Out of Sorts: Making Sense of an Evolving Faith

by Sarah Bessey

We understand our texts or ideas or practices differently, yes, but also with a sweetness because we are there by choice.

sometimes our most holy calling is to listen, to bear witness.

Whether it’s in our relationship with God or with our own families, at some point we find that it is time to sort. It’s time to figure out what we need to keep, what we need to toss, and what we need to reclaim. And we need to tell our stories in order to move forward.

I have had to lean into the pain and grief of my faith

I have complex feelings now about the whole Romans Road method4 of salvation, about making impressionable five-year-olds repeat certain words for assurance of victory over hell, even about our language of having a “personal Lord and Savior.”

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.

We create Jesus in our own image, don’t we? “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.

I wanted to follow Jesus: not a way of thinking or a doctrine, not a sermon or a list of rules, not political affiliations and church denominations or a path to a shiny-happy life or anything like that. I wanted to follow Him and love Him, right to the end, wherever He led.

God isn’t threatened by our questions or our anger, our grief or our perplexed wonderings. I believe that the Spirit welcomes them—in fact, leads among them and in them. We ask because we want to know, because it matters to us, and so I believe it matters to God. And sometimes the answers are far wider and more welcoming than we ever imagined; other times our answer is to wait in the question, and sometimes the answer is another question altogether.

The Bible is subordinate to Jesus,

Much of the Bible is the story of our fallible people seeking to understand and follow God. For instance, regarding the story of Israel’s war with the Canaanites—when Israel not only vanquished the enemies but went on to kill every man, woman, and child—Peter Enns argues that God never told the Israelites to kill the Canaanites. The Israelites believed that God told them to kill the Canaanites.6 This way of reading Scripture made more sense to me. It was more in line with Jesus, more in line with the way He taught us how we had misunderstood and misrepresented God even in our histories.

Wow

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.

God isn’t a different God than He was in the Old Testament; it’s just that Jesus gave us a new perspective, the true perspective, on God. And in stark relief, the Bible shows us this very truth. Jesus came to show us the true God: God in the world and in our lives and in our relationships with one another. 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.

For instance, I never liked the Apostle Paul very much. (Apparently you can type a sentence like that and not be struck by lightning.)

We can respect each other’s struggles with Scripture because they are often born out of our pain.

I am sick to death of prosperity teaching masking the poverty of the soul and of ignoring the cries for justice from the oppressed. I am sick of vending machine prayers, performance, easy answers, and formulas that don’t add up.

If you have needed to walk away, I know you’re grieving. Let yourself grieve. When something ends, it’s worthwhile to notice its passing, to sit in the space and look at the pieces before you head out.

You might need to be angry for a while.

Sometimes I wonder what in the world Jesus was thinking with this church thing. It’s all at sixes and sevens. It’s a disaster. Talk about an inefficient way to change the world.

Anyone who gets to the end of their life with the exact same beliefs and opinions as they had at the beginning is doing it wrong.

we should only share with people who have earned the right to hear our story.

And so we embraced the word, this idea of being each other’s Somewhere. We are the Somewheres for an unapologetic brag or a tearful admission or a “here’s the whole story behind this thing” or a disappointment or frustration in every corner of our lives. We all need somewhere to say that your heart is broken and you can’t get your baby to sleep and you wonder if you’re wasting your life and your marriage isn’t doing so good and you feel alive for

the first time and you are tired and you heard a terrible joke you can’t wait to tell someone and you found a new paint color for your bedroom and your teenager is giving you attitude and you want to sell everything you own to move to Paris but this time you mean it.

I have found too that good Somewheres listen and see, but they also pu...

Here are a few things you need to become Somewheres: An ability to welcome the contradictions in each other. Ferocious trust. Secret-keeping. A shared sense of humor. A fierce belief in the inherent goodness and holiness of each other. An equal amount of butt kicking and hair petting. Bravery. Silliness. A common core. The capacity to laugh through tears. A “you’re not telling the truth” detector. An aversion to the phrase, “I’m fine.” Unconditional welcome. Time, so much time. Openness to being challenged. A lot of small and inconsequential talk to lay the foundation for the big scary talks. Loyalty like blood. Showing up at the right time. Light for the darkness. And then

there is the part you can’t predict or plan or program: magic. There needs to be a bit of that Holy Spirit drawing together, a sense of purpose and destiny, an answered prayer, a shared language, all your own, discovered at last.

If you can’t find God while you’re changing diapers or serving food or hanging out with your friends, you won’t find God at the worship service or the spiritual retreat or the regimented daily quiet time or the mission field.

Kurt Vonnegut once counseled, “What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”7

We can embody the Gospel by going, absolutely, but we can also embody the Gospel by our roots, by our unhurried community development, by our family meals and our wanderings. Some of us embody the Gospel by staying put.

We love and we follow Jesus. We shape our lives into His life, to live here on earth as He would live among us. We weren’t called to follow political parties or ideology, nationalism, consumerism, or power. Instead, we were called to apprentice ourselves to Jesus’ way of life. We were called to be part of establishing the Kingdom of God here and now in our walking-around lives. Partnering with God to see the Kingdom come.

now when I think of that whole wrath-of-God thing, I think of it as a holy thing because it’s born of love, it’s directed at injustice and oppression, at anything that diminishes the imago dei in us.

I think faith is both a gift and a choice, sometimes at the same time. I think it’s a confidence in the midst of doubt, it’s work, and it’s rest. Faith is a risk, and it’s gorgeous to leap out into the free fall.

I will always pray as if this one thing is true: God is for us. And it’s worthwhile to keep knocking. That’s all I know about faith for sure.

We believed that our feelings and circumstances had to obey our carefully curated version of the Word of God: we are more than overcomers; the joy of the Lord is our strength; death has no sting. So don’t grieve when death comes calling: They are now with Jesus. Don’t be sick: Come down with a healing. Don’t be sad: The joy of the Lord is your strength. And I can’t tell you the grief I carry still over the people who were caught in the crossfire consequences of that teaching, believing that their darkness or grief or sadness or despair or sickness was their own fault because they simply lacked faith.

When their stories didn’t line up with our narrative, they felt shame and eventually disappeared.

Sovereignty is redemption, it’s not causation.

I couldn’t trust God if I suspected God was behind our deepest griefs and injustices. This is where the sovereignty arguments break down for me. I don’t blame God for much anymore. I see God as the rescue from the injustices, not the cause of them. I see God as the redeemer of the pain, not the origin of it. I see the promise of

sovereignty not as hypercontrol over the minute and painful details of the world, but as a faithful promise that all things will be restored, all things will be redeemed, all things will be rescued.

After all, God’s heart for justice doesn’t start and end with me or you: it includes the entire world, and we’re missing it mightily if we reduce the Gospel to a personal salvation experience.

Whether it’s racism, patriarchy, warmongering, greed, or child trafficking, it’s counter to God’s Kingdom. But the people caught in those systems are rarely the enemies; often they are just as caught, as longing for a rescue as the rest of us. We don’t battle against flesh and blood, not really, but against the powers and principalities that hold us all captive.

Hope is subversive precisely because it dares to admit that all is not as it should be.

In fact, I began to realize that a lot of what I was trying to accomplish for God was actually just me trying to gain recognition and satiate that weird desire to be God’s hero.

All things can be spiritual, and our most “spiritual” acts can become secular if they aren’t infused with the Holy Spirit. We can reduce Christ to a compartment in our lives instead of Lord over it all—our day-to-day decisions, our politics, our theology, our community. Stepping back from earning our salvation through ministry or productivity or platforms or titles meant that we learned how to invite God into our whole lives.

If we assume we hold the market on God’s truth and redemption, we miss all the different ways that God is at work in the world right now. If we narrow the holy vocations to a select few, we turn a blind eye to the places where God is already active in the world. The redemptive movement of God includes all creation. God doesn’t need our stamp of approval to be at work. In fact, I have often found evidence of God’s presence in the strangest of places, far from our neat and tidy categories. It has reminded me of His vastness, His boundary-shattering love, His wild and terrible habit of including the ones whom I forget. We forget that the line between secular and sacred is man-made. The presence of God can enflame it all.

I hope the Church continues to move toward missional embodiment, the theology of place, incarnational ministry, and embracing the value of how our everyday lives can embody the Gospel in very essential ways.