Charting a New Reformation, Part XXXVII – Thesis #11, Life After Death (continued), Survival is the Essence of Life

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 29 September 2016 34 Comments
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Question

Perhaps this letter has been gestating for some time. One day several years ago, my doctor (a devout Jew) asked me if I thought Jesus was the “real” son of God. My answer (as I awaited the bolt from heaven) was that no, I thought that his life was of such astounding wholeness that people designated him that way.

Then came your support/endorsement of Gretta Vosper (then I read her books). I’d read your book, A New Christianity for a New World, as soon as it came out. Then came your discussion in your weekly articles calling for a new reformation and Bingo! I was not crazy or a heretic. I have never believed that God would come down and heal one person because of an abundance of someone’s incessant prayers. Why heal one and not another? Why stave off a storm from one location and have it afflict another? Why are these and so many other things attributed to God? Well you gave voice to all my thoughts and doubts. I understand what you are saying about the new liturgies to encompass these new insights and I can’t wait. BUT, what are we to do in the meantime? Most prayers invoke a God who doesn’t act in that way, but I am still called to prayer.

Answer

Dear Beth,

First, let me thank you for your ministry. I hope you found your life enriched as you sought to enrich others. Parish ministry remains for me the most fulfilling aspect of ordained life.

You ask, “What do we do about liturgy?” I do not discern in institutional Christian life much desire to do anything about it. There must be something about its medieval form that gives meaning to people. Perhaps in worship they can act as if there is some unchanging reality in which they can feel secure. Perhaps they fear, and rightly so, that if worship were done in a modern idiom, the sense of the holy, mysterious and numinous might disappear. Perhaps the liturgical words which we have used over the centuries have become a kind of “mantra” that we simply didn’t want to question. Perhaps to look at what worship is saying intellectually is too painful, the resistance to liturgical change is powerfully present. Perhaps we fear that to think critically about liturgy will be the death of liturgy, and we prefer to live with our illusions. Perhaps people like you and me possess brains that we cannot turn off and when we apply those brains to the words of worship, we cannot escape the conclusion that it sounds like meaningless gibberish and we do not want to embrace that conclusion.

How does one pray that a hurricane will be turned away or that an earthquake will not occur or a tornado will not strike, when in a post-Newtonian world, these things are no longer understood as “acts of God.” Why do we continue in liturgy to pray for God to have mercy – Kyrie Eleison – when we no longer envision God as an angry parent or a severe judge?

Why do we denigrate our humanity and enhance our guilt by assuming that human life has fallen from an original perfection into original sin, when as post-Darwinian people we know that there was no original perfection from which we have fallen, but only a slow and unending evolutionary process, which has taken us from the stage of single cell life to the present stage of complex self-consciousness.

Why do we continue to practice idolatry in the liturgy? Is that not what it is when we process in church with the gospel book elevated, as if to be worshiped before we read it, marching the reserved sacrament through the church, while inviting the congregation to kneel before it in adoration, or addressing our prayers to the all-seeing God who lives above the sky? We are space–age people to whom these practices are both strange and inane.

Why do we resurrect incense for use in worship on special days when its original purpose was to drown the body odors of the unwashed congregation? Does incense make body odors holy? The other argument for the use of incense comes from the days of animal sacrifice, when it was assumed that the nostrils of the theistic God who lived above the sky who delighted in the odors of roasted meat, would also enjoy the sweet smell of incense wafting heavenward. How will the Church speak to the 21st century when it is so deeply mired through its practice in a world that no longer exists?

My criticisms of past and increasingly meaningless practices are greater than my ability to chart the ways worship needs to be understood and practiced in our generation. That is because I have not found contemporary ways to practice the presence of God in the accents of our day. Attempts to do that so often devolve into what sounds more like liberal politics, than it does about the divine-human engagement. I am not opposed to liberal politics, but I do not believe that liberal politics can ever really replace the mystical language of worship.

I wish more people would engage the task of developing new forms of liturgy, and thereby raise to consciousness the real debate about liturgy, and why continuing old patterns or reviving ancient patterns will never lead us into a Christian future. Until they do, I will continue to worship in the traditional patterns that are open to me, swallowing the absurdities, tolerating the anachronistic patterns until something better can be developed.

The late Richard Reid, sometime Dean of the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia, once said: “Of course, liturgy should change and the proper pace is about one word a century.” I suspect Dick Reid, who was an able, but very traditional biblical scholar, spoke not only for what the church wants, but also for what the church is capable of doing. That pattern, however, will not help to accomplish that which the church needs to accomplish if it hopes to survive into our dynamic future. The jury is still out on whether the church really wants to be revived.

John Shelby Spong

 

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