sharing is good-love wastefully
this is a portion of a speech given by John Shelby Spong(Retired Episcopal Bishop) at the commonwealth club. this speech helped focus alot of my thoughts about christianity and a god that loves all he has created. It was given post 911 and really touched and taught me. I put a link to the whole speech transcipt at the bottom.
A New Ethics
I’ve tried to develop a vocabulary to enable us to begin to conceive of and talk about a god beyond the theism/atheism debate – a Christ beyond incarnation, a concept of prayer that is something more than an adult letter to Santa Claus, which is what most prayer seems to be. I propose a basis for ethics not based upon an ancient code like the Ten Commandments, which is sexist to its core, the tenth commandment suggesting that you cannot covet your neighbor’s wife. Nowhere in the Bible is there a prohibition against coveting your neighbor’s husband. You just can’t covet your neighbor’s wife. The reason: When the commandments were given, only males were considered human enough to be part of the covenant community. The woman came into the covenant as the child of a father or the spouse of a husband, but she was property: “You shalt not covet your neighbor’s wife…nor his ox.” At least the woman was above the ox. That same theme is present in the seventh commandment, the one that says you shalt not commit adultery, that seems so straightforward and so clear. Yet, you need to recognize that when the commandment, “You shalt not commit adultery” was put into the Ten Commandments, polygamy was the style of marriage, and a man could have as many wives as he could afford, because women were property. Three hundred years after Moses was supposed to have given the Ten Commandments, King Solomon had a thousand wives. I don’t know what adultery means when a man has a thousand wives. If you have a thousand wives and still have some need to commit adultery, you’ve got a problem – and may I suggest it’s not just a moral problem.
A man having a sexual liaison with an unmarried woman was not guilty of adultery; he was guilty of a crime against that woman’s father, for she was the property of her father. I don’t believe we can base ethics on an ancient code written on tablets of stone, or even on a sacred page. Ethics must be grounded in life. Christian ethics must be based on whether or not this action, corporate or individual, enhances life or diminishes life, increases love or diminishes love, enhances being or denies being. A basis for ethics can be found in the midst of life without this supernatural appeal. I also tried to develop a concept of life after death that is not based upon reward and punishment. What I am proposing is a total revision of an ancient faith that I still dearly love: a new Christianity for a new world.
I cannot tell you who God is or what God is. I am not concerned about that, for neither can anyone else. It’s the height of human folly to think that anyone can tell any other person who God is or what God is. All I can tell you is how I believe I have experienced God, and even there, I must be open to the possibility that I am deluded. But I don’t think so. I experience God as the source of life, not a supernatural being up in the sky, but as that vital force of life that flows through the universe. And if God is the source of life, the only way I can worship God is by living fully. I experience God as the source of love, and if God is the source of love, the only way I can worship God is by loving wastefully, not stopping to say whether or not this person deserves that love. And I experience God in the words of theologian Paul Tillich, who did much to shape my thinking. I experience God as the “ground of all being,” and if God is the ground of all being, then I worship God by having the courage to be all that I am capable of being.
And I’m a Christian. When I look at the life of Jesus of Nazareth, I see a life so fully lived that I believe I sense the presence of the source of life in him. I see a love so wastefully shared that I believe I see the source of love in him. I see one who has the courage to be all that he is, under every set of circumstances. So I believe I perceive the ground of being in him. And I want to be a disciple of this Jesus, but a disciple of this Jesus does not mean that it is my compulsion to go out and convert everybody so that they will look like me and act like me. I would love for the church to get out of the conversion business and out of the evangelical business, out of the missionary business. Most missionary efforts are imperialistic, imposing one religious and cultural system upon another.
I do think that I have a responsibility as a disciple of this Jesus to live my life in such a way that I can help to build a world in which every human being has an opportunity to live more fully and love more wastefully and to be all that human being has the possibility of achieving, in the infinite variety of God’s humanity, whether our skin is black, brown, yellow or white, whether our gender is male or female, whether our sexual orientation is gay or straight, bisexual or transgendered, to call all people in the world into the fullness of life, the fullness of love, the fullness of being. If we can begin to address the Christian faith to those issues, and to find those conclusions, then I think there will be a reformation and a renaissance, perhaps not of the kind of Christianity that we knew in our childhood, but a Christianity that will call us to a new humanity. For if anything is obvious after September 11, it is that if we do not find a new way to be human, we will finally annihilate one another.