consciousness expanded by it, could we use the word God to describe that state of being? Could that still be a profound presence even if it were not defined as an external presence?”
Spong wants to contemplate new meanings and radically different figures of speech when it comes to the spiritual dimension of life. He points to the idea of god being an ultimate mystery, and that mystics of every religious tradition have always cried out against every specific definition of God, saying it is an interior rather than exterior journey.
Spong agrees with the theologian, Paul Tillich, once his teacher, who was convinced that there should be a moratorium declared on the use of the word “God” for a least a hundred years to rid it of the distorted and dying external images of yesterday’s prevalent ideas.
God, for Bishop Spong, is felt to be the “Ground of Being,” a phrase created by Tillich to mean life itself of which we are a part – an intrinsic part of each individual life, as well as of all life.
“It is,” says Spong, “the Source of Life and the Source of Love, daring us to love wastefully and abundantly.”
“It is a source within us that calls each of us into being, into living, and into loving.” He writes that “…meaning is not external to life but must be discovered in our own depths and imposed on life by an act of our own will.” He continues, “So I start here. There is no God external to life. God, rather, is the inescapable depth and center of all that is. God is not a being superior to all other things. God is the Ground of Being itself. And much flows from this starting place. The artifacts of the faith of the past must be understood in a new way if they are to accompany us beyond the exile, and those that cannot be understood differently will have to be laid aside. Time will inform us as to which is which.”Our greatest teachers, those who inspire us, such as Jesus certainly did, have the gift of the life-giving spirit. Perhaps we could access that possibility within each of us. Spong believes that “we are searching for a humanity through which the meaning of God that is in the midst of life might be revealed.” And he says, “It promises to be an exciting journey.”
Here’s where I see the connections with us. In our church, and, may I say, also out there is the wider Unitarian Universalist world, we have been exploring spirituality for the first time in many years. Of course it’s our way of being spiritual – humanist spirituality, UU spirituality. Only those who are reasoning and rational need apply!
Spong says, “Whatever the mind cannot believe the heart can finally never adore.” He knows we are here – and we must be very glad he is there!
Bishop Spong is a compelling voice for change and reform in the church, as is Matthew Fox who I talked about in the first of this series, and as is Mary Daly, who is the subject of the next series sermon. Our religion has been incorporating many of their radical ideas into our faith and practice for many years – we are already a living reformation of the church. Take your places as “Change Agents,” my UU brothers and sisters! You are really very good at it!
-Amen and shalom!
