Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

by Rachel Held Evans

Whether you meet the water as a baby squirming in the arms of a nervous priest, or as an adult plunged into a river by a revivalist preacher, you do it at the hands of those who first welcome you to faith, the people who have—or will—introduce you to Jesus. “In baptism,” writes Will Willimon, “the recipient of baptism is just that—recipient. You cannot very well do your own baptism. It is done to you, for you.”7 It’s an adoption, not an interview.

Church came to me far more than I went to it, and I’m glad.

I hadn’t yet learned that you tend to come out of the big moments—the wedding, the book deal, the trip, the death, the birth—as the exact same person who went in, and that perhaps the strangest surprise of life is it keeps on happening to the same ol’ you.

In baptism, we are identified as beloved children of God, and our adoption into the sprawling, beautiful, dysfunctional family of the church is celebrated by whoever happens to be standing on the shoreline with a hair dryer and deviled eggs. This is why the baptism font is typically located near the entrance of a church. The central aisle represents the Christian’s journey through life toward God, a journey that begins with baptism.

“I’m a Christian,” I said, “because Christianity names and addresses sin. It acknowledges the reality that the evil we observe in the world is also present within ourselves. It tells the truth about the human condition—that we’re not okay.”

Something about communion triggers our memory and helps us see things as they really are. Something about communion opens our eyes to Jesus at the table.

“When [Jesus] wanted fully to explain what his forthcoming death was all about,” writes New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, “he didn’t give a theory. He didn’t even give them a set of scriptural texts. He gave them a meal.”46 I guess sometimes you just have to taste and see.

On the days when I am hungry—for community, for peace, for belief—I remember what it was like to feed people Jesus, and for people to feed Jesus to me. And those pieces of memory multiply, like the bread that fed the five thousand, spilling out of their baskets and filling every hollow space. Communion doesn’t answer every question, nor does it keep my stomach from rumbling from time to time, but I have found that it is enough. It is always and ever enough.

Sometimes the most radical act of Christian obedience is to share a meal with someone new.

When hit with the glint of love’s light, even ordinary things become holy. And when received with open hands in the spirit of eucharisteo, the signs and wonders of Jesus never cease.

The Spirit is like fire, deceptively polite in its dance atop the wax and wick of our church candles, but wild and mercurial as a storm when unleashed.

It has become cliché to talk about faith as a journey, and yet the metaphor holds. Scripture doesn’t speak of people who found God. Scripture speaks of people who walked with God.

Walking with someone through grief, or through the process of reconciliation, requires patience, presence, and a willingness to wander, to take the scenic route.

The purpose of the church, and of the sacraments, is to give the world a glimpse of the kingdom, to point in its direction.

All we have are imperfect people in an imperfect world doing their best to produce outward signs of inward grace and stumbling all along the way. All we have is this church—this lousy, screwed-up, glorious church—which, by God’s grace, is enough.