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

by Rachel Held Evans

Repent. Break bread. Seek justice. Love neighbor. Christianity seemed at once the simplest and most impossible thing in the world. It seemed to me confirmed, sealed as the story of my life—that thing I’ll never shake, that thing I’ll always be.

Nicodemus struggled to see the Spirit outside the religious institution. Today, some of us struggle to see the Spirit within the religious institution, often for good reason. But God is present both inside and outside the traditional church, working all sorts of everyday miracles to inspire and change us if only we pay attention.

As Brené Brown puts it, “I went to church thinking it would be like an epidural, that it would take the pain away . . . But church isn’t like an epidural; it’s like a midwife . . . I thought faith would say, ‘I’ll take away the pain and discomfort, but what it ended up saying was, ‘I’ll sit with you in it.’ ”73

I felt simultaneously furious at Christianity’s enormous capacity to wound and awed by its miraculous capacity to heal.

I am missing out on a God who surprises us by showing up where we don’t think God belongs.

Cynicism may help us create simpler storylines with good guys and bad guys, but it doesn’t make us any better at telling the truth, which is that most of us are a frightening mix of good and evil, sinner and saint.

As long as Christians are breaking the bread and pouring the wine, as long as we are healing the sick and baptizing sinners, as long as we are preaching the Word and paying attention, the church lives, and Jesus said even the gates of hell cannot prevail against it.

Rather, he is explaining that when Christians imitate Jesus in their relationships, when partners in marriage serve one another rather than fight for dominance, we catch a little glimpse of the mystery of Christ’s relentless, self-giving love for the church, and the consummation of that love that is to come.

Rather, marriage is a relationship that is made holy, or sacramental, when it reflects the life-giving, self-sacrificing love of Jesus.

All relationships and vocations—marriage, friendship, singleness, parenthood, partnership, ministry, monastic vows, adoption, neighborhoods, families, churches—give Christians the opportunity to reflect the grace and peace of the kingdom of God, however clumsily, however imperfectly.

We must be careful, then, of idolizing the institution of marriage on the one hand and discounting its kingdom-reflecting potential on the other. What makes a marriage holy isn’t the degree to which the two partners reflect gender stereotypes, or stick to a list of rules and roles, or even reflect cultural norms and expectations, but the degree to which the love of Christ is present in one of the most challenging and rewarding commitments two people will ever make to one another.

When the people of God abandoned the covenant of love and fidelity, drawn as we are by the appeal of shallow, empty pleasures, God removed every possible obstruction to the covenant by being faithful for us, by becoming like us and subjecting himself to the very worst within us, loving us all the way to the cross and all the way out of the grave.

I may be wrong, but I think the point is this: what each of us longs for the most is to be both fully known and fully loved.87 Miraculously, God feels the same way about us. God, too, wants to be fully known and fully loved.

And so, in those relationships and in those moments when we experience the joy, ecstasy, and relief of being both totally vulnerable and absolutely cherished, we get just a taste, a mere glimpse, of what God has always felt for us, and what one day we will feel for God.

The kingdom isn’t some far-off place you go when you die; the kingdom is at hand—among us and beyond us, now and not-yet.

So church is, essentially, a gathering of kingdom citizens, called out—from their individuality, from their sins, from their old ways of doing things, from the world’s way of doing things—into participation in this new kingdom and community with one another.

I’m not exactly sure how all this works, but I think, ultimately, it means I can’t be a Christian on my own. Like it or not, following Jesus is a group activity, something we’re supposed to do together.

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.

I find myself wondering if perhaps every generation of Christians has felt itself at the edge of this precipice, waiting for resurrection and worrying it might not come.

We expect a trumpet and a triumphant entry, but as always, God surprises us by showing up in ordinary things: in bread, in wine, in water, in words, in sickness, in healing, in death, in a manger of hay, in a mother’s womb, in an empty tomb.