[Dialogue] Spong
Harry Wainwright
h-wainwright at charter.net
Thu Dec 25 19:10:05 EST 2008
Clare,
I think you will find that the subscription price for the weekly newsletter
is $9.95 per quarter.
Peace,
Harry
_____
From: dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net
[mailto:dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of Clare Whitney
Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2008 4:42 PM
To: Colleague Dialogue
Subject: Re: [Dialogue] Spong
Just a brief word from the other side. The cost of getting the Spong
delivered from his site is $9.95 per year - symbolic, surely. Have a
wonderful holiday everyone! Clare Whitney
----- Original Message -----
From: McCabe, Diann A <mailto:dm14 at txstate.edu>
To: Colleague <mailto:dialogue at wedgeblade.net> Dialogue
Sent: Monday, December 22, 2008 4:42 PM
Subject: Re: [Dialogue] Spong
On today's Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed someone about intellectual
property today. Some connections there:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98591002
--Diann McCabe
_____
From: dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net [dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On
Behalf Of W. J. [synergi at yahoo.com]
Sent: Monday, December 22, 2008 2:57 PM
To: Colleague Dialogue
Subject: Re: [Dialogue] Spong
I wouldn't worry too much about Bishop Spong's slide into poverty,
considering his speaking fees, royalties from his many books, and internet
income.
He spoke at my church several times over the years, and the last time
charged us a fee of "only" $300. Of course he's not exactly welcome within
the Episcopal Diocese, fee or no fee, so he speaks outside the fold, so to
speak.
Although I enjoy reading his posts, his bashing of the three story universe
and biblical literalists strikes me as crass.He's not exactly comparable to
Bonhoeffer, who wrote of a "religionless" Christianity.
I also wonder about his sense of personal integrity. In fact he's a closeted
gay man hiding behind his marriage while promoting a gay-affirming message.
How gay-affirming can you be if you have to hide the truth to make your
philosophical points?
He's also assumed a kind of celebrity status within certain circles, which,
I suppose, is an alternative to creating a life of revolutionary servanthood
as a "nobody".
All in all, his is better than your average clergy retirement package. I'm
more concerned about the "nobodies" among us and how we're all surviving.
Marshall
On Sun, 12/21/08, Beret Griffith <beretgriffith at charter.net> wrote:
From: Beret Griffith <beretgriffith at charter.net>
Subject: Re: [Dialogue] Spong: 12/18/08: Amos: The Prophet Who Transformed
God Into Justice
To: "Colleague Dialogue" <dialogue at wedgeblade.net>
Date: Sunday, December 21, 2008, 8:06 PM
I appreciate getting the Spong postings and at one time felt a slight pang
at not paying for them. Then, while on the adult education committee at our
church I was part of discussions to ask Spong to speak at the local UMC
church while he was in the area for another engagement. The chair of the
committee communicated with Spong's wife who handles his speaking
engagements. As I recall the request was to speak at the church service
(abouit 20 minutes) and at the adult forum (a 45 minute program). Spong's
wife wrote back that the time was free and the fee was upwards of $5,000,
non-negotiable. People most often regard it as an great opportunity to speak
at the church and adult forums and are appreciative of the small honorarium
they receive. We did not engage Spong. My memory of details may be off some
tho not much. I hope the Spong postings continue and am grateful to
colleagues who are contributing to the Spong site on our behalf.
Beret
At 03:44 PM 12/21/2008, you wrote:
There are a multitude of websites requesting financial support. And many
that I do support which do not require subscriptions but rely on the
generosity of their readers, unfortunately I can not support them all. I am
grateful that I can share Bishop Spong's essays and that colleagues who do
subscribe to them are willing and able to post them to us. Although I agree
we should not take advantage of such good sites, I also feel overwhelmed in
how many I can help out. However if you and Adam feel so inclined to shame
your colleagues into refraining from taking advantage of the help we receive
from them as they subscribe and share his essays with us, then I will miss
the absent postings very much and hope that some time in the future they
will return to the Dialogue.
Thank you Ellie and Dick (posthumously) for continuing the tradition of
posting Bishop Spong's essays. I look forward to receiving more but fully
understand that you maybe ethically inhibited from posting them. I believe
we all contribute to the needs of the Internet in our own ways and you have
certainly given us access to a very worthwhile website. Please keep it up.
Jim Baumbach
inmusunka at sbcglobal.net wrote:
Thank you Adam Thomson! Impecunious though I be, I just took the leap and
signed up, feeling now chagrined that I have been reading free while others
supported this great thinker's endeavor provide us all with the fruits of
his labors. A truly progressive thought, you had, in this new era.
Rev. Bob Ford
Preston Bradley Center, NFP
312-735-2123 cell
inmusunka at sbcglobal.net
----- Original Message -----
From: Adam Thomson <mailto:dmtmsn at language.eclipse.co.uk>
To: Colleague Dialogue <mailto:dialogue at wedgeblade.net>
Sent: Friday, December 19, 2008 3:17 AM
Subject: Re: [Dialogue] Spong: 12/18/08: Amos: The Prophet Who Transformed
God Into Justice
Concerning Bishop Spong and his essays - at the risk of saying something
that some might consider taboo, I do want to make this point:
Bishop Spong has a website where one can subscribe to his weekly essays at
just under $30.00 a year. I cannot see how this sum is a major barrier to
benefiting from Spong's insights, for most people.
Why should we not give financial support to this site? I think it is wrong
for us not to - and I have subscribed to the site for several years.
It isn't as though we are in the business of "in-kinding for the sake of the
mission" any more.
Best wishes to all
Adam
END OF MESSAGE
At 23:01 18/12/2008, you wrote:
Hi Ellie,
Thanks so much for forwarding Spong to all of us. I was afraid I might lose
touch when Dick Kroger. Thanks for continuing the flame bearing.
Charles Hahn
From: <mailto:elliestock at aol.com> "elliestock at aol.com"
<mailto:elliestock at aol.com> <elliestock at aol.com>
To: Dialogue at wedgeblade.net; OE at wedgeblade.net
Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2008 11:26:04 AM
Subject: [Dialogue] Spong: 12/18/08: Amos: The Prophet Who Transformed God
Into Justice
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Thursday December 18, 2008
Amos: The Prophet Who Transformed God Into Justice
Not every character in the Bible starts out to be a hero. Indeed, one of the
great themes of biblical literature is that it is the meek and the lowly who
become the channels through which God is known in new ways. Mary, the mother
of Jesus, is portrayed as expressing this theme in the Magnificat when she
is made to utter these words, "For he has regarded the low estate of his
handmaiden," but later generations "will call me blessed." The Old Testament
prophet who makes this truth powerfully real is named Amos. Today we turn to
his story.
Amos was a citizen of the Southern Kingdom of Judah in the 8th century BCE.
He lived in the village of Tekoa where he was a herdsman and a keeper of
sycamore trees, employment that hardly demanded high academic achievements
or the credentials that produced great expectations. In those days Uzziah
was king of Judah and Jeroboam II was on the throne of the Northern Kingdom.
The major powers of the world were preoccupied with their own problems and
with each other, which allowed these two small Jewish states to bask in an
Indian summer of prosperity, peace and wealth. The distribution of that
wealth was, however, hardly balanced. The worship places of the Jewish world
were crowded on holy days and religion was popular among the greedy ones who
dominated the social order. There thus appeared to be little relationship
between the words of the popular religion and the practices of people's
lives in the public arena. In many ways that is not dissimilar from the
current situation in the United States, where a few have achieved fortunes
by greed and manipulation of the markets, creating a situation in which the
wealthy are increasingly wealthy and the poor are increasingly poor and
people even now seem not to be concerned. This dichotomy, however, burned
itself into the consciousness of this simple herdsman named Amos and, like
the proverbial "Hound of Heaven," it allowed him no rest until he had
addressed this issue overtly and publicly. Amos packed his suitcase and
journeyed from Tekoa in the land of Judah to the shrine of Bethel in the
Northern Kingdom to make his witness.
When he arrived Amos entered the courtyard of this holy place, where all of
his suspicions were confirmed. He saw the crowds dressed in their finery
busily attending to holy things while the poor outside the city gates were
largely ignored. Amos wondered how he might get the crowd's attention. He
was a clever man, however, and knew how to appeal to the instincts of the
people. He found a corner in the courtyard, set up a soap box and then,
using one of the oldest tricks in human history, he began to solicit first
the curiosity and later the full attention of the crowd. Let me try to
re-create the story.
"Come closer," Amos shouted from his ma keshift pulpit, "Let me tell you
about the sins of the people of the city of Damascus." Amos knew that
everyone likes to hear gossip about the moral weaknesses of their neighbors
and so as he excoriated the Damascans the crowds grew. Next he turned his
judgment first on the people of Gaza and then on Tyre, condemning the sinful
practices found in both cities. The crowd, loving it, grew even larger as
Amos continued to appeal to their prejudices about and suspicions of their
neighbors. This strange looking rube from the south said the things they
wanted to hear. Then Amos moved to larger targets and his oratory rose to
new heights as he focused on the nation states surrounding the Northern
Kingdom. First it was the Edomites and about their sins Amos got more
specific. The Edomites had pursued "their brothers with a sword, showing
them no pity and they had allowed anger to tear perpetually" at the fabric
of their society. The ecstatic crowd began to shout, "You tell 'em,
preacher." With every loud voice of encouragement, the people gathered in
ever greater numbers. Next it was the Amorites' turn. According to Amos,
they had attacked Gilead and "ripped up the women with child in order to
enlarge their borders." As Amos pronounced his message of doom on these
nations, the people gathered around him roared their approval. When he
turned to the very unpopular Moabites the frenzy of the crowd exploded.
Next Amos, with the crowd in the palm of his hand and fully attentive, spoke
in a bare w hisper. "Now let me tell you about the sins of the Southern
Jews," he said. These Southern Jews were the people with whom the Jews of
the North were the most competitive and with whom they had the deepest
rivalry. The relationship between Judah in the South and Israel in the North
was like that of New Zealand and Australia today. Signs in shops in New
Zealand announce that "New Zealanders have two favorite teams, the All
Blacks (the name of New Zealand's national team) and anyone who is playing
Australia." So to hear their Jewish rivals in the south be condemned was
music to the ears of the Northern Jews. The crowd pressed closer to this
strange messenger and its size continued to increase dramatically. Those
Southern Jews, Amos said, "despised the Torah; they did not keep God's
commandments. Their lies caused them to err constantly," but God's justice
is sure, he promised, and so Jerusalem will be "devoured by the fire of
God." The crowd was ecstatic with enthusiasm, clapping and cheering. No one
budged as this crowd-pleasing evangelist reached his climax. Now with every
ear straining to hear, this herdsman arrived at the conclusion for which he
had journeyed from Tekoa to the King's chapel in Bethel. His message was
ready and so Amos turned to his climax.
"Now," he said, "let me tell you about the worst people in the world." The
crowd could hardly wait to hear who that would be. They were not prepared,
however, for what was to come. "You Jews of the Northern Kingdom," he said,
" are the ultimate culprits in God's world. You are the ones who worship
ostentatiously in the sacred shrines, but even as you worship, you sell the
righteous for silver and the poor for a pair of shoes. You trample the poor
in the dust of the earth. You violate one another sexually. You worship at
every altar in garments stolen from the labor of the poor. You profane holy
places with heavy drinking of wine purchased with fines levied against the
meek. You corrupt holy people, encouraging them to violate their sacred
vows. You even silence the prophets." The crowd was suddenly silent and the
smiles disappeared from their faces. Then Amos spoke of the punishment that
God would send. "This judgment is inevitable," he screamed. It was a
devastating message. The stunned crowd took a while to recover from shock,
so Amos continued to drive home his key insights. "Worship isolated from
life is of no value. Worship is nothing but justice being offered to God,
and justice is nothing but worship being lived out. If worship and justice
are ever separated, idolatry is the inevitable result." It was a stirring
message, but suddenly it was not a popular one.
When the members of the crowd recovered sufficiently to respond, they sent
for a priest from the Shrine at Bethel named Amaziah and asked him to come
to their defense, for they said, "Amos has conspired against you and the
land and we are not able to bear his words." Amaziah was the voice of the
established religion. He would brook no more of this interference with
worship at the King's Shrine and so to Amos he said: "O, Seer, go home, flee
away to your land in Judah. Prophesy there if you must, but you are never
again to come again to Bethel for this is the king's sanctuary. This is the
temple of our nation. Your words are not welcome here."
Amos responded to Amaziah, "I am no prophet, nor even a prophet's son. I am
a herdsman, a dresser of sycamore trees, yet the Lord took me from my flocks
and called me to prophesy to the people of Israel." Once again, he repeated
his charges. "The songs of your holy places will become nothing but wailing
to the Lord. You cannot worship while you trample the poor. You cannot wring
money from the poor to line your pockets with greed. God will turn your
sacred feasts into mourning and your pious songs into lamentations." The
preaching of Amos was now more than the people were willing to tolerate and
so Amos was physically driven from the shrine. Rejected and defeated he
returned to his humble life in Tekoa. In this newly imposed exile he wrote
out his prophetic message, and that message became known as the words of
Amos the Prophet. In time people heard transcendent truth in his words and
finally these words were added to the sacred text of the Jewish people and
were thus read in worship settings in the temples, synagogues and holy
places. That was when people began to recognize that in the words of Amos,
they were beginning to hear the "Word of the Lord." That is=2 0how the words
of Amos came to echo through the centuries. In that process, God was
inevitably redefined as justice. Worship and justice could never again be
separated in true Judaism and worship came to be viewed, as Amos had
suggested, as human justice offered to God while justice was seen as divine
worship being acted out. In this context justice became another name for
God.
It was through the work of the prophets primarily that God was redefined in
Jewish history. Love became the name for God through the writings of Hosea.
Justice became the name for God through the writings of Amos. The prophets
really do matter, not because they were the predictors of the future as so
many of us were once taught, but because they were able to see more deeply
into the meaning of God. The prophets more than anyone else made it possible
some eight hundred years later for people to see and to hear the presence of
God in the life of a crucified one named Jesus of Nazareth. The life of
Jesus pointed to a divine nature marked by the dimension of love that Hosea
had added to the meaning of God and the dimension of justice that Amos had
added to the meaning of God. That resulted in a new understanding of
consciousness in which divinity and humanity seemed to flow together as one.
The biblical story was never static, nor is the human understanding of God.
It is idolatry and an act of faithlessness that is being expressed when any
one thinks that all truth has finally been reveale d and that someone or
some institution actually possesses it.
- John Shelby Spong
_____
Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong
William from Newmarket, Ontario, writes:
If the roots of the Christ story are indeed in Egyptian mythology (according
to Tom Harpur's book The Pagan Christ) or the continuation of Jewish Epic
History (according to your Jesus for the Non-Religious
<http://johnshelbyspong.com/store/Jesus_for_the_Non_Religious.aspx> ) then
who were the writers of the gospels? How did they acquire the expertise to
make such a complex adaptation and what drove them, in spite of the risk of
persecution, to adapt these myths to the person of Jesus of Nazareth, either
as if this person was an historical figure, or if he never existed?< /TD>
Dear William,
The writers of the gospels were Jewish people who represented the second or
third Christian generation. They wrote in Greek, not Aramaic, which was the
language Jesus and his disciples spoke. The gospels - at least the first
three: Mark, Matthew and Luke - are the products of the Synagogue, which had
shaped the Jesus story dramatically over the 40-70 year period that
transpired between the crucifixion and the gospel writing tradition.
I disagree with Tom Harpur's thesis, for I do not think Egyptian mythology
can shape the Jesus story in as short a period of time as existed. I note
that Paul writes in Galatians, a book that is usually dated in the early
50's, that he had conversed with Peter and other "pillars" of the Christian
movement within four to nine years of his conversion, which scholars date
one to six years after the crucifixion. Mythology needs more time than that
to develop.
People need to embrace the fact that the Jesus story was kept alive,
recalled and celebrated in the Synagogue, for that is where the followers of
Jesus worshiped every Sabbath. The Synagogue and the Christian Church did
not separate until 88 C.E.
I am quite sure Jesus of Nazareth was a person of history20in whom and
through whom Jewish people believed that they had experienced the presence
of the holy God. It was in that experience that Christianity was born. The
earliest articulation of that faith came from Paul who wrote, "God was in
Christ, reconciling the world to God."
How we tell the world of the meaning of that experience is still what
Christianity is all about.
- John Shelby Spong
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