Episode 6: The Geography of God with Sarah Bessey
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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
Sarah Bessey
Evolving Faith coleader Sarah Bessey welcomes all into the spiritual wilderness with her writing, preaching, and podcasting for an inclusive theological table that welcomes the church’s outcasts and misfits. She is the editor of and contributor to the New York Times best-selling book A Rhythm of Prayer, as well as the author of three popular and critically acclaimed books: Miracles and Other Reasonable Things, Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith, and Jesus Feminist. She serves as chair of the board for Heartline Ministries, which aids Haitian families with maternal and infant health care, education, vocational training, and economic development. Sarah lives in Calgary, Alberta (Treaty 7 Territory) with her husband and their four children.
“What I thought was a dead religion that had nothing more to offer me but more pain and more burdens became a practice of faith that connected me not only to God but to my neighbors.”
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
Intro
JEFF: This episode is brought to you by Everything Happens with Kate Bowler. At the age of 35, Kate was diagnosed with stage four cancer. She was a new mom, a professor and imagined she had finally gotten the life she wanted. That was a few years ago. Since then, she has heard from thousands of people wrestling with the notion that "everything happens for a reason.” Friends, if you want to stop feeling guilty that you’re not living your best life now, this is a podcast for you. You can find “Everything Happens” anywhere you listen to podcasts.
<<<<TRANSITIONAL MUSIC>>>
SARAH BESSEY: Because it turns out that what I had been taught was the wilderness, the thing to be afraid of, was actually God's grace and goodness. That what I thought was the desert was where I found intimacy with God. And what I thought was just a plain pile of stones was an altar where fire would descend. What I thought was exile became home, and you bunch of misfits became my people. What I thought was a dead religion that had nothing more to offer me but more pain and more burdens became a practice of faith that connected me not only to God but to my neighbors. That those of us who were wounded became the healers, and those of us who were hungry were suddenly the ones offering bread to each other. And those of us who had been thirsty now were bearing up water from these ancient wells in new wineskins. And those of us who were lonely found home. This is a redrawing of the geography of God to say the margins are our center now.
SARAH: Hi, friends. I'm Sarah Bessey.
JEFF: And I’m Jeff Chu. Welcome back to The Evolving Faith Podcast.
JEFF: I am as excited as I ever get, because today, we get to hear from—and I get to embarrass—our own dear Sarah.
SARAH: Oh. I regret every single decision that has led me here. I think I've spent most of the past few years that we've been doing Evolving Faith trying to get out of preaching at our own conference. And then I have to work just as hard to try to keep us from featuring me on the podcast season. And the fact that I continue to fail is starting to sound like the problem might be me here. I know I need to get over this but like. Yeah. Here we go.
JEFF: Okay so you made me suffer, so I feel as if it is only fair that it’s your turn now. And I say that with all the love of Jesus in my heart.
SARAH: You are the worst. The absolute worst. I can literally hear your smile on your face, right now.
JEFF: I am grinning. I don't deny it, and I do not deny that I am the worst. So, Sarah, this is the part of the podcast where I was recently told to switch gears from talking about you that we're supposed to do the chitchat. Apparently, it's in the manual of how to podcast.
SARAH: Well, if there's a manual that it's, it's one that we've never read, which sounds about right. And that's funny because you, you despise chitchat. And since I'm Canadian, like the only chitchat that I'm really good at is to talk about the weather for 10 minutes without even being prompted.
JEFF: So chitchat is not a part of my culture, and I actually believe that chitchat is violence.
SARAH: Yeah, you say that. But then a couple episodes ago, you were the one who is waxing philosophical about Derry Girls for like six whole minutes.
JEFF: Listen, that was serious cultural commentary and in-depth exploration about the use of humor as a coping mechanism and a psychological and sociological aid for processing the troubles in Northern Ireland. I do not see anything chitchatty about that, and as a certified wee gay fella, I still highly recommend Derry Girls.
SARAH: Can we—can we chitchat about chitchat? Is that a thing that we're actually doing right now? It feels very meta.
JEFF: If it wasn't before, it is now. Anyway, I think we've met the quota right? We've met the quota.
SARAH: Okay. So in the interest of being people, which I think is the point of the chitchat, how are you? And you cannot say tired because we are all tired.
JEFF: "How are you" is honestly the chitchattiest question. Is this Target? Are you a cashier?
SARAH: Only in my dreams. I was a shop girl at a Smart Set in the ’90s and I learned everything that I need to know about chitchat there. I can talk to anyone between Smart Set and my extroverted husband, I can, I can talk to anybody, including how to ask whether or not you want three pairs of socks for $9.
JEFF: So that was definitely a long time ago because where can you get three pairs of socks for $9 now?
SARAH: Are you calling me old? Is that your version of chitchat? You are so bad at this. This is violence.
JEFF: I did not call you old. I am engaging in an important discussion about inflation and the Consumer Price Index, the economic environment. And also you've now opened up a sociological analysis of the shame associated with aging in Western culture.
SARAH: You are so bad at this.
JEFF: Okay, I don't deny that. As we've already established, I’m the worst. So maybe let's just do your bio, because I think that is something you have been looking forward to all day long.
SARAH: Oh.
JEFF: Folks, you should all know that nothing gives Sarah Bessey more joy than having her bio read to her. I encourage you to do it at every opportunity.
SARAH: It's absolute depravity in action.
JEFF: I fully admit that the process of my sanctification is incomplete. Here we go: Sarah Bessey is the cofounder and coleader of Evolving Faith and the author of three books, Jesus Feminist, Out of Sorts, and Miracles and Other Reasonable Things, and the editor of the New York Times bestseller A Rhythm of Prayer. She writes the immensely popular weekly newsletter Field Notes, she enjoys tormenting me, and she also serves as the board chair of Heartline Ministries, which works to empower Haitian families. Sarah, her husband, and their four kids live in Calgary, Alberta, on the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region and the Metis Nation of Alberta, Region 3. She lives with chronic illness, and she loves knitting, books, tea, hockey, hugs, Doctor Who, Schitt’s Creek, and Jesus.
SARAH: It’s quite the list.
JEFF: Here’s our very own Sarah Bessey, speaking to us from Evolving Faith 2019, in Denver, Colorado, in a hockey arena.
Part 2: Sarah’s Talk
<<<<TRANSITIONAL MUSIC>>>
This morning, I'm just going to warn you right out the gate, I really still have quite a thing about Jesus.
I'm sorry, I just can't seem to get over it. And so I wanted to take a little bit of time this morning to actually turn to the words of Jesus, mainly because they were very foundational to Rachel and I, when we were envisioning and dreaming up a lot of this gathering. The first time that I read this passage of Scripture over in Matthew 11, I read it as a child throughout my life, and I think that, like a lot of us, I had this experience of reading words and being familiar with them and then a moment happens in your life, where all of a sudden it changes. And those words mean something different to you now.
And it says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” This is Jesus speaking. “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
And then later on in my life, when I was in a very intense season of heartbreak and burnout and deconstruction—you can mark that on your bingo card—I read it in Eugene Peterson's Message. And he translated it as “Are you tired, worn out, burned out on religion? Come to me, get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me. Watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill fitting on you. Keep company with me. And you'll learn to live freely. And lightly.”
It is not an exaggeration for me to tell you that reading these words in this particular language saved not only my faith but probably my life in a lot of ways. They are at the core of what we were longing for when we threw open the doors to Evolving Faith.
The reason why the first time I read those words in that translation I burst into tears is because my experiences with the Christian religion had pretty much become the exact opposite of that. I was tired, and I was worn out. I was completely burned out on religion, a religion that had become a place of heartbreak and pain for me both personally and communally. I could not even call myself a Christian for a good long time because everything about even the label Christian felt heavy and ill-fitting, and this was 10 years before Donald Trump came on the scene.
So this vision from Jesus, this promise even, of an unforced rhythm of grace, to a life of faith, when everything about it had been feeling so forced. And so ill-fitting and like such a burden, like behavior modification, and perfectionism and purity culture, like earning and striving and everything always feeling like this adventure in missing the point. It was like Jesus giving me permission to take a breath and just not have it all figured out for a minute. And that is what my hope is for you this weekend. And so there are three things I wanted to bring out to you about why this has mattered, and how this passage of Scripture has given me a path to follow while I have been in the wilderness.
The first one is this. It is that God acknowledges your weariness and your burden. I find it so incredibly healing, and helpful to remember that Jesus did not judge the burdened one for the burden, or the sad one for your sadness, or the brokenhearted one for your grief. Jesus is never someone who turned around and said, “Well, you know, if you just had more quiet time” or “It's all about your perspective,” or “You're just being so negative.” There's a tenderness to the words of Jesus here that I needed. That God acknowledges even. With that acknowledgement, it felt like blessing our weariness, acknowledging that the yoke has been too heavy.
In a way it reminded me of when my children were really little because we used to do this thing. You know, kids just kind of have like bumps and bruises along the way. And whenever things like that would happen, I would kind of bundle them up in my arms and with a very terrible Scottish accent say something along the lines of “You pour wee lamb,” and it would kind of, they would laugh, and it would kind of jelly up lots of, you know, lots of affection about it. But by the time that our youngest was born, we have four children—thoughts and prayers—teenagers to preschools. Bless it. By the time our fourth came along, that phrase “poor wee lamb” had become something actually quite tender in our family, whether it was, you know, to be said when they had a fever when they were in bed, or, you know, at the end of the day, when we were debriefing a hard day of growing up, because God, it's hard to be a kid. There was something about how I noticed that they would lean in like they were craving my acknowledgement of their suffering. They needed it to be named before they could begin to turn towards healing or towards moving forward or even getting back up.
One day in fact, when our youngest, Maggie, was only about two, she was with her babysitter for the day while I was at work, and she had a bit of a bad fall on the sidewalk. And she was fine all day. I mean, just had a scrape, got it bandaged up, it was all right. Little palms of her hand had some scratches on them. But when I walked in the door, at the end of the day, she turned around, her eyes filled up with tears, her arms held up, and she said, “Mummy, I need you to call me a poor wee lamb.” There was just something in the acknowledgement of pain that she was craving. And in a lot of ways when I read now this passage of Scripture, those first few questions of “Are you tired and worn out? Are you burned out on religion?” it reads to me almost through my lens of mothering that God is joining us and acknowledging our pain and naming it with us.
And there is something still within us that craves the one whom we love to acknowledge our burden. And I'm not just talking about our doubts and our fears and our cynicism, our skepticism, our disbelief, those things are real and absolutely are part of what I'm talking about here.
But I think that Jesus was also talking about burdens that are not only internal but external. So Jesus, in a way, is calling out the heavy yoke of the religious elite or the powerful or our culture that is often placed upon ordinary people. That burden is not imaginary, friends. It's not just all in your head. Because it is a burden to bear when we see so many of our churches and our communities and our friends and our families not only capitulating to but baptizing and sacred language the evils of Christian nationalism and fearfulness and dehumanization. Religion is this measuring stick for worthiness, cruelty and patriarchy and homophobia and transphobia. These are burdens, and you cannot deny that.
So it's good and healing for us to name it in this space. That Mother God acknowledges your grief, and your burden and your pain and your weariness today. And it's okay to rest in that. If that's the place where you are today, you can check out emotionally and mentally right now as I keep going. That's enough.
The second thing I want to draw your attention to is the phrase “Walk with me and work with me. Watch how I do it.” Because after this acknowledgement of our burden, after an acknowledgement of the fact that it has been heavy and ill-fitting and hard to walk with, that Jesus turns around and says, “You know what, come away with me. Walk with me. Work with me. Watch how I do it.”
There's an invitation to Jesus's way of being human that I find incredibly compelling. Still. During all of my seasons of deconstruction and rebuilding, it felt like I got angrier because I was like, “Do you not all know how amazing this is?” I felt almost ripped off in a lot of ways because I began to see the subversiveness of Jesus that had been long tamed and neutered, explained away by so many that Jesus was embodying real rest and unforced rhythms of grace.
I began to see that God is feeding the hungry. That God is aligning with the poor and oppressed, that God is honoring children and eating with sex workers and sinners and considering it an honor. That God was teaching women and including them in their disciples, was washing the feet of their followers and calming storms and laying down their life not to satisfy some cosmic judge bloodbath, but for us, and Jesus was giving us a glimpse of what it means to live fully and completely within the love of God. And it then looks like love and freedom and wholeness and an unforced rhythm of grace. And so that invitation from Jesus to “come away with me, to walk with me and work with me and see how I do it” became then this invitation to this unforced rhythm of grace.
I have often said that it is following Jesus that made a feminist out of me. But I can also say that it was following Jesus that made me care about climate change and stewardship of the earth and Indigenous rights and missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. It was following Jesus that compelled me to fully affirm our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters and siblings. That it was following Jesus that made me care about justice and borders and politics and theology about pronouns and fiscal policy, about maternal health care justice, and refugees, and good food, and remembering the importance to sing together sometimes. That it was following Jesus that is still compelling me to do the work of decolonizing my faith, to grapple with my own privilege, to cast down and root out white supremacy not only from my own individual faith but from the structures and systems of my faith. And it was following Jesus that compelled me to love my Bible again. Because Jesus could remind me that he was the word, the logos, of God spoken to us. And now I could let the Bible be what it was instead of the fourth member of the Trinity. It was following Jesus that led me to pray for my enemies instead of curse them, and that led me to love the ones that I had been taught to despise. And that reminded me that no longer are we servants, but that God called us friends.
And there is an unforced rhythm of grace to this. Because Jesus reawakened me and recovered me and restored me to that gospel. This is the gospel that I learned at the feet of Jesus, hanging onto the hem of his garment: the length and width and depth and breadth of God's love is not fearful or restrictive or small or dull, that it is a wide-open love that sets us free.
It's a love that never steals, never kills, and never destroys us. It came that all of us might have life and life that is more abundant. It is this sort of love that brings that rest, that lifts our burdens and restores our souls and opens our hearts and changes lives. Because it turns out that what I had been taught was the wilderness, the thing to be afraid of, was actually God's grace and goodness. That what I thought was the desert was where I found intimacy with God. And what I thought was just a plain pile of stones was an altar where fire would descend, what I thought was exile became home, and you bunch of misfits became my people.
What I thought was a dead religion that had nothing more to offer me but more pain and more burdens became a practice of faith that connected me not only to God but to my neighbors. That those of us who were wounded became the healers. And those of us who were hungry were suddenly the ones offering bread to each other. And those of us who have been thirsty, now we're bearing up water from these ancient wells in new wineskins. And those of us who are lonely found home. This is a redrawing of the geography of God to say the margins are our center now.
And so that brings me to the final thing I wanted to share with you, about this passage of Scripture that has shaped me, is that there is still so much good work to do. That the yoke that Jesus speaks of here isn't necessarily, in this context, good or evil. It's benign; it's just a tool that keeps two creatures together to do work together. And Jesus says that his yoke is easy, is light, and it isn’t ill-fitting. It's a way of keeping company, and that to me is a gospel of hope. That God cares about our burdens and our weariness, that God enters into them, is as present in our suffering as in our joy, in our grief as in our victories. That God has given us now good work to do.
And we get to do it together alongside of one another. This is why the name of God, of Emmanuel, is so powerful: it's God with us. And Jesus didn't say here that the work is removed or over. That it still remains to be done. And so to me, then there was an invitation. There was peace to make, justice to roll down, and goodness to sow, and we get to do that in cooperation and co-creation, co-participation with God and being alongside of each other.
So this gathering to me, at this point, is more than my own comfort and giving you a nice new set of answers. I feel like that's the least thing any of us need to do, is to come up here and say, “Well, you don't know what you think about these things. So here's a nice new set. Go ahead and memorize these and everything will be fine.” That's not what the invitation is. And also just God help us from becoming progressive fundamentalists with new ideas but still dressed up in the same burdens of perfectionism and performance and purity.
So no matter where you find yourself in relation to Jesus, the invitation to walk with God and see how they do things is still a good one. It's a good one. It's an invitation to grace because it doesn't end at the false boundary of at our own business. The end of our stories isn't in our wounding. It isn't our burden or our exhaustion or our disappointment. The end of the story isn't the ones who placed the burdens upon you. The end of the story is our healing, our restoration, our hope, our good work in this world, that the despised will be celebrated, that the last will be first. That the least will be greatest and injustice will be made right. That God's thumb will be the one wiping away our tears.
So wherever you find yourself in this wilderness, you need to know that you are welcome. Whether you are needing that tender acknowledgment of your burden from God, whether you are needing to reorient yourself to that inclusive radical love of God to an unforced rhythm of what grace might look like in your life, or whether now in this place, you needed a reminder that there is still some good work to do not in spite of your love for God but because of your love for God. To me, that is some incredibly good news.
<<<<TRANSITIONAL MUSIC>>>
SARAH: If you’ve been listening to and loving this podcast, join us for Evolving Faith 2022, the live virtual conference. It’s on October 14 and 15.
So many of us are engaging in good, hard, holy work right now to cultivate love and reimagine and build a faith that works not only for us but for the whole world, and to find our way in the wilderness together. We need to be reminded of what matters, who is alongside of us. We need connection, inspiration, good conversations and laughter, and we need some hope too. We are gathering not in spite of these turbulent times, but because of them. So please join us.
We have set a big, rowdy table in the middle of the wilderness, and together, we will have a feast. We’re saving a spot for you.
Go to evolvingfaith.com and register today. You won’t want to miss this moment with this community. It’s pretty special. Okay, now back to the show.
Part 3: Conversation
JEFF: So I think where I want to start, Sarah, is with the gentle word you have, which I could honestly afford to hear more often—and that's only partially a hint—that God acknowledges when we're weary and when we're burdened, that Jesus understands what weighs us down, that the Holy Spirit is not just alongside us but actually with us in our exhaustion or in whatever we're walking through. And I think it was particularly important to me, and I imagine for others too, that you named examples of things Jesus didn't say: “Well, you know, if you just had more quiet time” or “it's all about your perspective” or “you're just being so negative” because these are all things that people have actually said to me at various points in my life. So here's my question for you: How do you experience God's acknowledgment of your weariness and your burdens? Like, how do you feel God meeting you in those hard moments and those tough times?
SARAH: You know, it's a small part of the talk, I know, but it's a—and it is a small thing maybe to talk about in the context of parenting, and I brought it up perhaps because it has been pretty counterintuitive for me. I think that, you know probably better than most people that I have this instinct to like aggressively cheer people up or to distract them from whatever pain we're experiencing. Like, if you need a silver lining found, I will find it. And remarkably, nobody has ever magically become fine because they were told "You're fine" by me. And so it's a gift of an Enneagram 9, I guess. So, yeah. I think that that acknowledgment from God about our suffering is a thing that I had to learn when my children were smaller. It still serves us now when they're teenagers that yes, it hurts, that yes, we're sad and we're tired and yes, we're suffering and being loved right in the midst of that. And even in light of, you know, kind of the moment in time that we're in, like, yes, this world is broken and there are powers and principalities at work. I've found that learning to tell the truth is its own form of comfort and rest. And so when you're asking me how I experience God's presence in those times, sometimes it's simply in the truth and telling the truth, which is what helps me turn towards even a possibility of healing and rising. And, you know, it's in naming that truth—whether it's to God, to myself, to one another—there's a sense of being held as you admit that you and the world are not fine. And that has to happen first for me in order to be able to, you know, turn towards a possibility of hope or faith or justice, towards the co-creation of making things right. And so when I experience that now, I often experience it as permission and comfort as a kind of permission to even finally say, “I'm not fine and I'm not okay.”
JEFF: I’m guessing, though, that you still don’t want me to say, “Sarah, you’re not fine. It’s not fine.”
SARAH: Yeah, that’s fine.
JEFF: Haha. Okay. Yeah, that sounded fine. Everything's always fine with Sarah, except when it's not.
SARAH: And it's not really quickly.
JEFF: So there's, there's this moment of such clarity midway through your talk when you mention letting the Bible be what it is rather than the fourth member of the Trinity. I love that phrasing. It was so clarifying. Can you talk a little bit about what you're responding to in that comment, maybe how you used to see Scripture and how you experience it now?
SARAH: Well, I appreciate you not calling out my math skills on the fourth member of the Trinity. It didn't make sense, but it made sense in my brain. So this is secretly actually a major part of my own faith shift, my own experience in evolving faith. We've mentioned before that I'm more from a Word of Faith or prosperity gospel branch of the charismatic kind of Pentecostal-ish expression in the church. And let me tell you, we loved what we thought our Bible said.
JEFF: I have always loved what I wanted the Bible to say.
SARAH: Exactly. You know, in some ways, I mean, I don't want—I don't want people to misunderstand me because there are a lot of sweet memories for me. And I know not everybody has that story, but I don't want to take away the gifts or the nuance there. Often we were first-generation believers who did not know how to read the Bible—we were never taught—and so of course we read things rather literally. But there is a shadow side to that, and it was that we elevated the words we liked in the Bible to being God themself, right? We worshiped the Bible. We made the Bible the center of our faith rather than God. Or maybe even a better way of saying that is we made our way of interpreting and understanding the Bible the center. But either way, it could sometimes feel like magic spells or ways of shutting down conversations or even ways of shutting down our doubts and our questions, our experiences, our—even our humanity. You know, like that “the Bible says it, that settles it” sort of thing, when in truth, it's that like “if the Bible says it, well, then we probably have like a whole lot of conversation ahead of us.” And so when I lost that way of reading the Bible, which I think I've talked about in a couple of my books, but when I lost that way of reading the Bible, I thought that meant I'd lost the Bible. But instead, it became this, I don't know, almost this threshold for learning the Bible again. It became a conversation, not a weapon or a toolkit or even a life manual. And I take the Bible so much more seriously now that I don't have to take everything literally. But what's your experience been? This is not just my turn to talk. What's been your experience with reading the Bible?
JEFF: I suppose it’s pretty similar to yours, although probably with a different theological spin, since I didn’t grow up charismatic. But I did grow up with pretty literal readings of the text. I have always loved Scripture, even though I’ve always been pretty terrible about consistency with quiet times—which is just one of a gazillion reasons that I was never a good evangelical. Of course, as a gay kid, there were moments when it felt as if Scripture was being used against me—and certainly I think it has been misinterpreted—and sometimes people have wondered why I’m not more angry at the Bible. I will say that I was probably helped by two things: One, I went to a Christian school, and in high school, maybe 11th grade, I took a class called The Bible as Literature. God bless Linda Warner, a teacher who finds herself undoubtedly in a very different theological place than I do today, but who helped these teenagers see that the Bible has layers—that there’s poetry and allegory and all different genres of writing that require interpretation, not just prophecy and law and rules. The second thing, I’d say honestly, is an upside to being Chinese: I don’t think I ever saw the Scriptures as primarily being about me or my people or our story. The way I understood it, at least as was transmitted to me by my grandparents—and my grandfather was a preacher and my grandmother a Bible teacher—the way I understood it was that we were grafted into this rich tradition and very blessed to be so, but while we honored the Bible and we treasured it, there was also just a little bit of a helpful distance from it. Does that make sense? Sometimes I guess it’s easier to have a good relationship with a thing without the kind of pressure that comes with having it be mine.
SARAH: Oh, that's a whole word. I think that that helpful distance would probably serve a lot of folks well, right now. You know, like I'm thinking even, as an outsider, I've often been curious about how America often sees itself as like the new Israel or how the Christian nationalist thing almost seems to see themselves as the center of that biblical story, like, they’re Israel or the hero. And in my eyes, you know, America's usually probably the empire in the story.
JEFF: I think it's always dangerous to see yourself as the hero of a story, right? And supersessionism, which I guess is the fancy term for what you're talking about, is a really troubling thing.
SARAH: Look at you trotting out all of your seminary words for us here. I'm impressed. You know, that's actually one thing that I remember you and Rachel really having in common was that you were both Bible nerds in a very similar way.
JEFF: One regret I have—one regret I have genuinely is that we never did a sword drill, because I was really good at them, and I wish I knew whether I could have beaten her. But yes, Rachel and I shared a deep affection for Scripture—and I know you love the Bible too.
SARAH: You know, I find myself weirdly stubborn about loving the Bible, about wanting to still wrestle with it and be in conversation with and even about it. Yeah, I mean, weirdly stubborn. I hang on to, almost like I don't, I don't want to give it up to everyone else yet. I'm really grateful for the teachers and the guides who have helped almost give me back my Bible.
JEFF: So maybe this is kind of relevant to what we’re talking about, because people have some pretty strong feelings about Scripture. You tuck what I think is a pretty important word in, right near the end of your talk, and I want to ask you about it just for a moment. You say, “God help us from becoming progressive fundamentalists with new ideas, but still dressed up in the same burdens of perfectionism and performance and purity.” I wondered if we could wrestle with this just briefly, because I think you might have some folks saying that they are just trying to live out justice in a way that the church hasn’t done so well, and so what’s wrong with high standards? Is purity such a bad thing when you’re talking about behaviors and practices that really harm people?
SARAH: Yeah, that’s a really good point, and I think it's a fair point, right. And what’s funny is even looking back on it now from this vantage point, that wasn’t actually in my notes. Which, you know, I’m a notes preacher. I write out everything I’m planning to say like in complete sentences. I believe, you know, the Holy Spirit is as present in preparation as in the act of preaching, but that’s just my own little soapbox. But anyway, yeah, it just kind of emerged while I was talking, pretty organically. I think I meant it in terms of spiritual formation. Like, there are stages of faith when fundamentalism makes sense, no matter what you believe, just developmentally. And fundamentalism isn’t necessarily what you believe but how you believe it, right?
JEFF: Wait, I want to think about that for a moment. Can you say a bit more about what you mean?
SARAH: Well, I think it was James Fowler who talked about that in his stages of faith, where he talked—I'm not going to get this entirely right—but he talks about how when we weave through these stages of faith, including kind of that, you know, early stages of like the mythic literal, you know, “if this then that,” you know, kind of, you know, a way of understanding our faith, that it's actually very developmentally normal. The problem is when we stop there and we just want to swap out the answers, right? So we become fundamentalists or Puritans or the “if this then that” kind of folks with different theology or practices or ideas. But we never actually become more loving, more open, more curious. And I think that that's what I was getting at here. I rarely feel like we're looking for necessarily just new answers, right? We—I'm needing to grow and evolve and develop. I need more awareness and perspective, even, you know, that sixth stage of Fowler stuff, of that sense of universal love beyond the boundaries of who is in and who is out. And I do think that we need the high standards like you were talking about. I do think we need to be calling people in towards our best ideals and best hopes. And so when I look at it maybe from this vantage point, it seems, I don't know, maybe even naive or foolish, but I do believe that how we do something matters. And I do believe that we're called to embody love and joy and peace and patience, self-control, even. And not, you know, and I know that there's a lot of nuance. And I don't mean, like, "be nice" by any stretch. I think what I mean is that I don't want to take the very things that have been used as tactics against people—silencing, bullying, cruelty, casual dismissals, gossip, performative public pile-on—and somehow think that I can baptize those tactics or I can use them better because I have better ideas and better theology and better ends. I would hope, I would hope that an evolving faith isn't just about new ideas or opinions—although those matter and they are important—but it's rather a new way of being in the world, which is a very adaptive and curious and loving way.
JEFF: I hope evolving faith is about a deeper and sometimes more difficult love. And I name that it's difficult because it's important to acknowledge that love can be really costly sometimes. You know, I've gotten in trouble before, and I probably will again for saying that those of us who have been dehumanized and shamed, especially for some aspect of our humanity, should know better than to dehumanize and shame others. And I really, truly believe that even when I believe that someone is acting unjustly. But I understand the impulse.
SARAH: Well, of course. I mean, it's a hard thing to talk about because there is a lot of nuance there. And I mean, especially when you're trying to have a lot of these conversations in maybe an online space, which is where nuance goes to die. But you also need a lot of discernment. And I think I have a default, I know I have a default, for wanting people to be nice and polite. But a big part of even my own journey has been learning how to be disruptive, to learn how to be bolder, to name what's true, like we talked about kind of at the beginning of this, in order to even have a chance at healing. And so my approach here, I think, is one of a learner, you know, learning to be a peacemaker, not just a peacekeeper. But, yeah, I do—I still feel called to love. I feel called to kindness, even when sometimes that love and that kindness can be perceived by others as disruptive and difficult. And I think that there's some tension there.
JEFF: So you end with this beautiful reminder to people that they're welcome. And at Evolving Faith, we really do try to create a sense of embrace, a literal one for those who really like hugs, but more metaphorical for those of us who are maybe not so into them, and I'm only half-joking because each of us experiences embrace in a different way. So I'm curious, and I guess this is fundamentally a love languages question: how do you best feel reminded that you are loved?
SARAH: I'm not really sure how to answer that, and I am not even sure that I like the question.
JEFF: So maybe the answer is “When Jeff doesn't ask me questions like that, I know that I am loved.”
SARAH: We could end there and I'd be satisfied, but I don't—I think it's a hard question because it feels like asking me how I experience breathing. Like it's just so fundamental to how I have experienced life in the world. And God, like I, I feel like I abide there. Like, my, my home address is, is in that love. I live out of it constantly and always. That has been part of my wilderness experience, almost like when you—when you think that you know the stars, when you are in your house, in the city, and you look up and you see the stars and you say, "Aren't they beautiful?" But then you go out in the mountains to like a dark sky preserve and you realize like, "Holy wow, we're moving." And there is an absolute sea of stars in this thing that we exist within. And being in the wilderness and having I mean, like, you know, Barbara Brown Taylor talked about that in our first episode, of having so much stripped away really left me with just that—love, my God’s love, love in every form. Love and the dirt and the stars and in each other. I rest there and I feel like I live there. That's where I learned that. And so, you know, it's the only thing that I know for sure sometimes is that I'm loved and you're loved. And we are all held in such a beautiful, strong, real love, like the air that we breathe. And so it's—it's not the reminder of love as so much a reminder of reality of what's true. And so maybe, I guess this is maybe why I didn't like the question, because me saying, well, "I just do and also God loves you" can feel, I don’t know, dismissive and simplistic and I don't, I don't mean it that way. This is the deep well water of my life. And it feels very inadequate to explain. And I know that I'm failing at it because it's not about how or what or when as much as it just is. It always is and always was and always will be.
JEFF: It doesn't feel dismissive to me at all, because as your friend, I love it for you. And I'll confess, I'm just a tiny bit envious when you say, “My home address is in that love.” It's such a gorgeous thing, and I would love to know what that's like someday because I just don't. I can talk a really good love game, but sometimes I see it because I'm trying to convince myself of it and remind myself in my heart of this thing that I believe in my mind. You say it because it’s a reminder of your reality, and I say it because I want it to be my reality. But maybe, maybe that's the beauty of community. And I say this with full conviction. I don't need to convince myself of this part. I'm so glad that there are people who don't question the reality of that love, who don't have to struggle quite as much toward that kind of love. Because we need their witness. We need your witness. And I think precisely because you're so conscious of how that feeling of being loved could be misunderstood, you're not going to make that mistake. And I think it's a gift to the rest, to the rest of us that you don't question the reality of God's love, because you then get to shine that out into a world that desperately needs more love and more hope. And you do it really well. I've been a beneficiary of it. I guess I also don't think we can ever say that to someone too often if we really mean it. God loves you and I love you with a deep and profound and abiding love. That just sounds like good news to me.
SARAH: Yeah, me too. I love you, Jeff Chu.
JEFF: Love you too, Sarah. And you survived your episode so you can go lie down now.
Part 4: Outro
[ Instrumental Music: It Is Well With My Soul by SueAnn Shiah ]
JEFF: Folks, you can find all of the links mentioned on today’s show as well as information about our friend Sarah and her work in the world, links and graphics to share, as well as a full transcript of this episode in our show notes at evolvingfaith.com/podcast. Sign up for my newsletter at jeffchu.substack.com and follow my dog, Fozzie, on Instagram at @fozziefozz.
SARAH: You can find me, Sarah Bessey, if you’re not sick of me already, at sarahbessey.com for all my social media links, the sign-up link for my newsletter Field Notes, and of course, my books. The Evolving Faith Podcast is produced by us, Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu, along with the multitalented SueAnn Shiah, who also provided our music. And please join us next week as we listen to our friend Jasper Peters. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Evolving Faith Podcast. And until next time, friends, remember that you are loved.
<<<<TRANSITIONAL MUSIC>>>
JEFF: Throughout our time together at Evolving Faith, there’s 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 need companions for the journey. We need folks to accompany us and be alongside us.
So we are delighted to invite you to join the Evolving Faith Community online, a new space we’ve created—and we hope you will co-create with us—for better conversations, deeper connections, questions big and small, and content that we hope will be inspiring and meet you where you are.
It’s free to join the Evolving Faith Community. Our desire is that you might find some fellow travelers in this oasis with whom you can feel a renewed sense of belonging and maybe even some hope. So come, explore, and share. All you have to do is go to community.evolvingfaith.com and sign up. We can’t wait to greet you. See you there.
