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May 27 - July 27, 2022
but eventually I’d have to work for God. I’d have to become God’s bitch.
I relented, but only because the pastor was gay, and I hoped that meant some flamboyance and dramatics.
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
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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.”
“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.
“Pay attention, this is for you.”
when Jesus goes on and on about how we really actually like darkness more than light because, let’s face it, the darkness hides our bullshit.
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 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.
Sometimes we can’t manage to choose the truth or to be good, and in those moments I just hope God comes and does that thing where something is transformed into healing anyway.
You hear a lot of nonsense in hospitals and funeral homes. God had a plan, we just don’t know what it is.
We want to go to God for answers, but sometimes what we get is God’s presence.
I realized that sometimes the best thing we can do for each other is talk honestly about being wrong.
Pirate Christian is my enemy. Oh, and by the way, fuck him.
And because hatred is simply a corrosive form of spiritual bondage, Jesus says, “Love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you.” It’s one of the most annoying things Jesus suggested.
Because if the devil made me do it, then I don’t have to face the reality that perhaps I made me do it. It’s all so ripe for abuse, and some of my parishioners, Asher included, had fallen victim to other Christians trying to cast out the so-called demon of homosexuality, as though spiritual warfare and culture wars are one in the same. So when I felt like I might need to talk about demonic forces the Sunday of Asher’s naming, it made me uncomfortable.
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
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The notion that our names are spoken by Jesus, and that this is what makes us turn and recognize him, had become important to me, especially in light of how I was called by God.
My experience, however, is that the God of Easter is a God with dirt under his nails.
“Lack of connections is death,” he told me as we sat in Hooked on Colfax, nine months after he’d first visited HFASS. “The opposite of that is being able to hug a perfect stranger.”
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 bodies are always in rough shape.
But Russell refused to play along. “Yeah, that sucks,” he said sarcastically. “You guys are really good at ‘welcoming the stranger’ when it’s a young transgender person. But sometimes ‘the stranger’ looks like your mom and dad.”
Then Asher spoke up. “As the young transgender kid who was welcomed into this community, I just want to go on the record and say that I’m really glad there are people at church now who look like my mom and dad. Because I have a relationship with them that I just can’t with my own mom and dad.”
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.
What if you have already been forgiven for all of that?
