Episode 16: “We Could Use Some Resurrection” With Nadia Bolz-Weber
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Show Notes
Co-hosts
Jeff Chu
Find Jeff online: @byJeffChu on Instagram or @JeffChu on Twitter. You can also subscribe to Jeff’s newsletter, Notes of a Make-Believer Farmer on Substack.
Sarah Bessey
Find Sarah online: @SarahBessey on Instagram or @SarahBessey on Twitter. You can also subscribe to Sarah’s newsletter, Field Notes on Substack. Explore Sarah’s recent books on her website.
Featured guest
Nadia Bolz-Weber
Nadia Bolz-Weber is an ordained Lutheran pastor, founder of House for All Sinners & Saints in Denver, Colorado, the creator and host of The Confessional podcast, and the author of three New York Times bestselling memoirs: Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith Of A Sinner & Saint (2013 and re-released in 2021), Accidental Saints; Finding God In All The Wrong People (2015), and Shameless; A Sexual Reformation (2019). Nadia writes and speaks about personal failings, recovery, grace, faith, and pretty much whatever the hell else she wants to. She serves as the ELCA’s first-ever pastor of public witness. She always sits in the corner with the other weirdos which makes her one of us. And make sure you’re subscribed to her newsletter, The Corners, to receive her writing in your inbox weekly.
Read more about Nadia on NadiaBolzWeber.com or follow @SarcasticLutheran on Facebook, @SarcasticLuther on Twitter or subscribe to The Corners on Substack.
“Jesus is not the Lord of empire. Jesus is not the Lord of institutionalized religion. Jesus is not the Lord of domination. Jesus is the Lord of compassion.”
Thanks to our producer, SueAnn Shiah, who also provided the music for this episode, you can listen to her album A Liturgy for the Perseverance of the Saints on Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube, or Bandcamp and find her at @sueannshiah on Instagram and @sueannshiah on Twitter.
Transcript
Part 1: Introduction
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NADIA: Bless the things we think are dead. Bless that which we have already begun to carry out of town to bury. Bless our rocky marriages and our college-age kids who smoke too much dope. Bless the leave-taking we have had with the thing we thought was faith, and bless the person at work we love to hate. Bless the young adult who assumes they are too young to be an alcoholic and the 60-year-old woman who has had too much work done. Bless the chronically sick. Bless it all, Lord of compassion, and love what only you can love—the ugly and abandoned and unsanitary in the wash of humanity upon which you have nothing but a gleaming compassion when we have none.
SARAH: Hello, everyone. I'm Sarah Bessey.
JEFF: And I'm Jeff Chu. Welcome back to The Evolving Faith Podcast. We're on Twitter and Instagram as @EvolvFaith E-v-o-l-v-F-a-i-t-h. And on Facebook as Evolving Faith. Thank you for joining us today. We're glad you're here.
SARAH: So today we'll be hearing from our friend Nadia Bolz-Weber. Many of you know and love Nadia as we do. And this message was preached as part of our communion service in Denver in 2019.
JEFF: It was really special to have Nadia preaching. As you all probably remember, Rachel Held Evans had died about six months before the 2019 conference, and she and Nadia were dear friends and had run the Why Christian conference together. Nadia lives in Denver, so of course we asked her to preach the communion service.
SARAH: Well, we have a communion service—I mean, for those people who maybe haven't had a chance to come to Evolving Faith yet, we have a communion service at the close of every Evolving Faith. And honestly, that's very much because of Rachel. The first time we were planning Evolving Faith, it was really clear that she so deeply valued the table and what it meant to her but also what it meant to all of us who are in some way part of the Christian tradition, I think, especially because many of us are here in the wilderness and we simply don't have the rituals and the sense of belonging that we maybe once had or even maybe we hoped to have. And so to take this practice that could maybe feel sort of familiar, maybe it felt sort of exclusive, and then just kind of participate in that together, is always incredibly powerful. I remember at our first gathering, we didn't honestly know how it would go or if it would even work. But later it turned out to be one of the most moving aspects of the weekend. We even do it when we have virtual or live online conferences like we're doing this year. It's just this bunch of misfits all coming to the table together, being served communion by one another, feeling a sense of community and belonging not only with one another in that moment but also to this larger story that we are wrestling with, that we are still a part of. It feels both stubborn and hopeful, which feels very much like us. And so, you know, we've held on to that practice. And so that year, it was our first few months without Rachel. And so having Nadia there to preach the message, to preside over the table, was very healing and beautiful. Almost like after this devastating thing that we had walked through together here, we all still were at the table, still hungry, still thirsty, and still together.
JEFF: But also, Nadia is just such a gifted preacher. She has a way with words and a wit that help make Scripture feel fresh, even as she's really quite orthodox, even more than sometimes you will realize. I think she almost catches you off guard with the Good News because she's funny and she's wry and she's observant and she's sharp. And then suddenly, you realize you've been overwhelmed not only with her love and her compassion but also with God's.
SARAH: I think that’s probably the best introduction I could have for Nadia, but for those of you who maybe don't know her very well, let me just share a wee bit about her. Nadia is an ordained Lutheran pastor. She’s the founder of House for All Sinners & Saints in Denver, Colorado. She’s the creator and the host of a podcast called The Confessional, and the author of three New York Times bestselling memoirs. There’s Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith Of A Sinner & Saint in 2013 and it was actually re-released in 2021, Accidental Saints; Finding God In All The Wrong People (I love that subtitle) and that was in 2015, and then Shameless; A Sexual Reformation in 2019. Nadia writes and speaks about personal failings and recovery, grace, faith, and honestly, pretty much whatever the hell else she wants to. She serves as the ELCA’s first-ever pastor of public witness. She always sits in the corner with the other weirdos, which makes her one of us. And make sure you’re subscribed to her newsletter, The Corners, to receive her incredible writing in your inbox weekly.
JEFF: Nadia's talk was different than the other ones we've featured this season because it wasn't really a talk, and since it was a sermon delivered in the context of closing worship at Evolving Faith 2019, I'd like to read the passage she was preaching on. So this is from the Gospel according to Luke 7:11-17. “Soon afterward, Jesus went to a town called Nain, and his disciples in a large crowd went with him as he approached the gate of the town, the man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother's only son and she was a widow, and with her was a large crowd from the town. When the Lord saw her, he was moved with compassion for her and said to her, ‘Do not cry.’ Then he came forward and touched the bier and the bearers stopped. And he said, ‘Young man, I say to you, rise.’ The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized all of them and they glorified God, saying, ‘A great prophet has risen among us and God has visited his people.’ This word about him spread throughout the whole of Judea and all the surrounding region.” Here's Nadia Bolz-Weber preaching to us from Evolving Faith 2019 in Denver, Colorado.
Part 2: Nadia’s Talk
NADIA: Grace, peace, and mercy is yours from the triune God. Amen.
About 12 years ago, I watched 24 consecutive hours of bad Christian television for a writing project, and my friends and family signed up for an hour each to watch along with me. The whole thing was insane, like the whole thing was insane, but things got especially crazy around 1 a.m. when I'd been at it for 20 hours and a show called The Power Team was on Trinity Broadcasting Network. If you don't know, The Power Team are a bunch of enormous steroid-muscled men who hold really loud Christian rallies in which they perform feats of strength like tearing phonebooks in two and breaking two-by-fours over their heads by the power of the Holy Spirit. It's impressive. It's. It's sort of like Benny Hinn meets the WWE. I noticed that while these enormous men destroyed physical objects, they talk a lot about what the Lord had done for them like "I was just a weakling. And then the Lord came in and transformed my biceps."
So anyway, my friend Andy, a Unitarian, and our friend, Jerry, an L.A. standup comic turned Methodist minister, were watching with me. So the three of us sat on my sofa watching The Power Team in, like, stunned silence as a Unitarian and a Methodist and a Lutheran, trying to understand what exactly it was that we were seeing when Andy finally said, "So wait, basically they just break stuff for the Lord," and Jerry said, "Well, big deal. I break stuff all the time." To which Andy said, "But is it for the Lord?" And Jerry said, "Well, it is now."
Honestly, the only reason I told you the story is by way of saying I'm not like a big fan of the overuse of the term the Lord. Like when people say, “I just love the Lord.” I, I just never really know what that means. And maybe because outside of references to Voldemort, we don't really use the word the Lord in regular life. I just, I don't know. I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm just saying that for whatever reason, I can't handle it.
So our reading from today was from Luke's Gospel, Chapter 7. And unlike for us today, in the context in which Luke lived, the word Lord did mean something, namely Lord was used for Caesar and all that Caesar stood for. In Luke's day, if someone was called Lord, they were to be feared and obeyed, and they would smite you just as soon as look at you. Lords were capricious and dictatorial and arbitrary and made people's lives miserable. In other words, lords back then were not unlike the God so many of us were taught to fear.
But I'm standing here today to tell you that Luke tells us of a different God entirely. Not God as Caesar, not God as angry bastard with a killer surveillance system who's always out to get you for being human. But Luke tells us of a God as baby. God as friend, God as Jesus. Did you hear that baby? Thank you for bringing babies. There have been so many babies in this room. I just can't think of what pleases God's ear more than to hear babies in worship.
Luke tells us of God as Jesus, the one who kisses sinners and touches the unclean. And as Luke so masterfully tells this gospel, he waits. He patiently waits to call Jesus “Lord” until this story, a story of how Jesus and his crowd were entering the city gate as a widow, and her crowd are leaving the city gate to go and bury her only child. And Jesus sees her as Jesus often sees those from whom we tend to turn our own gaze. Jesus sees her, and the text says he had compassion on her. But compassion is really far too polite a translation because in Greek it's more visceral than what we think of as compassion. It's more like his guts turned, his insides lurched at the sight of such loneliness as a widow grieving the death of her only child in the middle of a crowd.
What I mean to say is that Luke makes it clear Jesus is not the Lord of empire. Jesus is not the Lord of institutionalized religion. Jesus is not the Lord of domination. Jesus is the Lord of compassion. Maybe it goes without saying, but right now I need a story of Jesus seeing and being moved by human grief because that shit is still so heavy around me. And like many of you, I'm not unfamiliar with how bad we church folk can be around loss and suffering, how we tend to blame God or we blame each other, or we blame ourselves for it. And I'm also not unfamiliar with how often we avoid the grief of others, so we're not infected by it. So I love the simplicity of Jesus just seeing grief and being moved by it and being totally unafraid to touch it.
But right now, right now, I also need stories of resurrection. I mean, I'm sort of desperate for them. I know of all the stories in the Bible that are hard for us modern folks to believe, that stories of people rising from the dead can sound especially crazy, defying as they do the laws of both physics and mortality. But I love them. I love stories of resurrection. I love stories of resurrection. Because I'm someone who's desperate for second chances and third chances and really just like all the chances. I love stories of resurrection because they're messy and they're weird, and stories of resurrection sync a hook of hope into me like nothing else can. And we could use some divine hope right now, could we not? We could use some resurrection up in here. We could use something a little more powerful than our virtues, a little more reliable than our wokeness, a little more hopeful than our attempts to just try harder. I've tried trying harder. It doesn't make me free. It just makes me tired. So based on the raising of the widow's son, I have a prayer for us today. So I invite you into a place of prayer or mindfulness or whatever works for you.
Lord of compassion, I pray. As you did in Nain, enter our city gates, enter into the somber roads down which our hearses drive and the glad streets down which our children run. Walk uninvited into starter mansions and public housing and dorms and cheap motel rooms that charge by the hour. Stroll into the cool air freezer section where the pregnant women escape the heat and the bus stop benches where the weary wait. Enter every law office, Lord, and adult bookstore. Step into the spaces we say we feel your awesomeness and the places we claim your forsakenness.
Enter our city gates, Lord of compassion, and as you did the city of Nain. Bless. Bless the things we think are dead. Bless that which we have already begun to carry out of town to bury. Bless our rocky marriages and our college-age kids who smoke too much dope. Bless the leave taking we have had with the thing we thought was faith, and bless the person at work we love to hate. Bless the young adult who assumes they are too young to be an alcoholic and the 60-year-old woman who has had too much work done. Bless the chronically sick. Bless it all, Lord of compassion, and love what only you can love—the ugly and abandoned and unsanitary in the wash of humanity upon which you have nothing but a gleaming compassion when we have none.
Lord of compassion who saw the widow of Nain, we thank you for seeing us, seeing our loneliness and our bravery, seeing the times we can't say what we need to say, seeing the ones who have never felt like they're enough but who you know already are and always have been. Seeing the moments when we're more than we thought we could ever be. Seeing the cost of our work. Seeing what no one else can or will. Teach us to see each other with your heart and not our own. Lord of compassion, touch us as you did the widow's son who lay dead and speak those same words to us: “Young man, arise.” “Little girl, get up.” What I'm saying is, create a holy uprising here today, Jesus. To those who think they're not worthy to be loved, who medicate themselves with food and booze and shopping, say “Rise up.” To us who have been hurt by those who say they follow you, say “Rise up.” To the proud at heart who think they are not dead, say “Rise up.” To those who hide their guilt behind good works, say “Rise up.” To the unloved child who has no idea that one day they will change the world, say “Rise up.” To the one here today who's given up, say “Rise up.”
And when again, Lord of compassion, you've raised the dead, when again you have made whole that which is broken, when again you've ripped out my heart of stone and replaced it with a heart of flesh, when again you have reached into the graves we dig ourselves and loved us back to life, help us like the young man of Nain to sit up and speak. Give us words that are not empty praise or platitudes or piety, but give us strong words as real as the very soil from which you raised us. Give us brave words and kind words and prophetic truth-soaked words. Give us the words, Lord. But also, especially in my case, give us the pause before the words, please.
And then, as you did, the son to his mother, give us back to one another and help us to know when we do not have enough compassion for the road ahead, when we do not have enough compassion for our enemies, when we do not have enough compassion for ourselves, that you do. You do. And that it is enough, maybe not to rip phone books in half, but it is enough for today and tomorrow. And the day after that. It is enough. People of God, it's enough. Amen.
Part 3: Conversation
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JEFF: Nadia sort of starts this talk out by wrestling with how we named God. And I don't know that until she said that she's not a big fan of the overuse of the term the Lord that I really thought about what names for God I might or might not overuse. I definitely remember in my college Bible study those folks who would talk "Father God" into every single sentence as if they had to remind God in every sentence that they weren't done with their prayer yet. But I was not one of those people, mainly because I never wanted to pray out loud. But I'm curious, Sarah, when you think about God, what name or names do you tend to use?
SARAH: Now, I remember hearing Dr. Wil Gafney take a bit of a run at that word, Lord, and the feudal implications of it a few years ago, which did kind of knock me for a loop, because I think I’d just sort of always taken it for granted. But now I hardly ever use that language anymore because like a lot of things, you know, once you start to pull the thread of it, the thing under the thing, it unravels, you know, kind of all together. And so I've used a lot of different names for God over the years. Definitely logged a few years there of the "Father God, we just," you know, kind of prayers. And so I don't really have any room to talk, but now I love to use all sorts of names, you know, from Scripture, from liturgy. I think I can credit that to more liturgical Christians who often do things like that. It almost sounds like an invocation or a line of poetry, like what Nadia did in her sermon. I have to confess that I did go through a very strong, like Abba stage thanks to Brennan Manning back in the mid-aughts. And so it feels, like, very good to get that out there. But I have never, never done the whole "Daddy God" thing though, thankfully. I do have some standards.
JEFF: Okay. I have to say, as a gay man, "Daddy God" sounds just a little different to my ears.
SARAH: Stop it! I can't.
JEFF: You can if Daddy God says so.
SARAH: What? Rebuke, rebuke, rebuke!
JEFF: Sorry, but not sorry. Okay, seriously. Nadia so deftly gives us both a history lesson about how that title the Lord was used back in Jesus's time, and she gives us a theological one about how Jesus' Lordship is distinct and even radical in light of how Lordship was then typically understood, and the word she chooses as her center, which I love, is compassion, which comes from the Latin "for suffer with." And she defines and describes Jesus as the Lord of compassion. And that moves me even as I'm talking about it right now, because I want a God who reminds us that we're not alone, who's with us in whatever we're feeling, who is alongside us and who is for us. And also, I'm not very good at compassion.
SARAH: Well, I don't think that's true. You're, you're deeply compassionate. But yes, I've always really loved that word, compassion. I don't think it gets as much love these days, right. It can be seen as weakness or making excuses or even toxic niceness. But when you really encounter compassion, it is life changing. It is such a beautiful invitation to partner with God in that posture of compassion, I think most particularly in our weakness or with our enemies, perhaps it's a practice of that stubborn resurrection, I think.
JEFF: So speaking of resurrection, there's this line in Nadia's sermon that I love so much, and it's where she says, "We could use some resurrection up in here. We could use something a little more powerful than our virtues." And I've been thinking about that line a lot, because I honestly don't know how powerful our virtues really are at this point in this mess of a world. So many days, I think we do need some divine intervention. And I wonder what that might look like.
SARAH: Yes, I love that about Nadia. And it's something that we both feel very strongly about. And so maybe that's one of the many threads that tie us together with her in friendship, because we do need something more powerful than our own sense of justice or goodness or rightness. And so I cling to resurrection as a promise and a possibility. I don't always know what that looks like, but I know when I've experienced it, it's rare and often unexpected. But she's right. If it's just a matter of my virtues or behavior modification or hitting all of the marks right. This is not just exhausting and tiring, it's also soul crushing. So what do you think about that?
JEFF: One of the subtly beautiful things about the way she frames resurrection and you kind of just referred to it, is that, yes, it is something to do with the hereafter, with life after death, but it's also something to do with the here and now, because we actually experience a thousand little deaths and we need a thousand little resurrections, not just the one that comes after a physical death. To stand up a little straighter after you've been slumped over because of bullying, that's a little resurrection. Or to dust yourself off after an unfair rejection, that's a little resurrection. To forge your belonging after you've been pushed to the side, that is a little resurrection. And to take note of the sunshine after you've struggled through a long night, that's a little resurrection, too. And you get this sense of all the possible resurrections, especially when we get to Nadia's prayer.
SARAH: I have always loved how Nadia prays, just what a sanctuary she creates. In some ways, this moment or this sermon felt like the finish line because we had made it through this whole thing together, and then to have that benediction at the end really just laid me out. There were so many aspects of her words that I've held on to since then, but I remember her prayer for us to be given back to one another. And it's such a beautiful longing to give us back to one another, and even resting in the compassion of God when we can't or aren't able to do so. So I'm curious if there are aspects of that prayer and benediction that you remember or feel stirred by now.
JEFF: I feel a lot about how her prayer is such an act of hospitality and how it sees us as humans for who we are and where we've been. Nadia so wisely and observantly identifies the diversity of human experience, and she names it so poetically as well as so expansively. So I feel welcome in her prayer, and I imagine so many others do, too. And here's the interesting thing about a true welcome: It doesn't mean you won't feel challenged, but it's within Nadia's embrace that I feel this summons to do some really hard work, the hard work, for instance, of being compassionate to people I really, really don't like or the hard work of being compassionate to one particular person whom I often really, really don't like, namely myself. And if you parse Nadia's prayer, there is some deep and profound challenge. This is not a comfortable prayer, even though it is a gorgeous one.
SARAH: Well, we've talked before about the holy role of discomfort at times that that discomfort can be an invitation and a place of growth.
JEFF: Yeah, absolutely. It is a rebuke of that form of prayer that I once subscribed to that basically rolls through praise so that I can get to my wish list. And back then, I never thought of prayer as a place where we could work out some stuff with God and with ourselves. Some deeply important stuff.
SARAH: Mm hmm. I think that way about how Nadia has taught me to invoke blessings on and even in the midst of those places of discomfort. And I think she teaches us to see blessing as a discipline, that it doesn't always come out of good feelings or good happenings. She has taught me to bless those places of discomfort or pain or lack of compassion, precisely because God is a God of compassion and we are all worthy of compassion. And this changes not only how we see ourselves but each other. It's how we're given back to one another, perhaps. And so when she blesses rocky marriages and college kids who smoke too much dope, we see ourselves able to bless it too. That means we can bless this wilderness. We can bless this discomfort. We can bless our longing for communion and the tables where we hope we belong but we're not really even sure yet. We can and should bless our real lives and our real moments and our real neighbors, our real selves, not in spite of the reality but because of it. And so we bless our discomfort and our longing for compassion today.
[ Instrumental Music: It Is Well With My Soul by SueAnn Shiah ]
SARAH: You can find all of the links mentioned on today's show, as well as info about Nadia Bolz-Weber and her work in the world, as well as a full transcript of this episode in our show notes. Those are over at evolvingfaith.com/podcast. If you have been listening to and loving the podcast, then just take a few minutes to rate and review us on your podcast app as well as on Apple Podcasts. It is a small, free way to support us and the show, but it also will help other wanderers in the wilderness to find all of us. We appreciate it, especially if you give us five stars. But hey, no pressure. And you can always find me mostly at my newsletter, Field Notes, these days over at SarahBessey.com. But I do show up on social media every now and again, as @SarahBessey in most places.
JEFF: You can sign up for my newsletter at jeffchu.substack.com. The Evolving Faith Podcast is produced by us, Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu, along with our wise and seminary-bound colleague, SueAnn Shiah. Wish her luck. SueAnn also wrote and recorded our music. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Evolving Faith Podcast. And until next time, remember that you are loved.
[ Instrumental music: It Is Well With My Soul by SueAnn Shiah ]
JEFF: Throughout our time together at Evolving Faith, there is one thing we’ve heard over and over from you: We need community. Being in the wilderness can be really lonely. You can feel too isolated—even those of us who are profoundly shy introverts. We all need companions for the journey. And we need folks to accompany us and be alongside us.
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