If God is Love . . .

. . . [then] the only way we can worship God
is by loving others. The more we give love away,
the more we make the experience of God visible.
God is not a being, external to us;
God is experienced in the presence of love.

– John Shelby Spong
Excerpted from his forthcoming book,
Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation
Can Produce a Living Faith Today
HarperOne, 2018

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• A Return to the Spirit
• Move Us, Loving God
• Andrew Harvey on Radical, Divine Passion in Action
• Called to the Field of Compassion
• The Choice (and Risk) That Is Love
• Love as "Quest and Daring and Growth"
• Getting It Right
• The Longing for Love: God's Primal Beatitude
• Love as Exploring Vulnerability
• The Gravity of Love
• To Be Held and To Hold
• To Know and Be Known
• What We Mean by Love
• The Many Manifestations of God's Loving Embrace

Image: James R. Eads.

Bishop Spong on the Tea Party Movement

Recently in his "Question and Answer" column on his website, Bishop John Shelby Spong responds to Katherine Barney of the United Kingdom who asks: "Can you help me to understand the movement in American politics that you call 'The Tea Party'?" Following is Bishop Spong's answer.

_________________________________________


Dear Katherine:

. . . The Tea Party Movement is a manifestation of the great fear and anxiety that, today, accompanies Western politics everywhere. This anxiety is also present in Greece, France, Germany and Iceland, but since they did not have the Boston Tea Party in their national history they do not call it that.

It was born in the economic crisis that rocked this country in the last year of the Bush Administration, when the politics of greed finally brought Wall Street to its knees. It was fed by the healthcare debate, when lobbyists were paid to frighten the American public with distortions, half truths and absolute lies in an attempt to prevent the profits of healthcare companies, trial lawyers, drug manufacturers and private medical practitioners from being compromised. It also has in it an element of racism as the white Anglo-Saxon portion of our population began to see a multi-ethnic America coming into being and to feel that they were losing the power to impose their agenda on this emerging society in the way that they had always done in the past. It has within it a traditional fear of big and intrusive government, which is as old as our ancestors' reasons for migrating from Europe in the first place. The Tea Party Movement represents an inability on the part of many of our citizens to embrace our interdependent population that is now tempering the "rugged individualism" which was part of our past.

I believe that the movement will also prove to be little more than a momentary blip on the EKG chart of American history and will soon fade back into the woodwork, as the economy returns to normal, the ill-advised wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are brought to a close, the BP oil leak is finally plugged, the damage it has done to our environment is addressed, and when people finally accept the fact that a new America is emerging and that it represents a rising consciousness and a new vision of what it means to be human. This new version will then equip us to arrive at the time when we will celebrate our diversity rather than coddle our fears.

The Tea Party Movement will also almost inadvertently serve to drive us back to that biblical idea that we are indeed our brothers' and our sisters' keepers and that the humanity in each of us is ultimately dependent on recognizing the humanity in all of us. That is in fact what the Pentecost story in the Book of Acts is all about, the dawning of universalism that lifts us out of our tribal limitations.

Thank you for writing.

– John Shelby Spong

Why Jesus is My Man

Yeah, yeah, I know . . . it’s a corny title.

Actually, it was going to be: “Why I Love and Follow Jesus,” which, though no doubt just as corny for some, is probably a better description of what it is I’m trying to get across with this post.

It all started when my friend Paula recently shared with me the response of Bishop John Shelby Spong to the question: “Is there something about the Jesus of history [that allows us to see him today] as an icon of faith?”

I found Spong’s response to this particular question quite moving. Indeed, it triggered an emotional surge of love within me – love for that humble Jewish peasant who walked among us over 2,000 years ago, and love for all who throughout history have sought to follow his example and open themselves to that same transforming and “boundary breaking” spirit of love that he so completely embodied.

Reflecting later on Spong’s words, I realized that they succinctly sum up why it is I feel compelled to love Jesus, and why it is that I hope that others, when looking at my life, might be moved to recognize me as a follower of his way of consciousness and compassion. . . . Why, in other words, they could say that Jesus is my man.

Following are the words of Bishop Spong that started it all.

I see the primary Jesus experience as being that of a boundary breaker. His humanity and his consciousness seem to me to be so whole and so expanded that he was able to escape the basic human drive of survival that binds so many of us who are less fully developed. Unlike us, he appeared to need no security barrier behind which to hide. He could thus step across the boundaries of tribe, prejudice, guilt, and even religion into a new dimension of what it means to be human, and this is what caused people to experience God present in him. [Of course, it’s also what caused him to get killed.*] His call to us is therefore not to be religious but to be human and to be whole. That is what every gospel symbol, from his miraculous birth to his empty tomb, is seeking to convey, so we read them as doorways into the meaning of God.

_______________________

* I’ve come to recognize that it was for the message of God’s inclusive love and radical hospitality that Jesus died.

Indeed, Jesus believed in this message so much that not even the prospect of torture and death at the hands of those invested in a system of dominating imperial power (a hegemonic power, willing to do whatever it takes to stay in control) could deter him from imparting the liberating message of God’s love and of humanity’s potential to be, like him, living embodiments of this transforming love.


Images: Enrique Irazoqui as Jesus in Pier Pablo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964).

Notes Steven D. Greydanus: “Enrique Irazoqui, a half Jewish, half Basque economics student, had never acted and had no thought of acting when he met Pasolini. Irazoqui’s performance is often noted for its urgency and revolutionary zeal, but what most stands out to me is Irazoqui’s lack of self-consciousness and affectation. Few Jesus films manage to avoid the pitfall of making Christ seem artificially preoccupied with his own authority and status. In productions from the very early 1905 silent Life and Passion of Jesus Christ to Jesus of Nazareth, Christ often seems to wear his divinity like a royal robe (or, in the case of The Last Temptation of Christ, like a horsehair shirt). At the opposite extreme is the casual, unassuming ‘buddy Jesus’ of small-screen productions like the 1999 Jesus and the 2004 Judas, a figure lacking in authority and gravitas. The Gospel According to Matthew is one of the few Jesus films in which Jesus is at once authoritative and forceful, and also unaffected and, for lack of a better term, persuasively human.”


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• What We Can Learn from the Story of the Magi
• Revisiting a Groovy Jesus (and a Dysfunctional Theology)
• The Sexuality of Jesus
• An Enlightened Exploration of Integrity and Obedience
• In the Garden of Spirituality: James C. Howell
• On the Road with Punk Rockers and Homeless Mothers
• The Harvest Within the Heart
• Joy: The Most Infallible Sign of God’s Presence
• Reflections on The Da Vinci Code Controversy
• Thoughts on The Da Vinci Code
• Could Christ Have Been a Woman?
• The Triumph of Love: An Easter Reflection
• Jesus Lives!

"Homosexuality is Not Unnatural"

Following is an excerpt from “Homophobia – No Compromise Possible,” a 2004 essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong.

Bishop Spong’s wise words are a timely antidote to the foolishness we’ve been hearing of late from the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

__________________

The emerging new consciousness . . . asserts that homosexual people are neither morally depraved nor mentally sick, since one’s sexual orientation is not a choice; but something to which one awakens. It is like the dawning realization that one is male or female, part of a particular race or nation or even right or left-handed. A just and moral society cannot be erected on a premise that some human beings are subhuman or perverted, not on the basis of their doing but on the basis of their being. It matters not what any source of ancient wisdom has previously declared.

The Bible, for example, was once quoted to support slavery, to oppose science and to prevent women from achieving equality. On every one of those issues the Bible was quite simply wrong. To quote it now to uphold the evil of homophobia is no less wrong. These efforts will fail as they always do. The ultimate tragedy is, however, that some church leaders, ever on the wrong side of great moral questions of history, never seem to learn history’s lesson that any prejudice once publicly challenged by a new consciousness is doomed.

As I survey the debate on this issue in all parts of the Christian tradition, a tragic failure of leadership is once again depressingly obvious. The Roman Catholic hierarchy simply takes the old definition and labors first to defang it and then to perfume it. They call homosexuality “unnatural,” or “a deviation,” urging that it be suppressed wherever possible and controlled where not possible. Homosexuality, however, has now been incontrovertibly identified as present in the world of higher mammals. It also appears to be a stable and unchanging percentage of the human race at all times and in all places. These data suggest that homosexuality is not unnatural at all but is a minority aspect of the created order that appears quite normally in all higher forms of life.

- John Shelby Spong


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
The Many Manifestations of God’s Loving Embrace
In the Garden of Spirituality - Joan Timmerman
Perspectives on Natural Law – Daniel Helminiak
Perspectives on Natural Law – Gregory Baum
The Pope’s “Scandalous” Stance on Homosexuality
Stop in the Name of Discriminatory Ideology!
Celebrating Our Sanctifying Truth
Compassion, Christian Community, and Homosexuality
The Bible and Homosexuality

To Whom the Future of the Catholic Church Belongs

After spending time with DignityUSA,
Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong
reflects on the future of the Catholic Church.

My friend Paula recently shared with me a wonderful commentary by Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong (pictured below) entitled “On Spending Three Days With DignityUSA.”



As Spong notes in the opening paragraph of his commentary, “DignityUSA [is] a national support and advocacy organization for homosexual members of the Roman Catholic Church.” The organization recently held a conference in Austin, Texas, where 250 delegates from across the United States “assigned themselves the task of charting the future for homosexual people in the Catholic Church.”

“This was not an easy assignment,” observes Spong, who gave the keynote address at the conference, “since DignityUSA is treated by the hierarchy of [the Roman Catholic] Church as an embarrassing pariah and, instead of any recognition or support, its members are the recipients of enormous Catholic hostility. By Vatican orders, no Roman Catholic Church in America can allow this group to meet on any Catholic property.”

“When Dignity’s leaders picked the Hyatt Hotel in Austin as the gathering place for their national conference,” reports Spong, “Gary Preuss, a local Dignity leader, as a courtesy, notified the Most Rev. Gregory Aymond, the Catholic Bishop of Austin that they would convene in his See City. The bishop responded with a letter, acknowledging the notification and saying that he would pray for them. There was no word of welcome and neither this bishop nor any of his local Catholic priests made an appearance at the conference. How short the Church sometimes falls in the simple act of showing kindness.”

Following are further excerpts from Bishop Spong’s commentary - one that serves as a timely reminder of the important ministry of Dignity and as a hope-filled reflection on the future of the Roman Catholic Church.

Catholic opposition to homosexuality is so total and unrelenting that any American Catholic priest who says Mass for local Dignity chapters runs the risk of discipline at the hands of his local bishop. Under the auspices of Pope John Paul II a statement was issued on October 30, 1986, written by the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, which moved the Roman Catholic Church from benign neglect of gay people into the stance of being a gay oppressor.

This “Halloween Letter,” as the gay community refers to it, urged all Catholic bishops to oppose every legislative effort, on every level of government, which sought to provide equal rights under the law for homosexual people. This included not just official Church opposition to gay marriage, civil unions and benefits for domestic partners, but also any ordinance that would make it illegal to discriminate against people in the work place because of their sexual orientation.

When Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI one of his first acts was to announce his intention to purge gay males from the ranks of the Catholic priesthood. When the fine print was read, however, he limited himself to preventing aggressive or militant homosexual advocates from becoming priests. Even this Pope knew full well that a purge of gay men from the ranks of the Catholic priesthood would decimate the clergy, to say nothing of culling significantly the members of the College of Cardinals, the archbishops and bishops of that Church. The duplicity and dishonesty surrounding this issue in the Roman Catholic Church is breathtaking.

Despite this hostility, [the] gay Catholics [who comprise Dignity] still express genuine love for their Church and work tirelessly for the change that will enable them to find in their Church a place of welcome. They strive to demonstrate their loyalty to the worship tradition into which most of them were baptized. DignityUSA gathers in local chapters all across America and convenes its National Convention once every two years, to nurse the wounds of gay Catholics, to educate and inspire their members and to make people aware of their gay presence inside their beloved Church.

Because the members of Dignity know rejection first hand, they have developed a far more accepting and ecumenical understanding of Christianity than that which is official in Catholicism. Since their chapters of necessity are required to meet in non-Catholic churches, ties of friendship have tempered traditional exclusive claims. Dignity members understand what Catholic women have endured. In Dignity’s closing Eucharist, women were vested with priestly stoles while serving as full participants and co-presiders over the liturgy. These women’s hands were raised as they joined with a Graymoor priest to bless the bread and the wine and to utter the words of consecration. Catholic rules were clearly being bent here, but the presence of an ordained priest, whose security lay in that he was answerable only to the head of his order not a local bishop, nonetheless guaranteed the “validity” of the Sacrament.

For me, this conference was both humbling and exhilarating. Seldom before have I been so warmly welcomed, fully included and graciously engaged by members of this faith tradition. Seldom have I been so moved by worship as I was at this conference. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church needs to understand that these people are dedicated and committed Catholics who can neither be expelled nor driven away.

Dignity’s members are not threatening to leave their Church, they are threatening to stay! “This is our Church too,” they say, and “the hierarchy cannot define Catholicism in such a way as to exclude us.” They live out their Catholic lives in faithfulness, not in order to be troublesome, but to help to bring to Catholicism the inclusion that is called for in the gospel of Jesus. They are confident they will win this struggle for the soul of their Church and are encouraged by the incontrovertible fact that changes in consciousness are never reversed.

Inevitably every part of the Christian Church will lay aside its homosexual prejudices and embrace its gay, lesbian, transgender and bi-sexual brothers and sisters as the creation of God, the beloved of Christ and as those empowered to be all that they can be in the Holy Spirit. Benedict XVI is not the voice of the Catholic future; indeed, he will ultimately be little more than a negative footnote in Catholic history.

Every prejudice that is publicly debated is already dying, so this victory is inevitable. Diehard, retrogressive elements in every Christian Church lose ground daily. They will not prevail in this struggle. Christians cannot continue to sing, “Just as I am without one plea, O Lamb of God, I come,” and not live out that invitation.

The embarrassment of the Christian Church in our time will not result from the feared split over homosexuality; it will result rather from those Christian leaders who continue to value unity and institutional peace over truth and justice. Those are the people destined to discover that they do not, cannot and will not own the future. That future will belong to DignityUSA, to John McNeill, Sister Jeannine Gramick, Daniel Helminiak and their counterparts in every Christian tradition, who act without fear to make the Christian Church whole and to call it to be a sign of the Kingdom of God in our divided world. Indeed we live today at the dawn of a new era.

To read Bishop Spong’s commentary in its entirety, click here.


See also the related Wild Reed posts:
Honoring Brian McNeill
An Australian Bishop’s “Radical” Call for Reform
Beyond Papalism