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

by Nadia Bolz-Weber

of the universe is disturbing when you think about it. It’s too big and we’re too small. Suddenly, in that moment, all I could think was: What the hell am I doing? Seminary? Seriously? With a universe this vast and unknowable, what are the odds that this story of Jesus is true? Come on, Nadia. It’s a fucking fairy tale.

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

But I cannot pretend, as much as sometimes I would like to, that I have not throughout my life experienced the redeeming, destabilizing love of a surprising God.

the love and grace and mercy of Jesus was so offensive to us that we killed him.

God said “yes” to all of our polite “no thank yous” by rising from the dead.

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.

But the connection—the deep, ongoing, and personal connection people like Margery had with God, a power greater than their alcoholic selves—was in no way based in piety or righteousness. It was based solely on something I could relate to a hell of a lot more: desperation.

I hoped Unitarianism would be just right. Unitarians are such smart, good people. They seem so hopeful. They vote Democrat and recycle and love women and they let you believe anything you want to, and I wanted to be one of them badly. But I couldn’t pull it off. Four years of sobriety hadn’t come to me as a result of hopefulness and positive thinking. It was grace. Unitarians just don’t talk much about our need for God’s grace.

It was in those first couple months that I fell in love with liturgy, the ancient pattern of worship shared mainly in the Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox, and Episcopal churches. It felt like a gift that had been caretaken by generations of the faithful and handed to us to live out and caretake and hand off. Like a stream that has

flowed long before us and will continue long after us. A stream that we get to swim in, so that we, like those who came before us, can be immersed in language of truth and promise and grace. Something about the liturgy was simultaneously destabilizing and centering; my individualism subverted by being joined to other people through God to find who I was. Somehow it happened through God. One specific, divine force.

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 good guy and forgive you.” It’s God saying, “I love the world too much to let your sin define you and be the final word. I am a God who makes all things new.”

“It feels like the rug of the hope that the church might actually be something beautiful and redemptive was pulled out from under me,” I told Pastor Ross during a meeting in his office. I expected some kind of shared outrage from him. But in his humble wisdom, Pastor Ross suggested to me that God is still at work redeeming us and making all things new even in the midst of broken people and broken systems and that, despite any idealism otherwise, it had always been that way.

he pays everyone the same thing, which pisses off the upstanding early risers who worked all day in the scorching heat because he has made the slept-till-noon new hires equal to them. 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.

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.”

reconciled to God and to one another.

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.

But eventually the confession and absolution liturgy came to mean everything to me. It gradually began to feel like a moment when truth was spoken, perhaps for the only time all week, and it would crush me and then put me back together.

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 then the pastor said, “Fear not, brothers and sisters, God, who is full of grace and abounding in steadfast love, meets

us in our sin and transforms us for God’s glory and the healing of God’s world. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, your sins are forgiven, be now at peace.” Exhale.