Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint (Jericho Books, 2013)
Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People (Convergent Books, 2015)
Nadia Bolz-Weber
Nadia Bolz-Weber seems like an unlikely star among Lutheran pastors. By her own account, she's a cynic with anger issues and a foul mouth, who devoted her early adult life to drugs, booze, and tattoos. She's now in great demand as a speaker and preacher, and the author of two very popular memoirs. She's also the founding pastor of a Lutheran mission church called House for All Sinners and Saints, in Denver, Colorado.
Pastrix starts with a precocious twelve-year-old Nadia in Sunday School, discovering that she knew more about the Bible than her teacher; in the Church of Christ, this was not a woman's place, and she soon smart-mouthed herself right out of the denomination. She was left with an image of God as punitive, angry, and judgmental, consumed with drawing lines between saints and sinners. "It did not seem to me, even back then, that God's grace or the radical love of Jesus was what united people in the Church of Christ; it was their ability to be good. Or at least their ability to appear good. And not everyone can pull that off."
When Nadia walked away from striving to appear good, she opened Pandora's box: cursing, listening to punk rock, smoking pot, drinking, dropping out of college, living in a commune, and hanging out with Wiccan lesbians. At the end of 1991, however, she was pulled aside from the path of alcoholic destruction: "It was as if God abruptly, even rudely, interrupted my life." God preferred that she not be dead by thirty, because he (so to speak) had another plan for her life, in which she would recognize grace, and feel compelled to talk about it.
Four years into sobriety, she met the man who would become her husband, who was studying in a Lutheran seminary. That sounds like more of God's handiwork, because the Lutheran church offered her a completely different picture of how God sees the world, and what we're supposed to do about it.
The most obvious difference was the liturgy, a structure of themes and variations shared through centuries of tradition and practice. From week to week, some prayers are the same, and others change with the seasons, from Advent through Christmas, Epiphany, Lent and Easter. Following those same seasons, scripture readings span a three year cycle, a lectionary, observed in common by Catholics, Anglicans, and several Protestant denominations. This discipline is somehow just as liberating as it constraining. We don't have to figure out how to pray from scratch, or get stuck in the favorite Bible verses of our local preacher.
The other benefit of liturgy is that it requires community. It might be possible to be spiritual all by yourself, but you can't be religious. Bolz-Weber says, in Accidental Saints, "Spiritual feels individual and escapist. But to be religious (despite all the negative associations with that word) is to be human in the midst of other humans who are as equally messed up and obnoxious and forgiven as ourselves." That's what makes them qualified to share our joys, hear our confessions, and offer us God's forgiveness.
My favorite story in Accidental Saints is about the time Bolz-Weber agreed to give a talk to a national gathering of Lutheran youth. This was outside her comfort zone, since her regular congregants are nearly all adults, and she was nervous about how uncool she'd doubtless appear. On the plane, she sat next to a girl with pink bangs, in whose surly shyness she recognized her own teenage self. Suddenly, even in the unreal environment of the Superdome, it was simple: "I told them that this is a God who has always used imperfect people, that this is a God who walked among us and who ate with all the wrong people and kissed lepers...I told them that this God has never made sense."
But she made sense that night to a multitude of teenagers, and she does to me, too.
Email, Any Good Books, May 1 2022
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