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

by Nadia Bolz-Weber

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.

But there was one problem with my being a pastor: I’m a lousy candidate. I swear like a truck driver, I’m covered in tattoos, and I’m kind of selfish. Nothing about me says “Lutheran pastor.”

Most of what I had been taught by Christian clergy was that I was created by God, but was bad because of something some chick did in the Garden of Eden, and that I should try really hard to be good so that God, who is an angry bastard, won’t punish me. Grace had nothing to do with it.

I hadn’t learned about grace from the church. But I did learn about it from sober drunks who managed to stop drinking by giving their will over to the care of God and who then tried like hell to live a life according to spiritual principles.

“Nadia, the thing that sucks is that every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.” Damn.

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.

There’s a popular misconception that religion, Christianity specifically, is about knowing the difference between good and evil so that we can choose the good. But being good has never set me free the way truth has. Knowing all of this makes me love and hate Jesus at the same time. Because, when instead of contrasting good and evil, he contrasted truth and evil, I have to think about all the times I’ve substituted being good (or appearing to be good) for truth.

The first gentile convert to Christianity is a foreigner, who is also a person of color and a sexual minority? If only the guy were also “differently abled” and gluten intolerant.

If the quality of my Christianity lies in my ability to be more inclusive than the next pastor, things get tricky because I will always, always encounter people—intersex people, Republicans, criminals, Ann Coulter, etc.—whom I don’t want in the tent with me. Always. I only really want to be inclusive of some kinds of people and not of others.

I need to believe that God does not initiate suffering; God transforms it.

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.

“God simply keeps reaching down into the dirt of humanity and resurrecting us from the graves we dig for ourselves through our violence, our lies, our selfishness, our arrogance, and our addictions. And God keeps loving us back to life over and over.”

This is my spiritual community, where messy, beautiful people come as they are to gather around a story and a table—where truth and molassesy bread are shared—and it is simply the thing I was meant to do.