I knew that being on the cover of the paper was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our church, but the morning of Holy Saturday, when the story came out, I and just about everyone else at HFASS had to go find a copy of the paper. “My people” don’t read the paper. We get our news online or from NPR. Who does read the paper are fifty-year-olds from the suburbs and, aside from Michael Meehan, that’s mostly who showed up. It was awful.
As the weeks progressed during the early summer, I found it increasingly more difficult to muster up a welcoming attitude toward a group of people who, unlike the rest of us, could walk into any mainline protestant church in town and see a room full of people who looked just like them. We had started HFASS out of a disdain for consumer culture in religion. Ours was not a church where you passively consume some sort of religious product produced for you based on market research. We were a DIY church; we made art and sang a cappella, most of the liturgy was lead by whoever wanted to lead it that week, and we sat in the round. So here were a bunch of people, baby boomers who wore Dockers and ate at Applebee’s, who had driven in from the suburbs to consume our worship service because it was “neat” and so much cooler and more authentic than anything they could create themselves. It felt horrible and I became angry. And then I felt horrible that I had become angry.
My precious little indie boutique of a church was being treated like a 7-Eleven, and I was terrified that the edgy, marginalized people whom we had always attracted would now come and see a bunch of people who looked like their parents and think, “This isn’t for me.” And if that started to happen I would basically lose my shit.
If Stuart the big drag queen, Phil the aging hipster, or I walked into Middle America Presbyterian Church we might encounter a welcome that felt stretched and thin. Few of us at House for All Sinners and Saints feel comfortable in traditional, mainstream churches. But the fact of the matter was that we ourselves were now giving tight smiles to straight-laced, middle-aged men and soccer moms.
I called a meeting for the church to talk about the “sudden growth and demographic changes.” I had set the meeting up with a secret plan: I figured if the people who had been around HFASS for a while simply said who they were and what the church had always been about, then the new people who really didn’t belong there would self-select out, realizing it was really not meant for them. And yet even while I was arranging the details for this meeting, I knew it was wrong. Exhibit Z: It’s hard to be a good pastor when you’re not really that good of a Christian.
Two weeks later, the night of the meeting, it was hot and dry outside. Walking through the door of the Ogden House, where the meeting would take place, I felt the bricks of the building radiate heat like they had just been used to bake pizza. The Ogden House is a hundred-year-old, thirteen-bedroom house in Denver where young adults spend a volunteer year working at local service organizations and living in Christian community. It’s an old house with no air conditioning. The executive director, three board members, and countless current and former volunteers attend House for All Sinners and Saints, and sometimes we use their front room for meetings. I set up the chairs in an awkward, lumpy circle around the room and found a place for the sugar cookies, the frosting on which had turned into a glaze in the heat.
For the two weeks prior to this meeting, I had been engaged in a heated emotional battle, but now I felt calm. I had originally been determined to preserve and protect my community from the threat of people who read the local paper and ate at Applebee’s. And it had been a noble effort, but I had lost in what felt like divine defeat.
A few days before the meeting, I underwent what I can only describe as a heart transplant. The crazy Old Testament prophet Ezekiel explains it well. He wrote in Ezekiel 36:26 that God had said to him, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
It didn’t feel like a removal. Removal is far too pleasant a word. My heart was ripped out. When my own heart started to feel bitter and judgy and hard, and when I had articulated to as fine a point as possible why I was justified in such steeliness, God finally said, enough. And without anesthesia or a sterile environment, God reached in, ripped out my heart of stone, and replaced it (not for the first time) with a heart of flesh. You’d think that with as often as this particular procedure happens, I’d have a ziplock installed in my chest for easier access, but that’s apparently not how it works.
A few days before the meeting, I had called my friend Russell who pastors a church in St. Paul with a similar story and demographic as HFASS, but with about a decade on us. I asked if they had ever experienced feeling co-opted, and described what had been going on with us.
But Russell refused to play along. “Yeah, that sucks,” he said sarcastically. “You guys are really good at ‘welcoming the stranger’ when it’s a young transgender person. But sometimes ‘the stranger’ looks like your mom and dad.” I wanted to hold the phone out in front of me and yell, “You’re supposed to be my friend!” and then hang up. But I couldn’t, because in that moment I could feel actual blood and love pumping through my body for what felt like the first time in weeks. Russell was right.
I know that people who don’t believe in God might scoff at the idea that the creator of the universe has the time or inclination to try incessantly (and with not much long-term success) to change my heart. I get it. I just have no other explanation. All I know is that there have been so many times when I was so pissed off about something in my life and how it was some shithead’s fault that I couldn’t think or breathe correctly anymore. And when that has happened, I haven’t ever been able to feel anything except so-called justified anger. Compassion is always out of the question. And no amount of self-improvement or experience as a pastor or success as a sober alcoholic seems to change that. But when God comes to me in the form of a friend who will be just enough of an asshole to tell me the truth, then it really is as if my heart had been ripped out of my chest and replaced with something warm and beating. And the whole procedure is simply too sudden and feels so literal and is too against my nature to be of my own creating.
When the meeting day finally arrived, and people started filing into the pizza oven of a front room, all I could think about was what a miracle it was that any of them came to church at all. Since the heart transplant only days before, I’d developed a curiosity about the new folks, and by the time the meeting started, I knew what needed to happen. The new folks in the Dockers needed to tell us who they were and why they were there so that the young people with the tattoos who’d been around for a while could hear what this church was really about. But first I confessed to them what my friend Russell had said to me about how sometimes the stranger looks like your mom or dad.
Michael Meehan spoke up. He told us (as he again told me in the coffee shop) that he’d had no idea what he believed, but knew that something real happens in the Eucharist. He would never have been at HFASS if he wasn’t sure that broken people were welcome.
A seventy-three-year-old Episcopal deacon named Marcia said that while she knew she was a bit older than most of us, she felt that HFASS was a place where she really could pray and be herself. Next was Jennifer, a Brownie leader who had for the past few weeks been driving forty-five minutes in from the suburbs, said that she wasn’t sure if she fit in this church, but she knew that it was worth the drive to feel as close to God as she did in our liturgy.
Then Asher spoke up. “As the young transgender kid who was welcomed into this community, I just want to go on the record and say that I’m really glad there are people at church now who look like my mom and dad. Because I have a relationship with them that I just can’t with my own mom and dad.”
Aaaaand heart transplant healed.
I really hate that Jesus’ Gospel is so much about death. I hate it. I wish that Jesus’ message was, Follow me and all your dreams of cash and prizes will come true; follow me and you’ll have free liposuction and winning
lotto tickets for life. But obviously he’s not like that. Jesus says, “Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.” He says, “The first shall be last and the last shall be first,” and infuriating things like “if you seek to find your life you will lose it but those who lose their life will find it.” And every single time I die to something—my notions of my own specialness, my plans and desires for something to be a very particular way—every single time I fight it and yet every single time I discover more life and more freedom than if I had gotten what I wanted.
It goes without saying that House for All Sinners and Saints is stronger now because of those newcomers. You can look around at the 120 or so people gathered on any given Sunday and think I am unclear what all these people have in common. Out of one corner of your eye there’s a homeless guy serving communion to a corporate lawyer and out of the other corner is a teenage girl with pink hair holding the baby of a suburban soccer mom. And there I was a year ago fearing that the weirdness of our church was going to be diluted.
CHAPTER 18
He’s a Fuck-up, But He’s Our Fuck-up
John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
—Mark 1:2-5
Oh my gosh, we’re out of bread,” Rick Strandlof yelled from the kitchen, the statement putting a quick stop to the action in the church basement where moments before the commotion of Ziploc baggies, packets of mayonnaise, pumpkin pie bars, and mischievous holiday cheer had seemed unstoppable. Everyone paused but the children, who, unaware of the work stoppage, continued to slap stickers onto paper lunch sacks that read, “It sucks you have to work on Thanksgiving. Operation: Turkey Sandwich, brought to you by House for All Sinners and Saints.”
It was our third year bringing Thanksgiving lunches to unsuspecting folks all over our city who are unlucky enough to have to work on a holiday when most of us get to be with friends and family. Our “Operation: Turkey Sandwich” sack lunches mirror the traditional Thanksgiving meal: sandwiches made from freshly roasted turkey, pumpkin pie bars, and stuffing muffins (all accompanied by salt, pepper, mayonnaise and mustard packets, and a napkin). After assembling six hundred bags, we loaded them into our cars and dispersed to find any gas station cashiers, strippers, security guards, bartenders, bus drivers, or hospital janitors we could track down.
It was Rick’s first OTS. He’d been looking forward to it, as the event suited his manic personality. Six months prior, Rick had come to us a homeless, bipolar, pathological liar. Now, half a year later he was our homeless, bipolar, pathological liar.
His puffy REI vest and Levi’s had the smell of the infrequently washed and he slept in an abandoned building, but Rick is without question a helpful contributor to our church. He shows up early for every event and stays late until all the work is done. But when he offered to run out and get more bread for Operation: Turkey Sandwich, I froze. That’s the thing about saying that all are welcome at your church. People take you up on it. And Rick Strandlof is a notorious con artist.
Running my thumb repeatedly over the raised numbers on the church credit card in my hand as though it might contain a message in braille for how to respond to Rick’s offer, I spun around to Eileen, a nice lady in her fifties. “Eileen, you have a car. Could you run out real quick?”
When Rick had first started showing up at church, I had met him for coffee. “I know who you are,” I had said at the start of our meeting, “so let’s just start there.”
Two years earlier, in the summer of 2009, the FBI investigated an Iraq War veteran named Rick Duncan. Duncan had been seen in TV ads endorsing political candidates and telling his story as an antiwar vet who had also been present at the Pentagon on 9/11. He had started a nonprofit fund dedicated to helping returning war veterans receive their benefits. Rick was incredibly helpful. But his name wasn’t Rick Duncan. It was Rick Strandlof. And Rick Strandlof has never served in the military. He admitted all of this in an awkward interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper in July 2009.
Soon after the interview, he was charged with violating the Stolen Valor Act, a federal statute prohibiting the unauthorized wear, manufacture, or sale of any military decorations and medals. Impersonating a war vet was not enough for Rick Strandlof; he also claimed to have been awarded a Purple Heart for being wounded in action. Rick had, of course, never received the Purple Heart, but for lying about it, he did receive a great deal of time in federal custody during his trial. And a lot of negative publicity that, for a time, had his face and name (his real name) plastered on a lot of newspapers and on TV.
On July 16, 2010, a federal judge in Denver ruled the Stolen Valor Act unconstitutional because it violates free speech. In other words, a federal court determined that when Rick Strandlof lied about being a decorated war hero, it may have been reprehensible, but it was legal. All charges against him were dropped since it ends up that, unlike most con artists, Rick never deceived others in order to steal money. He just wanted to be liked. And he just wanted to be helpful. All the goodwill garnered from the work he had done on behalf of veterans was gone—replaced by vitriol for having impersonated a soldier. A lot of people hate Rick Strandlof for lying to them. And yet, he didn’t stop.
The next summer he reappeared in Denver as Rick Gold, convincing those around him that he was born in Tel Aviv and had served in the Israeli army, none of which was true. Rick is Jewish (I think). But he’s never been to Israel and has never served in the army.
Being conned is up there with throat cancer in terms of things I want to avoid. I had already been had by a Denver pimp and I hardly was up for repeating the experience with a Denver con man. So when Rick Strandlof showed up at church in August of 2011, my first instinct was to try to get rid of him. You know, like Jesus would do.
Ugh, Jesus. He always seems to be showing up when I want him to politely just keep out of my business. Once again, my friend Sara is right: The Boyfriend was all up in my shit. It’s the worst.
If becoming a person of faith were more like, say, receiving a personality transplant, life would be easier. But it doesn’t work like that. Over the years, most of my attempts at self-improvement have fallen sadly short. I could never manage to drink like a lady or say consistently nice things about other people or keep my car from looking like a homeless man lives in it. And that upright bass I’ve never played that my loving husband bought me ten Christmases ago still sits in the corner like the stringed version of an aging plus-size model. All of this is despite my resolve to change myself into a better person, a nicer, tidier, more musical person. A better person who would love Rick Strandlof without reservation.
Yet despite my own experiences of personal rejection and my years of theological education, countless prayers, an ordination, and a life centered on serving the church, I still have the same personality I was born with. I am often impatient and cranky. And my first response to almost everything is “fuck you.” I don’t often stay there, but I almost always start there. I’m still me. Yet the fact that I manage to now move from “fuck you” to something less hostile, and the fact that I am often able to make that move quickly, well, once again, all of it makes me believe in God. And every time, it feels like repentance.
Not the repentance of red-faced street-corner preachers waving REPENT! signs. No, that kind of repentance always sounded to me like Stop being bad—start being good or God is going to be an angry punishing bastard to you. This feels like more of a human threat than anything else. It never works on me. Who wants their spiritual arm twisted until they cry uncle? It’s bullying. I mean, fear and threat can create change in behavior. No question about it. But it doesn’t really change my thinking. Threats don’t change my heart and they don’t move me from “fuck you” to something less assholey in short order.
Repentance in Greek means someth
ing much closer to “thinking differently afterward” than it does “changing your cheating ways.” Of course repentance can look like a prostitute becoming a librarian, but it can also look like a prostitute simply saying, “OK, I’m a sex worker and I don’t know how to change that, but I can come here and receive bread and wine and I can hold onto the love of God without being deemed worthy of it by anyone but God.”
Rick Strandlof is trying to be a real person for the first time in his life and he doesn’t really know who that person is anymore. But he sees a glimpse of it at the communion table. He sees it in the eyes of the person serving him the wine and bread, saying, “Child of God, the body of Christ, given for you.” That’s his repentance.
And when the clerk in the adult bookstore on Colfax tears up as we hand him an OTS bag and says, “Wait. Your church brought me Thanksgiving lunch… here?” That’s repentance.
Repentance, “thinking differently afterward,” is what happens to me when the truth of who I am and the truth of who God is scatter the darkness of competing ideas. And these truths don’t ever feel like they come from inside of me. They come in weird little packages and are delivered to our lives in unexpected ways. Left to my own devices I would never welcome the likes of Rick Strandlof into my life or my church. I hate being lied to (have I mentioned that?) and I mistakenly trust more in my ability to protect myself from others than I trust in God to change my heart. But I really do love Rick, and this is just one more thing that makes me believe in God.
Repentance is the only explanation I have for how I went from wanting to protect myself and my church by getting rid of the con artist to actually suggesting he settle into our community and stay. It was not unlike the kind of heart transplant I needed when the yuppies moved in. I was so worried about losing face like the vets and the Jews did in Denver (and hell, sometimes I still am worried about that), but the arm of God reached in anyway, ripped out my own heart, and replaced it with God’s.
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