Subject: John Spong Speaks
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 1997 15:07:40 -0500 (EST)
From: Sally Greene <sally@sunsite.unc.edu>
To: "Greene, Sarah -- Sarah Greene" <Gilmer@dal.cleaf.com>

A message from John Spong himself.  His latest book must be just out?
It's been discussed on this feminist theology list.

I think he's right in his theology of course, but I still love the music.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 1997 22:32:41 -0500 (EST)
From: Ann Markle <ann.markle@yale.edu>
To: feminist-theology@mailbase.ac.uk
Subject: "Rethinking the Festival of Lessons and Carols" -- LONG! (fwd)

This came to me from my "Anglican" list, and since we've been discussing
him, I thought I'd pass it on.  I've skimmed it, and can't find much
problem with it (though I'd *never* advocate doing away with Lessons &
Carols -- one of my favorite services!  I'd love to know what you all
think, though.

Ann

Ann Markle
ann.markle@yale.edu

---------- Forwarded message ----------

<URL:http://www.dfms.org/newark/vox20197.html>

THE VOICE, January/February 1997

Rethinking the Festival of Lessons and Carols

by John S. Spong, Bishop of Newark

During the Advent, Christmas and Epiphany seasons a form of worship known
as "The Festival of Lessons and Carols" usually finds its way into the
liturgies of our various churches. There are many advantages to this
service. It gives our choirs an opportunity to sing some of the beautiful
seasonal music. It provides an opportunity for a variety of lay leaders to
read familiar passages of holy scripture. It frees the clergy from the task
of preparing yet another sermon during the busy holiday season.
Congregations anticipate and enjoy this service. It is indeed almost a
holiday ritual that takes its place alongside the Christmas pageant and the
midnight service.

The Festival of Lessons and Carols was introduced in 1880 by Bishop F. W.
Benson of the Diocese of Truro in the United Kingdom. In 1918 it was
adopted by King's College, Cambridge and from there has made its way into
churches across the English speaking world.

Despite its history, the beauty of its music and even its popularity, I do
not believe I would allow this service in its present form again in a
church where I was serving as rector or vicar. Nor do I believe I would
attend this service again by choice. My reason is that the service of
lessons and carols is based on a fundamentally flawed theological concept.
As such, it undergirds an attitude toward the Bible that I find uninformed
and

increasingly distasteful. Let me explain. The service begins with readings
from the Hebrew scriptures. These particular passages are chosen because
they appear to us Christians to be literal prophecies that were lived out
and fulfilled by Jesus of Nazareth. We act as if these Hebrew scriptures
actually contained a blueprint for the words Jesus spoke and the deeds he
did. Listen even now to the typical way we hear the familiar narratives
that we have incorporated into the Christian story. "A shoot shall come out
from the stump of David, and a branch shall grow out of his roots (Isa.
11:1)." "But you Bethlehem......from you shall come forth for me one who is
to rule in Israel, whose origin is from old, from ancient days (Micah
5:2)." "A young woman (The King James Bible would say 'virgin') is with
child and shall bear a son and shall name him Emmanuel (Isa. 7:14)." "Rise,
shine for your light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you
(Isa. 60:1)." "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light
(Isa. 11:3)." "And his name shall be called wonderful, counselor, mighty
God, everlasting father, prince of peace (Isa. 9:6)."

We recognize these passages immediately because they have been read over
the centuries as part of our Christmas celebration. Indeed, Frederick
Handel imprinted many of these passages into our minds indelibly as part of
his incredibly beautiful oratorio "Messiah." So deeply have we come to
associate these texts with Christ that many people believe they were
actually written about him. Some even think they are found in the Gospels.
Actually every quotation I have cited above comes out of a period of
history from the 8th century B.C.E. to the 6th century B.C.E.! Once this
elementary insight enters our minds, then the Christian rationalization
process begins and one hears it said that even though these words were
written 600 to 800 years before the birth of Jesus, they are nonetheless
actual prophecies about Jesus, which were fulfilled in a literal and
miraculous way. Underlying this claim is the assumption that God planned
the story of salvation in such a way as to require these ancient writers to
pen words for their texts that would be fulfilled centuries later in
specific detail. This was thought to prove the divine nature of Jesus. It
was such a cozy, circular and apparently persuasive theory that such
explanations became normative with little or no critical study. Most of us
have grown up with some version of this understanding.

But these assumptions are biblical nonsense and commit us to accept a
superstitious interpretation of the Bible. Think for just a moment exactly
what such a claim would mean to the concept of revelation: It would first
understand God as the master planner in the sky who dictated the content of
the prophetic writings so that a divine plan would be seen to occupy vast
sweeps of time as one unfolding whole. God would have to control the world
so tightly that the words God caused to be written centuries before would
govern little events that occurred centuries later. Because we know today
that the Gospel writers did not quote the Hebrew originals, we would also
have to ascribe to God the micromanaging process of directing the various
translations of these texts so that the exact prophetic message, penned in
the original Hebrew, would still be preserved intact in the new Greek
language into which the Gospels were destined to be written. Next we have
to take into consideration the fact that in this six to eight hundred year
migration, God would have to guarantee that the prophetic predictions would
be accurately and precisely hand-copied literally dozens of times.

We also need to recall that the works of these prophets existed on
individual scrolls, not bound together into a single volume. Frequently
such scrolls were stolen, lost, burned or otherwise destroyed. To protect
these divine revelations against this contingency would again require that
God must oversee these sacred writings and keep them from harm during vast
stretches of time. The view of God revealed in this analysis is very human,
a superstitious, invasive, inadequate God, indeed. Yet that image,
unbelievable as it is, permeates the common mind of many Christians, and it
is this view of God that is revealed again and again in the liturgy we call
"The Festival of Lessons and Carols." This is the mentality that suggests
that the prophets foretold exact events according to the long range plan
that God had encoded centuries earlier in the Bible. Only Gentile
interpreters, imposing their western minds upon these Jewish scriptures,
could devise such a strange doctrine of revelation or seek to impose upon
the scriptures such a superstitious explanation. The reality we find in the
Bible, when properly understood, is 180 degrees different from this
self-serving Christian interpretation. Jesus did not fulfill these
prophetic writings in a supernatural, literal way. Rather the words of the
ancient prophets were used by the Gospel writers to interpret him. The
story of Jesus was actually crafted with the Hebrew scriptures open.
Episodes in Jesus' life were written to conform to the prophetic
expectations. Words were placed on Jesus' lips to make the prophecies find
their fulfillment in him. That is why the fit is so perfect. The Gospel
writers believed that the God who had been present in Moses, Joshua, Elijah
and Elisha was present in Jesus and so stories once told about heroes of
the past could legitimately be told about Jesus of Nazareth. The account of
Pharaoh killing all the boy babies in Egypt when Moses was born was retold
in the Gospel as a Jesus story with Herod playing the role of the Pharaoh
by killing all the boy babies in Bethlehem when Jesus was born. Since the
God who had been pointed to in the Psalms and the Prophets was now seen in
Jesus, so the prophetic words were simply attributed to Jesus. He was made
to quote Psalm 22 from the cross, not because he actually said these words,
but because those words adequately interpreted the God experience met in
Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospels were not designed to be biographies with
literally accurate details. They were Jewish portraits painted by Jewish
authors. God had been met anew in Jesus. That was the experience. To
interpret that experience in a Jewish context was the reason the Gospels
were written.

That is why we find in the Gospels the stories, words and expectations of
the Jewish past wrapped around the person of Jesus. This means that the
prophets were not soothsayers who predicted specific events that would
occur centuries later. They were rather authors whose words were adopted by
the Gospel writers in order to allow the meaning of Jesus to be reflected
in the wisdom of the Jewish past.

For us today to line up passages of the Hebrew scriptures with passages
showing their "fulfillment" in the Gospels as if to suggest that the
correlation results from a supernatural plan of salvation placed in the
scriptures hundreds of years ago is to engage in bad theology and to
violate the integrity of the Jewish scriptures. It also perpetuates a
strange concept of the Bible itself. Yet that is exactly the glue that
holds together the service we call "The Festival of Lessons and Carols."
That is why this liturgical form has lost appeal for me.

Does that mean that I want the Church to abandon the message of Jesus as
the fulfillment of the expectations of the ages? Of course not. I too want
the Church to shout to the highest heaven "God was in this Christ!" This is
our experience. But that God presence was not achieved by a Wizard of Oz
who had a heavenly script worked out centuries before that was magically
hidden in the ancient texts of the Jews only to be discovered by the Gospel
writers. Jesus did not fulfill the literal expectations of the Hebrew
scriptures. The story of his life was written on the basis of these ancient
sources. We must cease to ask the gospels the strangely western question:
"Did this event actually occur?" We must rather begin to ask the gospels
the Jewish question: "What does it mean that, when trying to understand the
God met in Jesus, these evangelists cast the events of his life in terms of
those sacred stories of their past?" The Gospels were designed to paint an
interpretive portrait, not to provide us with literal snapshots.

This approach to the Bible breaks the sacred texts open in dramatic new
ways, and delivers us from yesterday's mindless fundamentalism. One of the
casualties of this insight will inevitably be the format of the Festival of
Lessons and Carols, which was created on the basis of a literal, and now
discredited, view of the Bible. A Church that wants to engage the future
cannot perpetuate this ignorance of the past.

The music of the season must find a new way to express itself. The Festival
of Lessons and Carols in its present form, however, must go. Liturgists
with a commitment to scholarship and with an eye to the future need to
develop for us a new form for this beautiful service. I hope they will.

John S. Spong

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