Birth of Jesus, Part XIV. The Old Testament Antecedents in Luke's Story of Jesus' Birth

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 16 May 2013 2 Comments
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Question

I have been reading your books and articles for many years and I find your arguments persuasive, though I do not agree with everything you say. It may be only a minor aberration but what on earth do you mean by “living wastefully”?

Answer

Dear Kevin,

You have misquoted me; I have never said “living wastefully.” My mantra as to the way to demonstrate the gospel of Jesus is to “live fully, love wastefully and to be all that one can be.” This threefold appeal comes out of what I call my God experience. I seek to escape the theistic definition of God as an external being, supernatural in power, who invades our world periodically in miraculous ways. That definition of God simply no longer translates to a post- Galilean, post-Newtonian and a post-Darwinian world. Indeed, I think human beings should give up their almost idolatrous attempt to define God at all. We can experience God, but we cannot define God. So most religious God talk is nonsensical.

We can, however, define our experience of God, recognizing that what we call “a God experience” may well turn out to be a subjective delusion, but I do not think it is, at least not in most cases. So when I try to make sense of what I believe is my experience of the transcendent, I use three concepts. I experience God as “the Source of life” empowering me to “live fully.” I experience God as “the Source of love” freeing me to “love wastefully,” by which I mean to love without stopping to count the cost; without pausing to determine whether the recipient of that love is an appropriate recipient. I experience God as “the Ground of all Being,” who gives me the courage to be all that I can be. If that is what God means to me then I worship this God by “living fully, loving wastefully and being all that I am capable of being.” My mission as a Christian is not “to convert the heathen” as we once asserted, it is rather to assist in the task of helping all people “to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that they are capable of being.” This is a Christianity grounded in a radical understanding of humanity.

The reason I call it Christian and the reason I claim my identity as a Christian is that when I look at Jesus, I see in him a life fully lived, a love wastefully given and the courage to be himself in all circumstances, even when people are seeking to make him their king on Palm Sunday or when they were seeking to put him to death on Good Friday. So Jesus is the human life through whom the meaning and the presence of God is mediated to me. I can then join with St. Paul in the assertion that God was in Christ.

I invite you to open yourself to this insight and to these possibilities. If you do, I do not believe that you will then ask “what do you mean by living fully or by loving wastefully?”

~John Shelby Spong

 

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