Seekers & Skeptics, Hope’s Tuesday night book discussion group, will begin discussing a new book, Pastrix, The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint by Nadia Bolz-Weber on Tuesday, January 7, 2014. Bolz-Weber is pastor of House For All Sinners And Saints, an ELCA mission church in Denver, Colorado, and is a leading voice in the emerging church movement.

Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint Outrageous, rich, and remarkable, PASTRIX turns spiritual memoir on its ear in this sardonically irreverent and beautifully honest page-turner. Nadia Bolz-Weber takes no prisoners as she reclaims the term “pastrix” (pronounced “pas-triks,” a term used by some Christians who refuse to recognize female pastors) in her messy, beautiful, prayer-and-profanity laden narrative about an unconventional life of faith.

Page xvii: The story told in this book is not chronological, but rather thematic. It’s about the development of Nadia’s faith, the expression of her faith, and the community of her faith.

Page xvii: “How the Christian faith, while wildly misrepresented in so much of American culture, is really about death and resurrection.”

Page 9: “here in the midst of my own community of underside dwellers that I couldn’t help but begin to see the Gospel, the life-changing reality that God is not far off, but here among the brokeness of our lives. And having seen it, I couldn’t help but point it out. For reasons I’ll never quite understand, I realized that I had been called to proclaim the Gospel from the place where I am, and proclaim where I am from the Gospel.”

Page 15: “I can’t imagine that the God of the universe is limited to our ideas of God. .. In a way, I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.”

“Unlike my feelings toward the Christian fundamentalism from which I would soon part ways, I never stopped valuing the spiritual weirdness of hospitality and community. … I was looking for a community in which all of me would actually fit in.” (Page 26)

“..the connection — the deep, ongoing, and personal connection people like Margery had with God, a power greater than their alcoholic selves — was in no way based on piety or righteousness. It was based solely on something I could related to a hell of a lot more: desperation.” (Page 38)

“God’s grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings.” (Page 49)

“If they choose to leave when we don’t meet their expectations, they won’t get to see how the grace of God can come in and fill the holes left by our community’s failure, and that’s just too beautiful and too real to miss.” (Page 54)

“What makes Lutherans blessed is not, as I once thought, that they’re somehow different from the people in the Church of Christ where I was raised. Rather, what makes us all blessed is that, like the landowner in the parable, God comes and gets us, taps us on the shoulder, and says, ‘Pay attention, this is for you.’ Dumb was we are, smart and faithful as we are, just as we are.” (Page 56)

“There’s a popular misconception that religion, Christianity specifically, is about knowing the difference between good and evil so that we can choose the good. But being good has never set me free the way truth has. Knowing all of this makes me love and hate Jesus at the same time. Because, when instead of contrasting good and evil, he contrasted truth and evil, I have to think about all the times I’ve substituted being good (or appearing to be good) for truth.” (Page 72)

“There is simply no knowable answer to the question of why there is suffering. But there is meaning. And for me that meaning ended up being related to Jesus — Emmanuel — which means, “God with us.” We want to go to God for answers, but sometimes what we get is God’s presence.” (Page 86)

“I was, now a pastor of a GLBTQ “inclusive” congregation, and I felt revulsion at seeing an intersex person. It was humbling to say the least. And it made me face, in a very real way, the limitations of inclusion. If the quality of my Christianity lies in my ability to be more inclusive than the next pastor, things get tricky because I will always, always encounter people — intersex people, Republicans, criminals, Ann Coulter, etc. — whom I don’t want in the tent with me. Always. I only really want to be inclusive of some kinds of people and not others.” (Page 90)

“I was reminded again of the loaves and fishes. ‘What do we have?’ they asked. ‘We have nothing. Nothing but a few loaves and a couple of fish.’ And they said this as though it were a bad thing. The disciples’ mistake was also my mistake: They forgot that they have a God who created the universe out of ‘nothing,’ that can put flesh on dry bones ‘nothing,’ that can put life in a dusty womb ‘nothing.’ I mean, let’s face it, ‘nothing’ is God’s favorite material to work with.” (Page 104)

“I think loving our enemies might be too central to the Gospel — to close to the heart of Jesus — for it to wait until we mean it.” (Page 115)

“For far too long, I believed that how the Church of Christ saw me, or how my family saw me, or how society saw me, was the same as how God saw me.” (Page 138)

“Somewhere along the way I was taught that evil is fought through justice and might. … So maybe retaliation or holding on to anger about the harm done to me doesn’t actually combat evil. Maybe it feeds it.” (Page 149)

“Jesus brings a kingdom ruled by the crucified one and populated by the unclean and always found in the unexpected. I’d expected to look at the past and see only mistakes that I’d moved on from, to see only damage and addiction and tragic self-delusion. But by thinking that way, I’d assumed that God was nowhere to be found back then. But that’s kind of an insult to God. It’s like saying, ‘You only exist when I recognize you.'” (Page 162)

There are times when I hear my name, turn, and recognize Jesus. There are times when faith feels like a friendship with God. But there are many other times when it feels more adversarial or even vacant. Yet none of that matters in the end. How we feel about Jesus or how close we feel to God is meaningless next to how God acts upon us.” (Page 176)

“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.” (Page 184)

“Repentance in Greek means something much closer to ‘thinking differently afterward’ than it does ‘changing your cheating ways.'” (Page 192)

“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 me.” (Page 193)

“The greatest spiritual practice is just showing up. And Mary Magdelene is the patron saint of just showing up. Showing up, to me, means being present to what is real, what is actually happening.” (Page 197)

“And it was her, a deeply faithful and deeply flawed woman, whom Jesus chose to be the first witness of his resurrection and to whom he commanded to go and tell everyone else about it.” (Page 198)

Chapter 16: Dirty Fingernails

• “The notion that our names are spoken by Jesus, and that this is what makes us turn and recognize him, had become important to me, especially in light of how I was called by God.” (Page 167)
• “He confessed that after nine months at our church he still wasn’t so sure about this Jesus thing. But he knew something real happened in church, especially in the Eucharist.” (Page 168)
• “The best I could do in that moment was to assure Michael that I didn’t care that he felt like Jesus was ignoring him.” (Page 169)
• Nadia reminds Michael about how they first met, and what has happened since. (Easter Sunday sermon at Red Rocks)
• “Easter is not a story about new dresses and flowers and spiffiness. Really, it’s a story about flesh and dirt and bodies and confusion, and it’s about the way God never seems to adhere to our expectations of what a proper God would do (as in not get himself killed in a totally avoidable way.)” (Page 172)
• “New doesn’t always look perfect. Like the Easter story itself, new is often messy.” (Page 174)
• “God simply keeps reaching down into the dirt of humanity and resurrecting us from the graves we dig for ourselves through our violence, our lies, our selfishness, our arrogance, and our addictions. And God keeps loving us back to life over and over.” (Page 174)
• “Lack of connections is death,” he told me as we sat in Hooked on Colfax, nine months after he’d first visited HFASS. “The opposite of that is being able to hug a perfect stranger.” (Page 175)
• There are times when I hear my name, turn, and recognize Jesus. There are times when faith feels like a friendship with God. But there are many other times when it feels more adversarial or even vacant. Yet none of that matters in the end. How we feel about Jesus or how close we feel to God is meaningless next to how God acts upon us.” (Page 176)

Chapter 17: The Wrong Kind of Different

• “It was the summer of 2011, and three months earlier a bad thing and a couple of good things had happened” (Page 178)
• Bad: HFASS was evicted from the church building they had been in for three years
• Good: Nadia preached at Red Rocks and the Denver Post cover feature, with her picture, had been printed.
• “This will change everything, I’d thought.” (Page 179)
• Up to this point HFASS rarely had more than 45 people show up on Sunday
• “When I dreamed of my church growing, I dreamed of having seventy people at liturgy.” (Page 179)
• “The very next week after Easter — after the Post and after Red Rocks — our church doubled in size.” (Page 180)
• “But what we didn’t realize was that they were going to stay, and that they wouldn’t look like us.”
• “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.” (Page 181)
• “I called a meeting for the church to talk about the ‘sudden growth and demographic changes.'” (Page 182)
• “For the two weeks prior to the meeting, I had been engaged in a heated emotional battle, but now I felt calm.” (Page 183)
• “I had lost in what I felt like divine defeat. A few days before the meeting, I underwent what I can only describe as a heart transplant.”
• “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.” (Page 184)
• “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.” (Page 184)
• Russell was right.
• “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.'” (Page 185)
• “Aaaaand heart transplant healed.” (Page 186)
• “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 as going to be diluted.” (Page 187)

Chapter 18: He’s a Fuck-up, But He’s Our Fuck-up

• “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.” (Page 191)
• “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 the move quickly, well, once again, all of it makes be believe in God. And every time, it feels like repentance.” (Page 192)
• “Repentance in Greek means something much closer to ‘thinking differently afterward’ than it does ‘changing your cheating ways.'” (Page 192)
• “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 me.” (Page 193)
• “the real Rick has a history of childhood neglect, mental illness, and alcohol abuse.” (Page 193)

Chapter 19: Beer & Hymns

• “Singing vespers in a bar is something even we had never done, but it was July 20, 2012, and nineteen hours earlier and nine miles east of us, a gunman had walked into a midnight showing of a Batman movie and opened fire, killing twelve people and injuring dozens more. Some of our friends had been in that theatre.” (Page 196)
• “It took a few minutes for me to pinpoint the uniqueness of how these hymns were being sung. But then I knew. It was defiance.” (Page 197)
• “The greatest spiritual practice is just showing up. And Mary Magdelene is the patron saint of just showing up. Showing up, to me, means being present to what is real, what is actually happening.” (Page 197)
• “And it was her, a deeply faithful and deeply flawed woman, whom Jesus chose to be the first witness of his resurrection and to whom he commanded to go and tell everyone else about it.” (Page 198)
• “To sing to God amidst sorrow is to defiantly proclaim, like Mary Magdalene did to the apostles, and like my friend Don did at Dylan Klebold’s funeral, that death is not the final word.” (Page 201)

Chapter 12: The Haitian Stations of the Cross

• In this chapter Nadia writes about how she learned about the earthquakes in Haiti in January 2012 and how she determine how to lead HFASS’ reaction to it.
• Nadia’s challenge: what to preach on that Sunday with the assigned text for that day being the Wedding at Cana.
• “So the week of the earthquake, I started to see Mary in a long line of prophets who have not kept silent.” (Page 127)
• What liturgical practices do you like? (For example, the stations of the cross)

Chapter 13: Demons and Snow Angels

• In this chapter Nadia writes about identity, and our identity through baptism
• “That’s when Paul finally understood grace. Paul finally understood that God’s ability to name and love us is always greater than our ability to make ourselves worthy of either thing.” (Page 134)
• “Luther read that we are saved by grace and not through our ‘works,’ and when he read that he realized he had been lied to.” (Page 134)
• Nadia compares Paul and Luther to Asher (Mary Callahan), and notes that at the time of Asher’s naming rite she too was struggling with identity issues. Her feelings of self-worth too heavily tied to the success or failure of HFASS.
• Nadia is struggling with the sermon for that Sunday, the text for which is Jesus’s baptism, which she associates with identity.
• “Before we do anything wrong and before we do anything right, God has named and claimed us as God’s own.” (Page 138)
• “For far too long, I believed that how the Church of Christ saw me, or how my family saw me, or how society saw me, was the same as how God saw me.” (Page 138)
• “Our identity has nothing to do with how we are perceived by others.”
• In that sermon Nadia preached about demons.
• Martin Luther: “I am baptized.” (Page 140)
• “since the thing I love about baptism is that it is about God’s action upon us and not our decision to ‘choose’ God, I believe that the promises spoken over us in baptism are promises that are for all of humanity.” (Page 140)

Chapter 14: Doormats and Wrinkled Vestments

• In this chapter Nadia writes about preaching on the tenth anniversary of 9/11
• Tenth year anniversary of 9/11. “A cheerful, yellow square on which was written: ‘I can’t forgive this. Can you?’ (Page 145)
• “I find forgiveness to be one of the trickier elements of the Christian faith since it can feel like forgiving something is the same as saying it’s OK.” (Page 145)
• The lectionary texts for that Sunday were all about forgiveness
• “Jesus showed up ten years after the most unforgivable, murderous event of my lifetime and started babbling about forgiveness. And this made forgiveness feel less like a concept and more like a crucible.” (Page 147)
• “Jesus always seems to be pairing God’s forgiveness of us with our forgiveness of others. But why?” (Page 148)
• “Somewhere along the way I was taught that evil is fought through justice and might. … So maybe retaliation or holding on to anger about the harm done to me doesn’t actually combat evil. Maybe it feeds it.” (Page 149)
• “What if forgiveness, rather than being a pansy way of saying it’s OK, is actually a way of wielding bolt cutters and snapping the chain that links us?” (Page 150)
• “What happened on 9/11 was not OK. That’s why I need to forgive. Because I can’t be bound to that kind of evil. Lest it infect the evil in my own heart and metastasize it.” (Page 150)

Chapter 15: Ghosts in the Kingdom of Heaven

• In this chapter Nadia writes about recognizing the kingdom heaven.
• “The week Amy Winehouse died, I was trying to come up with a sermon for that Sunday when my ex-boyfriend sent me a Facebook friend request.” (Page 152)
• The gospel text is a string of parables in Matthew comparing the kingdom of heaven to things like a mustard seed and yeast and searching for fine pearls.
• “Every commentary and article I read about the parables offered me the same combination of obvious and useless.” (Page 159)
• In this context of her ex-boyfriend contacting her and preparing her sermon, she learns that Amy Winehouse is dead.
• “Yet Jesus says that heaven’s kingdom is like shrubs and nets and yeast. … I remembered that yeast was considered impure. … So then I began to consider that maybe the kingdom of heaven is found in the unclean and surprising and even the profane.” (Page 161)
• “I mistakenly had been thinking that the kingdom of heaven was something I should be able to find an illustration for on this side of my life.” (Page 162)
• “Jesus brings a kingdom ruled by the crucified one and populated by the unclean and always found in the unexpected. I’d expected to look at the past and see only mistakes that I’d moved on from, to see only damage and addiction and tragic self-delusion. But by thinking that way, I’d assumed that God was nowhere to be found back then. But that’s kind of an insult to God. It’s like saying, ‘You only exist when I recognize you.'” (Page 162)