[Oe List ...] 12/22/11. Spong: Christpower

[Ellie Stock]

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Christpower

A Note to my Readers:
Many years ago, in 1974 to be specific, for the sermon at the Christmas Eve Midnight service at St. Paul’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, I sought to redefine Jesus through the medium of poetry.  I could, even then, no longer see him with credibility as the incarnation of a supernatural being who lived above the sky.  That image to me made the relationship between Jesus and God somewhat like that of Clark Kent to Superman.  I had come to understand Jesus both as something more than that and at the same time as the essence of what life itself is all about.
The God I met in Jesus was not an invasive divine power who entered this world from outer space.  I rather experienced God as the primal life force that surges through all living things, but which comes to self-consciousness only in human life and was somehow uniquely seen in its fullness in Jesus of Nazareth.  I also experienced God as that power of love that always expands the levels of consciousness in which all of us share and into which we evolve as we become more deeply and fully human.  This was for me a breakthrough into a new religious understanding.  That understanding came to a new intensity when I wrote my book: Eternal Life: A New Vision – Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell.
After that service a very gifted poet from Richmond, Lucy Newton Boswell Negus, laid my words out in free verse.  Then she took my sermons over the previous three years, lifted the essence or climax from each and put that into the same free verse form.  Ultimately, Thomas Hale Publishing Company published that project in a coffee table size volume entitled Christpower.  I was elected bishop in Newark some three months later and this book all but disappeared.  In 2007, however, this volume of theological poetry, was discovered, revised, updated and republished by St Johann Press in Haworth, New Jersey, and is now newly available in a paperback version from Amazon or directly from the publisher.  Encouraged by the response of my readers I have used this new version of this Christmas sermon as my column every year since 2007.  It has thus become my Christmas gift to my readers.  I hope you enjoy it.
Merry Christmas!
~John Shelby Spong
Christpower
Far back beyond the beginning,
stretching out into the unknowable,
incomprehensible,
unfathomable depths, dark and void
of infinite eternity behind all history,
the Christpower was alive.
This was the
living,
bursting, pulsing,
generating, creating
smoldering, exploding
fusing, multiplying,
emerging, erupting,
pollenizing, inseminating,
heating, cooling
power of life itself: Christpower.
And it was good!
Here
all things that we know
began their journey into being.
Here
light separated from darkness.
Here
Christpower began to take form.
Here
life became real,
and that life spread into
emerging new creatures
evolving
into ever higher intelligence.
There was a sacrifice here
and
a mutation there.
There was grace and resurrection appearing
in their natural order,
occurring, recurring,
and always driven by the restless,
creating,
energizing
life force of God, called the Christpower,
which flowed in the veins of every living thing
for ever
and ever
and ever
and ever.
And it was good!
In time, in this universe,
there emerged creatures who were called human,
and the uniqueness of these creatures
lay in that they could
perceive
this life-giving power.
They could name it
and embrace it
and grow with it
and yearn for it.
Thus human life was born,
but individual expressions of that human life
were marked with a sense of
incompleteness,
inadequacy,
and a hunger
that drove them ever beyond the self
to search for life’s secret
and
to seek the source of life’s power.
This was a humanity that could not be content with
anything less.
And once again
in that process
there was
sacrifice and mutation,
grace and resurrection
now in the human order,
occurring, recurring.
And it was good!
Finally, in the fullness of time,
within that human family,
one
unique and special human life appeared:
whole
complete
free
loving
living
being
at one
at peace
at rest.
In that life was seen with new intensity
that primal power of the universe,
Christpower.
And it was good!
Of that life people said: Jesus,
you are the Christ,
for in you we see
and feel
and experience
the living force of life
and love
and being
of God.
He was hated,
rejected,
betrayed,
killed,
but
he was never distorted.
For here was a life in which
the goal, the dream, the hope
of all life
is achieved.
A single life among many lives.
Here
among us, out from us,
and yet this power, this essence,
was not from us at all,
for the Christpower that was seen in Jesus
is finally of God.
And even when the darkness of death overwhelmed him,
the power of life resurrected him;
for Christpower is life
eternal,
without beginning,
without ending.
It is the secret of creation.
It is the goal of humanity.
Here in this life we glimpse
that immortal
invisible
most blessed
most glorious
almighty life-giving force
of this universe
in startling completeness
in a single person.
Men and women tasted the power that was in him
and they were made whole by it.
They entered a new freedom,
a new being.
They knew resurrection and what it means to live
in the Eternal Now.
So they became agents of that power,
sharing those gifts from generation to generation,
creating and re-creating,
transforming, redeeming,
making all things new.
And as this power moved among human beings,
light
once more separated from darkness.
And it was good!
They searched for the words to describe
the moment that recognized the fullness of this power
living in history,
living in the life of this person.
But words failed them.
So they lapsed into poetry:
When this life was born,
they said,
a great light split the dark sky.
Angelic choruses peopled the heavens
to sing of peace on earth.
They told of a virgin mother,
of shepherds compelled to worship,
of a rejecting world that had no room in the inn.
They told of stars and oriental kings,
of gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
For when this life was born
that power that was
and is
with God,
inseparable,
the endless beginning
was seen
even in a baby
in swaddling clothes
lying in a manger.
Christpower.
Jesus, you are the Christ.
To know you is to live,
to love,
to be.
O come, then, let us adore him!
~John Shelby Spong

Read the essay online here.





Question & Answer
Vicky, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
I am a member of a group of (progressive) Christians and Jews who have been studying the New Testament.  We began with Mark and are now into Matthew and have been guided along the way by several of your books, including Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism.  Our question is this: why do you claim that Matthew’s gospel, in particular, is a nightmare for literalists?  Why Matthew more than the others?  Thank you and thank you for making me believe I am a Christian after all.
Answer:
Dear Vicky,
I don’t recall the particular quote to which you refer about Matthew, but I am happy to tell you why I regard him as a nightmare for literalism.  In the opening chapter of Matthew, he gives a genealogy of Jesus.  He turns this genealogy into three groups of 14 generations; the first from Abraham to David which would be about 800 years or 40 generations; the second from David to the Exile, which would be about 400 years or 20 generations and the third from the Exile to Jesus which would be close to 600 years or 30 generations.  Matthew says that these three epochs in Jewish history constituted fourteen generations each.  In order to keep this symmetrical scheme in tact Matthew goes so far as to leave out some kings mentioned in the Bible itself, pretending, I suppose, that they must not have existed. That is rather difficult for the literalists.
Next Matthew moves to the birth story of Jesus and he quotes a text from the Hebrew Scriptures to justify each episode in his narrative.  None of those quoted texts, however, is even remotely related to the situation for which Matthew was using it.  He is like a country preacher who applies a text whether it fits or not.  Literalists must go crazy trying to make sense out of this.  For example, Isaiah 7:14, which he quotes about a virgin conceiving, has nothing to do with the story of the Virgin Birth.  Indeed, the word virgin does not appear in that text in Hebrew. It rather refers to a woman who “is with child.”  Such a woman can hardly claim a virgin’s status!  Then he quotes Micah 5:2 as if it predicts a Bethlehem birth place for the messiah, but Matthew was making a reference to the birthplace of King David and if the idea that the messiah must be a direct descendent of King David is to be part of the Jesus claim then he must have his place of birth transferred from Nazareth, where he was surely born or else he would not have been known as “Jesus of Nazareth,” to Bethlehem, “the City of David.”
In the story of King Herod slaughtering the male babies in Bethlehem he quotes the prophet Jeremiah, who wrote about “Rachel weeping for her children who were not.” This text, however, was about the fall of the Northern kingdom of Israel to the Assyrians in 721 BCE.  Rachel was thought to be the ancestral mother of the Jews of the Northern Kingdom who thought of themselves as the children of the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, who were the sons of Joseph, whose mother was Rachel, it has nothing to do with the apocryphal story of the murder of the infants by King Herod.  The Herod story was in fact a Moses story being retold about Jesus.
He then quotes a text out of Hosea “Out of Egypt have I called my son” to show that the flight of Joseph, Mary and the Christ Child to Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod was the fulfillment of this Hosea text. Hosea was, however, referring to the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt under Moses’ leadership some 1250 years earlier.  It had nothing to do with the flight of Jesus, Mary and Joseph to Egypt.
Finally, Matthew asserted that the settling of the family of Jesus in the town of Nazareth was done to fulfill another prophetic saying, but does not tell us his source. The fact is that Jesus was probably born in Nazareth and he certainly grew up there.
That is just for starters.  Literalism is something we impose on the gospels, but Matthew, as an inveterate quoter of scripture, encourages literalism with his quotations and almost universally they represent a bad and distorted use of texts. The Bible itself refutes his claims.
I could add that only Matthew has Jesus preach the Sermon on the Mount.  He is the first gospel writer to make the resurrection look like a physical resuscitation of a deceased body and the first to have the Risen Christ speak.
This is part of the substance that makes me think that Matthew is a “nightmare for literalists.”
~John Shelby Spong





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