None of us knew yet how to do this kind of thing well, so it looked awkward and lumpy. About half of us bought tri-fold presentation boards that held text or pictures posted on colored construction paper. “Oh my gosh, it looks like a theological science fair in here,” Seth teased.
In the center of my middle school presentation–looking station of the resurrection I had placed an icon of Mary Magdalene, and the story of her encountering Jesus at the tomb. Below her picture was just one line from the story “And he said to her, ‘Mary’ ”—under which people were invited to write their own names. Someone wrote “queer child.” The notion that our names are spoken by Jesus, and that this is what makes us turn and recognize him, had become important to me, especially in light of how I was called by God.
Four years after that awkward Easter liturgy, our church was going strong, and for a while I had been holding office hours at the Hooked on Colfax coffeehouse on Colfax Street in Denver. Colfax was a street written of by Jack Kerouac, referred to as the boulevard of broken dreams, and known especially in the ’70s and ’80s as a street walked by women. When people come for meetings at the coffeehouse, I never know if they just want to chat, or if they have completely lost their faith, or if they are in a crisis of some sort, or if they are just trying to work out an idea or insight about life. What I am certain of is that there is no way to know which of these is actually true based solely on why they tell me they want to talk. One always presents as the other. I think it’s the only way we know how to be vulnerable; to do it sideways.
So when Michael Meehan, a parishioner at my church, met me there one morning I wasn’t totally sure what we’d really be talking about. We covered his work situation and what was going on with his brother, and then he confessed that after nine months at our church he still wasn’t so sure about this Jesus thing. But he knew something real happened in church, especially in the Eucharist. “It’s like that Dylan line, ‘You know something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?’ ” That seemed a good enough explanation to me.
Then he said, “Jesus seems to be friends with all my friends, but the dude seems to be ignoring me. I’m trying not to take it personally.”
I love it when people talk about Jesus like he’s real. My friend Sara calls Jesus the Boyfriend. Once I called her to gossip how so-and-so, someone I just absolutely hated, was kind of growing on me and how I was frustrated I couldn’t hate her anymore.
“Girl,” Sara had said, “the Boyfriend is all up in your shit right now.”
Michael seemed to be saying that the Boyfriend was not all “up in his shit,” yet he was saying this even while he was claiming to not believe in “the dude,” which felt a bit conflicted. To some pastors that might have seemed like a crisis, but to me, pastoring the people I do, it was almost mundane.
I didn’t have any advice for Michael. I never do. I just don’t have a whole lot of control over Jesus or over what people in my church believe, and, mercifully, that seems to bother me less and less. The best I could do in that moment was to assure Michael that I didn’t care that he felt like Jesus was ignoring him. He looked at me like I was clearly not understanding his “Jesus isn’t friending me on Facebook” story.
“Do you know the band The Hold Steady?” I asked. “They have a song with lyrics that describe this girl who crashed into the Easter Mass with her hair done up in broken glass and tells the priest, ‘Father can I tell your congregation how a resurrection really feels?’ ”
“Sometimes,” I told him, “that’s what this Jesus thing is all about.” Then I offered him his own story of death and resurrection to consider.
In January of 2011 Michael Meehan, a forty-nine-year-old man, had given up. This giving up looked like him sitting alone in a cheap motel bathroom in central Oregon, razor in hand. He had bled out but hadn’t managed to die, and when the police found him before the ambulance arrived, they were reportedly kind. In the hospital the ER doctor asked if he had family. “Just a brother, but we’re not close,” he’d said.
This not-close brother flew from Denver to Oregon, picked up Michael, and brought his broken body and spirit from near the ocean to a mile above it. There’s less oxygen here in Denver, but it’s still where Michael learned to breathe again after he had tried to stop altogether.
Three months later, as Michael drank coffee in his brother’s kitchen, a portrait of a tough-looking, tattooed lady-priest on the cover of the Denver Post caught his eye, and he read the headlined story: “Guided by Resurrection, and a Dose of Insurrection; Pastor Turns Heads by Blending Tradition and Irreverence.” That week, Michael heard me preach at Red Rocks.
It was a cold and damp Sunday morning. I’d spent a lot of time at Red Rocks, a natural amphitheater and outdoor concert venue. As a Colorado teenager, Red Rocks was a favorite place for me to drive up to in order to get high and look at the stars. I’d even been backstage once before, at a UB40 show in 1985. To state the obvious, I was not wearing a clergy shirt then.
It had been a long road from first sitting in a church-basement recovery meeting, to Ross Merkle’s church-basement membership class, to now, about to preach to a crowd of ten thousand (or as my snarky husband would say, five thousand men plus women and children) at a Colorado amphitheater. But as I sat on a chair on the edge of the Red Rocks stage that Easter morning, all I could think about was how I was, for the second time, in the insufferable situation of sitting in full view of a large crowd of people while something embarrassing was happening on stage: Praise songs were being sung slightly off-key by suburban moms dressed in matching outfits. And since it was a worship service and I’m a clergyperson, I had to try to pretend not to be horrified.
My first experience of trying not to look horrified in front of a crowd happened just before I preached at the ELCA Eucharist in San Francisco when something mis-named “liturgical dance” was being performed. I find liturgical dance to be neither liturgical nor dance and is often performed by liberal, middle-aged women with lots of scarfy things going on.
Pretending to feel a way other than how I actually feel is not a gift God gave me. I can pull it off for short periods of time when needed, but the effort is exhausting. If something like liturgical dance or cheesy praise singing is happening on stage and thousands of people can see me, I can manage my own body language and facial expressions for a half hour or so. But then, like when I’ve had to be nice to more than three people in a row, I need a nap.
The plus side was that the combination of the shivering cold and the effort it took to not roll my eyes had burned off any nervous energy I might have had, so when I began to preach, I was calm.
“For many churches,” I said to the crowd, “Easter is basically another word for church showoff day—a time when we spiff up the building, pull out the lilies, hire a brass quintet, and put on fabulous hats and do whatever we have to do to impress visitors. To me, it had always felt kind of like the church’s version of putting out the guest towels, which makes no sense. Easter is not a story about new dresses and flowers and spiffiness. Really, it’s a story about flesh and dirt and bodies and confusion, and it’s about the way God never seems to adhere to our expectations of what a proper God would do (as in not get himself killed in a totally avoidable way).”
It was freezing. The crowd of ten thousand in front of me was covered in down parkas and hats, and I wore a linen alb over a cotton clergy shirt. I had to take my gloves off to turn the pages of my manuscript, which I tried unsuccessfully to do without breaking stride.
“Jesus didn’t look very impressive at Easter,” I said, “not in the churchy sense, and certainly not if Mary Magdalene mistook him for a gardener.”
As I looked out over the shivering crowd, I suggested that perhaps Mary Magdalene thought the resurrected Christ was a gardener because Jesus still had the dirt from his own tomb under his nails. Of course, the depictions in churches of the risen Christ never show dirt under his nails; they make him look more like a w
ingless angel than a gardener. It’s as if he needed to be cleaned up for Easter visitors so he looked more impressive and so no one would be offended by the truth. But then what we all end up with is a perverted idea of what resurrection looks like. My experience, however, is that the God of Easter is a God with dirt under his nails.
Resurrection never feels like being made clean and nice and pious like in those Easter pictures. I would have never agreed to work for God if I had believed God was interested in trying to make me nice or even good. Instead, what I subconsciously knew, even back then, was that God was never about making me spiffy; God was about making me new.
New doesn’t always look perfect. Like the Easter story itself, new is often messy. New looks like recovering alcoholics. New looks like reconciliation between family members who don’t actually deserve it. New looks like every time I manage to admit I was wrong and every time I manage to not mention when I’m right. New looks like every fresh start and every act of forgiveness and every moment of letting go of what we thought we couldn’t live without and then somehow living without it anyway. New is the thing we never saw coming—never even hoped for—but ends up being what we needed all along.
“It happens to all of us,” I concluded that Easter Sunday morning. “God simply keeps reaching down into the dirt of humanity and resurrecting us from the graves we dig for ourselves through our violence, our lies, our selfishness, our arrogance, and our addictions. And God keeps loving us back to life over and over.”
When Michael Meehan heard me preach that sermon, he was certainly not a churchgoer. He was raised Catholic but had never in his adult life felt much need for church. Yet he’d tried to end his life and had gotten it back again despite himself. So when he heard me say that God reaches into the graves we dig ourselves and loves us back to life, he knew that, in his case, this was not actually a metaphor, and the next month he showed up at House for All Sinners and Saints.
There were so many new people that first month after the Denver Post cover story and the Red Rocks Easter service that I barely registered seeing Michael, a nearly fifty-year-old man with a funny walk—one leg too short and a busted hip. But Catherine, a young Episcopalian architect who had been attending House for All for a while, did notice him. During the passing of the peace, a time in the liturgy when everyone shakes hands or hugs one another saying, “Peace be with you,” Michael had seen Catherine hug several of her friends who sat around her. Then she came to Michael and extended her hand.
“But you are a hugger, right?” he asked and then boldly embraced her.
Later he would describe this act as entirely outside of his nature. He also would come to say that in the months before the night he had held a razor in a cheap motel bathroom that he had very systematically disentangled himself from just about everything. His business as a book designer dwindled down to just about nothing. He had no relationship, no money, and his much-beloved dog suddenly took ill and died. So Michael gave up, sold his furniture, and dissolved all connections to his own life.
“Lack of connections is death,” he told me as we sat in Hooked on Colfax, nine months after he’d first visited HFASS. “The opposite of that is being able to hug a perfect stranger.”
Michael found community at House for All Sinners and Saints. He is connected there. Appreciated. Wanted. Yet while he says he loves Jesus’ friends at HFASS, he has just explained to me that he feels like a stranger to Jesus himself. (Which strikes me as weirdly opposite to what Gandhi reportedly once said: “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians,” and I’ve tended to be with the Mahatma on that one.)
Three months after that day in the coffee shop when Michael told me he didn’t feel close to Jesus, and I in turn reminded him of his own story of death and resurrection, he was again in the hospital. This time though, it was for what seemed like progressive-resurrection. Michael got a new hip.
I sat in the waterproof hospital-visitor’s chair and listened to his amazement at what his life looked like now. He hadn’t yet been able to build his business back up to where it was, still lived with his brother, and he wasn’t yet ready to love another dog, but Michael had friends who were friends with Jesus, a place to come and pray, and a brand-new hip. And even if he doesn’t feel particularly close to the dude, Michael understood death and resurrection, the basic idea of Christianity, better than most clergy I knew. And this strangely made me believe even more that this thing is real. This whole Jesus thing.
There are times when I hear my name, turn, and recognize Jesus. There are times when faith feels like a friendship with God. But there are many other times when it feels more adversarial or even vacant. Yet none of that matters in the end. How we feel about Jesus or how close we feel to God is meaningless next to how God acts upon us. How God indeed enters into our messy lives and loves us through them, whether we want God’s help or not. And how, even after we’ve experienced some sort of resurrection, it’s never perfect or impressive like an Easter bonnet, because, like Jesus, resurrected bodies are always in rough shape.
CHAPTER 17
The Wrong Kind of Different
Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.
—Hebrews 13:1
We have to move the church out of here,” I said to my right-hand woman, Amy Clifford, as we cleaned up after liturgy. “This neighborhood is way too nice; it’s attracting the wrong element.”
She laughed with the kind of laugh that says, “That’s funny; but you know better.”
It was the summer of 2011, and three months earlier a bad thing and a couple of good things had happened that caused me to say we should move out of Park Hill, the stately, historic neighborhood in Denver where House for All Sinners and Saints had been temporarily housed. The bad thing: We had been evicted from the church building in the edgy, artsy, hipster neighborhood we had been in for three years. The good things: I had preached at Red Rocks, and the Denver Post cover feature about HFASS had been printed. The full-length photo of me wearing a traditional short-sleeve clergy shirt, arms tattooed and folded, and sternly looking over my glasses, made it look as though I might kick your ass if you don’t listen to my sermon.
This will change everything, I’d thought. I’d imagined that the photo and the opportunity I’d been given to preach at Red Rocks would be like an “Olly, Olly in come free” for the people in Denver who belonged at House for All Sinners and Saints but had just never heard of us yet. Until that point, House for All Sinners and Saints rarely had more than forty-five people showing up on any given Sunday night (which made it all the weirder that I’d preached to so many and the Post ran that story), the vast majority of whom were single, young adults who lived in the city. I obviously hadn’t wanted HFASS to become a sprawling operation of a megachurch featuring a Jumbotron, parking lot attendants, and drop-off dry cleaning; and there was little threat of that happening (the Rally Day experience had taught me that lesson well).
Once, in the first year, someone asked if I thought the church I was starting was going to become really big. I smiled, looked up in the sky, and said, “Yeah… um… no.” When one of the main messages of the church is that Jesus bids you come and die (die to self, die to your old ideas, die to self-reliance), people don’t tend to line the block for that shit. Churches that try to live into the beauty of radical hospitality and the destabilizing idea that Jesus is experienced in welcoming strangers don’t tend to be described as “sprawling.” Jesus wants you to be rich and beautiful is doing great as a message, though. There are shiny millionaire preachers and full attended–parking lots every Sunday morning in America to prove it.
Still, the problem was that the “us” could have been just a bit bigger for my taste. When I dreamed of my church growing, I dreamed of having seventy people at liturgy. Seventy people could share the work, pay the bills, and still know who each other were. With forty-five people I did more than my share of work, paid more than my
share of bills, and knew I resented it.
The lack of growth in church attendance was maddening to me; as soon as we’d get a couple of new people, three would move out of town. There was a creeping futility that felt like it was hunting me down spiritually. I was convinced that there were more than forty-five people in Denver for whom this church would be the right fit. They just didn’t know we were here. I tried everything I could think of to get more people. I had coffee with everybody in the city of Denver. Twice. We held quirky events in the community. I showed up to everything I could think to show up to, and yet we stalled out at forty-five, and it was torturing me.
One night in the fall of our first year, I was lying alone in bed when Matthew came in to get something from his dresser. I immediately regaled him with whatever I was obsessing on at the moment (I think it was about why so-and-so wasn’t showing up to church anymore). He stood there blankly, but I was too absorbed to realize it.
Finally I groaned, “Man, I wish I could think about something besides church.”
“Yeah,” he responded, turning out the light, “me, too,” and walked out. We had come a long way from the days in California when he was trying to convince me to come along for liturgy.
The very next week after Easter—after the Post and after Red Rocks—our church doubled in size. We knew that given the exposure there would be some looky-loos—people just seeing what HFASS was about, out of curiosity—but what we didn’t realize was that they were going to stay, and that they wouldn’t look like us. I wanted the “us” to be bigger. What I wasn’t prepared for was the “us” to be different.
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