Part XIX Matthew – Did Jesus Really Do Miracles?

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 17 April 2014 1 Comments
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Question

I am a 74 year old gay man. I came out 10 years after my wife of 44 years passed away. It has been a most wonderful time of enlightening adventure for me. I started attending the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation in Highlands, North Caroline about three years ago. My problem is letting go of some of the evangelical teachings that I bought into for most of my life. In a recent piece in one of the Highlands publications a Baptist pastor wrote an article entitled “Hell is Real; Prepare Against it.” In this article he stated “rejecters of this doctrine have, through the ages, found some measure of pseudo-comfort by simply denying this truth.” I sometimes find myself feeling anger at people who know the “truth.” I have spent my life fearing death since I had been told that I could never measure up to what God expected of me. I have shed much of this “religion of guilt,” but would appreciate it if you could help me in some way to shed some of my anxiety about hell.

 

Answer

Dear Tom,

Letters like yours make me rejoice and weep at the same time. I rejoice that after decades of suppressing the truth of your identity and thus escaping to some degree the condemnation of the Christian faith, which has traditionally been more about guilt and fear than it has been about life and love. I weep at the way this gospel has been twisted by those who think of themselves as in the service of Christ, but who spend their energy condemning what they do not understand and pretending that they are serving God in the process.

Hell is not mentioned in the writings of Paul. Hell is barely mentioned in Mark, Luke and John. The fires of hell burn bright in the New Testament, but primarily only in the book of Revelation and in the Gospel of Matthew. In Christian history, the reward of heaven and the punishment of hell became convenient weapons in the game of behavior control. The Church and its ordained leaders began to shift the ministry of the Church from the expansion of life and love toward the repression of life at the hands of a punishing deity, who was in the service of enforcing cultural norms. We are emerging from that distortion now and have been for the last 100 years.

You are fortunate that you live in the beautiful town of Highlands in the mountains of Western North Carolina. You are fortunate that you attend the Church of the Incarnation, where Bruce Walker, a former dentist, serves as the rector. He is a man of great sensitivity, caring and love. He has been welcoming to the gay members of that community, many of whom I know and admire. There is also at that Church a wonderfully stimulating adult class that meets each Sunday morning. It is called “The Heretics Club” and is led by a remarkable couple, Martha Porter and Peter Ray. There is a close friend of mine who attends that class that you would do well to meet; his name is Ray McPhail. He is a successful developer who grew up in a Baptist Church in the Deep South. The fear of hell was drilled into him so deeply that though he escaped it intellectually, he is still subject to its emotional fears. Ray is a gregarious man of kindness, generosity and caring, but one who still bears the scars of his fundamentalist upbringing. In my friendship with him, I have seen my role as that of trying to get the fear of hell out of him. I am helped in that task by his wonderful wife Diane, who has studied with Matthew Fox and embraces his call to “Creation Spirituality - Original Blessing not Original Sin.”

So, my advice to you is to attach yourself deeply to the Church of the Incarnation until the power of the healing gospel removes the hurt of the idea of your sinfulness learned in your earlier life.

Live well! Accept yourself! Rejoice in who you are! Those are the steps necessary to take as you walk into Christian wholeness.

God bless you on your journey.

John Shelby Spong

 

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