Bishop Spong's Articles November 2010

The stories of Elijah and Elisha are found in the Bible between I Kings 17, where Elijah suddenly arises in the text, and II Kings 13, where Elisha makes his final appearance and his death is recorded. Contained in these chapters are some of the most dramatic narratives in the entire Bible. While these two figures were on the center stage of Jewish history, they dominated the biblical story in very dramatic ways. I and II Kings record their adventures in a manner that is both fanciful and sometimes even farcical, but always entertaining. Both of these figures also play important roles in the development of the Christian story, causing much of the New Testament to be non-sensical if we do not understand that Elijah and Elisha are lurking in the background. First, Elijah was identified as the one who would herald the coming of the messiah, so he figures prominently in the early gospel portrait of John the Baptist. Mark, for example, the writer who first introduces John th e Baptist in the Christian tradition, presents John in Elijah's clothing, has him fed with Elijah's diet and locates him in Elijah's wilderness. Second, in some other parts of the tradition, the messiah was himself said to be a new and greater Elijah and so the story of Elijah, and to a lesser degree Elisha, shapes the content of the Jesus story, particularly in the gospel of Luke. Let me now lift both of these personalities out of the biblical story so that we might examine them closely.

Elijah was called a Tishbite because he hailed from Tishbe in Gilead, an area east of the Jordan River in the land called Israel. His emergence into the Jewish story is very dramatic. There was a drought throughout all the land. Elijah seems to have predicted this drought to King Ahab of the Northern Kingdom, the husband of Queen Jezebel, and thus it appears that he was assumed to have been responsible for it. Thus with a price on his head he flees in fear into a hiding place, first to a hiding place by the Brook Cherith in the desert. He is clearly portrayed as being a very special person for it was said of him that God provided for his needs by having the ravens bring him bread to eat during the drought's resultant famine. When the waters of the Brook Cherith later dried up, he went further east to Zarephath where he had his first dramatic encounter with a widow, who was the mother of an only son. Elijah asked this widow for water and a meal cake but she replied tha t she was down to her last bit of flour and oil and her plan was to use her meager supplies to make a final meal for herself and her son before they both died in the famine. Elijah assured her that if she did as he requested her supply of flour and oil would never run out. Here we find a regularly recurring biblical theme involving a miraculous feeding in which the food supply seems to expand endlessly. This theme, found first in the Moses story of manna from heaven, will also appear in the Elisha story and will make a dramatic reappearance in the New Testament, where Jesus is said to have taken five loaves and two fishes and they keep expanding until the multitude of thousands is fed. Later in the story, the son of this same widow dies and Elijah is said to have raised him back to life. This is the first biblical story in which one person raises another from the dead. Later, however, Elisha will also raise someone, this time a child, from the dead. Both of these stor ies will later, in slightly heightened forms will be retold about Jesus of Nazareth in the Synoptic Gospels. This is another example in which the idea of miracles being recycled in the Bible becomes apparent.

In the tradition of Nathan, the prophet whom we met when he confronted David, Elijah will now confront King Ahab time after time, winning for himself from Ahab the title of "the troubler of Israel." The issue between the prophet and the king was whether or not the worship of Baal and Asherah, gods of the fertility cult of the Canaanites, which still exercised great influence in the land and was clearly supported by Queen Jezebel, could live side by side with the God Yahweh, worshiped by the faithful prophet Elijah. Elijah challenged the priests of Baal and Asherah to a duel on Mt. Carmel. Four hundred priests of Baal and four hundred and fifty priests of Asherah were lined up against the solitary and quite heroic figure of Elijah. The contest was to determine which God would respond to the prayers requesting fire from heaven to burn up the sacrificed bull. The priests of Baal and Asherah went first, dancing, chanting and even cutting themselves in pleas to their deities , but to no avail. The fire from heaven never came. Elijah, who must have had a hair shirt of a personality, taunted them from the sidelines with suggestions that perhaps their God were asleep until finally it became his turn to call on his God. Then he poured barrels of water over his altar and the sacrificed animal until the water filled the ditch around his altar, which surely heightened the power of the miracle. One wag, trying to account for the supernatural elements of this story, suggested that while it looked like water that he was pouring, it was really natural gas! Then Elijah called down the fire of God and it came devouring the sacrifice with flames and licking up all the water around the altar. Elijah, clearly the winner in this contest, was not gracious in his victory. He proceeded to cut off the heads of all the "false" priests with his sword and thus he moved quickly to purify the worship of Israel. Calling down fire from heaven appears to be something Elijah could do easily, for he repeated this miracle on two other occasions in the biblical narrative.

The story of Elijah's ascension into heaven at the end of his life is also a very dramatic story, involving a fiery chariot drawn by fiery horses and a God-sent whirlwind for propulsion into the sky, all of which we will see later when Luke incorporates these details into his narrative of the ascension of Jesus.

Elijah's hand-picked successor, Elisha, comes next to the Bible's center stage and we watch as many of the stories in the Jewish tradition, including the stories of Elijah, are now replicated in the Elisha cycle. Miracles are in fact deemed to be recyclable in the Bible. Moses, Joshua, Elijah and Elisha all seem to be able to split a body of water so that each can walk through on dry land. Elisha, like Elijah, has other less admirable qualities. In a fit of anger about being called "bald headed" by some little children, he causes two she bears to come out of the woods to devour them. He appears able to cause an axe head to float on the top of a river so that it could be found. He, like Elijah, can raise the dead and, in addition, can cure foreigners of leprosy by having them wash in the Jordan River. Like Moses and Elijah before him, he had power over the weather and used it to punish the Jews for their sinfulness, especially the unfaithfulness of the king. Elisha wa s said to be able to cause a barren woman to conceive and this power, reminiscent of the earlier narratives of the births of both Samson and Samuel, will reappear in the gospel stories as background to the virgin birth of Jesus.

Yes, these Elijah-Elisha stories are filled with miracles, magic, fantasy and folk lore, all built on what was probably a mere germ of history. They clearly establish the prophet's role in Israel to be that of speaking with authority in the citadels of political power. These stories demonstrate again and again that no one, not even the king, can escape the moral law of God!

Elijah and Elisha flow together in the Bible so that it is hard to keep them separate. Even things commanded for Elijah to do are sometimes completed in the life of Elisha and sometimes even later in Jewish history. It seems obvious that Queen Jezebel's vow to remove Elijah's head, as he had done to her priests of Baal at Mount Carmel, finally gets its fulfillment when another queen named Herodias, the wife of King Herod, has John the Baptist's head removed. As the later gospel of Luke makes clear, many of the themes that he developed in his portrait of Jesus were merely the retelling of Elijah stories magnified and reused to apply to Jesus.

These two figures, Elijah and Elisha, are deeply emblazoned in Jewish history and they form a bridge to the writing prophets of the eighth century and beyond, who help to turn the religion of the Jews from the worship of a tribal deity, who is somewhat vindictive and blood thirsty, into a universal presence incorporating into the divine identity a new sense of oneness, the meaning of a transfiguring love, a searing sense of divine justice and ultimately evolving into the creation of` a deity who turns away from the external requirements and begins to assert that worship means how one lives one's life, not how one practices liturgy.

As I roamed once again over the passages of the Bible that contain the stories of Elijah and Elisha, I saw anew just how deeply interdependent the Jewish-Christian story is, how none of it can be viewed literally and how the Hebrew people believed that the divine qualities they attributed to God showed up generation after generation in the lives of the prophets. God's eternity was thus viewed and experienced in that this divine power to control nature, to command fire, to expand the food supply and even to raise one to new life are constant themes.

Elijah shows up once more in the Synoptic Gospels when he appears with Moses and the two of them talk with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. That was the gospel writer's way of saying that to understand Jesus you must read the Hebrew Scriptures. That is true!

– John Shelby Spong

 

Dear George,

Marcus Borg and Dom Crossan are brilliant New Testament scholars and I think you might do well to pay close attention to any theory that they present. They are also good friends and admired colleagues and I have read most everything they have written, both individually and together.

Over the years, many theories have been offered to explain Paul's mysterious "thorn in the flesh," which he prays for God to remove. Paul's assumption is that this is something akin to a chronic and non–curable affliction. Among these various theories offered through the ages are such things as a chronic draining eye affliction, epilepsy, malaria and a deeply feared and repressed homosexuality.

In my book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, I speculated that a deeply feared and repressed homosexuality was the reality to which Paul referred. I went through the writings of Paul to gather the autobiographical evidence that Paul himself seems to provide. He argues in Romans that the attraction of a person to his own gender was punishment for not worshiping God properly. In other parts of the genuine Pauline corpus, he goes to great pains to demonstrate that he had made a lifetime effort to be one who worships properly. With all his heart Paul tried to be faithful to the traditions of his "Fathers." I cited his own writings to portray him as a deeply conflicted human being. His body, he said, did not follow the law of his mind. I noted that Pau l never married, that he was filled with a sense of self–loathing, quoting such things as his cry: "O, wretched man that I am who will deliver me from this body of death." I looked at his transformation in which he says that now, nothing, not even my own nakedness, which I interpret to mean not even the secrets of my own body, when fully exposed, can separate me from the love of God that he has met in Christ Jesus.

Repressed homosexuality in a world that thought that to be a homosexual was to be evil, seems to me to fit all the data better than malaria or any other malady. Am I certain? No, my suggestion is a theory just like Marcus and Dom's suggestion of malaria is a theory. We will never know for sure until we interview Paul in the Kingdom of heaven. Until then I recommend that each of us listen to and consider all of the theories that are abroad, examine the evidence that is available and come to the conclusion that best fits the evidence. I do not believe that salvation depends on any of us having everything correct.

– John Shelby Spong

Christopher Hitchens, a well-known transatlantic journalist and political pundit, has recently referred to the Bible in a New York Times review of a book by Philip Pullman, as a "radically immoral book," citing such things from its pages as the promise of a monopoly on heaven for true believers (John 14) while threatening those who waver with the torment of everlasting fire (Matthew 25). He found in the figure of Jesus "not a divine presence, but that of a sorcerer and a fanatic," since the Bible portrayed him as cursing a fig tree for not bearing fruit even though it was not the season for figs (Mark 11) and of inflicting a herd of pigs with demons that produced, not "deviled ham" as one wag suggested, but a stampede of pigs and thus the drowning deaths for the livestock of some poor farmers (Mark 5).

What is the nature of this book that can produce such strong and diametrically-opposed sentiments? There is clearly something both attractive and strange about the book called "sacred scripture," for in its pages conflicts and contradictions abound.

The Bible has been the best-selling book in the Western world every year since the invention of the Gutenberg printing press in 1450. It is also probably the least read, best-selling book in human history and it is surely the least understood. It is also simultaneously the most quoted and the most distorted book. Let me illustrate.

Verses from the Bible still adorn the oratory of politicians designed to give their words both gravitas and authority. It is read in almost every synagogue and church in public worship "wherever two or three people are gathered together." When read in these contexts, these readings are usually proclaimed to be "The Word of the Lord!" Hardly a funeral is conducted in the Western world without some biblical passage being part of the liturgy, whether these funerals are religious or secular. Book titles, and consequently motion picture titles, are frequently direct quotations lifted from the Bible. Elected officials take their oaths of office most often with their hands laid on the Bible. This book not only informs our culture, but it also criticizes it, judges it and blesses it. Yet at the same time there is no book in human history that has been responsible for more pain and suffering in the lives of more people than the book we call "The Holy Bible."

"His blood be upon us and upon our children (Matt 27:25)" are words the Bible attributed to the Jewish crowd at the time of the crucifixion. They have been a factor in a series of killing, anti-Semitic activities throughout the centuries reaching a culmination in a final act of orgiastic frenzy, the murder of millions of Jews in the Holocaust in the 20th century, in a Western, civilized, ostensibly Christian nation..

"I forbid a woman to have authority over a man (1 Tim 2:12)," or "Woman was created for man (1Cor 11)" and "Wives obey your husbands (Ephesians 5)" are just a few of the texts from the Bible that have been used to dehumanize the feminine half of the human race. In response to the these biblical definitions of what a woman is, higher education was denied to women until the 20th century; the right to vote in national elections was not extended to women until 1920, and the doorways to economic opportunities and just wages have been closed to women until fairly recently. Even in contemporary churches, we Christians still use the definition of a woman as the property of a man in wedding ceremonies, as one man gives the woman away to another man as if either of these men had or would later own her.

"Slaves obey your masters (Col. 3)" are words right out of the Bible. Slaves must be returned to the life of bondage, says Paul's Epistle to Philemon. The injunction against enslaving a fellow Jew is found in the prophets and the direction to Jews to take their slaves from nearby countries is stated in the Torah. Each of these texts has in the past been enlisted in the service of the human institutions of slavery, segregation and apartheid. The Pope, known as the Vicar of Christ, has owned slaves with no qualms of conscience, because biblical words have always been available with which to perfume these human evils. The "Bible Belt" of the South, home of Protestant Evangelical and Fundamentalist religious exponents, the region of our nation where both church going and Bible reading are clearly saluted as values, is the same part of our nation that first established, then protected and fought to defend slavery. After defeat on the battlefield forced these good, Christian p eople to end slavery, they installed segregation as the law of the land. When segregation was finally declared illegal, these same evangelical Christians employed police dogs, fire hoses, bull horns and even murder as legitimate tactics to keep segregation alive. The Southern police, who refused to arrest the guilty and the Southern juries that refused to return appropriate guilty verdicts were made up largely of those who "acknowledged Jesus as my personal savior." The Bible, they felt, justified this behavior toward those whose true humanity they could not see.

"A man who lies with a man as with a woman is an abomination. Both shall be put to death (Lev. 20)." This is one of nine biblical texts, stretched to the breaking point to cover the visceral, uninformed prejudice that has plagued and victimized gay, lesbian, transgender and bi-sexual people for centuries. At the Wyoming funeral of Matthew Shepard a young gay man set upon by a group of adults, beaten into unconsciousness and hanged on a fence post in sub-freezing weather until he died, a Baptist minister from Topeka, Kansas, carried a picket sign stating "God says fags should die--see Leviticus 20)" In more recent history that same minister with that same message, claiming the right of freedom of speech, asked the Supreme Court of this country to protect him against a lawsuit brought by the parents of a member of the armed forces killed in Iraq after he had picketed their son's funeral ceremony. There are terrible texts in the Bible and some of these texts have without d oubt been used to cause great pain in the lives of many people. Surely we need to face this dark side of our religious past, but that is not the whole story of the Bible's history. Words from the Bible have also been instrumental in creating a quest for learning and thus in forming the great educational institutions in the Western world, from Uppsala University in Sweden, to Cambridge and Oxford Universities in England, to Tubingen and Berlin Universities in Germany, to McGill and Queens Universities in Canada and to Harvard and Yale in the United States. Yet when knowledge challenged religious presuppositions, the Bible-quoting church has been the fiercest critic of knowledge and it became the persecutor of scholars from Galileo to Darwin to Stephen Hawking.

So we have this book that has permeated every aspect of our cultural life and at the same time has caused untold pain, suffering and horror. What are we to make of it? What are we to do with it?

Can we extract its benefits and dismiss its ignorance and its self-serving inspiration to violence? Do we accomplish this by an act of delicate surgery, such as Thomas Jefferson was able to do when, by using his penknife to remove offensive passages, reduced the New Testament to 46 pages of acceptable text? Or do we dismiss it all as little more than the last vestige of a superstitious world that is no longer and then consign the God we meet in this book to the museums of human religions where this deity can take a place beside the gods of the Olympus, and the gods of the fertility cults who encouraged child sacrifice and temple prostitutes during other now embarrassing stages in human development? Or can we see the Bible as an imperfect but unfinished chronicle of the human quest for understanding life, finding meaning and exploring transcendence? Are we able to see the changes in the text that moved our minds from a tribal deity who hated the enemies of the chosen peop le, to a book that enjoins us to love our enemies? This latter path offers, I believe, some hope.

I find these universal truths in the Bible that cause me to want to defend this book with passion, despite the abuse it has encouraged throughout history. Those truths are:

1. Every life is holy. That is the major theme of the Hebrew Scriptures and that is what I mean when I say I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Creator.

2. Every life is ultimately and totally loved. That is the truth I learn from the Jesus story and what I mean when I say I believe in God the Son.

3. Every life is called to live into the fullness of its potential, to be all that each of us can be. That is what I mean when I say I believe in God the Holy Spirit, who calls each of us to the deepest meaning of life.

Those are the essential human convictions that to me are the gifts given to us from the biblical story. We abandon them at our peril. So my fight is never to destroy the Bible but to transform it, to separate its wheat from its chaff and to make its underlying convictions available to my world. I regard that as a worthy vocation.

– John Shelby Spong

 

Dear Ian,

I think your simile is wonderful although most people who do not see walnut trees growing are not aware of that soft outer shell. Sigmund Freud had similar thoughts when he wrote about how the super ego protects both the ego and the id.

The fact is that we are survival–oriented creatures and that is not the result of something called "original sin," it is simply a characteristic of life, raised in human beings alone into self consciousness.

I think that, at least for me, self consciousness also opens to me the possibility that I am part of the universal consciousness I call God, which means that I am part of who God is and God is part of who I am. Above all, I know that the God defined as an "external, supernatural, miracle–working deity" is dying. Many people seem to think that if this definition of God dies then God has died. That is not my experience. The death of the theistic definition of God has been for me the doorway into the mystical reality of the God who is beyond any definition. Your analogy of the walnut helps to move me in that direction.

My thanks.

– John Shelby Spong

The border between the United States and Mexico is marked by the Rio Grande River (or at least that is what it is called in the United States. It is the Rio Bravo in Mexico). This river is America's fifth largest, yet it is only navigable for seaworthy ships for a few miles inland from where it empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Only barges, rafts and small individual craft are seen on its waters further inland. This 1,885 mile long river originates in the mountains of southwest Colorado at a Rocky Mountain height of 12,000 feet above sea level, from which it begins its journey through New Mexico, past Santa Fe and Albuquerque until finally entering Texas at El Paso and then it flows another 1,000 miles, with Mexico on one side and the United States on the other, until it reaches Brownsville, Texas, where it enters the Gulf of Mexico. There are places along this river like the Santa Elena Gorge in which steep mountains on both sides render almost any human passage to be all but impossible. There are also places in this river where the flow of water is so slight that people can step across without leaping. There are paired cities along the river like El Paso and Juarez or Brownsville and Matamoros, where the populations have always been interactive and interdependent both economically and personally. Most people along this border speak both Spanish and English in an adequate way. There are places along this river where cows graze in pastures and they move from one side to the other simply by fording the stream. These cows don't seem to need passports to travel to which ever side would be to these cows a "foreign shore." When we were rafting down the river toward the Santa Elena Gorge, we spotted a calf that was stuck in the river on the Mexican side and unable to extricate itself from either the mud or the water. Without rescue that calf would have drowned. Our guide took our raft to the distressed calf and while one of us held the raft near the shore, he went out of the boat into the river and onto the land pulling the calf to safety and returning it to its mother, who was waiting nearby. It did not occur to us until later that we had illegally invaded Mexico.

As we visited border towns like Presidio in what the Texans call the Big Bend, it was difficult to know whether we were in Mexico or the United States. Both the streets and the towns tended to have Spanish names. The restaurants overwhelmingly served Mexican food and the people on both sides looked, dressed and spoke in a very similar fashion. The border blends far more than it divides and that is a result of history, not geography. The border between Mexico and the United States from Texas to California separates today that part of the Northern Hemisphere that was once all Mexico. That fact, seldom recalled in the American press, caused me to think in a new way about national boundaries.

I listen to "Tea Party" politicians and devotees say and carry signs that proclaim, "We want our country back." I wonder who they thought were its owners and who took it away. North America has no primates, human or ape, that are native to this hemisphere. All human beings in this hemisphere are descendants of immigrants, who came at varying times in the past. The first invaders, who are now called "Native Americans", came across the Bering Straits or what actually may have been a land bridge before the last ice age, at some point about 20,000 years ago. They spread throughout what we now call North and South America, reaching to both poles, building in the process great civilizations and establishing themselves into identifiable tribes or nations in the process. They are the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Pueblos, the Cherokees, the Sioux and others. Yes, they had wars among themselves, but they ultimately settled into identifiable areas and developed unique cultures. They took this land from no one and claimed these hemispheres as their own with no sense that this ownership would ever be challenged.

There were forays into this hemisphere by Viking Europeans perhaps as early as the 11th century A. D., but no settlements of invading Europeans came before the early years of the 16th century. These invaders came primarily from Britain, Holland, France, Germany, Denmark and Spain, and in time they conquered the heretofore native peoples. Canada was French in the east, British in the west. The United States was closely divided between the British, Dutch and the Germans in its early years, but ultimately Britain won out and imposed its life, language and culture on what came to be known as the United States, while Spain and Portugal divided the rest of the hemisphere.

When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, it included most of what are now the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and California. This area collided with the American expansionist dreams. So first America aided Texas in its bid for independence in 1836 and then, between 1846 and 1848, this nation fought Mexico and, in victory, forced Mexico to cede all of the territory from Texas to California. This was the moment when the Rio Grande, previously a river running through the middle of Mexico, became instead the dividing line between the United States and Mexico. This means that Mexico lost about half of the land that formed its nation. Like the division of Germany into east and west portions or Korea into North and South after World War II, families were divided. Mexicans on this side of the Rio Grande became citizens of the United States, but cultural and family ties with their kin people in Mexico were not terminated and at what was for them an artificial border they went back and forth constantly. The border has always been porous with American businesses having both encouraged and exploited Mexican workers as a source of cheap labor ever since. America's fruit and vegetable industries, its hotel and restaurant industries and its construction industries that have built the great cities of the west from Houston to San Diego, have all knowingly depended on illegal, immigrant labor. Now, however, tribal, protectionists' fears are high, as they always are during times of financial stress and economic downturn, so we have become anxious about "aliens" and want to contain and punish the very people upon whom we continue to depend. It is impossible to police a 1,000-mile common boundary. There are no fences tall enough to stop illegal immigration. The way forward is not to pretend that we can, but to help the Mexican government stabilize that country and to grow the Mexican economy. As long as there a re insufficient jobs available in Mexico for its burgeoning population, coupled with the desire of American business leaders to maximize profits by using cheap and available labor, illegal immigration will occur. The political desire not to reward illegal behavior with citizenship is both interesting and irrational, because all of our European ancestors were themselves illegal immigrants, who forced their way into this country.

The ultimate problem of population control in the whole world is another factor that must also be addressed before the immigration problem can be solved. Finite natural resources cannot sustain infinite population expansion. Family planning and effective birth control are moral imperatives. Unless population growth is stopped, the standard of living of the well-to-do nations is destined to drop and the presence of illegal immigrants on the borders of these developed lands will not diminish and irresponsible politicians will continue to exploit tribal anxieties for their own political gain. These tactics will not solve the immigration problem. If American employers were required to pay full wages and benefits for all of its workers, the willingness to hire illegal immigrants would disappear, but the price of most things would also rise. No politician will face these facts when one can win elections by talking about building fences instead. A trip along the Rio Grande wi ll convince any rational observer that illegal immigration cannot and will not be stopped until the systemic problems of greed and over population are addressed. The sad thing is no politician who addresses greed and over population will ever be elected.

– John Shelby Spong

 

Dear Don,

No, you don't have it quite correct. The Passion narrative of Mark was read at the observance of Passover, 14:17–15:49. The journey section of Mark 9:20–12:44 would be read between Dedication (Hanukkah) to the month of Nisan. Mark 13–14:1 would be read on the two Sabbaths in Nisan before Passover. Mark opens with readings for Tishri 1 on Rosh Hashanah (1:1–15), which is the Jewish New Year. He moved on to Yom Kippur that comes on Tishri 10 and then moves on to Sukkoth that comes on Tishri 15–22. The passages from Mark 5–9 cover the Sabbaths between Sukkoth and Dedication. There are no readings in Mark for Pentecost or Shavuot because Mark only writes for the Sabbaths between Rosh Hashanah and Passover or 6 1/2 months of the year. That is why both Matthew and Luke expanded Mark to cover the whole year. Matthew's lesson for Shavuot is the Sermon on the Mount, Matt. 5–7 and Luke's lesson for Shavuot is Luke 3:15–22.

With no knowledge of the liturgical year of the Synagogue, I know that this is confusing material to grasp. I spelled this thesis out in detail in my book, Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes. I still regard this book as the most pivotal, ground–breaking book of my career. Jesus for the Non-Religious assumes this prior book.

I hope this helps.

– John Shelby Spong

"In the struggle to emancipate gay and lesbian people from oppression, you have been what Martin Luther King, Jr. was in the struggle to emancipate people of color from oppression." These words, spoken by Dr. Lawrence Carter, Dean of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Chapel at Morehouse College in Atlanta, marked the unveiling of my portrait in their "Hall of Honor" of civil rights leaders. I now hang just below Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. It seemed inconceivable that words like these would ever be uttered about me. I have wrestled with the demon of homophobia and I find it astonishing that I am now seen by the community of formerly oppressed people of color, as well as by gay and lesbian people, as one who helped to bring emancipation. I previously shared with you, my readers, the story of my journey out of racism. Now I ask you to indulge me as I relate my journey out of homophobia.

When I was growing up I did not know what homosexuality was or that I was homophobic in my attitude. Apparently we did not have homosexual people in the Bible Belt of the South. The word "homosexual" did not enter my vocabulary until I was in my mid- to late-teens. When I finally grasped the concept, I accepted without question the cultural definition prevalent in my region. Homosexuality was either a mental sickness that needed to be cured or a depraved choice made by deviant and evil people who needed to be changed or converted.

I was comfortable with that attitude and it prevailed in my life until I was elected the Bishop of Newark in June of 1976. Up until that moment in my ministry, I was not aware that I knew any gay or lesbian people. This was still an era of family shame and of fearful hiding within the closeted confines of secrecy while acting in the life of both church and community. When I became in 1969 the rector of St. Paul's Church in Richmond, Virginia, a parish that I still deeply love, I met in my congregation a number of wonderful people and respected community leaders, who were known as "confirmed bachelors." These men lived in the upper echelons of Richmond society and frequently escorted socially prominent widows and divorcees to socially prominent events. People said of these men that they were "not the marrying kind," but it never occurred to me to think that any one of them might be gay. I am sure now that one of the reasons I did not know any homosexual persons was because they perceived in me an inability to know them. Nobody reveals himself or herself to one who cannot receive the revelation.

Homosexuality never arose in the long interview process that resulted in my being nominated for the Episcopal office in Newark. The issues before the Church in 1975-76 were the revision of the prayer book, whether women could be or should be ordained and the perennial concerns about church growth. In retrospect, that omission seems strange given the way the debate on homosexuality grew in the Church from that day to this. It certainly never occurred to me that I would ever be engaged in or identified with this issue in any significant way.

I had not, however, been in my Newark office three months before I had an appointment with one of my priests. He was highly respected in the diocese, much loved by his congregation and a clear leader. I knew nothing about him personally except that he was not married. After the usual pleasantries, I asked, since he had scheduled the appointment, what was on his mind. "Bishop," he said, "I did not vote for you to be my bishop, but you got elected so I must deal with that. I have never been dishonest with my bishop and I do not plan to start now. I am a homosexual. I have been a gay man all my life. I perceive you are not comfortable with that. If I can help you to grow in your understanding, I want to offer you my services."

This man was neither embarrassed nor ashamed. He was the first self-accepting homosexual I had ever met. I am sure my response was not helpful or affirming. It was some version of what would later be called "don't ask, don't tell." I assured him that I had no intentions of leading a witch hunt, but that if he became an object of community debate or scandal, I could not defend him. As for his offer of assistance in growing my understanding, my experience was and is that new bishops feel little need for help from any source until the glamour of the office wears off. I suspect this man left my office in despair.

Shortly thereafter, I went to inform another priest serving a small urban congregation that the diocese had decided it could no longer support this church financially and that it would be closed in six months. I was prepared to offer him another position in the diocese and, since I was aware that he had no wife or children, this move would not cause a major disruption in his life. When I arrived at his home I became immediately aware that he shared this house with another person. We talked. I broke the news. We discussed alternative positions. I stayed about two hours. Before leaving I asked if I could use his restroom and he directed me down the hall. I entered the door and saw towels hanging that said "His" and "His." Above the towels were pictures of nude males. Only then did it dawn on me that I was in the home of a gay couple.

When I came out I said, "Paul, you have a very interesting bathroom." He responded, "I thought you might notice." I asked: "Will you tell me about it?" "Yes, he said, and this story poured out. "The man I live with is my life partner. I love him as much as you love your wife. If I ever have to choose between my partner and my priesthood I will choose my partner."

Trying to justify my prejudice, I said, "Paul, I could not allow an unmarried heterosexual couple to live in one of the church's rectories and I certainly cannot allow an unmarried homosexual couple to do so." I thought I sounded even handed. He responded, "The heterosexual couple can choose marriage. Neither my church nor my nation has given us that choice."

I grimaced at his logic and retreated into my defensive clichés. "Paul, if this partnership ever became public knowledge, I do not have the power to protect you." His response was: "Do not or will not?" He was right. I had no intention of protecting him. I left, but the conversation remained with me like a pebble in my shoe, constantly rubbing against my irrational and uninformed presuppositions. At least my homophobia had been raised to my consciousness.

Finally, unable to remove or to deny that irritant with my normal responses, I called a friend who was on the faculty of the Cornell School of Medicine in New York City and asked if he or others at Cornell would be willing to share with me their knowledge in regard to sexual orientation, for I was suddenly aware that I knew almost nothing about the subject. Perhaps the opportunity to educate a bishop was appealing to them for they took me on, shared with me their knowledge and their research papers and much conversation answering my questions.

Gradually a new understanding of sexual orientation was born in me. My conclusions were simple and straightforward. No one chooses his or her sexual orientation. It is a given like gender, eye color or left handedness. No one can cause another to become homosexual. It is not catching. I began to realize for the first time that I had not made a conscious decision to be heterosexual; I had simply awakened to the reality when I was twelve or thirteen that girls were no longer obnoxious, so I began to do things like take baths more frequently, if that was what it took to attract female attention! I also began to see clearly that sexual orientation is not about one's behavior, but about one's being. That is why no one can change his or her sexual orientation any more than one can change one's gender or eye color. This meant that all so- called "therapies" touted by right wing religious organizations and designed to cure a person of his or her homosexuality are therefore absolutely bogus and should be identified as such.

I also learned at Cornell that homosexuality is the norm for a steady percentage of the population at all times in all places. That percentage, a normal fact of nature, neither rises nor falls. I learned that homosexuality exists among the higher mammals and thus cannot be called "unnatural." I learned that homosexual persons are not born on the planet Krypton, but that they are our brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, sons and daughters and our friends. They are not abnormal. They are a minority. So is red hair!

When I became convinced of these truths, the basis on which my homophobia had been erected was destroyed. Now homophobia was no different from racism or sexism. It was and is a prejudice that needs to be banished from my church, my nation and the world. It took me months to live into these conclusions, but with my mind now convinced, my heart easily followed and I began to act out of this new understanding. In 1988 I published a book, Living in Sin? A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality. It became a seminal book in the debate that has raged inside institutional Christianity from that day to this. In 1989 I ordained the first openly gay man who was living in a publicly acknowledged commitment with his partner. When I retired in 2000, the Diocese of Newark claimed 35 openly gay and lesbian clergy, 31 of whom had visible partners. Many of them were extraordinary clergy, indeed among the finest I have ever known.

Today, without compromise or apology, I favor full civil rights for homosexual people, including marriage for gay couples. I rejoice that my church has now chosen by a free democratic electoral process two openly gay, partnered priests to serve as bishops in New Hampshire and Los Angeles. When people complain that conflict over the full inclusion of gay people in the church has disturbed the unity of the church, I respond that a unity based on a shared homophobia ought to be destroyed. I grieve that the Christian Church is today the last major stronghold of homophobia. I am embarrassed by the fear, prejudice and sometimes actual hatred that still emanate from recognized Christian leaders. I treasure the place I have occupied in my own church's struggle and I am both touched and honored that my portrait hangs today in the Hall of Honor in the King Chapel of Morehouse College.

– John Shelby Spong

Dear John,

Thank you for your letter, your thoughts and your comments on my book Eternal Life: A New Vision. I am glad we have met even if it was, as you say, just an aside in Hendersonville. I really do enjoy the Congregational–United Church of Christ there. It is one of the more exciting churches in America that I have ever visited. The present pastor, Richard Weidler and his immediate predecessor, David Kelly, are, in my opinion, largely responsible for that.

I am now working almost exclusively on the Fourth Gospel. It is a diligent study and quite fascinating to focus so completely on one major book of the Bible. Scholars of all stripes have worked on John. I do not know where this study will lead. If it is to be a book, it would not come out until 2014 and at my age this seems like a real challenge.

I hope our paths cross again.

– John Shelby Spong