Rev. Peg Boyle Morgan
January 15, 2006
West Seattle Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
I was a sophomore in college, at Seattle University. Since my family home was in Puyallup I went home for a weekend every month or so. It was great to have some home cooked meals, and to leave the hubbub of the dormitory. This particularly weekend was a rite of passage for me. It was a time in which I realized that in a very important way, my experience and therefore my thinking was different from my parents. You see, my father said to me that our neighbor had been in Seattle, and had seen me walking down the street with a colored man. This literally stunned me. It was clear that this was an accusation. I hadn’t had any opportunity for African American friends in Puyallup, so there had been no prohibitions about such friendships. Now I was clearly hearing that my father disapproved and that he was disappointed and embarrassed to be told about my behavior by a neighbor. I did have a good friend, Fred, who was African American, and who was in a number of my classes. Though I didn’t remember being off campus with him, and so it may not have even been me the neighbor saw… the accusation was still a moment of self-actualization for me. My father and I had different moral thoughts about black – white relationships, causing him to disapprove of me.
Something similar, but more dramatic happened to a little boy named John Shelby Spong, later to be known as Bishop Spong, of Newark New Jersey. John was born during the depression in the segregated south of Charlotte, North Carolina in 1931. John had ancestors who fought on the side of the south in the civil war. His parents employed colored servants for $5.00 a week, servants who were not allowed to go in or out the front door.
His parents had him baptized in the Episcopal Church, though his father chose to go to the Elks Club on Sunday, worshipping at the altar of the slot machines. Sometimes John would talk his father into letting him skip church and go with him. John’s mother was much more religious, with a Calvinistic Presbyterian background. John’s trips to the Elks with his father would be their little secret.
Though being “Christian” John was growing up in an atmosphere of great cruelty to African Americans and great sexual repression. It was when John was not more than about four years old that he had his rite of passage, his dramatic moment when his gut ached for the confusion between his respect for all adults and his father’s dramatic correction. He begins his story this way: (p.17 Here I Stand)
“…it settled into my memory bank and over the years acted like a pebble in my shoe. For me it marked the first moment of self-actualization, the first step out of my Southern upbringing.” Perhaps some of you can relate to this.
He says: “A decorative brick wall was being constructed on the side of our home. Two black men whom I presumed to have been bricklayers were employed to assist my father in the construction. One of them was an older man whose heavy head of hair had turned gray. The other was a much younger man, perhaps in his late twenties. My father had told me about this project and that he would need my help, and I had anticipated the day we would get the new brick wall with excitement. During the day, I stirred cement, carried bricks, got in the way, and asked hundreds of questions, all of which started with ‘How come?’ For the two bricklayers I must have been a chore indeed. …”
Now having been taught southern manners of always saying to one’s adults, yes ma’am, and no sir, John goes on to say that “On this particular Saturday morning, the elderly black bricklayer had asked me a question, and I had responded just as I had been taught with a proper ‘yes sir’ or ‘no sir,’ whichever was appropriate. My father stopped what he was doing, took me forcibly into the house, where he lectured me sternly on the fact that ‘you do not say ‘sir’ to a Negro.’”
John reports being crushed, confused, and thinking there must be something different about my elders if they are black. The rules somehow did not apply to them. This moment had a deep indelible quality to it. What happened didn’t make sense, and John was sure that his father was being unfair. That day, he learned that his father was not always right. A rite of passage indeed, marked in a place deep in his soul.
He noticed other things he didn’t quite understand, like how there were no black children in his school. Didn’t they go to school? Why couldn’t he play with Black children? Why weren’t they at the swimming pool? Good questions that he couldn’t ask as a good little Christian boy. There were things that just were, with no questioning about why or who profited.
John recalls his fifth grade in their all white church. The curriculum was to go through the 10 Commandments, one by one. He remembers it was pretty tedious going through rules about idols, graven images, the sacred name of God, and the Sabbath day, honoring parents, not killing…Then without any explanation the teacher skipped over the 7th commandment, going straight to the 8th which was about stealing. John remembers raising his hand and saying to his teacher: “but Mr. Darrow, we skipped the seventh commandment. What does it mean to commit adultery?” The response was an embarrassed, befuddled teacher saying: “You’ll learn about that when you are older.” (p. 16) John would learn that sex and race were topics that were highly charged, as he picked up on “the vibrations of a way that even then was doomed, although its adherents did not yet know it.” Never in the lessons about the 10 commandments was it ever said that to kill a Black man was wrong, nor to rape a Black woman.
But the future Bishop Spong would continue to be a thoughtful boy, and he needed to develop his own strength. He could not accept in his gut the racist behaviors and values of his community, though he remembers that this “was not easy in a world where even the values of my church seemed to affirm the values of my racist and sexuality-denying society.” He also could not depend upon his father-- who turned out to be a serious alcoholic, and whose drinking eventually would leave the family penniless and fatherless. Not surprisingly, John did not do too well in school, though he did very well in leadership in his church youth group activities. There he felt great affirmation. With his connection and mentoring from an Episcopal priest, he decided he wanted to go to college and eventually become a priest. Without a scholarship, he could never go, and so in his senior year of college he threw himself into his studies, got straight A’s, and received enough scholarship to go to college, and later to Virginia Theological Anglican Seminary.
It was there that he began to question the concept of God he had carried since childhood. One of his professors passed on the ideas of his own professor, the famous Paul Tillich, who believed God was not a person but the ground of being, unknowable, mysterious and without form. He would struggle with these new ideas which challenged his image of God as Father God protector, a Mr. Fixit. In the process of class discussions, John reports that this fixit god would begin to “shake visibly, wobble before my eyes, and fade perceptibly.”
One significant experience shook his belief in the fixit God. The wife of one of the professors was seriously ill. The students set up a vigil in the chapel to pray to God 24 hours a day, skipping sleep. They believed they just needed to bolster the good side of the struggle between lightness and darkness. But she died anyway. The professor met with the students the next day, and with an unsteady grief filled voice, thanked them for their caring, telling them that their prayers made a difference, for it comforted both him and more importantly his wife in her final hours. He thanked them for their prayers because the prayers had unleashed much loving energy that made a huge difference. John began to reassess the meaning and purpose of prayer.
The professors expected their seminarians to go out into the parishes and challenge their parishioners to consider new conceptions of God and prayer, but most did not, not wanting to experience the upset feelings and conflicts that happen when you begin to take away someone’s fixed sense of security and knowing. John vowed to himself that he would be different, not knowing how hard it would eventually be.
He would serve parishes in Durham and Tarboro North Carolina, and Lynchburg Virginia; where he would learn the deep realities of people’s lives, including the grief of all kinds of losses. Here the operative image of God would make a difference as to how he would pastor. He would not give pat answers to explain human loss. He would come to believe that “those who are incapable of living without the security of their religious myths of antiquity become the fundamentalists and the religious fanatics of our time. They vigorously deny their doubts and fears and cover their insecurity by seeking to impose their particular form of religion on all others.”
Instead, John began to see God as the life within us that opens us to the miracle of transcendence, that sense of connection with a reality beyond us, a ground or source of being that allows us to feel a oneness with other life. He began to see God as a life force that surges within us, a love we can receive and then pass on. This kind of God prompts a different response to a grieving person—rather than simplistic answers about the paternalistic God’s will be done, John’s response began being the sharing of this love, and the just being with another in compassion.
And in his years as a parish priest he would face up front and personal the evils of racism. Pastoring to Black members of the community made him well known as a nigger lover, with threats to John’s new young family. In Lynchburg he would know a young pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church, Jerry Falwell whose racism was absolutely clear. The Lynchburg News, a powerful force in the community, was racist, favoring Falwell. Blacks who got married would have to pay for an ad to publicly announce it, while whites got the notice for free.
“It was a bizarre policy started in an era in which racism was so entrenched that it was assumed to be proper, and it had become so frozen that it was made to feel normal, no matter how irrational.” (p138) John Spong would find himself stepping into the fray, being often the only public voice to defend the folks who could not defend themselves, advocating for an end to racist policies. His parishioners would have questions at times about his being involved in these political issues, but he would tell them what he tells critics today, that religion needs to address matters of morality and what is more about morality than practices that demean other people?
All along in his first couple decades of being a priest John Spong would struggle with his theology, and in part for his own advantage he began making a focus of his parish work the teaching of classes, bringing the challenge of theological school to his parishioners. To do this he would seek the latest scholarship to study. He would teach that the bible cannot be taken literally, and that old interpretations of bible stories needed to be rethought in light of modern scholarship and science.
He used the story of Lot’s wife, because she was turned to rigid salt while looking backward, to teach that those who face the past ways of knowing and interpreting rather than the future, will have similar experiences. He stirred up some controversies, but he came to believe that “the church would die of boredom long before it would die of controversy.” (p. 154) Soon he was encouraged to turn his successful lectures into books, which have been enormously successful and controversial.
After he was elected Bishop he would feel the injunction he read in the bible so many times. “To whom much is given, shall much be required.” He would work towards inclusion for African Americans and for women in the church and in the ordained ministry, major emotional issues causing people to fear and hate him. He condemned how organized religion has historically been a major force in the oppression of women.
And it was as Bishop that he would look at his own homophobia. An issue had come before the Bishop’s meeting suggesting the church become more welcoming to gays and lesbians. He chose not to sign it. Shortly after, a priest of his diocese decided to privately come out to him, asking him to consider these issues further, sharing the realities of what it is like to know you are gay all your life, but not being able to share who you are with others. Because of the courage of this young capable and faithful priest, John reconsidered his position. He decided to back a new study of the issues, and was fortunate enough to have a member of the community who was a foremost expert in brain chemistry to support the study and convince him that homosexuality is a normal existence found in many higher species.
“It is like the dawning realization that one is male or female, part of a particular race or nation or even right or left handed. A just and moral society cannot be erected on a premise that some human beings are subhuman or perverted, not on the basis of their doing but on the basis of their being.” The bible is wrong on slavery, and it is wrong to quote it to support homophobia.
He saw the parallels with discrimination against African Americans. John would put himself at great risk within the Bishop’s group advocating for a welcoming open door to gay and lesbian people. He would eventually win some of these battles, though there would be significant losses. He supported the ordination of the first out gay priest, but would later be terribly hurt by that person becoming dysfunctional in ways that would feed into stereotyped prejudices of gay men. To his credit, though, John kept his thinking clear, continuing to embrace his principle of inclusion, not letting one person turn him from the general truth.
Today, Bishop Spong is outspoken in his condemnation of the Roman Catholic Church’s stance on women and on homosexuality; regarding the latter saying that given the large numbers of gay clergy, to watch the leaders of this church condemn that which is a fact in the lives of its cardinals, bishops and priests is either dishonest or an act of unconscious psychological denial. Of the Southern Baptist Convention that voted to “reaffirm” its earlier condemnation of homosexuality as “behavior repugnant to God” and “condemned by scripture” he reflected that “they seemed not to recognize that any definition that has to be reaffirmed is no longer holding. The only questions are how protracted will be the debate, and how many people will be hurt before that prejudice dies. When anyone seeks to protect a dying definition, failure is inevitable.”
But his greatest pain probably comes from his recognition that the Archbishop of Canterbury, international head of the Anglican Union of which he is a part, refuses to take a clear stand on being welcoming of gay and lesbians out of fear to the unity of the church. He says that the fear of a loss of the unity of the church, is “a breathtakingly bankrupt idea.” It grieves him that his leaders wish to wait for some new consciousness, and to pretend that it is ok to try to reach some kind of compromise in the meantime. He likens it to what it would be like today to say to slaveholders that they can keep their slaves until society changes its attitude. There can be no compromise with such moral issues affecting the lives of people.
The bottom line is that if homosexuality is a given and not a chosen way of life, the continued violation of gay and lesbian people, in order to preserve unity with the Church’s homophobic constituency, is simply immoral. Some may fear the threat of parts of the church leaving if homosexual people are fully welcomed, but we can’t compromise the truth to comfort others in their prejudice.
Bishop Spong took these courageous stands, risking his physical and professional safety, time and again for years.
And for a little over 30 years, he was married to the mother of his three daughters, Joan, who became very ill with a paranoid personality, and was unwilling to take medication. Home life was bazaar and unpredictable. Increasingly Joan would not attend social events with him, out of fear of the CIA recording their conversations.
Such a situation caused him to understand how our lives take turns we do not expect, and required him to seek appropriate support elsewhere. Indeed I think those years until his wife died, probably propelled him to dedicate himself more to his profession than he might have if he had had companionship at home.
Bishop Spong retired from his position as Bishop of Newark in the year 2000. At that time he completed his autobiography which has been a significant source for this sermon. He continues to lecture, write and advocate for moral issues, including for accountability in our government, denouncing the war in Iraq.
A few years ago, in Birmingham our Unitarian Universalist ministers from across the continent were in the midst of a 5 day convocation that happens every ten years. Luckily for us, Bishop Spong was speaking in town one night, and 40 or so of us adjusted our schedule to attend. Word got to the Bishop that we were there. He knows well that we UUs stand for the very values of justice, equity, compassion and peace that he has dedicated his life to, and so he asked us to all stand and be recognized for being ministers in a faith that is making the right difference in a world that so needs our message. I must say that standing as a group representing all UUs, in the light of the acknowledgement of so good and great a man, was very moving.
Some people leave a church that has immoral tendencies. I did. Others stay and fight from within. Neither stance is better than the other. We need both responses. Certainly Christianity has needed the voice of Bishop Spong to move huge segments of it along towards being more in line with what life and divine love asks of us, in the words of Micah, “to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.”
His example to us shows us how we can all have our thoughts and biases, but that does not mean they are true. He had the courage to listen to oppressed people, oppressed because of their race, gender or sexual orientation, and to be influenced by them to reassess his thoughts. In relationship with real people he was moved to do justice.
His example calls us to step up to those opportune moments of our lives when we see an injustice, and to speak out-- for silence is a betrayal to all that we hold dear and complacency is complicity;
Rather—when we step up in public witness for just causes, whether in a private conversation, or in committee meeting, whether on the street corner, or on the Capitol steps in Olympia we engage in a work that has a transcendence that is fulfilling to be a part of. For once a prejudice is critiqued by the rising tide of social consciousness, its time is doomed. It is only a matter of time, and a matter of how many voices speak in unison and in harmony.
May we continue to deepen our congregation’s engagement with public witness, for it continues to be and harkens to become an even greater part of our spiritual journey together.
May it be so. Amen
Reference:
Bishop John Shelby Spong, Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love, and Equality. 2000.