Dear Reader,

A Trump presidency is what I can best depict as a “disastrous opportunity,” because it encourages an intersectional dialogue as well as activism against potential erosion if not dismantling of decades-long civil rights gains. Americans on the margins have the most to lose in a country pivoting away from their full protections and participation in a multicultural democracy.

However, while I am nervous I am also reminded of the 1960’s.

During the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960's, "the voice of one crying out in the wilderness" was the clarion call for justice. The voice that was heard articulated the trials and tribulations of black suffering under an unyielding reign of white supremacy in the United States. One voice in the movement was occasionally heard more loudly than others: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who represented African Americans' collective voices crying out in the wilderness of America's racism.

In the inimitable rhetorical style of the African-American jeremiad tradition, King's voice crying out in the wilderness of American racism is most remembered from his "I Have a Dream" speech. Like John the Baptist, who prepared the way for Jesus' public ministry in this gospel, the force and the momentum of the Civil Rights movement prepared the way for King's ministry. And like the way that John the Baptist's public preaching is most remembered and revered in this gospel where he quotes the prophet Isaiah, King, too, quoted the same words of the prophet Isaiah. Standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, speaking to a crowd of over 200,000, he said, "I have a dream that one day . . . 'every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plains, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.'"

King saw America "in the wilderness" in that time when life was divided along a color line into distinctly black-and-white terms. And the wilderness experience of the 1960's for us Americans was due to racism.

As a geophysical reality, the wilderness was the U.S. South. And the South represented a place unsuited for human habitation. It was a place of danger, inhospitality, marauding Ku Klux Klansmen, and ongoing chaos.

During the time of King's address, the Southern states had long systematized a peculiar brand of justice with its "separate but equal" laws that allowed for separate drinking fountains, restrooms, restaurants, hotels, etc. The South was a place where the entire country could watch African Americans being subdued by blazing-water hoses or being charged by aggressive German shepherds on national television. But at night, when no one was watching, the Ku Klux Klan rode through black neighborhoods to burn their property and/or them, brandishing fire and terror as symbols of white supremacy.

However, racism did not just situate itself unabashedly in the South, it also colored life in the North, albeit differently and less visibly. And although segregationist practices directly violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, the federal government exerted little to no effort to enforce these amendments -- in either North or South.

The wilderness, therefore, functions as multiple sites, and it can heal us as a people -- both the oppressed and the oppressor.

The wilderness should not be seen as a permanent place in which one resides or into which one falls and gets stuck, but rather as a place of transition and growth, where radical transformation can take place. It should be used as an interpretative lens to look at reality from an involved, committed stance in light of a faith that does justice. The wilderness is where you see the face of the damned, the dispossessed, the disinherited, and the disrespected, and know that is your starting place.

And for those in the wilderness, it is a space where liberation begins. The wilderness gives you the agency to effect change on your own behalf. It offers an oppositional gaze from which you can honestly critique the oppressive structures in society that keep us separated from who and what we are as the body of Christ.

Advent invites us to journey into the wilderness. It does not invite us into the wilderness to put us on a road without signposts or a road map; instead, Advent invites us to journey into the wilderness as a shared experience of struggle, discovery, enlightenment, community, and liberation. It is only in a shared wilderness experience that the "voice of one crying out in the wilderness" becomes many and is heard.

The Silence Breakers are the TIME person for 2017. It started with one voice that is now many and a worldwide #Me Too movement speaking out against sexual harassment and assault.

~ Rev. Irene Monroe

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

The Meaning of the Christmas Myths

It is a beautiful time of the year. The celebration is in full swing. The symbols, some sacred, some quite secular, mingle in the market place: Bethlehem and the North Pole, the Angel Gabriel and Rudolf, the Heavenly Host and Santa's reindeer, crèche scenes and Christmas trees. It is also a season in which light hurls back the darkness of the winter solstice. Christmas captures our imaginations as few things ever do. Unfortunately the religious minds of our generation believe that these traditions can be protected from erosion only if they are literalized. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The deepest meaning of this season can never really be understood until literal claims have been laid aside. Jesus' birth was not something that occurred on a silent and holy night in the little town of Bethlehem. No star announced his birth and no angels sang of peace on earth. These mythical details rather embody a beautiful and eternal human dream that we enter symbolically year after year. Let me briefly analyze the data.

Bethlehem as the birthplace of Jesus was a late developing part of the Jesus story that did not appear until the writing of the Gospel of Matthew in the 9th decade of the Christian era, when people began to claim that since Jesus was the anticipated messiah, he had to be the heir to the 'throne of David.' That idea carried with it the assumption that this future leader had to be born in the "City of David." The early Christians found scriptural authority for this claim in the prophet Micah, an 8th century BCE figure, who had written " But you O Bethlehem, who are little to be among the clans of Judah, but from you shall come forth from me one who is to be the ruler of Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days."

Matthew had the scribes of Herod quote this text to the Wise Men as he directed them to Bethlehem. So important to Matthew was Jesus' royal lineage that he opened his gospel with a long genealogy, that we call the 'who begat whom' chapter, to document this claim. So Matthew tells his readers that Mary and Joseph actually lived permanently in a house in Bethlehem. It was such a specific house that a star could stop and shine directly on it to guide the wise men to their destination. It was a house that Matthew says they had to abandon when informed in a dream that their child was at risk from King Herod, who like the Pharaoh of old, was destroying Jewish male babies in an attempt to wipe out the promised deliverer. It was a house to which this family could return from Egypt when they heard that Herod had died. It was a house they abandoned once again when they learned that Herod's brother, who was equally dangerous, was now on the throne. This time they fled to Galilee and that, Matthew implies, is how Jesus just happened to grow up in Nazareth and why he became known as a Galilean and a Nazarene. Matthew's myth of Jesus' birth presents him as a new Moses, so that as God once led the chosen people out of Egypt, so God could now lead the chosen messiah out of Egypt. This narrative so clearly serves Matthew's apologetic purpose that it cannot be confused with history. The overwhelming probability is that Jesus was born in Nazareth, which is the clear assumption in Mark, the earliest gospel. Matthew, who had Mark before him when he wrote, is the one who altered the tradition.

Luke, writing near the end of the 9th decade or perhaps even early in the 10th decade (88-93 CE), treated the developing Bethlehem tradition quite differently. Like Mark, Luke is quite clear that Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth. However, he too must address the growing idea that Jesus, as messiah, is the heir to the Royal line of David. So Luke seeks to temper his story of Jesus' Nazareth origins (which were becoming too humble a place of birth for so great a person) to accommodate the Bethlehem tradition. His literary device for doing this was a census that he dates by saying it was ordered by Caesar Augustus when Quirinius was governor of Syria. This census, by which "all the world was to be enrolled," required, according to Luke, that every male person must return to his ancestral home to be registered. This meant, said Luke, that Joseph had to go to Bethlehem, a 94-mile journey from Nazareth, for he was of the house of David. So Joseph just happened to be in Bethlehem when his wife delivered her first-born child. Through this accident of history, Luke argues, the scriptures were fulfilled in Jesus. It was a very ingenious solution indeed since it enabled Luke to combine Jesus' obvious Nazareth origins with the fantasies building around Jesus, proclaiming him the Messiah born in the city of David.

The most preliminary study will reveal, however, that the story is not history. Luke and Matthew, for example, both say that Herod was king at the time of the birth of Jesus. Since secular records reveal that Herod died in 4 BCE, this means that Jesus had to be born before this date. Luke then says that the enrollment, ordered by Caesar, came when Quirinius was governor of Syria. Secular records, however, reveal that Quirinius became governor of Syria in 6-7 CE, by which time Jesus would have been at least 10-11 years old. History begins to wobble visibly.

Luke's theory required that this worldwide enrollment had to occur in the male person's ancestral home. This was the strangest literary wrinkle of all and would have required a massive dislocating migration. David, who had 300 wives, died about the year 960 BCE. Luke was asserting that all of the descendents of King David, whose number some 960 years later must have been legion, not only had to know this ancestral detail about themselves but they also had to make their way back to Bethlehem. This was a time in which human longevity made three generations a century normative, so we are talking about 27-30 generations of keeping family lines alive. To my knowledge no one, in that time when there were no birth or death certificates, to say nothing of marriage licenses, was that deeply into ancestor worship. It is also of interest that the genealogies of Jesus in both Matthew and Luke do not agree in almost any detail, including which of King David's sons constituted the royal line: it was Solomon says Matthew, Nathan says Luke. No one knows who Nathan is but if a man had as many wives as David, certainly one of his sons might have been called Nathan, or anything else for that matter. These genealogies also disagree on who Jesus' grandfather was: Jacob, says Matthew, Heli, says Luke.

A final note that makes Luke's story clearly not history is that on this journey to Bethlehem Joseph was said to have taken his wife, who was "great with child." Why? To be enrolled? Women were not counted in a census, or registered for tax purposes. Women also did not normally travel. Given the mode of transportation available in that day, walking or riding a donkey, what man in his right mind would take an eight months plus pregnant woman on a 94 mile walk or donkey ride, that would normally take seven to ten days and in a world with no restaurants or hotels? One woman biblical scholar, on reading this observed, "Only a man who had never had a baby could have written such a story." No, the Bethlehem birthplace of Jesus is not history. It is part of the later developing mythology that gathered around the origins of Jesus. A person as significant as Jesus was believed to be when these later gospels were written could not have had an ordinary birth; so Matthew and Luke, 50 to 60 years after the crucifixion, freed their imaginations and created these miraculous tales that form our Christmas stories.

Once the mythical content of the Bethlehem birthplace is established, all the other details of these birth narratives fall as literal history. Ancient astrologers did not follow a star announcing the birth of a Jewish king, especially one that no one recognized as a king until well after his death. Recall that Matthew says later that this king was also a carpenter's son. Nor do angels sing to hillside shepherds, propelling them on a similar journey to search for a baby. Luke gives the shepherds only two clues. The baby would be wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. We do both the Bible and human scholarship a grave disservice when we try to literalize and make history out of these interpretative myths, created by the second or third generation of those who were the disciples of this Jesus. No reputable biblical scholar in the world today, Catholic or Protestant, treats these narratives of Matthew and Luke as history. It is time the church said that publicly.

Why do we then keep these stories and repeat them every year if they are not factually true? That is usually the question of an adult who has had his or her fairy tale religion shaken. The answer is simple. Truth is so much bigger than literalism. The meaning of Santa Claus, who receives his greatest joy by giving gifts to children, is not dependent on there being a literal fat elf dressed in red who lives in a place to which we can never go. Some human experiences are so large, so real, so life changing and so defining that the words used to describe those moments must break open the imagination if they are to capture this kind of truth. That is what myth does. That is what the biblical stories of Jesus' birth are all about. There was something present in this Jesus, they said, that opened human lives to new dimensions of reality. Human beings could never have produced what we have experienced in Jesus. In him, they exclaimed, we believe that we have met eternity breaking into time, transcendence entering the mundane, the divine in the life of the human. If that is our experience with the adult Jesus, then his birth must have been marked with heavenly signs that drew people to him.

That is what these stories are trying to say. Our task is not to master the details or to pretend that myths are history. It is rather to enter the experience that caused the myths surrounding his birth to be born, to be transformed by that life and to become a new creation through that experience. If that occurs, these early Christians were saying, we too will see the star of Bethlehem, hear angels sing, and like the wise men and shepherds of old, begin our journey toward the mystery and wonder of God. Bethlehem, the symbolic town where God and human life come together, is finally our human destiny. That is the meaning of Christmas.

~John Shelby Spong
Originally published December 22, 2004