[Oe List ...] 5/12/11, Spong: Nebraska: Bright Lights in America's Heartland

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Nebraska: Bright Lights in America's Heartland
Mutual of Omaha. Warren Buffet and Nebraska Football! These are the best known icons of the Cornhusker State of Nebraska. In my mind there will always be one more. Roman Lee Hruska, who represented Nebraska in the United States Senate from 1954 to 1976.
Senator Hruska had a distinguished career as a vocal fiscal conservative, but he did vote for the Civil Rights bill of 1964, which means to me that he was far more understanding of human values than I find in most of those who are known today as “fiscal conservatives.” He is best remembered, however, for a speech delivered in the Senate in defense of a Nixon nominee to the Supreme Court named Harrold Carswell, who was criticized by the American Bar Association as not qualified for a seat on the high court “either by intellectual achievement or judicial experience.” Senator Hruska rose to defend Carswell’s mediocrity, a process generally thought of as “damning with faint praise!” In this speech he said, “Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation aren’t they and a little chance?” With friends like that Carswell did not need any enemies and the Senate failed to concur with that appointment and Senator Hruska became known, probably unfairly, as the “Senator for the Mediocre.”
Nebraska, however, now means far more to me than this list of local icons might suggest. In the last month I gave six lectures at three sites in Nebraska, a Synagogue, a Methodist Church and a United Church of Christ. It was one of the most exciting opportunities I have had in a long time and I met some of the most competent clergy that I have ever known. There was nothing Hruska-like or mediocre about my Nebraska experience. 
The first stop was to keynote a conference known as “Horizons of Faith.” It was the tenth anniversary of this event. The brainchild of a lay woman named Joan Byerhof, the first conference was held in 2001 and was jointly sponsored by the First Methodist Church and Temple Israel, a Reformed Synagogue. They are neighbors on Cass Street in Omaha and throughout the years have carried out many programs together.
The weekend opened with a “Welcome the Sabbath” service on Friday evening at the Synagogue. Jewish worship has always impressed me. The music, the prayers, the God consciousness, the deep sense of oneness between the people and their God, the role of the Torah, doing Kaddish for the recently deceased, all seem to me to have a deep integrity.
The Rabbi at Temple Israel, Aryeh Azriel, was lively, caring and enthusiastic. He beat on the pulpit in time with the music and gave every evidence of having been a bass drummer in a previous life. The Temple was packed and I spoke of my journey out of anti-Semitism, most of which I had learned in my Christian Sunday School many years ago. Whether that anti-Semitism was conscious or intended, the fact is that through my Sunday school material I never met a Jew who was not portrayed as evil. By definition, Jews were the enemies of Jesus and of Paul. They had names that I was taught to think of negatively: Pharisees, Sadducees, Annas, Caiaphas and of course, Judas Iscariot, who was presented to me as “the quintessential Jew.” I was told, for example, that Judas “would do anything for money.” No one ever told me in Sunday school that Jesus was a Jew, as were Paul and all of Jesus’ disciples. When I saw a picture of Jesus in my church, he did not look Jewish– he had blond hair, blue eyes and fair skin. I assumed he was a Swede! I knew, however, that Judas was a Jew because he was always portrayed as dark and sinister. In my lecture at this Synagogue, I traced the history of anti-Semitism from the New Testament to the Holocaust. It is not a pretty picture and it represents what is probably the darkest chapter of Christian history. I sought to reclaim, for both the Christians and the Jews who were present in the Synagogue that night, the Jewish womb in which Christianity was born and to honor it, even as I tried to recast Christianity in terms of the Judaism from which it has sprung. It was a good way to open the weekend and the “Jewish Cookies” at the reception following were spectacular.
On Saturday the conference moved next door to the First Methodist Church. This church has been the focus of Methodist disputes since the late 90’s when their former senior minister, the Reverend Jimmy Creech, precipitated a denominational crisis when he presided over and blessed the union of two lesbian members of his congregation and, later, two gay men. This action split the congregation and Jimmy Creech was ultimately put on trial by the Methodist Church and deposed from its ministry. He was, nonetheless, supported by a large part of the congregation who shared his vision of what a church must be and that vision has continued and grown in that place. Those who did not share that vision decided to leave to form a new Methodist Church dedicated to what they believed were “traditional values.”
The remaining members of the congregation of the First Methodist Church absorbed these losses and began the Horizons of Faith program to call their congregation deeper and deeper into a more inclusive and intellectually-challenging kind of Christianity. Over the decade this conference has drawn people from as far away as Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, Texas and South Dakota. The South Dakota contingent actually rented a private plane to make the trip for this weekend. This church has become a magnet for those who yearn to experience a deepening understanding of their faith. They have had several pastors since Jimmy Creech and are today served by an enormously talented woman named Jane Florence, who shepherds this inquisitive congregation in ever new and more exciting directions. They have regained more members than they lost in that distant dispute and they project today a very vibrant and exciting image.
Their organist and choir director, Mark Kurtz, directs an incredible music program and he composed and produced an original Easter Cantata for my visit based on words from my book Resurrection: Myth or Reality. At this church my four presentations focused on how Christianity was shaped by and illumined through a study of Jesus’ Jewish roots. Their enthusiasm carried me through the two very busy days.
Next we journeyed to Lincoln, the capital of Nebraska, to speak on a Monday night at the First Plymouth United Church of Christ, served today by a very genial and multi-talented Senior Pastor named Jim Keck. He is an able successor to their former Senior Pastor Otis Young, who died not too long ago after his well-deserved retirement from this church. Otis Young saw his church as an open and intellectually inquisitive congregation offering an alternative to the closed-minded fundamentalism so prevalent in that part of the Midwest. He developed a television ministry that carried the services of his church every Sunday not only across Nebraska, but to the surrounding states. People were thus introduced on a regular basis to a different kind of Christianity, one in which brains were allowed to be engaged, honest doubts were respected and compassion was displayed toward all those that traditional, conservative Christianity seems eager today to denigrate. People of color are not only welcomed at this church, but they are deeply part of this church’s life. Women are honored; two women pastors are on the staff. Gay and lesbian people experience complete acceptance and their sacred unions are regularly recognized and blessed. The television ministry continues today and across the heartland of America, a different understanding of Christ’s inclusive love blankets that geographical area each Sunday.
Over 600 people packed that church on that Monday night when I spoke on how my search for the meaning of eternal life had deepened my understanding of life itself, but even more about how it has deepened my understanding of Christianity. The response was touching; the questions that followed the lecture were deep, provocative and insightful. Present in that audience were atheists and agnostics, Christians and Jews, believers and searchers. I found no one defensive for God or eager to man the barricades around the traditional Christian understandings that are dying in the light of the intellectual revolution that has engulfed the Christian world from the time of Copernicus and Galileo, through Newton, Darwin, Freud and Einstein. They seemed to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I came home from Nebraska enormously encouraged about the future of Christianity and impressed with the possibility that the renewal and even the revival of a new Christianity for a new world might arise from the heartland of America. I would be happy attending and becoming a significant participant in any of the congregations that I experienced on this particular lecture tour. Senator Hruska may have felt the need to champion “mediocrity” a quarter of a century ago, but there was nothing mediocre about the Nebraska that I encountered. I was emboldened by what I saw–an open, loving, secure, questioning Christianity; an invitation regularly offered to people in these congregations to journey deeply into the mystery of God and a genuine conviction that God is bigger than our human minds can ever embrace.
I would go back to Nebraska in a moment. I thank them all for inspiring me so deeply that their gift to me, by itself alone, will surely carry me at least through the rest of 2011.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.





Question & Answer
John Neu, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
A recent question in your column from Mark Dickinson of Ottawa touched a very sore nerve in me. I am an Anglican priest in Ontario and have, for many years, observed the need for intense revision of what is taught in our Sunday schools. Taking the position that a plant starts from a seed and grows into a tree, for example, the process evident is that the seed must be nurtured in order to achieve its potential. It must come from the bottom up. Having been raised Roman Catholic and converting to Anglicanism after my four years’ service during WW II, I can attest to the extreme difficulty in wrenching what I was taught about religion out of my gut. I say gut because there it is and there it remains to this day. It is a constant battle. Therefore, it is imperative to me, at least, that we must reverse the process. More emphasis must be placed in educating the children than trying to reverse age-old teaching in the minds of adults. Yet I have never seen a comprehensive Sunday School curriculum developed and promoted for use in Sunday School. I suspect some may say that the minds of adults must be changed in order for a new approach to teaching children be accepted. Perhaps if a good curriculum is presented to adults for consideration not only will the children receive enlightened teaching, but it will surely rub off on adults. I have long thought that the poorest paid teachers, those in the lowest grades, should be the highest paid. The emphasis should be on teaching the desire to learn. If done well the rest will be so much easier. That applies to all the books you have written (which I have read) and also books that Crossan, Borg, etal have written: "A Little Child Shall Lead Them.” Have we overlooked a vital link in our religious education of the flock?
Answer:
Dear John, 

You raise a difficult issue, but I would approach it very differently. I think you start in church with the adults and teach them the scriptures in a comprehensive and scholarly way. You remove the legends, the myths and identify them for what they are. You make no attempt to “preserve” the immature Sunday understanding of God that most adult churchgoers seem to have and you make it difficult to replicate that kind of understanding in Church School. You introduce those parts of the Bible that are morally repugnant to the modern consciousness - the denigration of women, other religions and homosexual persons. You face the conflicts between biblical “truth” and scientific knowledge. You look at the literal nonsense found in the pre-Copernican biblical stories that assume God lives above the sky (The Tower of Babel, manna in the wilderness, the ascension of Jesus.) You force the miracles to be in touch with what we know of how natural law operates. You chronicle the contradictions in the virgin birth and resurrection narratives. You seek to discover the God experience and the Christ experience beneath the words of scripture. When that educational task is complete, you ask these people to teach the children in Sunday School. Only then will it make much difference what curriculum you use. 

Most Church School material is institutionally produced and its dedication is to institutional well-being, that is, “do not sow doubts!” I am glad that ProgressiveChristianity.org has produced Church School material. It is quite good, but placed into the hands of an uninformed pre-modern teacher, it will not overcome the present existing at handicaps. 

My experience teaches me that I start with the adults. This is the arena in which I believe the “trickle down” theory works. Trickle down economics usually trickles only from John D. Rockefeller to Nelson Rockefeller. Ideas trickle down, however, to convert and educate the parents and the children will be the recipients. 

~John Shelby Spong





Announcements
A NOTE FROM BISHOP SPONG:

DEAR READERS,
ONE OF THE MOST CREATIVE THEOLOGIANS IN OUR GENERATION IS MATTHEW FOX, THE AUTHOR OF MANY BOOKS, THE BEST KNOWN OF WHICH IS ORIGINAL BLESSINGS, a book in which he challenged for the first time the Christian Church's doctrine of "original sin." Matthew is also a good friend of mine, who has had a tumultuous relationship with the Roman Catholic Church in which he served as a priest for years. He has just published a chronicle of that relationship under the title "The Pope's War: Why Ratzinger's Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How it Can Be Saved." I include here a press release from his publisher:
"Theologian Matthew Fox, a former Catholic priest silenced by Pope Benedict XVI when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, recounts the "war for the soul of the Catholic Church" waged by Benedict and his predecessor, John Paul II. His new book, The Pope's War: Why Ratzinger's Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved is a searing indictment that portrays a church hierarchy obsessed with rooting out theological dissent and crushing creativity, while covering up the pedophile crisis. The Pope's Warbegins by recounting Ratzinger's life story, including his "conversion" from an up-and-coming progressive theologian at Vatican II to "ecclesial climber and chief inquisitor" who proceeded, along with Pope John Paul II, to dismantle the work of Vatican II, including the promises of collegiality, lay leadership, and theological pluralism. Fox concludes that the last two papacies have created a schism in the church by ignoring Vatican II but ends with a hopeful vision for the future. He believes that the Holy Spirit is at work in "ending the Catholic Church as we know it" and making it possible to "push the restart button on Christianity."
The book is hard hitting and revealing. It poses for us the crisis that is in our sister church and points to a way out of that crisis. I doubt if it will be welcomed in the Vatican, but it should be. It is the kind of criticism that only one who loves the Catholic Church as an insider could write. This book will cause enormous discussion. I want you to be aware of it.
~John Shelby Spong
ANNOUNCEMENTS FROM THE PUBLISHERS
Read what Bishop Spong has to say about A Joyful Path Progressive Christian Spiritual Curriculum for Young Hearts and Minds: "The great need in the Christian church is for a Sunday school curriculum for children that does not equate faith with having a pre-modern mind. The Center for Progressive Christianity has produced just that. Teachers can now teach children in Sunday school without crossing their fingers. I endorse it wholeheartedly." 
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