Pastrix

by Nadia Bolz-Weber

  PCR is an online radio station that is free from the scurvy plagues of pop-psychology, goofy fads, self-help, pietism, purpose-drivenism, the prosperity heresy, contemplative mysticism, seeker-sensitivism, liberalism, relevantism, Emergent nonsense, and the sissy girly Oprah-fied religiosity that is being passed off as “Biblical Christianity.”

  This station defends the historic Christian faith.

  His “I represent the pure doctrine of the one true faith and here is why everyone but us is wrong, wrong, wrong” shtick plays to a devoted and adoring audience who may or may not be also stockpiling weapons, canned food, and Bibles in their backyard bomb shelters.

  Chris is also a member of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, a rather sectarian and fundamentalist part of the Lutheran family tree. We stopped engaging with each other ages ago, as if we couldn’t even civilly share a Thanksgiving dinner. We’d embarrass them by inviting too many sinners over, with our trampy “all are welcome” behavior. And they’d call the doctrine police, trying to get the unsavory folks away from their table. So nowadays, a joint restraining order of sorts keeps us civil, but the LCMS really has more in common with the fundamentalist church I was raised in than it does with my own Lutheran denomination.

  So after calling me his good friend on Facebook, Chris received some serious lashings from his fans, who in turn called me a dangerous apostate. How could he call a friend someone who they believed had rejected the teachings of the true Christian faith?

  Seeing the shit storm on my friend Chris’s Facebook page, I shot him a text saying, Honey it’s looking pretty rough out there. If you need to renounce our friendship in public I would totally understand and still be your friend in private.

  He replied, Never. If being your friend is a sin, it’s still worth it.

  But we weren’t always friends.…

  My liberalness and femaleness and gay-lovingness made me easy plunder for the Pirate. On several occasions he had spent time on his radio show talking about “Pastrix” Nadia Bolz-Weber and all her false teachings. At first I actually liked it. I had gained a bit of national attention as a pastor by this point, and I found being noticed by people who hated my guts especially thrilling. I must really have been important, after all, if someone I’d never met would spend twenty minutes talking about me on his Internet radio show. Granted, those twenty minutes were filled with vitriol, but still… Ego and anger often compete for stage time in my head, and inevitably anger cannot be kept behind the curtain for long. No one puts Baby in the corner. So after initially being perversely pleased about being noticed, I was soon enraged for being “persecuted.”

  When Chris and I finally met, it was at a conference where I was speaking and where Chris had showed up hunting for heresy.

  “Good news, Nadia. Pirate Christian is here,” my friend Jay Bakker said to me, looking like a Cheshire cat with a lip ring. Jay is the punk rock son of TV evangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. He survived his childhood of Pentecostalism and public disgrace like any reasonable person would: by drinking. But now Jay is sober and pastoring his own very liberal congregation in Brooklyn called Revolution Church. Generally speaking, Jay and I are hated by the same people.

  The 23rd Psalm may say, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies,” but all it took was Jay announcing the presence of my enemy for anger, the heartburn of emotions, to climb up my insides, eroding the lining of my humanity. I informed Jay that I will not be talking to Pirate Christian and to not even point out to me who he is and that I hope he just goes away. Pirate Christian is my enemy. Oh, and by the way, fuck him.

  The next day, after I’d given a talk about the Gospel and forgiveness and what it’s like at a church where I can be unapologetically myself and expect others to do the same, several people were lined up waiting to speak to me. Standing in a large Minnesotan church hall I tried to muster up the interest and stamina it takes to greet each person with the honor he or she deserves. This always feels like a battle between my misanthropic personality (I don’t actually care about you) and my values (you are a beloved child of God who deserves to be heard) and it’s exhausting. Like when I have to pretend not to be annoyed by praise music, but then I pretty much need a nap.

  I greeted a middle-aged lady who always wanted to go to seminary, and for some reason she seemed to want my blessing. And then I talked with a giddy young woman who was mostly interested in all my tattoos and then a young, hair-gelled gay man who, teary eyed, said, “I wish my mom could have heard that.”

  That is pretty much how it goes when people talk to me after speaking events, which is why my bishop once joked about the clergy collars we wear. “You know why we wear those little white squares right here?” he asked, pointing to his throat. “We wear them so that people can project their home movies onto them.”

  Last in line was a guy in his mid-forties with a beer gut and a bad goatee.

  “Nadia, I’m Chris. The Pirate Christian,” he said. Perhaps I was expecting an eye patch or a peg leg, I’m not sure. But I was caught off guard.

  God, please help me not be an asshole, is about as common a prayer as I pray in my life. And in situations like being faced with my enemy in public, what else do I have at my disposal but prayer?

  Chris extended his hand to me, and after fighting the urge to just tell him to fuck off, I took it.

  “It’s weird, Nadia,” he said. “We obviously disagree about a lot, but something tells me that out of all these liberal Christians, you and I have a couple things we might agree on.”

  “Great,” I said, after a moment of stunned silence. “Let’s… uh… let’s talk about that.”

  And with an openness that felt like spiritual waterboarding (Jesus holding my head under the waters of my own baptism until I cry uncle), I had a long conversation with my enemy.

  Since the Pirate and I were in the middle of a fellowship hall at the conference, the crowd around us who knew about our feud perhaps expected a showdown. But instead, they saw us share a thirty-minute public dialogue about our own brokenness and need for confession and absolution, why we need the Gospel, and what happens in the Eucharist. And as he talked he cried. Twice.

  I found him to be hurting and tender and really smart.

  I looked him in the eye and said, “Chris, I have two things to say to you. One, you are a beautiful child of God. Two, I think that maybe you and I are desperate enough to hear the Gospel that we can even hear it from each other.”

  God made my enemy my friend that day. And I have not been plunder for the Pirate ever since. Chris has not spoken about me or written about me. But he does call. Sometimes we talk for an hour about theology and our families and at times we argue, but we do it with the respect of friends. We are two unlikely people who have shown each other where there is water in the desert.

  When these kinds of things happen in my life, things that are so clearly filled with more beauty or redemption or reconciliation than my cranky personality and stony heart could ever manufacture on their own, I just have no other explanation than this: God.

  I thought of my pirate friend a year or so later when I was struggling with writing a sermon about loving our enemies. Some weeks are easier than others for preachers. I assume the same must be true of teachers and garbage collectors and exotic dancers. But all I know is that the week I had to preach on this text from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” I couldn’t keep focused. I was distracted by a thought: Where exactly is the verse that says you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemies? Because I hadn’t remembered reading that in the Old Testament, which is where Jesus usually gets his best material.

  I called my friend Paul, an Episcopal priest from the same church in San Francisco where my friend Sara works. Paul is basically my wise, funny, gay, big brother, and I asked him where that whole hate your enemies th
ing is that Jesus was referring to.

  “Honey, why?” he asked. “Are you looking for an exemption clause?”

  Obviously.

  “It’s like trying to look for ‘God helps those who help themselves,’ ” he said. “It’s simply not in the Bible.”

  Paul was right. It’s not in the Bible. But when I hung up, I realized why “love your neighbor and hate your enemy” sounds so familiar… I’m pretty sure it’s in my heart. It’s like, in my DNA.

  It felt like a horror movie. “The phone call is coming from inside the house.” In my heart I want to savor my resentments. Because my anger and hatred is special. It’s justified. And knowing, with as fine a point as possible, why each of my enemies (fundamentalists, Becky the bully, people who drive too damn slowly) clearly deserves to be hated can feel like a big delicious meal, until I realize I’m the main course. And because hatred is simply a corrosive form of spiritual bondage, Jesus says, “Love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you.” It’s one of the most annoying things Jesus suggested.

  I struggled with what Jesus meant when he said to “love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us,” because I don’t think he meant that we should muster up warm feelings toward people who hurt us. I don’t even think it’s about really meaning it.

  I think loving our enemies might be too central to the Gospel—too close to the heart of Jesus—for it to wait until we mean it. I don’t mean it. I didn’t mean it when I shook Pirate Christian’s hand. And my heart, that very place where I found the impulse that I am to love my neighbor and hate my enemy, isn’t going to purify itself any time soon. So if God is waiting for that same heart to feel nice, loving, warm, pink, fuzzy things about someone who is my enemy, well, I think God might be waiting a while.

  So I wondered if maybe the prayer part of the “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” bit was about how we love them. Maybe my little “God, help me not be an asshole” prayer was like the smallest little opening for God to do God’s thing. I don’t know how prayer works, and I’m not even sure it always does, but I can’t think of why else it is that I was able to talk to my enemy that day with an open heart.

  In my sermon I told the story of me and Chris and how loving our enemies doesn’t require the right feelings of niceness or generosity. It requires that we commend them to the one who has perfected the love of an enemy. It requires being in the prayerful presence of a God who was killed by God’s enemies and then, rather than retaliation, rather than violence, rather than an eye for an eye, Jesus said, “Forgive them.” I titled the sermon “Loving Our Enemies, Even When We Don’t Mean It” and sent it to Chris.

  It was a few months later, and just two days after Osama bin Laden was killed, that my father asked if he could read my sermon “Loving Your Enemies, Even When You Don’t Really Mean It” to the guys at his men’s prayer breakfast. Here’s what you need to know about that: My dad is still a member of a Church of Christ congregation (although one a bit less conservative than the one from my childhood) and the men to whom he was reading my sermon are (to the best of my understanding) wealthy, privileged, and both theologically and politically conservative. Later that day when we spoke he said, “That sermon was so powerful, Nadia. I can’t imagine the teachings of Jesus being put more poignantly. You could have heard a pin drop in that room when I read it at the prayer breakfast.” I was thrilled. Until he said, “Of course I didn’t tell them who wrote it.” And then my heart sank.

  I texted him: Perhaps for those in the room who believe that the Gospel of Jesus Christ simply cannot be preached by a woman, it might be important to know who wrote the sermon they just heard. He texted back I’ll fight one battle at a time, thank you very much.

  Did that feel like shit? You bet. Did I feel betrayed? No question. But even in the midst of it, I was grateful that two days after Osama bin Laden was killed and amidst the inevitable celebration of our “victory,” Jesus’ message about how he calls us to love our enemies was heard. And those men may not have had ears to hear if they had known that a woman had written that sermon. This is the ambiguity of our fragile, messy human existence. I long for black and white, I really do, but that’s not how I experience the world. I continue to learn, over and over again, that there are often more than just two possible labels for things.

  Months later, I found myself in a situation both the Pirate Christian and my father could understand.

  Sojourners magazine, which describes itself as a progressive Christian commentary on faith, politics, and culture seeking to build a movement of spirituality and social change, had refused to sell ad space to Believe Out Loud, an organization that is helping churches become fully inclusive of all people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. My name is on the Sojourners’s “God’s Politics” blog: I’m one of their writers. I also serve a church that is self-described and indeed is “queer inclusive.”

  But as I thought about what to say or do in response to Sojourners’s decision, I felt confronted by a terrible ambiguity, similar to what my dad must have felt when he excluded my name from my sermon. The ambiguity is this: Sojourners has, in my assessment, done more than any other organization to call evangelical Christians to the reality that a central part of following Jesus is a concern for the poor. This is a truth largely absent from much of American evangelicalism. Sojourners has a platform to speak about social justice to those who otherwise may not have ears to hear, and this is critical. While mainline Protestantism is on a clear trajectory toward full inclusion of our GLBTQ brothers and sisters, many evangelicals are, by and large, not there yet. So by taking a stance on GLBTQ issues, Sojourners may have lost its ability to be a voice for the poor in the more conservative areas of the church. Many of my progressive Christian friends and colleagues were calling for a boycott of Sojourners and I respected that. I just couldn’t join them. Doing so would feel like limiting things to two containers and two labels, and I love that shit like cocaine, so have to steer pretty clear.

  I wrote a blog post about this paradox and sent it to a young transgender man and a gay man from my congregation for approval. Having a green light from them, I posted my response.

  A stream of comments that felt like bullying followed, but this time it was the liberals who attacked. They told me I was a traitor. And that it was a good thing Jesus didn’t have to choose his battles. And how would I have felt if this was about black folks and not gays? I was perpetuating the alienation of GLBTQ people from the church, and shame on me.

  I may have gotten an ego boost from being attacked by a conservative heresy hunter, but it felt awful to be attacked by my own people. I didn’t get much work done that day as I obsessively read each comment as they came in. It was like going door to door, volunteering to get slapped.

  Yet I’d started a church with eight people, four of whom were queer, I reminded myself. Our church continues to be not “inclusive” of queer folks; House for All Sinners and Saints—its origins, its leadership, and its culture—has always been partly queer itself.

  “Screw them,” I spit out to my unsuspecting husband who was innocently walking through the living room to go get a soda. “I have boots on the ground in this thing every day of my life. What do these more-liberal-than-thou commenters have? Opinions. Oh, you have a better opinion? OK. Oh, and fuck you.”

  Matthew just looked at me with that trapped “just tell me what it is you want me to say and let me go” look on his face.

  Of course I knew that my anger was just masking the fact that (a) I was actually hurt, and (b) I was ashamed that blog comments could hurt me. I didn’t care if the conservatives had at me. I had just never gotten it from my own kind before.

  My phone buzzed and I was tempted to ignore it. But if I’m egotistical enough to read blog comments in real time what are the odds I can ignore a text?

  The screen was still illuminated when I looked down. It was from Chris the Pirate Christian. It’s looking pretty rough out
there for you, the text said. How you holding up?

  Not well! I replied, and immediately he called me.

  Here’s the thing: Chris doesn’t agree with me or the more-liberal-than-thou group about the issues of GLBTQ inclusion in the church. But the one phone call I got in the middle of being attacked by my own tribe was from someone who is on the other side of the issue entirely. But he knew what it felt like for your own people to turn on you and he knew it felt like shit. Chris said that he loved me and would pray for me. His enemy.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Haitian Stations of the Cross

  I will not keep silent. I will not rest until the promises of God are fulfilled.

  —Isaiah 62:1

  In January of 2012, my family spent a week touring San Diego and enjoying a four-day cruise on a boat roughly the size of Wichita. My kids loved the fun and freedom of a cruise, but to me, having gluttony and frugality fighting within myself the whole time was exhausting. I both loved the twenty-four-hour all-you-can-eat buffet and loathed all the wasted food that resulted. In the end, gluttony won out. I rationalized it by deciding that the more I ate, the less food was wasted, and any time I might find a way to turn a vice into a virtue, count me in, especially if it involves cookies or nachos.

  Upon debarking in San Diego, where we’d planned to stay another night before heading home, we wedged our overfed bodies into a hot rental car. The radio was still set to a news station. Haiti.

  Shaken out of our cruise ship food coma, we listened in horror to the reports of tens of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands left without shelter, food, or family. And on top of it all, there was no running water.