Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint

by Nadia Bolz-Weber

And in the very next moment I thought this: Except that throughout my life, I’ve experienced it to be true.

And it is the story of how I have experienced this Jesus thing to be true. How the Christian faith, while wildly misrepresented in so much of American culture, is really about death and resurrection. It’s about how God continues to reach into the graves we dig for ourselves and pull us out, giving us new life, in ways both dramatic and small. This faith helped me get sober, and it helped me (is helping me) forgive the fundamentalism of my Church of Christ upbringing, and it helps me to not always have to be right.

It’s about spiritual physics. Something has to die for something new to live.

For reasons I’ll never quite understand, I realized that I had been called to proclaim the Gospel from the place where I am, and proclaim where I am from the Gospel. What had started in early sobriety as a reluctant willingness to start praying again had led to my returning to Christianity, and now had led to something even more preposterous: I was called to be a pastor to my people.

When I tell other Christians of my time with the goddess, I think they expect me to characterize it as a period in my life when I was misguided, and that I have now thankfully come back to both Jesus and my senses. But it’s not like that. I can’t imagine that the God of the universe is limited to our ideas of God. I can’t imagine that God doesn’t reveal God’s self in countless ways outside of the symbol system of Christianity. In a way, I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.

We had started out caring about each other, but in the end none of us knew how to care for each other. But this experience taught me that a community based on the idea that everyone hates rules is, in the end, just as disappointing and oppressive as a community based on the ability to follow rules. I moved out two weeks before the cops busted the house.

The Sunday after New Year’s Day 1992, I was six days sober and sitting in a dingy, generic room filled with cigarette smoke and sober women—suburban housewives, haggard cocktail waitresses, a couple of grandmas, and a lawyer—on the second floor of York Street.

“You just have to find a higher power you can do business with,” Margery suggested one morning when I admitted that I hated Christianity. “This isn’t about religion, honey.” For her, God was the key to staying sober. Her relationship to God wasn’t doctrinal. It was functional.

The church had provided me a sorting system, which was now ingrained. It had containers into which every person and idea and event was to be placed. These were sometimes labeled “saved” and “not saved” (those who will join us in the glory land and those who will not) or perhaps “us” and “not us” (same thing) or simply just “good” and “bad” (again, same thing).

One morning, I sat in our tiny apartment kitchen lamenting over a bowl of oatmeal how un-Unitarian I was, when Matthew said, “Just come with me to St. Paul’s on Sunday. It doesn’t suck, I promise. Plus you’ll love Pastor Ross; he’s gay.” I relented, but only because the pastor was gay, and I hoped that meant some flamboyance and dramatics. As Matthew drove us the following Sunday to St. Paul Lutheran Church in Oakland,

here’s what Pastor Ross taught me: God’s grace is a gift that is freely given to us. We don’t earn a thing when it comes to God’s love, and we only try to live in response to the gift. No one is climbing the spiritual ladder. We don’t continually improve until we are so spiritual we no longer need God. We die and are made new, but that’s different from spiritual self-improvement. We are simultaneously sinner and saint, 100 percent of both, all the time. The Bible is not God. The Bible is simply the cradle that holds Christ. Anything in the Bible that does not hold up to the Gospel of Jesus Christ simply does not have the same authority. The movement in our relationship to God is always from God to us. Always. We can’t, through our piety or goodness, move closer to God. God is always coming near to us. Most especially in the Eucharist and in the stranger. (Write out these bullet points, memorize them, and you could save a lot of money not going to Lutheran seminary.)

I have been a Lutheran since then because the Lutheran church is the only place that has given me language for what I have experienced to be true in my life, which is why I now call Pastor Ross Merkle the Vampire Who Turned Me.

need to clarify something, however. God’s grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God’s grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word. My selfishness is not the end-all… instead, it’s that God makes beautiful things out of even my own shit. Grace isn’t about God creating humans as flawed beings and then acting all hurt when we inevitably fail and then stepping in like the hero to grant us grace—like saying “Oh, it’s OK, I’ll be a go...

Welcome to House for

All Sinners and Saints. We will disappoint you.

Pastor Nadia, We are currently planning a festival Eucharist and rite of recognition here in San Francisco for six GLBTQ [gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer] clergy to be officially brought onto the ELCA clergy roster. At that time, Pastor Ross Merkle of St. Paul Lutheran will be reinstated onto the clergy roster. They have asked that you be the preacher for the event. Would you preach for us? My reply: “All day long.”

The landowner is like, “Seriously? You’re angry because I am generous?” and then the final line of the parable is, “The last shall be first and the first shall be last.” This is exactly, when it comes down to it, why most people do not believe in grace. It is fucking offensive.

I swallowed and began to preach. I said that the text for the day is not the parable of the workers. It’s the parable of the landowner. What makes this the kingdom of God is not the worthiness or piety or social justicey-ness or the hard work of the laborers… none of that matters. It’s the fact that the trampy landowner couldn’t manage to keep out of the marketplace. He goes back and back and back, interrupting lives… coming to get his people. Grace tapping us on the shoulder. And so, I reminded those seven pastors specifically, including the man who introduced me to grace, that the kingdom of God was just like that exact moment in which sinners/saints are reconciled to God and to one another. The kingdom of God is like that very moment when God was making all things new. In the end, their calling, and their value in the kingdom of God comes not from the approval of a denomination or of the other workers, but in their having been come-and-gotten by God. It is the pure and unfathomable mercy of God that defines them and that says, “Pay attention, this is for you.”

There are times when you just don’t know what to feel, because you feel things that don’t normally mix in polite company. I felt angry and ashamed at having been conned. I felt deep sorrow for a sweet child and her baby who were victims of a situation far sadder than a hurricane. I felt disappointment in myself for not really wanting to help her anymore. But I hated being lied to. I hate being lied to. The next Sunday, I was ashamed to face Matthew’s congregation, who had been told the truth of the Amerie situation in an email the day before.

“Nadia,” she said, with a kindness I’ll not soon forget, “God was still glorified in this. Who knows if Amerie would ever have had the courage to leave him if she hadn’t received the love she had over the past month while part of our community. Maybe now they know that they are worth more than the life they’ve always had.”

“Nadia,” she said, “you have a limited amount of time and emotional energy in your life, and you are squandering tons of it on this one situation just so you can maintain the idea you like to have of yourself as being a loyal friend.” “Look,” I said, in my own defense, “I didn’t call you for this truth bullshit.” (The late writer David Foster Wallace was right: The truth will set you free… but not before it’s done with you.)

The truth does crush us, but the instant it crushes us, it somehow puts us back together into something honest. It’s death and resurrection every time it happens. This, to me, is the point of the confession and absolution in the liturgy. When I first experienced it—the part where everyone in church stands up and says what bad people they are, and the pastor, from the distance of the chancel and the purity of her white robe says, “God forgives you”—I thought it was hogwash.

stood in the blue-carpeted sanctuary at my husband’s church and for the first time I really paid attention to the confession. We have sinned by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.

And in that messy chaos, my job was to just stand there and be aware of God’s presence in the room. Kind of a weird job description, but there it was, and in those moments, I felt strangely qualified. I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone who just had shoulder surgery, but I couldn’t help but feel God’s presence in the trauma room. It wasn’t long before I found myself sensing God’s presence in other rooms, too. I felt it in the little white room with just enough space for four love seats and as many boxes of tissue where we brought the families of those who are dead, or might be dead, or should be dead, or had died and are now not dead, but we don’t know for how long. I’d sit with people in their loss. Their

When I first began dipping my toe back into the waters of Christianity, back when Matthew and I were dating, I read a lot. Mostly I read Marcus Borg and others who had done work on what is called the Historical Jesus. Matthew had given me a book called Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. It was my gateway drug.

This was the bonus to liberal Christianity: I could use my reason and believe at the same time. But it only worked for me for a short while. And soon I wanted to experiment with the harder stuff. Admiring Jesus, while a noble pursuit, doesn’t show me where God is to be found when we suffer the death of a loved one or a terrifying cancer diagnosis or when our child is hurt.

Admiring and trying to imitate a guy who was really in touch with God just doesn’t seem to bridge the distance between me and the Almighty in ways that help me understand where the hell God is when we are suffering.

The passion reading ended, and suddenly I was aware that God isn’t feeling smug about the whole thing. God is not distant at the cross and God is not distant in the grief of the newly motherless at the hospital; but instead, God is there in the messy mascara-streaked middle of it, feeling as shitty as the rest of us. There simply is no knowable answer to the question of why there is suffering. But there is meaning. And for me that meaning ended up being related to Jesus—Emmanuel—which means “God with us.” We want to go to God for answers, but sometimes what we get is God’s presence.

And yet, there I was, now a pastor of a GLBTQ “inclusive” congregation, and I felt revulsion at seeing an intersex person. It was humbling to say the least. And it made me face, in a very real way, the limitations of inclusion.

began to realize that maybe the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch was really about the conversion—not of the eunuch, but of Philip. In the story, the eunuch was riding along the desert road in his chariot reading Isaiah, and he was returning from Jerusalem having gone there to worship. But I started to wonder if he was also familiar with Deuteronomy, specifically 23:1, which says, No one whose testicles are cut off or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.” (Why John 3:16 is the most popular verse in the Bible and not Deuteronomy 23:1 is beyond me.)

The wideness of the tent of the Lord is my concern only insofar as it points to the gracious nature of a loving God who became flesh and entered into our humanity. The wideness of the tent is my concern only insofar as it points to the great mercy and love of a God who welcomes us all as friends. So in the story of the conversion of Philip and the eunuch is some hope for the church and maybe society itself. Under God’s really big tent we can ask questions, invite those who represent the establishment to come and sit by us and read the scriptures. We all can be converted anew by the stranger, and see where there is water in the desert and enter fully into the baptism of God’s mercy with foreigners, with the “not us.” And then go on our way rejoicing, having converted each other again and again to this beautiful, risky, expansive life of faith.

Having a Rally Day event, complete with a cotton candy machine at a church without children, was just the sort of random thing that started getting House for All Sinners and Saints noticed by the ELCA. That and the fact that we were almost exclusively a congregation of single, young adults: the exact population that other ELCA churches can’t manage to attract at all. For these reasons, I would be getting up at four a.m. the next day to board a plane to Chicago, where I would be keynoting a Lutheran theological conference. They wanted to hear more about my church. And this Rally Day without children story would be fun to tell.

And here’s the great thing about the Gospel of Matthew’s account of the feeding of the multitude: The disciples said, “Nothing.” “What do we have?” they asked. “We have nothing. Nothing but a few loaves and a couple of fish.” And they said this as though it were a bad thing. The disciples’ mistake was also my mistake: They forgot that they have a God who created the universe out of “nothing,” that can put flesh on dry bones “nothing,” that can put life in a dusty womb “nothing.” I mean, let’s face it, “nothing” is God’s favorite material to work with. Perhaps God looks upon that which we dismiss as nothing, insignificant, and worthless, and says “Ha! Now that I can do something with.” I had looked at the twenty-six people at Rally Day, and when Jesus asked, “What do you have?” I said, “Nothing.”

realized that sometimes the best thing we can do for each other is talk honestly about being wrong.

Chris is also a member of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, a rather sectarian and fundamentalist part of the Lutheran family tree.

So nowadays, a joint restraining order of sorts keeps us civil, but the LCMS really has more in common with the fundamentalist church I was raised in than it does with my own Lutheran denomination.

my bishop once joked about the clergy collars we wear. “You know why we wear those little white squares right here?” he asked, pointing to his throat. “We wear them so that people can project their home movies onto them.”

God, please help me not be an asshole, is about as common a prayer as I pray in my life.

I found him to be hurting and tender and really smart. I looked him in the eye and said, “Chris, I have two things to say to you. One, you are a beautiful child of God. Two, I think that maybe you and I are desperate enough to hear the Gospel

that we can even hear it from each other.”

think loving our enemies might be too central to the Gospel—too close to the heart of Jesus—for it to wait until we mean it. I don’t mean it. I didn’t mean it when I shook Pirate Christian’s hand. And my heart, that very place where I found the impulse that I am to love my neighbor and hate my enemy, isn’t going to purify itself any time soon. So if God is waiting for that same heart to feel nice, loving, warm, pink, fuzzy things about someone who is my enemy, well, I think God might be waiting a while. So I wondered if maybe the prayer part of the “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” bit was about how we love them. Maybe my little “God, help me not be an asshole” prayer was like the smallest little opening for God to do God’s thing. I don’t know how prayer works, and I’m not even sure it always does, but I can’t think of why else it is that I was able to talk to my enemy that day with an open heart.

But as I thought about what to say or do in response to Sojourners’s decision, I felt confronted by a terrible ambiguity, similar to what my dad must have felt when he excluded my name from my sermon. The ambiguity is this: Sojourners has, in my assessment, done more than any other organization to call evangelical Christians to the reality that a central part of following Jesus is a concern for the poor. This is a truth largely absent from much of American evangelicalism. Sojourners has a platform to speak about social justice to those who otherwise may not have ears to hear, and this is critical. While mainline Protestantism is on a clear trajectory toward full inclusion of our GLBTQ brothers and sisters, many evangelicals are, by and large, not there yet. So by taking a stance on GLBTQ issues, Sojourners may have lost its ability to be a voice for the poor in the more conservative areas of the church.

But he says that from a heavenly perspective, evil—darkness and the devil—rages on earth not because it is so powerful, but because it is so vulnerable. Koester says that Satan desperately rages on earth because he knows he has already lost.

When the forces that seek to defy God whisper if in our ears—if God really loved me, I wouldn’t feel like this… If I really am beloved, then I should have everything I want… if I really belong to God, things in my life wouldn’t suck—to remember that God has named us and claimed us as God’s own. When what seems to be depression or compulsive eating or narcissism or despair or discouragement or resentment or isolation takes over, try picturing it as a vulnerable and desperate force seeking to defy God’s grace and mercy in your life. And then tell it to piss off and say defiantly to it, “I am baptized” or “I am God’s,” because nothing else gets to tell you who you are.

But what I hoped he heard from me was that it doesn’t really matter which gender Asher identifies as. Any identity other than child of God is spiritually meaningless.

What I can’t bear, though, is the thought of preaching something I suspect might not be true. And on Sunday, September 11, 2011, I suspected that it might not be true that we should forgive evil, because when faced with evil, Jesus wants us to be holy doormats and say it’s OK. And I most certainly did not believe the other popular message preached from many an American pulpit that day: The United States has most-favored-nation status in the eyes of the Almighty, and God will vindicate the evil done to us and it is in that God we trust.

It would seem that when we are sinned against, when someone else does us harm, we are in some way linked to that sin, connected to that mistreatment like a chain. And our anger, fear, or resentment doesn’t free us at all. It just keeps us chained. What if forgiveness, rather than being a pansy way of saying it’s OK, is actually a way of wielding bolt cutters and snapping the chain that links us?

As the great American writer Flannery O’Connor said, “Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.” My heart may be dark, but I choose to try to act according to what I believe, not what I feel. What happened on 9/11 was not OK. That’s why I need to forgive. Because I can’t be bound to that kind of evil. Lest it infect the evil in my own heart and metastasize it.

Two days after PJ’s death, a group of my friends undertook what I can only describe as a mission of compassion: They entered the home of our dead friend and they cleared out all the pornography. Every Playboy and videotape. All of it. They wanted to spare PJ’s parents any more pain than they were already dealing with. That, I preached, is the inbreaking of the kingdom of heaven on earth. That we might clear out the pornography from our dead friends’ homes before their nice, small-town parents come to settle their son’s affairs. It’s small, it’s surprising, and it’s a little profane, but it’s the real thing.

Jesus brings a kingdom ruled by the crucified one and populated by the unclean and always found in the unexpected. I’d expected to look at the past and see only mistakes that I’d moved on from, to see only damage and addiction and tragic self-delusion. But by thinking that way, I’d assumed that God was nowhere to be found back then. But that’s kind of an insult to God. It’s like saying, “You only exist when I recognize you.” The kingdom of heaven, which Jesus talked about all the time, is, as he said, here. At hand. It’s now. Wherever you are. In ways you’d never expect.