Be Bold, Be Brave, Be Like Nadia

"Since we have such a hope, we are very bold."  2 Corinthians 3:12 Recently, my little parish, St. Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church, took on a bold move.  We booked Nadia Bolz-Weber to speak at our little church in July 2016.  For those in the Christian community who might not know of her (maybe they just returned from Timbuktu, or came out from under a rock), Nadia Bolz-Weber is an ordained ELCA pastor of a church in Denver, House for all Sinners and Saints.  She is the author of the best-selling book, Pastrix, and the upcoming and much-awaited book, Accidental Saints.  (Find more information click this link:  Nadia Bolz-Weber's Website  Booking someone like Nadia is bold on a few levels, bold in scope because we hope for regional attention and attendance, bold in action, because promoting and organizing the event will take considerable (but enjoyable) effort from our parishioners, and bold in budget, because we are placing a big financial bet on the greater community to step up and purchase tickets.  As I brought this idea to our vestry, I had to consider this question, “Why?  Why should we put our effort, our enthusiasm, and our money into booking a big-name speaker when we already hear the gospel in inspiring sermons several times a week from our rector?  Why is this important while we struggle to serve to our community, run a resale ministry and various other outreach activities, and maintain our shoestring budget? Why do we need Nadia?  What can she bring to us?”

The answer for me, personally, was boldness and bravery.  I love Jesus Christ and I love my church, but I hold that love close to my heart.  Outside of my blog and intentional conversations with some of my friends, a person might now know how important my Christian faith is to me.  I don’t wear a cross, I don’t have a Jesus fish on my car, sometimes I even downplay my activities at church.  When going to Ascension service, or vestry meetings, or fundraisers, sometimes I just tell my friends, “I’ve got a thing tonight.”  I am afraid to be one of those “bible-beaters”, the people from my youth who were so high on the spirit that they tried to convert everyone they knew.  I am afraid to be cast as one of “those Christians”, the judgmental kind, who think everyone who isn’t saved in their special way of saving is going to burn in hell for eternity.  So, I keep a little bit quiet about my faith, and I am ashamed of that.

Too often, the loudest Christian voices are the most conservative, leaving those of us with moderate and liberal views left to wonder how we fit in.  It’s hard to get publicity when the great claim of your church is “We take the Middle Way. We love everyone!”  Reactions range from indifference to suspicion.  It is hard to be heard above the cacophony of judgment and hate.  Nadia makes herself heard.  She is an outspoken voice for inclusion and love of ALL people in traditional church--ALL PEOPLE--people in the LGBTQ community, people suffering from addiction, people suffering from mental illness, and people who happen to be suburban soccer moms driving mini-vans (yes, we need a church, too, my friends).   Nadia is loud and proud and she literally wears her faith on her sleeve, in a tattoo of Mary Magdalene.  Nadia makes me proud to be one of "those Christians"--a Jesus-loving, God-embracing, advocate for love in this world!

Not only is she an outspoken advocate for the disenfranchised and a powerful voice of love in the church, she is a damn good theologian.  She preaches the gospel of grace--unearned, universal, catholic grace--as found in the love of Jesus Christ.  She doesn’t water down her Jesus.  She doesn’t apologize for her faith in Jesus, or rationalize the sacred mystery; she proclaims the Gospel (with a capital G) from the rooftops, reaching the people who the church might just forget.  She speaks the seducing power of the love of Christ, the way C.S. Lewis did, the way Robert Farrar Capon did, the way that romanced me back into the church.  I couldn’t quite believe that I would actually find a God of love and grace, wrapped up in traditional liturgy.  Was it possible that the church I left because I thought it was wrought with judgment and self-denial was actually a party of forgiveness, love, and inspiring, uplifting, transforming grace?  Lewis, Capon, and now Nadia Bolz-Weber promised me that it was just that party.  On their promises, I returned to church and found the glory in traditional liturgy, humbleness in service, and the blinding love of God reflected in the eyes of my fellow Christians.

My friends, we need Nadia because she’s not afraid to proclaim her faith..  She doesn’t hide her light under a bushel.  She proclaims that we are all loved children of God, we are all sinners, we are all saints; she says it boldly and bravely.  This year, I challenge myself to be brave in faith, be bold in actions and words, and be a little bit more like Nadia Bolz-Weber.

For information about our event in Antioch, IL, click this link: Saint Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church
and like this Facebook page: Nadia Bolz Weber at St. Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church
and stay tuned to this blog for updates.

Love thy enemies? A reaction to the Charleston shootings

This is perhaps the most difficult blog post I've ever written. I feel powerless and so, so sad about the state of race relations in my country. I wonder if I even have the right to comment on it, yet I am compelled to speak.

White privilege.  Racism.  #blacklivesmatter.  These words are all over my Facebook and Twitter feed; I cannot ignore the issue anymore.  Wednesday of last week, I went to my church to check in at the resale shop, to visit with friends, and to hang up a sign advertising our Vacation Bible School.  Wednesday of last week, a group of people went to a Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC for worship.  Nine of them didn’t leave alive.  They were gunned down by a man who told them, “You are taking over our country.  I have to do what I had to do.”  He hated the church and the people in it because they were black.

The news is full of the same rhetoric as before.  "It’s one crazy person with a gun.  It’s about mental illness.  What can we do?  If they would have had guns in the church, this wouldn’t have happened."  Really?  Then, we have the same other rhetoric, the shrill, desperate voices asking the holders of power and privilege in this country, the middle-class and upper-class white people, to be honest, to talk about racism, to talk about violence, and to listen.   I am listening, friends.  What can you tell me?

How can I help?  I am stricken by these events.  I am listening and begging for answers, because I don’t understand how to help the problem.  I grew up in a predominantly white area, I live in a predominantly white neighborhood, worship in a predominantly white church, and work in a school with a predominantly white staff.  Of course, I believe I'm not a racist, but I benefit from my pale skin and blue eyes, from my middle-class upbringing, from a society built upon the backs of slaves and oppressed minorities.  I bear the guilt by virtue of my lucky birth.  When I interact with the police and other law enforcement, I meet respect and helpfulness, not suspicion and fear.  My children will not be called “thug” or “ho” based on the color of their skin.  My male children will not have to learn how to submit to the police in order to stay alive.  As a white person in a white-dominated culture, I cannot truly understand the struggle of minorities.  I cannot get out of my own skin to experience it.  How does a privileged white person address the racism that is pervasive and corrosive in our culture?  How am I complicit?  How can I help?

I feel powerless and sad, and I'm not even a direct victim of this particular atrocity or the terror of racism. What right do I even have to feel powerless and sad? Perhaps the fact that so many people are finally outraged about this issue means we will finally give it some honest attention. I will think about it, talk about it, and write about.  I will educate myself further on racism in this country.  I will pray.  That’s the hard part; what am I supposed to pray for?  I want to pray for vengeance for the victims, for justice for the murderer.  I want to pray for God to step in and lead us into a just, merciful society where people are not so fueled by fear and hatred and wrapped up in violent delusions that they pick up a gun and take innocent lives.  I want to pray like a pagan, to bargain with God that if I make the right sacrifices and say the right invocations, God will solve the problems of society.  I want God to fix it.  But, I don’t worship that God.  

I worship Jesus Christ, the God who died in fear and despair, an innocent victim to people fueled by fear and hatred. I worship the God who walked through his human fear into a supreme sacrifice that saved the entire world.  I worship the God who was lying down with the victims, holding the wounded and grieving in his arms while they wept. I worship the God who tells me to love my enemies--my enemies, for Christ’s sake!  Ah, there’s the rub--in my swearing lies the answer.  I am to love my enemies for Christ’s sake.  I am to love the people falling victim to violent delusions, the people falling victim to racist dogma and hate speech, the people so fearful of losing control of their lives that they kill the scapegoats they blame for their inadequacies.  I am to love the people in thrall to neo-Naziism, people who fear and hate my friends in the LGBT community, people who believe that black citizens are taking over this country. I have no idea how I am supposed to do that.  Love the bigot--hate the bigotry?  Love the person, hate the hateful idea?  Love people while you vehemently disagree with what they stand for, when it threatens your idea of society, when you desperately want them to change their ideals? Love them, while you strive to silence their hateful beliefs? Love myself, as I benefit from the circumstances of my birth while others struggle because of theirs?  How does that work?

It is a fearful time and a very fearful thing to try to love in the midst of all this fear and hatred.  Jesus Christ tells us that love is the only weapon we have in the face of fear and hatred.  Good God, I do not have the strength for it!   Good God, though, the strength will not come from me.  The strength to love will come from the Holy Spirit, from the grace of Jesus Christ, just as the families of the victims forgave the shooter.  I have faith, not in my own strength and goodness, but in the strength and goodness of the Lord, in the strength of repentance and forgiveness for my own sins, that God will break my heart open and find the love--to love my neighbors of all colors and types, my enemy, and myself.

Choosing to Love

Fourteen years is kind of a long time. It's enough time for an adorable child to grow into an awkward teenager. It's more than enough time for most people to achieve their undergraduate, master's, and PhD work. It's enough time to drive a car into the ground. And, It's enough time to learn something about marriage. This week is the fourteenth anniversary of my marriage to a wonderful, complicated, opinionated man. In some ways, it's quite surprising that we like each other at all.  For a couple, we have very few things in common, at least on the surface level.  My husband is a lifetime athlete, a Division 1 baseball player in college, a PE teacher, a coach of multiple sports, and an athletic director.  He never met a competition he didn’t want to win, or a game he didn’t want to watch.  I however, cannot throw, catch, hit, or dribble a ball in any manner.  I never met a game that didn’t put me to sleep.  I love reading books, writing, theology, church, and riding horses.  He only reads Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest, and he has ridden a horse about three times in his life.  If you drew a Venn diagram of our interests, the shared part would be very, very small.   It would contain a strong mutual attraction and a love for Seinfeld and Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn movies.  Kind of a surprising foundation for fourteen years of happy marriage.

There are a few binding principles that help us stick together.  We both have a strong work ethic for our careers and support the other person.  We share similar morals and ethics, even if we disagree on politics and various religious points.  We both treasure our families.  We both stand up to our partner when one of us is acting like a jerk, and we both appreciate that fact about each other. I may be less-than-thrilled at the time, but I truly value when my husband calls me on my bad behavior.  Maybe it is presumptuous to write about marriage and love after only fourteen years, here are my two cents, for what it's worth.

When our relationship is working well, it is because love is what we DO.  It is not some force that acts upon us without our control, like how people say, “I can’t help falling in love…”  or “I love you, but I’m not in love with you, and I don’t know how that happened.”  Love is not something we possess, that we can lose or misplace, the way I lose my sunglasses or my car keys.  I do not want to look at my partner some day and say, “Where did our love go?”  Our relationship works the best when love is an ACTION, when it is the way we speak to each other, the way we give each other space or support each other in need, the way we touch each other, the way we joke each other out of a rotten mood, and the way we notice and listen to each other.  

A few years into our marriage, I realized that love and commitment is a constant choice, an action that repeats itself moment by moment.  Nearly every day, we make decisions to love or not to love.  Nearly every day, we decide to continue the loving relationship, or to move away from the object of our affection.  Some days, the choice is incredibly easy, when my husband looks so handsome in scruffy working-in-the-yard clothes, learns all the Disney princess’s names for our daughters, and brings me a hot fudge sundae with the hot fudge separate so the ice cream doesn’t melt on the way home.  Those days, the choice is obvious.  Some days, when he’s late to get home, is cranky about money, is obsessed with problems at his work, or forgets to pick up the toilet paper, the choice is not quite so easy.  Each day in a relationship, we have a choice to come closer together or further apart through our actions.  We ACT the LOVE that we FEEL; sometimes, we ACT the LOVE that we don’t feel at the moment, because we know we will feel it again soon.  Love is something we DO, not something that we have or do not have.

These are bold words, I know, and of course I fall short of them regularly.  My life (my relationship with my husband and children, and my own spiritual and emotional well-being) works better when I treat love as a verb, as the thing I do, rather than something I possess.  I’m not so great at keeping track of possessions; I lose things all the time and I don’t look for them very carefully.  If love is something that I have, then I can also lose it.  If love is something that happens to me, that I do not act upon, then it can also leave me.  I can fall “out of love”.  I can allow myself to be distracted, hold grudges, and make excuses for not acting lovingly.  When I think of love as an object, that either acts upon me or one upon which I act, I can lose track of it.  

When I think of love as something I do, an action, a choice, I AM the love.  That doesn’t mean that I am constantly smiling, happy, and romantic.  Many days I’m cranky, tired, and impatient.  In those moments, through my anger, I can still choose to love.  For the last fourteen years and for many, many more, I choose to love.

***It's important for me to clarify that I absolutely do NOT wish to imply that my marriage is perfect, or to judge a person who has separated from a partner. This is merely my perspective, from within this one particular relationship.**