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August 3 - August 16, 2024
We don’t want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith. Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.
Millennials aren’t looking for a hipper Christianity, I said. We’re looking for a truer Christianity, a more authentic Christianity.
Church books are written by people with a plan and ten steps, not by Christians just hanging on by their fingernails.
Christianity isn’t meant to simply be believed; it’s meant to be lived, shared, eaten, spoken, and enacted in the presence of other people.
They reminded me that, try as I may, I can’t be a Christian on my own. I need a community. I need the church.
It’s about why, even on days when I suspect all this talk of Jesus and resurrection and life everlasting is a bunch of bunk designed to coddle us through an essentially meaningless existence, I should still like to be buried with my feet facing the rising sun. Just in case.
It was the ’80s, so all my earliest memories of Jesus smell like hair spray.
The great struggle of the Christian life is to take God’s name for us, to believe we are beloved and to believe that is enough.
Death and resurrection. It’s the impossibility around which every other impossibility of the Christian faith orbits.
In the ritual of baptism, our ancestors acted out the bizarre truth of the Christian identity: We are people who stand totally exposed before evil and death and declare them powerless against love.
Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow. —Flannery O’Connor
Sometimes the church must be a refuge even to its own refugees.
Philip got out of God’s way. He remembered that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out, but who it lets in.
We could not become like God, so God became like us. God showed us how to heal instead of kill, how to mend instead of destroy, how to love instead of hate, how to live instead of long for more. When we nailed God to a tree, God forgave. And when we buried God in the ground, God got up.
We are not spared death, but the power of death has been defeated. The grip of sin has been loosed. We are invited to share the victory, to follow the path of God back to life.
There was no great personal tragedy to shake my foundations, no injustice or betrayal to justify my falling away—just a few pesky questions that unraveled my faith like twine and left me standing here unable to sing a song I know by heart, chilled by a shadow no one else can see.
But no one really teaches you how to grieve the loss of your faith. You’re on your own for that.
That recurring choice—between faith and science, Christianity and feminism, the Bible and historical criticism, doctrine and compassion—kept tripping me up like roots on a forest trail. I wanted to believe, of course, but I wanted to believe with my intellectual integrity and intuition intact, with both my head and heart fully engaged.
I became a stranger to the busy, avuncular God who arranged parking spaces for my friends and took prayer requests for weather and election outcomes while leaving thirty thousand children to die each day from preventable disease.
Looking back, I suspect their reactions had less to do with disdain for my doubt and more to do with fear of their own.
He moved through the world with the patient maturity of someone who’d already had his expectations adjusted, who already knew that faith was something you took a day at a time, not something you figured out at the start.
We were, as they say, “plugged in” to a church. To be plugged in to a church is to be wired into a highly choreographed, interconnected system of relationships, programs, and events that together produce a society complex enough to put on a decent Christmas pageant. One’s function in the collective is determined by age, gender, and marital/procreative status.
These are the quotidian signs and wonders of a living, breathing church, and they are powerful and important and real. But to a woman for whom the mere mention of a “ladies’ tea” elicits a nervous sweat, sometimes being plugged in felt a bit like being assimilated. There were rules in this society, particularly for women, and I still hadn’t learned my lesson about avoiding the topic of eternal damnation at baby showers, showers that were now, inexplicably, under my care. I was better suited for leading a Bible study or theological discussion, but those things happened at the men’s breakfasts
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Sunday mornings, on the other hand, weren’t going so well. On Sunday mornings, my doubt came to church like a third member of the family, toddling along behind me with clenched fists and disheveled hair, throwing wild tantrums after every offhanded political joke or casual reference to hell.
I realized that just as I sat in church with my doubt, there were those sitting in church with their sexuality, their race, their gender, their depression, their addiction, their questions, their fears, their past, their infertility, their eating disorder, their diagnosis, their missed rent, their mess of a marriage, their sins, their shame—all the things that follow us to church on Sunday morning but we dare not name.
IN MANY CHURCHES, THE HOLIEST HOUR OF THE WEEK occurs not in the sanctuary on Sunday morning but in the basement on Tuesday night, when a mismatched group of CEOs and single moms, suburbanites and homeless veterans share in the communion of strong coffee and dry pastries and engage in the sacred act of telling one another the truth. They admit their powerlessness and dependency.
Many months would pass before I understood that people bond more deeply over shared brokenness than they do over shared beliefs.”18
I talked about how faith is always a risk and how the story of Jesus is a story I’m willing to risk being wrong about.
They remind us that we all move through the world in the same state—broken and beloved—and that we’re all in need of healing and grace. They embolden us to confess to one another not only our sins, but also our fears, our doubts, our questions, our injuries, and our pain. They give us permission to start telling one another the truth, and to believe that this strange way of living is the only way to set one another free.
The truth is, we think church is for people living in the “after” picture. We think church is for taking spiritual Instagrams and putting on our best performances. We think church is for the healthy, even though Jesus told us time and again he came to minister to the sick. We think church is for good people, not resurrected people.
We Christians don’t get to send our lives through the rinse cycle before showing up to church. We come as we are—no hiding, no acting, no fear.
Kathy discovered that when a church functions more like a recovery group than a religious organization, when it commits to practicing “honesty for the sake of restoration,” all sorts of unexpected people show up.
Imagine if every church became a place where everyone is safe, but no one is comfortable. Imagine if every church became a place where we told one another the truth. We might just create sanctuary.
Our reasons for staying, leaving, and returning to church are as complex and layered as we are.
JESUS WAS NEVER POPULAR AMONG RELIGIOUS LEADERS.
“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17).
Through touch, God gave us the power to injure or to heal, to wage war or to wash feet. Let us not forget the gravity of that. Let us not forget the call.
church isn’t static. It’s not a building, or a denomination, or a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Church is a moment in time when the kingdom of God draws near, when a meal, a story, a song, an apology, and even a failure is made holy by the presence of Jesus among us and within us.
When Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, he was showing them what leadership in the upside-down kingdom of God looks like.
Unfortunately, the difference between the clergy and the laity is often perceived as more vast than it is, which leads to all sorts of trouble, from abusive and authoritarian churches, to the idolization of religious leaders by their followers, to unhealthy and unhappy pastors who struggle to manage the weight of the expectations placed upon them, to Christians who miss the full depth of their own callings because they believe ministry is something other people do.
I could only proclaim the great mystery of faith—that Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again, and that somehow, some way, this is enough. This body and this blood is enough.
As a Jew, keeping kosher was tantamount to Peter’s very faith and identity, but when following Jesus led him to the homes and tables of Gentiles, Peter had a vision in which God told him not to let rules—even biblical ones—keep him from loving his neighbor.
The church is God saying: “I’m throwing a banquet, and all these mismatched, messed-up people are invited. Here, have some wine.”
We have the choice, every day, to join in the revelry, to imbibe the sweet wine of undeserved grace, or to pout like Jonah, argue fairness like the vineyard employees, resent our own family like the prodigal’s older brother.
Before the words left my mouth, I knew I’d just violated rule number one of conversational self-preservation: never tell a religious person you’re searching.
Christians like to claim divine protection when a long line at Starbucks miraculously saves them from the fourteen-car pileup on the interstate, or when a wildfire just misses their home to take out a dozen others, but I’m always left wondering about the victims, those whose supposed lack of faith or luck or significance puts them in the path of the tornado instead.
In a sense, we’re all cobblers. We’re all a bit like Brother Joseph, piecing together our faith, one shard of broken glass at a time.
Scripture doesn’t speak of people who found God. Scripture speaks of people who walked with God. This is a keep-moving, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, who-knows-what’s-next deal, and you never exactly arrive.
A worldwide movement of more than two billion people reaching every continent and spanning thousands of cultures for over two thousand years can’t expect homogeneity. And the notion that a single tradition owns the lockbox on truth is laughable, especially when the truth we’re talking is God.
But you won’t know how to explain that there is nothing nominal or lukewarm or indifferent about standing in this hurricane of questions every day and staring each one down until you’ve mustered all the bravery and fortitude and trust it takes to whisper just one of them out loud on the car ride home: “What if we made this up because we’re afraid of death?”
