I was told during the week that I was going to have to move my chair back just a few feet from where I normally have it because of the bowl of fire behind me.  The people that watch this service via video let us know after the service two weeks ago that when I sit right here, with the bowl of fire behind me, it looks like there are flames of fire shooting out my ears, and out of the top of my head.

That image really captured my imagination during the week.  It reminded me of some conspiracy theories, such as people finding the image of the devil in the World Trade Center as it comes down.  It also reminded me of a situation when I was inducted into my first parish in Sydney.  As is always the case, the leaders of the church came forward with the bishop, and lay their hands on me.  Many hands would bear down on me that first night as I was inducted, and it was a hot Sydney summer’s night.  I had a shirt on, a cassock, and a surplus; all the paraphernalia, and I was so hot that I was dripping with sweat.  I had all of these hands bearing down on me, and heat rising from my body.  One of the people who had their hands on me approached me after the service, and said that he had never experienced anything like this type of heat.

As I was giving my first sermon in the church, the same person told me that he had seen something rise above me, just behind me on the wall.  He described it as being some type of angel.  The angel came with a very positive message- to welcome me, and bring good news to everyone about my arrival.  12 months later, after a series of meetings in which we as a congregation had to open up regarding issues of sexuality, and whether we would be a church open to people of all sexuality, this same man came up to me and said that he had actually changed his mind.  What he had seen that day was not actually an angel of light, but was, in fact, a demon.  It was bringing a message to the community to beware- this man does not bring good news; he comes of the devil, to bring news which opposes the word of God. 

So, the bowl of fire was scaring me.  I wondered. ‘What would people make of these flames shooting out of my ears, and out of my head?  We can’t let that happen anymore.’

Bishops and Spines

All this took me back to the ceremony of a new bishop being consecrated.  What happens at a bishop’s consecration ceremony is that 3 other bishops come and lay hands on the new bishop.  And the joke goes:  The 3 bishops are not laying hands on him so much as to fill him with the Holy Spirit, but more to remove his spine.  I sit here, as an Anglican, to tell you that my experience has been exactly that.

I’ve only come across one bishop in my whole life that, in my experience, has a spine.  And that is Bishop Spong.  We look forward to his visit in just two weeks.  My experience of bishops has been that they are spineless.  They are usually unwilling to stand at the edge, at the place where they are most needed, in the place where the frontiers of the church need to be opened up in new ways and to new people.  You very rarely find a bishop in that place.

When we had these issues of whether or not to welcome gays and lesbians in my first community, the bishop was called in.  A group of people in my community went to him and said, ‘Ian does not believe in the Bible.  He does not believe it when the Bible says that gay and lesbian people are not welcome in the kingdom of Heaven.  There were two meetings held with this particular bishop.  The first meeting was held just with me.  In this meeting, the bishop said that he was right with me, and he fully supported me.  He felt that I had done nothing wrong; in fact, one of his own daughters was a lesbian, and he felt that the church should be more open to gay and lesbian people.  So I left the meeting very encouraged that the diocese was behind me. 

The next day, another meeting was held, with the same bishop, and the other group from the community.  It was as if I were meeting with a different person.  His story completely changed.  There was no mention of his daughter, or of openness, just some very ambiguous comments about not offending anyone.

Bishop Spong’s Legacy

That has been my experience of bishops in institutions- they do not get involved at the edge, where they are most needed.  Bishop John Shelby Spong is a great exception to this rule.  That is exactly where he has dwelt his whole ministry.  His whole career has been at the edges of the church.  At the edges of the church, you tend to have things thrown at you.  You tend to be spat on and cursed, and yet, at the edges of the church are where things become more open.  Those are the places where people who never before felt that they could find any kind of life inside the institution, come and receive a welcome.  That is where Bishop Spong has dwelt. 

I want to tell you about the time I visited Bishop Spong in Newark, New Jersey, in 1998.  When I arrived in his office, he looked so tired.  He looked as if he had just come from a funeral, and sure enough, as he told me a little about what he had been doing, I realized that that was exactly what had happened.  He had just come from a meeting, which for him was like the next step in the funeral for the church.  The death of the church was taking place.  He had just come from the Lambeth Meeting, where all the world Anglican leaders gather.  Up until the meeting, there had been various people writing to support him as the leader of the cause for the inclusion of gay and lesbian people in full leadership of the church.  When it came to the actual conference, they all went silent.  So at this conference, Jack Spong was a lone voice fighting for a more open and inclusive church.  All the liberal bishops from around the world who had, until that point, said that they supported him, suddenly decided that unity was more important than justice.  Not getting out of step with other churches and denominations became their primary goal, rather than the issue at hand, which was one of justice.  It was one of opening the doors of the church to all people.  And so, Jack Spong became a lone voice on that issue.  He was battle weary.  He was scarred.  You could see on his face that he bore the wounds of the nastiness of church people who had been spitting on him and cursing him, and being two-faced around him. 

The words that he gave to me that day, I will never forget.  They were good words, words that have guided me through my life at the edge of the institution.  The words he gave me were:

Stay focused at your inner core.

People can hurt you, physically harm you, they can tear your self-confidence, but they can never touch that inner core.

I knew that he had lived those words through his struggle with the church.  His battle was with the church, not the world.  Those words, he was living.  He gave them to me.  Those words, we live as we dwell at the edge of this institution.  People can curse us, they can spit on us, they can run us down and try to tear our confidence away, but they can never touch the inner core, which we could call God.  It cannot be touched.

Jack Spong has been a great gift to the progressive church.  I would go so far as to say that Jack Spong is a hero for the progressive church.  No one has been braver.  No one has been more courageous in being there, with us and for us, as we pioneer a new way of being Christian in this world.  Jack Spong is my hero, for so many reasons. 

He has given us a way to read the Bible.  It makes sense; it puts sense into our world, and makes sense of things that happened in the first century.  The great gift of Jack Spong in our reading of the Bible is that all of the events and stories that were put together that we now know as the New Testament, were actually first century Jewish attempts to make sense of their history.  And so, they were re-enacting ancient Hebrew scenarios in liturgical ways.  That is the basic theory that Jack Spong presents in his work on the Gospel.  With that theory, we can rescue the Gospels from redundancy.  We can fill them with new meaning and new sense in our world today.  Jack Spong has redefined so many of the Doctrines of the Christian faith.  Some of these doctrines have, for many of us, ceased to make any sense.  He has filled them with new meaning. 

Spong and Progressive Theology

One of the most important doctrines that Spong has filled with new meaning is our understanding of God.  He himself was greatly influenced by the theologian Paul Tillich.  The great advance of Paul Tillich was that, at that time people were saying that God is dead.  People were finding no sense in this notion of God.  People were coming forward for the first time, and saying, ‘There is no God.  God is dead.  God makes no sense.’  Tillich came back to them and said, “Do you believe in life?  Do you believe in yourself?  Do you believe in the connectedness of all people?’  Whether you call that ‘God’, or the ground of being, or the source of life, Creator…Whatever words you use, you are describing God.  All of those things are good, and life affirming.

This was an amazing advance in the history of theology.  Paul Tillich was the one that brought that to our notice, Jack Spong was the one who popularized it.  Spong was the one who came, through his books, and lectures around the world, and brought the notion of God as the ground of being into public awareness, and into our everyday lives.  This is Jack Spong’s greatest achievement for the progressive Christian world.  He brought us three particular gifts:

• That we might live fully
• That we might love wastefully
• That we might be all that we can be

As he brings these gifts to us he says, ‘They are not just for you, to experience yourself, but also for you to manifest for other people.  They allow the world to live fully, to love wastefully, and to be all that it can be.’  It was a gift for us, but also a call to go out and give that gift to others.

Being All We Can Be

Let’s get back to the idea of Paul Tillich- the possibility that God is all things.  God is every situation, every person that you encounter.  If you can believe that possibility, then every moment is pregnant with all that it can be.  Every moment is pregnant with God, with holiness, sacredness, wonder and mystery.  There are not some moments that are holy and some that are not; every situation and every person is holy.  You can just imagine how that opens up the life of a community such as ours.  What we do here on a Sunday morning is holy, but no more holy than what we do when we walk out the doors, no more holy than when we encounter people in our lives.  No more holy than when we go to work, or to school on a Monday morning.  Everything in life is sacred; therefore every moment is pregnant with possibility.  Be all that you can be by living fully.

Jesus said, “I have come that you may have life, and have it in abundance.”

When I think about Paul Tillich, in the 20th century, speaking about the ground of being, it surprises me that it took that long for the notion to become popularized for people, especially when you hear readings like our reading this morning from John’s Gospel (John 10:30-38).  The mystics throughout the centuries have been speaking about this.  How is it that it took 2000 years for that idea to hit the mainstream?  You heard it in the Bible reading as plain as day: Jesus said, “I am in the Father, and the Father is in me.”  He tried to show the people that he was mixing with that they were gods too, but it was too hard for them.  The responsibility was too heavy.  The responsibility feels heavy for us as well:  The responsibility for us to be gods, to manifest God in our life.  Yet that is the call of the progressive Christian.   As Jesus was called to manifest God, we are called to manifest God.  By living fully. 

Living Fully

If anyone knows what it is like to live fully, it is Jack Spong.  He has met with people all over the world, in every walk of life, and every faith, every denomination.  He has had the experience to fully live life, and yet in his autobiography Here I Stand, he tells a very straightforward story about a time when he learned to live life more fully:

A good friend of his had taken ill, and was in the hospital, dying.  He was called to go to the hospital to have a conversation with her.  They spoke for about 40 minutes, had a good, tender, and very authentic conversation.  At the end of the conversation, Jack said, “I’d like to pray with you now.”  At the point that he began to pray, he felt himself contracting.  Suddenly his words became unauthentic.  The words suddenly fell back on the religious piety of his past.  He prayed for a few moments, and left the hospital.  He was devastated by what had just happened.  This incredible and authentic conversation had contracted as soon as he’d brought his religion into the picture.  At that moment he realized, for the first time in his life, that prayer, communion with God, had to be as authentic as every other moment that he lives.  It changed his view of prayer, from then forward.  He was a young bishop at the time, and never again prayed with such religious piety.

Loving Wastefully

Jack Spong has lived fully, been human, and made mistakes.  In his mistakes he has become more human.  He has manifested God in his mistakes, and in his learning from them.  He has encouraged others to do the same.

Jack Spong had a journey of his own regarding the issue of sexuality.  As a new bishop, he turned up to see one of his young priests, who he didn’t realize was a gay priest.  He sat for a while in the priest’s living room, and they chatted, and then he went to the bathroom.  In the bathroom, Jack discovered “His” and “His” towels, and pictures of naked men on the wall.  After a few moments of thinking, it clicked into gear for him, and he thought, “This man must be gay, and he must be living with his partner.’ 

Sure enough, he went back out and asked the priest if he were gay and living with his partner.  The priest confessed and said, ’Yes, I am.’ 

Jack, being a young bishop, and not yet fully thinking through all of his theology at this point, said, ‘I have to tell you that your own personal choice is fine, but in terms of living in a church house like this, I couldn’t allow anyone who is not married, heterosexual or homosexual, to live with their partner.’

The gay priest responded, ‘Yes, bishop, but we don’t have the option of getting married.’

Those words struck Bishop Spong in his heart.  He carried them forward, and realized that his calling as a bishop was to open up the possibilities for all people for full membership in the church, and full leadership in the church.  A person’s sexuality should be no bar to that leadership.  The church should be at the forefront of fighting for justice for people who are discriminated against.  He made that his ministry calling.  Jack Spong was learning what it meant to love wastefully.  He was learning how it was for other people to love wastefully in their chosen lifestyle.  He affirmed that, and called them to do that- love wastefully.

One of the things that strike me most about Bishop Spong is his optimism.  If you have not had a chance to meet him personally, I would encourage you to do that.  He is the most positive person in the face of so much battering over the years.  Who could imagine that he could remain so positive while he has taken a beating by the church?  Those he thought were his friends have left him high and dry.  The other liberals in the church have left him out on his own. 

His first wife died after a long battle with cancer and mental illness. Jack was sitting with his children at the funeral, when an old woman came forward, and beat him over the shoulder with a stick.  She then cursed him, turned and left the church.  That’s the type of life that he has lived.  For being at the edge, you get beaten.  For being at the edge, you get cursed.  People find it hard to understand that a bishop would dwell at the edge of the life of an institution.  He paid the price for it.  Even at his wife’s funeral, he paid the price. 

Yet, there were some other people present at the funeral, and when the funeral was over, a group came forward.  They had been the acolytes and pallbearers that morning.  They had a surprise for Bishop Spong.  They were a group of people from an organization called “Integrity”, which was an Episcopalian gay and lesbian activist group.  They had come as an act of solidarity for their hero- Jack Spong.  He heard the encouragement of the group saying, ‘thankyou for being with us at the edge.  No one else in the church will.’  And he knew that day that this would be his calling.  In the face of beatings, cursing, and betrayal, he never lost his focus on that inner purpose: God, the ground of being, at his essence.

Jack Spong is my hero.  Without him, I don’t know if I would have remained in the church.  Without Jack Spong, where would this community be? 

Next week I want to take that thought a little bit further, and talk about Jack’s interest in this community, and his interest in my career, and how he brought us together.  He was the one who suggested that we should get to know each other, because there is a vision there that is very much in harmony.   It is because of Jack Spong that we moved our family to this community.  I want to talk more about that next week, and about how that vision goes forward. For now, the life and the ministry of John Shelby Spong, great hero and pioneer of the progressive Christian church, calling us to live fully, to love wastefully, and to be all that we can be as a community.  Manifest this God and this goodness for all those around us, in our lives, and in our families, in our work, and world.  May all people be invited to embrace the God that is life lived fully, love expressed wastefully, and is all that can be in the world.