Windsor Team Ministry

Sunday Xtra in All Saints Hall at 10am on 10 July

 
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Sunday Xtra is a short, informal service of worship on the 2nd Sunday of every month.  Note these dates in your diary now: 10 July; 14 August; 11 September; 9 October; 13 November; 11 December.  Who could you bring with you?
 
Do you have a comment or question?  Want to get more involved?  Email the Sunday Xtra leadership team: SundayXtra@windsorchurches.org.uk

Hear what the Spirit says to the churches……

When did you last read John’s Gospel – the whole thing? It was, for me, a preparatory exercise in early June before spending five days at Gladstone’s Library in Flintshire in the company of thirty-six others, and Jack Spong: retired bishop of Newark, New Jersey, radical, liberal, a democrat, biblical scholar, just eighty and still enquiring, still learning, still searching after truth. He has been studying the fourth gospel for three years, and led us through, in a series of lectures, what he has come to understand, which may be published in 2014 “if I am still alive”.

Reading through John (RSV), it was as if I had never read it before. I was struck by his vilification of the Jews and their determination to have Jesus killed: “it is to your advantage that one man should die for the people” says Caiphas, “rather than that the whole nation should perish.” And I was challenged to try to make sense of the long discourses, purportedly given by Jesus. A very different read from the Synoptics, to say the least.

 “We will never understand the scriptures” says Spong, “unless we isolate the writer in context.” This gospel was written sixty or more years after Jesus’ death. The Romans had taken over Jerusalem. All the Jews had left were their sacred scriptures and their mystical tradition. The Jesus Jews tried to make sense of Jesus in a Jewish context. Orthodox Jews wanted to exclude from the synagogue revisionist Jews who wanted to include followers of Jesus.

Spong entitled his lectures “The Fourth Gospel – Tales of a Jewish Mystic”. In it Jesus is not baptised by John the Baptist who, rather, is a witness: “this is the Son of God”; the ‘miracles’ are signs that point to a different reality; the themes of the Gethsemane prayer are universal; the climax is the crucifixion; the second coming (“in a little while”) is the gift of the Holy Spirit. This gospel is different from the others: no genealogy, no birth story, no temptation in the wilderness, no transfiguration, no parables, no suffering in Gethsemane or on the cross – Jesus is in full control. There is no sense of the ‘fall’; the task of salvation is not moralistic – to be ‘saved from sin’ – but about what life can be, expanded to abundant life. ‘I am the Way’ is about the way to a new kind of humanity. “There’s something greater than feeling guilty” suggests Spong, “and that is being whole. If you become whole and expanded you may participate in being God.”

John – whoever the author was – develops his gospel around dramatically drawn figures, mostly unnamed, who don’t appear in the other gospels. They are symbols not history. Lazarus and the beloved disciple never existed; they are two sides of the same coin. The author is trying to put into words a transformative experience – a call into life. This gospel is full of symbols that the Jews would have understood. If we read it as literally true, we destroy it.

I’m writing this to give you a flavour of a refreshing and liberating experience. The thing about Spong is that he says things that one rarely hears in our everyday church circles. A few sound bites: 

• “Every living thing is survival oriented – it is the nature of life.”
• “Religion is a coping strategy – we want a God to do what we can’t do – to deal with the traumas of death.”
• “On the cross, Jesus went beyond the survival instinct.”
• “We become transformed when we love another more than we love ourselves.”
• “Jesus calls us to discover our freedom to give ourselves away in love”
• “No one comes to the Father but by me – taken literally leads to religious imperialism.”
• “Literalism is the dagger in the heart of the Christian faith – it renders the scriptures inaccurate.”
• “It’s difficult to study scripture critically when told: ‘This is the word of the Lord’.
• “The core of Christianity is not a doctrine but an experience.”
• “I don’t think God is a Christian”.
• “Jesus was all that he could be and we saw God in him.”

I hope that’s enough to interest some readers in Spong. He is both liberating and challenging. His books are readable: as good a place to start as any is “Why Christianity must change or die” (Harper Collins 1998).

 

Keep the Flag Flying at St John the Baptist

 
Your chance to vote to save the tower!
As part of the Royal Borough's Big Society 'Neighbourhood Budget' activity, all those who live, work or otherwise have an interest in Windsor & Maidenhead are eligible to vote for the council to spend money on their favourite projects. The Parish of St John the Baptist with All Saints have submitted Windsor Parish Church Tower Restoration as our favourite project, and all readers of the Team Magazine are urged to logon to www.rbwm.gov.uk to vote between July 4 and 31, AND ALSO TO ENCOURAGE ALL YOUR RELATIVES, FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES TO VOTE TOO! The submission can be found at www.rbwm.gov.uk.