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Started reading
September 30, 2020
Resurrection never feels like being made clean and nice and pious like in those Easter pictures. I would have never agreed to work for God if I had believed God was interested in trying to make me nice or even good. Instead, what I subconsciously knew, even back then, was that God was never about making me spiffy; God was about making me new. New doesn’t always look perfect. Like the Easter story itself, new is often messy. New looks like recovering alcoholics. New looks like reconciliation between family members who don’t actually deserve it. New looks like every time I manage to admit I was
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There are times when I hear my name, turn, and recognize Jesus. There are times when faith feels like a friendship with God. But there are many other times when it feels more adversarial or even vacant. Yet none of that matters in the end. How we feel about Jesus or how close we feel to God is meaningless next to how God acts upon us. How God indeed enters into our messy lives and loves us through them, whether we want God’s help or not. And how, even after we’ve experienced some sort of resurrection, it’s never perfect or impressive like an Easter bonnet, because, like Jesus, resurrected
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When one of the main messages of the church is that Jesus bids you come and die (die to self, die to your old ideas, die to self-reliance), people don’t tend to line the block for that shit. Churches that try to live into the beauty of radical hospitality and the destabilizing idea that Jesus is experienced in welcoming strangers don’t tend to be described as “sprawling.”
The crazy Old Testament prophet Ezekiel explains it well. He wrote in Ezekiel 36:26 that God had said to him, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” It didn’t feel like a removal. Removal is far too pleasant a word. My heart was ripped out. When my own heart started to feel bitter and judgy and hard, and when I had articulated to as fine a point as possible why I was justified in such steeliness, God finally said, enough.
It goes without saying that House for All Sinners and Saints is stronger now because of those newcomers. You can look around at the 120 or so people gathered on any given Sunday and think I am unclear what all these people have in common. Out of one corner of your eye there’s a homeless guy serving communion to a corporate lawyer and out of the other corner is a teenage girl with pink hair holding the baby of a suburban soccer mom. And there I was a year ago fearing that the weirdness of our church was going to be diluted.
Yet despite my own experiences of personal rejection and my years of theological education, countless prayers, an ordination, and a life centered on serving the church, I still have the same personality I was born with. I am often impatient and cranky. And my first response to almost everything is “fuck you.”
Repentance in Greek means something much closer to “thinking differently afterward” than it does “changing your cheating ways.” Of course repentance can look like a prostitute becoming a librarian, but it can also look like a prostitute simply saying, “OK, I’m a sex worker and I don’t know how to change that, but I can come here and receive bread and wine and I can hold onto the love of God without being deemed worthy of it by anyone but God.”
Repentance is changing my thinking, changing actions, reframing!!
Rick Strandlof is trying to be a real person for the first time in his life and he doesn’t really know who that person is anymore. But he sees a glimpse of it at the communion table. He sees it in the eyes of the person serving him the wine and bread, saying, “Child of God, the body of Christ, given for you.” That’s his repentance.
He agreed to this. We now call it “the Plan.” So for the first time in his adult life he is just being Rick Strandlof. But being Rick Strandlof is more painful than being Rick Duncan or Rick Gold because the real Rick has a history of childhood neglect, mental illness, and alcohol abuse.
Repentance also involves confession and forgiveness. Confession + changing thinking/context/framing + new life/resurrection/absolution!
Allan Bjornberg
The greatest spiritual practice is just showing up. And Mary Magdalene is the patron saint of just showing up. Showing up, to me, means being present to what is real, what is actually happening. Mary Magdalene didn’t necessarily know what to say or what to do or even what to think when she encountered the risen Jesus. But none of that was nearly as important as the fact that she was present and attentive to him.
If Saint Mary Magdalene had been the “pastrix” of my congregation, she would not have shied away from the news of innocent people slaughtered while it was still dark. She would have showed up and named the event from two days prior exactly what it was: horrific, evil, senseless violence without a shred of anything redemptive about it. And that was what I had decided to do.
What Mary would do is show up and remind us that despite the violence and fear, it’s still always worth it to love God and to love people. And always, always, it is worth it to sing alleluia in defiance of the devil, who surely hates the sound of
This is the resurrected God to whom we sing. A God who didn’t say we would never be afraid but that we would never be alone.
Singing in the midst of evil is what it means to be disciples. Like Mary Magdalene, the reason we can stand and weep and listen for Jesus is because we, like Mary, are bearers of resurrection, we are made new.
