Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Envolving Faith

by Sarah Bessey

It’s about church and church people and why both make me crazy but why I can’t seem to quit either.

I’ve heard that most of our theology is formed by autobiography. This is true in my case and maybe it’s true for you too.

toward that place on the other side of rationality, when we reengage with our faith with new eyes. We take responsibility for what we believe and do. We understand our texts or ideas or practices differently, yes, but also with a sweetness because we are there by choice. As Richard Rohr writes, “the same passion which leads us away from God can also lead us back to God and to our true selves.”4

We are dying, perhaps, but even death is part of our story: it comes right before resurrection.

At the threshold of any change, we are confronted with fear. This is a pretty natural response to the birth of new life. In childbirth, Dr. William Sears calls it the “fear-tension-pain cycle.”

To interrupt the cycle, midwives and doctors recommend that women surrender to what is happening in their bodies. Counter to our intuition, the solution is to lean into the pain.

As for a caterpillar in the cocoon, it becomes more painful to stay within our tight home than to simply break free and unfold our new wings. We fight the very thing that is meant to free us. It is only by releasing ourselves, giving ourselves fully over to the pain, and riding its cleansing wave that we find new life.

Maybe I’m tired of finding other ways to say it, to make it more palatable and reasonable and logical. What is this life in Christ like if not a bit of disorderly resurrection?

I love the expression “disorderly resurrection” :)

But I still remember how it felt when I was a kid—how I felt so close to Jesus, so safe in the knowledge of His presence.

I’ll write more about Church later in the book, but for now, I’ll just say this: I lost Jesus in there. It seemed one could be a Christian without being a disciple of Jesus.

“It is always true to some extent that we make our images of God,” wrote Brennan Manning. “It is even truer that our image of God makes us. Eventually we become like the God we create.”6

I could no longer reason away or gloss over the systemic abuses of power, the bitterness, the bigotry and hypocrisy, the sexism and racism, the consumerism, the big business of church that was consuming people and spitting them out for the “greater good.” Church became the last place I wanted to be. I didn’t trust Christians. And I was tired of pretending that those things were not real. But through it all, I somehow knew one thing: this wasn’t Jesus.

Even as I grew more disenchanted with organized religion, I was still hanging on to the hem of his garment, begging for healing.

I began to call myself a follower of Jesus, instead of a Christian.

Then came the day when it dawned on me that if I was going to call myself a follower of Jesus, I should find out what that meant. It sounds so silly to write it out, but that is actually what happened.

To know Jesus is to know God. And I found myself saying, without knowing what it meant, that I wanted to be like Jesus. And to be honest, I was growing tired of defining myself by what I wasn’t.

It occurred to me on that day that if I got to know Him—really, truly know Him—I could perhaps begin to spot counterfeit Jesuses. There are Jesuses out there who are co-opted for every cause and argument, and these false Jesuses bastardize the message and misrepresent a man none of us really understands—and we all do the co-opting, for everything from power to money to the smug feeling of being right while everyone else is wrong. We all do it, progressives and conservatives alike. Jesus isn’t our mascot and He isn’t the magic word.

We aren’t so different from the people of Jesus’ own time here on earth: He is not the king we expect.

He is now supervising the entire course of world history10 while simultaneously preparing the rest of the universe for our future role in it.

I was being called to become like Him. “We don’t reduce Christ to what we are; he raises us to what He is,” wrote Paul.13

I thought I grew out of the flags and the happy-clappy Jesus-is-my-boyfriend songs, that I was too wise and smart for such sentimental things, but in my maturity now I want to shout out hallelujah and fling myself to the ground prostrate, in gratitude for dirt and little boys, for babies and the lines around my eyes, for Johnny Cash and pine trees at dusk, for the taste of cold water and the vineyard, for the piano and the ones from among us who stand to lead us out into the day singing.

There is something so satisfying about watching an ugly lie burn away to ash.

What is the point of the whole “accepting Jesus into my heart” thing? If you don’t say the words right, are you going to hell? By the way, what is hell? Is it real? And while we’re at it, what’s heaven?

Why won’t God heal my friend? My child? Me?

What makes a church a church instead of just a bunch of people hanging out? What’s the deal with communion? Baptism?

How do I figure out what God wants me to do with my life? Don’t even get me started on the Book of Revelation.

think about God and then living that truth out in our right-now lives. So theology matters, not as a vast scholarly exercise or a fun way to tie knots in each other, but because those ideas trace their way back to what we truly believe about the nature and character of God, which informs everything in our lives.

Perhaps this is the danger of dualistic thinking—this is right, so this is wrong. We need to hold the “yes, and” more than the “either/or.” Yes, we need scholars and academics, leaders and ministers. And we need people like me—low-church, untrained laity who are a bit sloppy at times—to grapple with the deep theological issues, bringing our stories, our wisdom, our experiences, our knowledge to the larger conversation.

We have much to learn from the ordinary people, from people on the margins, from people who experience God and life so differently from ourselves. I’m still a recovering know-it-all.

I think that motivation is pure-hearted and earnest, but now I also see that it can be utterly motivated by the fear of “What if?”

Let’s be honest: this sorting can be terrifying. We might lose something valuable to us: our certainty, our church, our community, our comfort, our current view of our self.

Now that I have a house full of small humanity, I think I’m beginning to understand why Jesus would encourage us to have faith like a child. They don’t know. And so they ask. We don’t know. And so we ask. The asking isn’t wrong. The wondering isn’t wrong. The doubt isn’t wrong. It’s humbling to admit you don’t know; it takes guts to ask and wrestle. The childlike quality isn’t unthinking acquiescence: it’s curiosity. But here is the key of a child, the true wonder of childlike faith: They truly want to know. They’re not asking to be cool or to push back on the establishment or to prove anyone wrong or to grind an ax or make a point without making a change. Tinies ask because they want an answer.

After all, in the Gospels, Jesus answered a lot of questions with more questions, pushing us to think in a new direction. It’s interesting how often Jesus disrupted the comfortable—the ones who thought their answers were settled and done, the ones who were convinced that their righteousness was equal to their rightness.

The Spirit is part of the dance in me and for me. I find it exciting now, challenging. I know it makes some people uncomfortable. We want the Right Answer, once and for all. I think those things happen sometimes, absolutely, but my catalog of Right Answers grows smaller every year.

And as I said, we often experience this transition at the threshold of change, when there is a catalytic event or happening, so of course it comes with grief or anger. But as development continues, we move from this stage to one of acknowledging paradox and transcendence. And finally, a few of us may land in the sixth stage: universalizing, when we come at last to compassion and love and grace, to the enlightenment of treating all with ferocious love and tender justice.

But I had to learn that taking the Bible seriously doesn’t mean taking everything literally. I had to learn to read the whole Bible through the lens of Jesus, and I had to learn to stop making it into something it wasn’t—a glorified answer book or rule book or magic spell. I had to stop trying to reduce the Bible to something I could tame or wield as a tool. I had to let the Bible be everything it was meant to be, to cast away the idols of certainty, materialism, and control.

If I had kept reading that chapter of the Bible in context instead of cherry-picking, I would have seen it sooner perhaps: the Word is actually Jesus. John was writing about Jesus, not about a Bible that didn’t even exist yet.

I think I used to elevate the Bible to being a fourth member of the Trinity. I yearned for systematic theology with charts and graphs and easy-to-decode secrets. I wanted answers and clarity—the cry of the modern reader. But the more I read of the Bible, the more confused I became. So much of the Bible didn’t line up with what I had been taught about the Bible. Old Testament scholar Peter Enns summed me right up when he said that the problem isn’t the Bible, “the problem is coming to the Bible with expectations it’s not set up to bear.”2 My expectation was divinity, simplicity, infallibility, literalism, easy answers.

And when we examine the deeper issues of our beliefs or questions—particularly when the roots of those beliefs are not merely information but gut-level experience rooted in sadness and grief—well, it is sacred ground or scary ground, a minefield. That’s okay. One thing I’ve learned is that the Holy Spirit can be trusted. When the time is right, the time is right.

Not a book that has to be defended 24/7 to make sure our faith doesn’t dissolve. In other words, not an artificially well-behaved Bible that gives false comfort, but the Holy Bible, the Word of God, with wrinkles, complexities, unexpected maneuvers, and downright strangeness.

We are free to walk away from this invitation, of course, but we are not free to make the Bible in our own image. What the Bible looks like is God’s call, not ours.”3

How unfortunate to use the Bible as a conversation stopper, not a starting point.

The purpose of the Bible is to equip us to be sent out into the world, to proclaim the Kingdom of God, to lift up our eyes and see each other and see God at work—and then, to participate fully in that life. Now.

In our early years of parenting, Brian and I began to read a children’s Bible storybook aloud. I was trying to be a good mother, and wasn’t reading Bible stories part of being a good mother? That was when I began skipping big sections of Scripture. I wasn’t able to turn off my pathos. Noah and the Ark? All I could see in my mind were animals and people drowning in terror. Jericho? Forget your fun Sunday school songs, this was genocide. The story of Hannah, giving up her son Samuel to temple, broke my new-mother heart. I faltered before a God who would ask such a thing of a mother. I read the story of David and Bathsheba as an adult, and suddenly I saw Bathsheba as a victim, possibly of rape but at the very least, a victim of patriarchy, an unequal power structure that left her without choice. Story after story in the Bible disturbed me, and so I would skip and skip and skip as I tried to read the Bible to help my children form an idea of God. Because what sort of God would tell His people to dash the brains of babies against the rocks? What sort of God would ask Abraham to sacrifice his son as a “test” of obedience?

For Christians, the Gospel has always been the lens through which Israel’s stories are read—which means, for Christians, Jesus, not the Bible, has the final word.

If we want to know what God is like, we can look to Jesus. And if we want to read the Bible well, we need to start with Jesus and remain in Jesus, and we need to let Jesus explain it. The Bible doesn’t trump Jesus; Jesus interprets the Bible.

Once I stepped outside my selective reading of pet Scripture verses, I discovered that the Bible was so much more—poetry, history, narrative, law, wisdom, prophecy, encouragement, personal letters, a love story of the ways that we have perceived God and the ways God has broken through those perceptions to substantive life.

As my friend Rachel says, “If you aren’t questioning the Bible, I have to wonder if you’re even reading it.” For instance, I never liked the Apostle Paul very much. (Apparently you can type a sentence like that and not be struck by lightning.) Like many Christians, I am still drawn toward certain personalities within the Bible. My heart has always aligned itself with the Apostle John: so many aspects of his character and story and passions oddly sing to me.

As I was writing my first book, Jesus Feminist, a strange transformation took place in me: I began to love Paul. Really, truly love him as a brother, precisely because I was writing about life on the other side of the gender debates, advocating for the full equality of women.

But as I worked my way through the passages of Scripture that I used to hate, I began to see Paul more clearly, to understand Scripture even better. I began to see his wisdom, his subversion, his heart. When I looked at his full ministry—how he praised and esteemed women in leadership in the Church, how he turned household codes within a patriarchal society on their heads, how he used feminine metaphors, how he subverted the systems, how he passionately defended equality—the verses that used to clobber me began to embrace me. The truth broke through. I wasn’t fighting against Paul—I was fighting with him. I read Paul’s words in Scripture and I began to realize I had not known him, his world, his context, his brilliance. I had been silenced or shut down by people putting words in his mouth or intent in his words that he never intended. I had missed so much of the beauty of Paul. By reading Paul without any thought for context or place, narrative or history, I had nearly missed a great gift.