Bishop Spong's Articles October 2009

The facts, however, are these. We have no original words of Jesus in the language in which he spoke. We have no firsthand accounts of the things he is supposed to have done. Even the earliest narrative describing the crucifixion is a creation of at least the second generation of Jesus' disciples and it is constructed not on eyewitness testimony, but on the interpretive use of the Hebrew Scriptures to portray Jesus as the fulfillment of all of their expectations. In the column last week we located the life of Jesus in terms of history, suggesting that the most informed guess for the date of his birth is 4 BCE and for the date of his death is 30 CE. With those dates in mind, let me line up today the books of the New Testament on a time grid of the first century and allow you to see how the New Testament developed. By doing that we can trace such things as when new claims, heightened accounts of the miraculous and the developing layers and traditions of the Jesus story wer e added to the narrative.

Assume that the life of Jesus was lived between 4 BCE and 30 CE. We face the fact that from the years 30 CE to about 50 CE, there is not a single word preserved of anything Jesus said or did. A tunnel of total silence exists, into which only speculation is possible.

In the years between 50 and 64 CE we come to the writings of Paul. Not all the epistles that bear his name are actually Pauline, but we are generally convinced that I Thessalonians, Galatians, I and II Corinthians, Romans, Philemon and Philippians are authentic. Almost all scholars dismiss the Pauline authorship of Hebrews, I and II Timothy, Titus and Ephesians, while the Pauline authorship of Colossians and II Thessalonians is still debated.

The four gospels were written between 70 and 100. The Book of Acts, the pseudo-Pauline epistles, the General Epistles (I, II, III John; I and II Peter; James and Jude) and the book of Revelation would all be dated between the 7th and 10th decades. With that dating system in mind let me go back and chronicle how the story developed between Paul, our earliest New Testament writer, and John, the last gospel writer.

Paul is the first person to give us any writing details about the life of Jesus, but these details are scanty indeed. Letter writer that Paul was, it was not his agenda to relate the words of Jesus, stories about Jesus or even the major events of his life, except inadvertently. Paul has no sense of Jesus having had a miraculous birth. He says of Jesus only that he was "born of a woman" like all human beings and that he was "born under the law" like all Jews. He does suggest that he is linked by heredity to King David, but since that was a popular messianic claim, it is hard to judge its historicity. Paul also indicates that he knows James, the brother of Jesus, but he never mentions the names of Jesus' parents nor shares any knowledge about them.

Paul records no account of Jesus as a miracle worker. He reveals no knowledge of the tradition that Jesus was betrayed by one of his disciples. All he says is that "On the night in which Jesus was handed over, he took bread" and instituted the Christian Eucharist. The words handed over became the fragile basis upon which the betrayal story was constructed. Paul does not suggest that this "handing over" was done by one of his disciples, nor does he identify this "last supper" in any way with the Passover. Paul makes no mention of the content of Jesus' teaching, nor does he reveal any familiarity with any of the parables.

When Paul comes to the final events in Jesus' life, his knowledge is equally scanty. The fact that Jesus was crucified is central to Paul, but none of the familiar details of that event are noted. All that Paul says is: "He died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures." Paul never mentions Pilate, Herod, the soldiers, the two thieves crucified with him, any words that Jesus was supposed to have spoken from the cross or what his death might have looked like. To say that Jesus "died for our sins," appears to be an allusion drawn from the synagogue liturgy of Yom Kippur, while his words "in accordance with the scriptures" may relate to the way that early Christians interpreted the Hebrew prophets as having their words find literal fulfillment in the life and death of Jesus. We do know that the image of the "servant" drawn by II Isaiah (40-55) and of the "shepherd king" drawn by II Zechariah (9-14) were popular images for interpreting Jesus by the time the gospels we re written. When he comes to the burial of Jesus Paul writes only "that he was buried." There is no tomb, no Joseph of Arimathea, no angels, no guards, no women visitors. Dead people are buried is all he claims.

About the resurrection Paul says only that "on the third day" Jesus was raised "in accordance with the scriptures," but he does not say into what he was raised. Was it into the life of this world or into the life of God? Was the resurrection a resuscitation of a dead body or an ascension into heaven? There were three stories in Jewish tradition in which a holy man (Enoch, Moses and Elijah) is victoriously translated into heaven. Paul would have been familiar with each of them. Most of Paul's later writing points to the understanding that he believed that Jesus was raised into the eternity of God, rather than being physically resuscitated back into this life.

Paul goes on to give a list of those people to whom the raised Christ was "made manifest." He includes "the twelve," which seems to say that Judas was still among them. He also includes himself, claiming his experience of the risen Christ was like all the others except that his was last. When Paul's epistles, written between 50 and 64, were all that the Christian Church had in writing, the fact is that the remembered details on Jesus' life were few indeed.

The first gospel was Mark, written in the early 70's, followed by Matthew in the early 80's and Luke in the late 80's and finally by John in the late 90's. Both Matthew and Luke copied large portions of Mark into their works, with Matthew utilizing about 90% of Mark's content and Luke utilizing about 50%. John appears to be aware of the first three gospels, but he was not dependent on them, except very slightly. So when we line up the books of the New Testament, in the historic order of their writing we can see the developing story line quite clearly.

Mark in the 8th decade is the first to introduce John the Baptist, to say that Jesus performed miracles or to suggest that his mother's name was Mary. None of those things had ever been mentioned before. He never refers to a father figure at all, much less one named Joseph. Mark is the first writer to introduce Judas as the traitor and the first to write a narrative of the cross. In that narrative, now-familiar details such as Peter's denial, the crown of thorns, the crucified thieves and the cry of dereliction, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" enter the tradition. Mark also is the first to introduce Joseph of Arimathea and to relate the story of Jesus' burial. When Mark gets to Easter, he portrays only an empty tomb and a messenger who makes a resurrection announcement, but never in the first gospel is the raised Christ seen by anyone. That is all we have until the 9th decade.

Matthew, writing about a decade after Mark, adds other touches. He is the first to provide a genealogy, the first to introduce the virgin birth story of Jesus and the first to weave the story of Jesus around the narrative of Moses. Only in Matthew is there a Moses story about a wicked king trying to destroy Jewish male babies, but now told about Jesus, and only in Matthew does Jesus preach the Sermon on the Mount, re-interpreting the Law of Moses in a new way from on top of a new mountain. Matthew adds the parable of the sheep and the goats found nowhere else. He also copies all of Mark's miracles, adding none of his own. Finally, Matthew is the first gospel to portray Jesus as physically raised from the dead, though he is quite ambivalent. The raised Christ is physical with the women in the garden, but not with the disciples in Galilee.

Luke, writing a little less than a decade after Matthew, builds on the miraculous birth story, adding details that do not harmonize with Matthew. In Luke angels replace the star and shepherds replace the magi. He adds two new miracle stories to the tradition, the healing of the ten lepers and the raising from the dead of a widow's only son in Nain. Luke is also the source of the best known of Jesus' parables: the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son and Lazarus and the Rich Man, which appear in no other gospel. Luke adds words to the cross unheard of before and he makes the resurrection quite physical. The stories of Ascension and Pentecost are also Lucan.

John adds two new miracles: turning of water into wine and raising Lazarus from the dead. He expands the teaching of Jesus, frequently turning it into long, highly developed theological monologues. He prefers the word "sign" to the word "miracle" and makes the ascension something that occurs before Jesus appears to the disciples, not afterwards.

This very brief analysis gives us a sense of how the Jesus story grew as the New Testament developed. We will return to look at this in more detail later. For now, however, I simply want my readers to be aware of how dramatically the story grows between 70 and100 as the gospels are written. Then I ask you to wonder with me about how the story might have grown from 30 to 70, where we have little or no data for comparison. That will prepare us to enter that dark oral only tunnel where no written data exists when this series continues.

Dear Robert,

I could not disagree with you more, and feel that you profoundly misunderstand the Jewish Scriptures. I also do not understand why anyone would want to develop a "national religion." I think the worship of God should lead people to transcend all boundaries, including our tribal or national boundaries. That seems to me to be what the story of Pentecost was saying when it suggested that in the power of the spirit people could communicate in the language of their hearers. Your point of view is also not new. It was offered and defended by a man named Marcion around 140 CE. His views were later condemned as heresy.

The problem with the Old and New Testaments is that they are both dated pieces of literature that reflect the values and mores of those who wrote them between 1000 BCE and 135 CE. Many passages in the Old Testament reflect a tribal mentality that portrays God as hating everyone the people of Israel hated. It also portrays God as killing the firstborn male in every household in Egypt on the night of the Passover; justifies the institution of slavery (except for fellow Jews) and defines women as the property of men. Note that even the Ten Commandments exhort us "not covet our neighbor's house, his wife, his slaves, his ox, his ass, etc." The neighbor is clearly a male, and the things that we are forbidden to covet are all male possessions. These Hebrew Scriptures, however, also define God as love, justice and as a universal being. In the portrait of the "Servant" in Isaiah 40-55 the Hebrew Scriptures portray human life as capable of giving itself away and even of acting in such a way as to draw the pain out of others, absorb it and return it as love.

The New Testament portrays Paul as believing that slavery is good if it is kind. Paul also reveals attitudes toward women that are today deeply embarrassing: "I forbid a woman to have authority over a man." "Women should keep quiet in church." No, I want both Testaments always to be available to the Christian community, I want no part of the Bible to be treated literally and used as a weapon to enforce someone's will and I want no part of a national religion.

One does not expect to experience one of the most remarkable congregations I have ever met in a rather quiet community less than an hour north of Toronto in the center of Ontario. By most external measures, Holy Cross Church is not especially impressive. Its frame building looks more like a house than a church. This structure was originally built to be a "Kingdom Hall" for the Jehovah's Witness tradition. When that enterprise folded, it was sold to a Montessori School and only later did the Lutherans buy it and turn it into a church. The entrance level is a large room that serves both as a sanctuary on Sunday and a gathering place for all church activities at other times. One room has been cut into this space to provide a small office for the pastor. On the lower levels are washrooms, a kitchen, additional rooms that house a day care center and storage space. The maximum numbers of worshipers this church can accommodate at one time is 85. The average Sunday attendan ce is normally about 55. Yet the smallness of their numbers has not limited the largeness of their vision.

The pastor and congregation of Holy Cross Church are self-consciously about the task of reinventing worship and recreating what it means to be the church. "Beer and Theology" on Monday nights throughout the program year in a local pub is only one facet of their corporate life. A series of lectures on "Rethinking Christianity" is another part of their offering to the community. I was there this fall to be the speaker at the first of this year's series. There was a spirit of anticipation and preparation in the air and I had the sense that my presence was the result of a long period of preparation on the part of the congregation.

The format for these lectures included two presentations of about an hour each followed by another hour of questions and discussion. They were held in the church itself on a Saturday. A box lunch divided the four-hour day into two equal halves. With the capacity of their space limited, they refused to exceed the maximum number they could accommodate and so the class was closed when 85 people had signed up. To accommodate more people in their community and surrounding area, however, they also arranged for me to do a third lecture open to the public, held on Sunday night in the auditorium of a local school that could accommodate 500 people. That was a remarkable undertaking for this very small church to offer to its community, but the people in that area have learned to expect big things from these Lutherans.

On Sunday morning I was the guest preacher at their regular Sunday service, which gave me a great insight into their understanding of liturgy and worship. True to the traditions of the German Lutheran Church, music plays a large part in this congregation's worship life. Singing is made easy by the fact that both the words and the music are printed in the bulletin so there is no searching through books to find the correct number. In the congregation there were also two male voices of superior and trained ability that made congregational singing a joy to hear. One of these men studied opera and actually toured with an opera company and has recorded CDs on the market. He is a strong tenor and his CD that I have contains most of the familiar chestnuts that tenors regularly sing to the joy of their audiences. Only "O Danny Boy" is missing from his repertoire. The other man also studied voice and is a trained musician. He actually married his accompanist and she is today t he musician who accompanies the congregation's singing on the piano. An unvested choir of about six people presents an anthem each week. The words of the hymns are remarkably refreshing, filled as they are with hope and affirmation rather than the guilt, sin, fear and references to the cleansing blood of Jesus that seems to mark so much of Christian hymnody. The music with which this congregation's Sunday worship opened when I was there set a mood of expectation. Beginning the service, we sang:

"Longing for light, we wait in darkness
Looking for truth, we turn to you.
Make us your own, your holy people
Light for the world to see."

The hymn continued for five verses in which the themes of peace and hope for a troubled world were heard and a desire was expressed that they might become "bread broken for others until all are fed." The refrain proclaimed the prayer that Christ might shine in their hearts, shine through the darkness, and concluded with the petition that Christ "might shine in this church gathered today." I thought about other hymns I have endured recently that pronounced me "a wretch" and called me "vile" and spoke of "blood from the veins of Jesus" that might cleanse me of my sins. The contrast was refreshing.

Another hymn that we sang defined God, not theistically as a supernatural, miracle-working deity who lived above the sky, but as the "Oneness" we seek, the "life that is part of us," and as the "love and the joy that makes us whole." It was a joy to be enveloped in those words.

When we came to the "affirmation of faith" it was not the convoluted words of the fourth century Nicene Creed that seeks to build security fences to keep out heresy, but was something the people of the congregation worked on to define their faith in words they could understand. Yet it still contained all of the marks of historic Christianity, including references to God as creator; Christ as the Incarnation of love to whom his disciples responded, "My Lord and my God;" and as the Holy Spirit who was defined quite biblically as breath, the wind of God, the giver of life and as holy wisdom. It was, however, open, affirming and joyously proclaimed. "We are a community of faith," this affirmation began, and then what their faith meant was spelled out: We share a vision of God, whose spirit is love. We search for the meaning of God in our experience. We share a vision of Jesus, who "forgave those who crucified him," who in the "mystery of the resurrection continues to live e ven more profoundly through the ages," and who calls us to be reconciled with the whole of creation. The congregation acknowledged that the Holy Spirit bids them "to cry out for justice for the powerless and oppressed and to see the presence of God in every created thing." Their creed concluded with these words: "We reach out to one another for strength beyond our own. This is our community. This is our faith." I found myself inspired and enfolded as I repeated these words.

When the time came for the prayers, the phrase "Lord have mercy" was mercifully absent. That phrase is little more than the petition of a beggar before the righteous judge, and it serves to relate the worshiper to an authoritarian God who does little more than fill worshippers with a sense of guilt and failure. The response of the people in these prayers on that particular Sunday was the ringing affirmation "Let it be so!" They prayed to let the beauty of creation inspire them to walk lightly upon the earth, so that they might be empowered to end to greed, violence and war. They prayed that they might embody the gifts of eternal life and seek justice for all, that wholeness might be their goal and that they might walk in the ways of love. I was almost shouting "Let it be so!" when the prayers ended in the sharing of the peace.

The Communion table was open. No external barriers were erected. No one said this sacrament is for the baptized only, the confirmed only, Catholics only, Christians only. It was open to all who were hungry for what God means. The Lord's Prayer was sung in such a way as the constant refrain was heard, "Let the will of God be done on earth as in heaven." The communion hymn announced that God is in our questions as well as in our answers and that the sacrament draws those who are many throughout the world into one bread and one body gathered for the sake of the world.

The closing hymn was the prayer of St. Francis, "Make me the channel of your peace, where there is hatred, let me sow love." The traditional God who is so often located above the sky in our liturgies was now located inside the worshipers who were to be the channels through which the love of God engaged history. Obviously the one presiding over the Eucharist faced the people, for that is where God is to be found. God's dwelling place was not "up there" or "out there," but in the midst of the people.

I left that church elated, refreshed, committed and filled with joy. My life had been affirmed and I had been stretched to a new level of humanity. I was no longer a "miserable offender" who was not worthy "to gather up the crumbs" from the divine altar. It would almost be worth it to commute to Holy Cross Lutheran Church in New Market, Ontario, to attend worship each Sunday. There I got a vision of what a church is supposed to be.

Note: Those who wish to know more about this church may visit its Web site at www.holycrosslutheran.ca. Better still, write a note of encouragement and affirmation to the Reverend Dawn Hutchings at pastordawn@holycrosslutheran.ca. That can be your positive and life-affirming deed of the day.

Dear Carter,

Liturgy is defined as the work of the people. Liturgy also reflects the attitudes and world views of the people who composed it. Before Copernicus and Galileo almost everyone thought of God as a supernatural being who lived above the sky. When we understood the immensity of the universe, that definition of God became quite inadequate. Yet our liturgy still assumes it — "Our Father who art in heaven," we say. Stories in the Bible, from the Tower of Babel in Genesis to the ascension of Jesus in the book of Acts, still assume this pre-Copernican world view.

Before Isaac Newton, we defined everything we did not understand as a miracle. After Newton, miracles and magic shrank into non-existence. Yet the Christian Eucharist still tells the Jesus story as the theistic God from above the sky, entering human history in the person of Jesus and somehow paying the price of our sins.

What we need to understand is that the theistic definition of God is not God. It is a human definition of God. Human definitions always fade with the expansion of knowledge. Theism has now faded. Yet the Eucharist tries each week to do artificial respiration on the corpse of theism.

I do not think the great mystics of Christian history were theists. They were certainly God-intoxicated but they did not define God in theistic ways. The time has come for us to seek to redefine our God experience in the liturgy in non-theistic symbols.

I do not believe any human being can define God. I do think we can experience God. I experience God as the source of life calling me to live fully, as the presence of love calling me to love wastefully, as the Ground of Being empowering me to be all that I can be. So God is seen for me in lives fully lived, love wastefully given and being used to empower others to be.

That is the God I meet in Jesus and that is what the Eucharist is all about. One would not know that, however, with all of the blood, sacrifice and sin talk with which the Eucharist is now laden.

I see reformation coming and I welcome it. The way for liturgy to change is for the people involved in it to do it. Your question indicates that you are already raising these issues.

Stay with it. Liturgy changes very slowly.

I will particularly ignore those members of my own Episcopal Church who seek to break away from this body to form a "new church," claiming that this new and bigoted instrument alone now represents the Anglican Communion. Such a new ecclesiastical body is designed to allow these pathetic human beings, who are so deeply locked into a world that no longer exists, to form a community in which they can continue to hate gay people, distort gay people with their hopeless rhetoric and to be part of a religious fellowship in which they can continue to feel justified in their homophobic prejudices for the rest of their tortured lives. Church unity can never be a virtue that is preserved by allowing injustice, oppression and psychological tyranny to go unchallenged.

In my personal life, I will no longer listen to televised debates conducted by "fair-minded" channels that seek to give "both sides" of this issue "equal time." I am aware that these stations no longer give equal time to the advocates of treating women as if they are the property of men or to the advocates of reinstating either segregation or slavery, despite the fact that when these evil institutions were coming to an end the Bible was still being quoted frequently on each of these subjects. It is time for the media to announce that there are no longer two sides to the issue of full humanity for gay and lesbian people. There is no way that justice for homosexual people can be compromised any longer.

I will no longer act as if the Papal office is to be respected if the present occupant of that office is either not willing or not able to inform and educate himself on public issues on which he dares to speak with embarrassing ineptitude. I will no longer be respectful of the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who seems to believe that rude behavior, intolerance and even killing prejudice is somehow acceptable, so long as it comes from third-world religious leaders, who more than anything else reveal in themselves the price that colonial oppression has required of the minds and hearts of so many of our world's population. I see no way that ignorance and truth can be placed side by side, nor do I believe that evil is somehow less evil if the Bible is quoted to justify it. I will dismiss as unworthy of any more of my attention the wild, false and uninformed opinions of such would-be religious leaders as Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, A lbert Mohler, and Robert Duncan. My country and my church have both already spent too much time, energy and money trying to accommodate these backward points of view when they are no longer even tolerable.

I make these statements because it is time to move on. The battle is over. The victory has been won. There is no reasonable doubt as to what the final outcome of this struggle will be. Homosexual people will be accepted as equal, full human beings, who have a legitimate claim on every right that both church and society have to offer any of us. Homosexual marriages will become legal, recognized by the state and pronounced holy by the church. "Don't ask, don't tell" will be dismantled as the policy of our armed forces. We will and we must learn that equality of citizenship is not something that should ever be submitted to a referendum. Equality under and before the law is a solemn promise conveyed to all our citizens in the Constitution itself. Can any of us imagine having a public referendum on whether slavery should continue, whether segregation should be dismantled, whether voting privileges should be offered to women? The time has come for politicians to stop hid ing behind unjust laws that they themselves helped to enact, and to abandon that convenient shield of demanding a vote on the rights of full citizenship because they do not understand the difference between a constitutional democracy, which this nation has, and a "mobocracy," which this nation rejected when it adopted its constitution. We do not put the civil rights of a minority to the vote of a plebiscite.

I will also no longer act as if I need a majority vote of some ecclesiastical body in order to bless, ordain, recognize and celebrate the lives and gifts of gay and lesbian people in the life of the church. No one should ever again be forced to submit the privilege of citizenship in this nation or membership in the Christian Church to the will of a majority vote.

The battle in both our culture and our church to rid our souls of this dying prejudice is finished. A new consciousness has arisen. A decision has quite clearly been made. Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state. Therefore, I will from this moment on refuse to dignify the continued public expression of ignorant prejudice by engaging it. I do not tolerate racism or sexism any longer. From this moment on, I will no longer tolerate our culture's various forms of homophobia. I do not care who it is who articulates these attitudes or who tries to make them sound holy with religious jargon.

I have been part of this debate for years, but things do get settled and this issue is now settled for me. I do not debate any longer with members of the "Flat Earth Society" either. I do not debate with people who think we should treat epilepsy by casting demons out of the epileptic person; I do not waste time engaging those medical opinions that suggest that bleeding the patient might release the infection. I do not converse with people who think that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans as punishment for the sin of being the birthplace of Ellen DeGeneres or that the terrorists hit the United Sates on 9/11 because we tolerated homosexual people, abortions, feminism or the American Civil Liberties Union. I am tired of being embarrassed by so much of my church's participation in causes that are quite unworthy of the Christ I serve or the God whose mystery and wonder I appreciate more each day. Indeed I feel the Christian Church should not only apologize, but do public pen ance for the way we have treated people of color, women, adherents of other religions and those we designated heretics, as well as gay and lesbian people.

Life moves on. As the poet James Russell Lowell once put it more than a century ago: "New occasions teach new duties, Time makes ancient good uncouth." I am ready now to claim the victory. I will from now on assume it and live into it. I am unwilling to argue about it or to discuss it as if there are two equally valid, competing positions any longer. The day for that mentality has simply gone forever.

This is my manifesto and my creed. I proclaim it today. I invite others to join me in this public declaration. I believe that such a public outpouring will help cleanse both the church and this nation of its own distorting past. It will restore integrity and honor to both church and state. It will signal that a new day has dawned and we are ready not just to embrace it, but also to rejoice in it and to celebrate it.

Dear John,

I am not surprised that you have found fundamentalism in rural Texas difficult to understand. One has to be raised in that tradition, as I was, to know what it means to the people involved. You do not engage this way of thinking by rational argument. The Fourth Gospel is the only place where Jesus claims the identity of God, but I am not sure that is a proper understanding of this gospel. That is, however, is the way the Fourth Gospel is traditionally understood. I have just finished working my way through Rudolf Bultmann's massive commentary on John's gospel. He sees Jesus as "the Revealer" of God who becomes so mystically at one with God that John's Jesus can say things like "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father." John's Jesus is portrayed as believing that God worked through him. Later interpreters interpreted that to be that Jesus was identical with God. Yet in this gospel Jesus is made to utter the "High Priestly" prayer of Chapter 17. That prayer was not addressed to himself, but to one he envisioned as being beyond himself. John's Gospel portrays Jesus as dying. Surely God is not subject to the limits of humanity, but Jesus is. So it is apparent to me that these texts should be read as God being revealed in and through Jesus, but not incarnationally as if Jesus is God masquerading as a human being.

Mark, the first gospel to be written, portrayed God coming into the human Jesus at his baptism. That is not dual nature, but a God-infused life. The earliest records of Easter in the Bible speak of God raising Jesus. The action was God's not Jesus' — again no single identification.

What is clear throughout the text is that people met God in Jesus and through Jesus and that is what the core of the word incarnation was designed to say.

I hope you will find a church in which you can participate without necessarily buying the theology. Don't argue with it, but live out your values and through love be an agent of change within that church. I'm sure there are others like you in Baird, each waiting for someone else to take the first step.

The issues in this health care debate are not as clear as we wish, but a major reason for that is that it is in the vested interests of certain people to make sure that these issues stay unclear. Fear, scare tactics and even incredible misstatements of facts thrive in that kind of environment. Great numbers of people in our society have their mouths in the proverbial feeding trough of our current health care system, having dined well there for years. The lawyers are one such group. They resist tort reform because they make enormous money by suing doctors for malpractice and being awarded huge settlements by a jury of a victim's peers. Drug makers are also reaping huge profits, even though far too often they have to use some of those profits to pay for the dramatically, devastating painful deaths that have accompanied certain drugs. The makers of medical devices are another group frequently shown to be guilty of deliberately hiding defects that have been disastrous. Of course, all of us wind up paying the costs of these legal settlements in the ever-expanding cost of our insurance. Doctors today are not nearly as negative to things like the public option as they once were. In fact, one recent poll suggested that 70% of America's doctors favored the public option. I talked with a highly regarded doctor recently who favored, and thought we would eventually adopt, the single payer system. He cited the fact that doctors have worked with Medicare for years now and they know that the government interferes in patient health and in medical decisions far less than private insurance companies do. Doctors also know that Medicare, unlike the health care companies, will pay them promptly and fairly for the senior citizen section of their practice. Many doctors also resent the lack of freedom and the massive amount of paperwork that is primarily an insurance company effort to manage costs and thus to maximize profits. Paperwork connected with ins urance forms has forced doctors to hire staff just to manage the paper flow, which in turn raises medical fees. For these reasons doctors are not as negative to a national health service as they once were.

If the truth were fully disclosed we would discover that the insurance companies are making huge profits. There is no other reason for them to be spending billions of dollars to lobby against any reform. All of the proposed bills in Congress are designed to cut the cost of medical care, and that means cutting the profits of the insurance companies. Spokespersons for this industry are the people primarily responsible for the loaded rhetoric that has been dumped into the debate. It comes straight out of unscrupulous public relations firms. Whenever one hears in this debate emotionally loaded words like "government takeover," "government death squads" (who, they suggest, will decide which elderly people will live and which will die), and "government bureaucrats" (who will stand "between you and your doctor"), all of us should know that this rhetoric is the result of paid lobbyists seeking to manipulate public opinion. What we have operating in the economy today is an insura nce company takeover of American health care and they do not want to be challenged by what they call "a government takeover of American health care." The insurance companies are today the ones who decide what services will be covered. They thus are already making the decisions as to who will live and who will not. Their rhetoric simply projects what they are already doing onto their favorite bogeyman, "the government." At least a government program would be responsible to its constituency, the people of the United States, while the insurance companies must satisfy their constituency of profit-driven management and dividend-seeking stockholders. Few people recognize that 35% of the premiums people pay for health insurance goes to executive compensation, bonuses and dividends. There is enormous profit in health care. One wonders how moral it is for a few to profit from the illnesses of the many.

Another rather ingenious attack on health care reform heard recently in Congress by the perpetual naysayers is that the provision requiring everyone to carry insurance amounts to a "new tax" imposed on young Americans. Behind this charge is the fact that among those who have no health insurance is a significant number of young Americans who refuse to get it for two reasons: one, it is very expensive and two, they feel no need for it, given their youthful and robust health. To me this is one more manifestation of the selfish greed that so deeply affects this nation. I was responsible for an urban hospital in Jersey City for 24 years while I served as the bishop of Newark. It was not only our desire to serve the poor, but also a government mandate, that we had to treat any patient in need who appeared in our emergency room whether they were insured or not. Under this law we in turn billed the government for "uncompensated care." The government obviously passed on these co sts to the taxpayers. So the fact is that all of us today are already paying for those who have no insurance, even though those in the young adult category are quite capable of paying for it. If all the young and healthy Americans were forced to come into the health care system at appropriate levels, we would discover that the cost of health care would go down for all. We require those who drive a car to have insurance. Is that a tax? I think not! It is an act of responsible citizenship. This fact also counters the fear, so often expressed in this debate, that this nation cannot cover the uninsured without adding hugely to the national deficit. It is amazing how opponents of health care can argue both sides of an issue whenever it serves their purpose, even if the two sides are radically contradictory. That is when you know that the real agenda is hidden.

The biggest scare tactic of all has been the suggestion that under a new plan the health care of the elderly would be rationed by setting up "death panels" to determine which senior citizens to euthanize. Here again behind this fearful and dishonest rhetoric there are some facts that need to be made clear. An enormous percentage of our health care dollars is expended in the last year of a person's life. Some of that is normal and to be expected, since death comes to most people after a sickness in old age. There is, however, a large elephant in the room in this debate that is never mentioned, which is the systemic over-treatment of the elderly. As Evan Thomas noted in a recent Newsweek article, researchers at Dartmouth have discovered and documented that the average cost of a Medicare patient in Miami is $16,351 while in Fargo, North Dakota, it is $5,738. This study also revealed that the average Medicare patient undergoing end-of-life treatment in Manhattan spen ds 21.9 days in the hospital while in Iowa, it is 6.1 days. There is no evidence to suggest that there is any difference in care or longevity related to the difference in cost. The primary difference was in the number of tests and procedures that doctors ordered. Medicine pays by the procedure. According to Mr. Thomas some studies estimate that Americans nearing death are over-treated by roughly 30%. Some of this I am certain is motivated by the fear of malpractice suits, some by the "fee for service" way we practice medicine and some by greed. In places like the Mayo Clinic, where doctors are paid a salary to care for patients, the costs go down and the effectiveness of care goes up.

Another important issue, which has been demonized in this political season, is the effort to encourage end-of-life conversations between doctor and patients. This has never been a prelude to euthanasia as the hysterical Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa has irresponsibly suggested. It is designed to give a patient a major role in managing his or her disease. Where this has been done effectively, patient costs have dropped 35% while the quality of life has been improved. People with this counseling tend to die at home in the care and arms of their loved ones, not in an antiseptic environment surrounded by strangers.

I applaud the ingenuity of our health care professionals, which has expanded both the length and the quality of life. I have had two diagnoses in my life that my grandfather would not have survived. There is a fine line, however, between expanding life and postponing death. I do not believe that life and existence are the same. Insurance should not pay for guilt, but for meaningful life. I want to wring every ounce of sweetness possible out of my length of days, but I also do not want to live one moment beyond the time when my life loses meaning and contact with those I love. I do not want anyone's religious values to be imposed on me. I do not ever want life to be defined as extended time. There is a difference and someday I hope unscrupulous politicians and those with clearly vested interests will understand that as I do.

Dear MiddleAgedMama,

Yours is a difficult position. You in effect withdrew from this decision when you agreed to raise your child in the Roman Catholic Church. There is a certain expectation in Roman Catholicism that "the truth" is to be communicated to each generation in a predictable, traditional way. If this church were to cease to do this, it would call all of its authority claims into question. That is not likely to happen any time soon. This is why the only alternatives that people who are raised in the Catholic Church have are to acquiesce or depart. Vast numbers of people today have chosen to depart. The Roman Catholic Church is held up in America today statistically only by the immigrant population. You need to be true to your partner, true to your commitment and true to your own integrity. That is not easy.

With my own children and grandchildren, I was committed to never telling them that something was true if I did not myself believe it. I did not want to be dishonest. I did not have the burden of having them taught things in the church that were not considered debatable, so I said: "I do not believe that" whenever they asked a direct question. In your case, I hope you will listen to your children and engage them in conversation about what they are learning. Ask them lots of questions that show different ways of viewing an issue. If you disagree with something they are being taught, say so without judgment by simply stating, "Well, I have a different understanding of that," or "No, I do not think that's the right answer."

I think you can say that every ancient people had a myth about the first man and the first woman. The Adam and Eve story in the Bible was actually written in the 10th century BCE. Scientists today have identified human-like beings, but not yet really human beings as we understand them, from as early as 4.4 million years ago. The story of Adam can hardly be literally true given that time frame. Even if we make the emergence of self-consciousness part of the definition of human life, then human life is about 250,000 years old, still far too much time to suggest that a 3,000-year-old tribal story about the first human being is actual history. That, however, might be too much for a six-year-old child to embrace, so I would simply discuss the issues and use questions to destabilize certainty, but not to attack taught conclusions.

Your daughter will learn enough to raise questions herself someday. As she does, answer each one honestly, but try to avoid using authoritarian words. Say something like, "This is what my study has led me to believe and your study must lead you to your own conclusions."

In time if she studies religion in an academic setting, she will learn that the virgin birth tradition was a 9th decade addition to the Christian faith and not original to it at all, and that understanding the resurrection as the physical resuscitation of a deceased body was not the original understanding of the Easter experience, and in Christian academic circles it is widely rejected as the meaning of Easter today. When your child learns these things, she will also learn that you have always been caring and honest with her and she can share her questions and even her doubts with you in the same way that you shared your questions and doubts with her. The most important thing is that you be loving and supportive. Nonjudgmental honesty is a big part of that.

My best and good luck,

Where does one go to look for clues? I know of only one possible place. If a subject is filtered through any vehicle for a significant number of years, that vehicle ought to leave an imprint. So we study the gospels looking for signs that identify how the material was preserved. Such signs are not hard to find in the early gospels.

The first clue comes when we examine how often the word synagogue appears in the gospels. One finds a reference to the synagogue or synagogues eleven times in Mark, nine times in Matthew, sixteen times in Luke and five times in John. Historically we know that the Christian movement was expelled from the synagogue in 88 CE and that John's gospel is the only one of the four that reflects that expulsion, which is perhaps why synagogue references drop in John. The fact remains that deep into the fabric of the Jesus story, as we have that story in the gospels, is written a very deep connection between people's memory of Jesus and the synagogues of the Jews.

The second clue is to see how it was that by the time the gospels came to be written, Jesus had been interpreted through, presented as the fulfillment of, and his story had been wrapped inside the scriptures of the Jewish people. There are constant references to these scriptures in almost every line of the gospels, especially Mark, Matthew and Luke. Indeed the gospel writers assume that their readers or listeners will have a deep familiarity with these scriptures. In the very first verse of Mark, the first gospel, the author writes, "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ; as it is written in the prophets." And he proceeds to quote both Isaiah and Malachi. Mark moves on to tell the story of Jesus' baptism by presenting John the Baptist as the new Elijah. Mark clothes John with camel's hair and a leather girdle, the clothing that Elijah wore, according to the Old Testament. He suggests that John's diet consisted of "locusts and wild honey," the food that the Old Te stament tells us Elijah ate. Mark locates John the Baptist in the desert or wilderness, which is where the Old Testament suggested that Elijah lived. Only those familiar with the Jewish Scriptures would understand the level of communication that was going on here.

The feeding of the multitude by Jesus with five loaves and two fish in Mark is reminiscent of the story in the Hebrew Scriptures of Moses providing bread to feed the multitude in the book of Exodus. The miracles that Mark ties to the story of Jesus are closely identified with the miracles attributed to Old Testament heroes Moses, Elijah and Elisha, or with the miraculous cures that Isaiah says will accompany the coming of the messiah. Once again only an audience familiar with these sources would know their original form and what it was that Mark was trying to communicate.

When one turns to the second gospel, Matthew, who adds the account of Jesus' miraculous birth to the developing tradition, we discover that Matthew suggests in those opening chapters that everything that happened to the infant Jesus was a fulfillment of the prophets. Why was he born of a virgin? To fulfill words from Isaiah that Matthew immediately quotes, or in this instance actually misquotes. Why was Jesus born in Bethlehem? To fulfill the expectations of the prophet Micah, who once again Matthew quotes. Why did the wicked King Herod come to Bethlehem and slaughter the male children two years old and under? To fulfill the prophecy of Jeremiah that Rachel, one of the "mothers" of the Jewish nation, would weep for her children who were not. Why did Joseph flee to Egypt with Mary and her baby? To fulfill the prophecy of Hosea, Matthew said, who wrote that God would call his son out of Egypt. Even the later move from Bethlehem to Nazareth occurred, said Matthew, to f ulfill the prophets.

When we turn to Luke, this pattern continues. Luke simply copies much of his narrative from Mark, but when he adds material, it is also out of the Hebrew Scriptures. Only Luke tells the story of Jesus healing the ten lepers, one of whom is a foreigner, a Samaritan, which is deeply reminiscent of the story of Elisha healing the leprosy of a foreigner, Naaman the Syrian, from the book of II Kings. Only Luke tells the story of Jesus raising from the dead the only son of a widow in the village of Nain. This story is clearly patterned to conform to a story of Elijah raising the only son of a widow from the dead in I Kings.

There are countless other illustrations of the fact that the memory of Jesus had, by the time the gospels were written, become deeply wrapped inside the Jewish Scriptures. The question is where could this coalescing of the memory of the life of Jesus with the scriptures of the Jewish people have happened? The answer is only in the synagogue! Why? Because only in the synagogue did people hear the scriptures read, taught, discussed or expounded. Only in the synagogue was there any familiarity with the Hebrew Sacred Scriptures, which would enable the readers of the gospels to understand how these Jewish stories had been applied to and retold about Jesus.

The next step in this discovery process is to place ourselves inside the experience of the people who lived in the first century world, and then the picture becomes very clear. The printing press had not yet been invented. Books were rare because they were expensive. Every book had to be hand copied. Therefore, individuals did not own personal bibles. There were no Gideons to place the Hebrew Scriptures in your motel or hotel room. The only place in which first century people could possibly have become familiar with the Jewish sacred story was by attending the synagogue and hearing those scriptures read. For these scriptures to have been used to interpret Jesus' life was an activity that could only have happened in the synagogue. For this reason, we can be fairly certain that in the silent period we call "the oral period" the memory of Jesus, including the things he said, the things he did and the narratives told about him could only have been recalled, restated and passed on in the synagogue.

We add to this knowledge the tradition attested in the gospels that suggests that the life of Jesus was lived inside and interpreted through the great events of the Jewish liturgy. When that connection is made, we have another major clue. All of the gospels, for example, tell the story of Jesus' crucifixion against the background of the Jewish observance of Passover. In the story of the transfiguration there are echoes of the Jewish observance of the Festival of Dedication, or Hanukkah. In the narrative of John the Baptist with which Mark opens his gospel, there are numerous notes of the Jewish observance of Rosh Hashanah.

The memory of Jesus was not transmitted individually. It reflects rather the corporate presence of the synagogue gathered in worship. In the first century synagogue's liturgy there would be just a long reading from the Torah, the books of Moses; then a reading from what the Jews called the former prophets (Joshua through Kings); and finally a reading from what they called the latter prophets (Isaiah through Malachi). At that point, the synagogue leader would ask if anyone wanted to bring the message. Followers of Jesus would stand and relate their memories of Jesus to the reading of that Sabbath. In this moment the story of Jesus was recalled, Sabbath by Sabbath, year by year, until the gospels appeared 40 to 70 years after the end of Jesus' life.

Thus we shine the light of the synagogue onto the dark, mysterious oral period of Christian history, and suddenly the darkness of the unknown fades and we begin to see that the gospels are the product of the synagogue. That clue will open a rich interpretive vein, which we will discover as this series on the New Testament unfolds.

Paul was the first person to break that silence with his letters that we still possess. So we begin our study of the content of the New Testament with the person of Paul. When he wrote, the followers of Jesus were still participants in the synagogue. The church as a separate institution had not yet been born. These "followers of the way," as the Christians were then called, represented a challenge to the traditions of the Jews. Paul began his life as a rabid opponent of that challenge. We turn to Paul next week.

As I read your description of the conference held in Porthmadog ("Wales: Where Visions of a Christian Future Are Being Born," June 25, 2009), I wondered if any mention was made of prayer. Do post-Christians, agnostics or even atheists pray? Is there acknowledgement of a higher being, perhaps a creator, a mind or consciousness? Prayer seems like such an important part of your life as well as many traditional Christians. The God I pray to these days is Spirit, the Spirit within which we live, move and have our being. This Spirit permeates all created life; it births life but also allows death, which is the passageway to the pure Spirit. Spirit is not all powerful, but is rather a guide, a way leading us. Spirit does not control natural forces of wind and water, etc., but I do not know Spirit's r elationship to these elements. Clearly, this "image" is of my own conjuring, drawing from various sources, but for the purpose of directing, focusing and attaching my spiritual longings to "Another." What or who is the object of my prayer, if any, for such as those you describe in the Wales conference?

Dear Mary,

As I try to recollect the Porthmadog, Wales, conference, I do not recall a focus on prayer, and yet the conference itself was held in the context of and surrounded by the liturgies of the Church, all of which had prayer as part of them.

I do not think that prayer is the place to begin when trying to reform Christianity for the future. Prayer, at least as it is traditionally understood, is a byproduct of a particular theological understanding of God. The God to whom most people address their prayers is a being, supernatural in power, located somewhere outside this world and thus invoked to enter this world in some miraculous way to establish the divine will or to answer our prayers. If that definition of God dies then that understanding of prayer will die with it. So this conference was on the primary issue of how do we conceptualize God, not on the secondary issue of how do we pray to the God we have already defined.

What you have done in your letter is to recognize that the old God definition is no longer operative for you and so you have sought another definition. You try to enfold prayer into this new definition. I think you are on the right path and I encourage you to walk even more deeply into it.

I think "theism," which is the traditional definition of God as a supernatural, external being, who comes to our aid, is dying. I think this definition of God is the casualty of an expanded world view, but I do not think God is dying, so I seek to go beyond "theism" but not beyond God. Once the theistic God is no longer in view, a redefinition of prayer is mandatory. I have worked on this for many years. My first book published in 1973 was entitled Honest Prayer. In my book A New Christianity for a New World I devoted two chapters to this subject. One of my colleagues, Gretta Vosper, who heads the Progressive Christian Network of Canada, is working now on that subject in a book as yet untitled, which will be published by Harper/Collins, Toronto, sometime in the next two years. I have every reason to believe that Gretta's book will move the debate forward significantly.