Zombie movies have become popular in the last several years, what does the rise of zombie movies say about us?

The section “Give Me Freedom from the Pursuit of My Satisfaction” really speaks to me. In this section the focus is on obsession of the pursuit. Does the fact that “pursuit of happiness” is written in one of the founding documents of the United States say anything about that obsession?

Is selfishness natural or taught?

On page 79 Rollins writes, “Indeed, people who are driven to pursue something like wealth or fame are often painfully aware of this reality.” If that is the case, why are people driven for more, even when it is to their detriment?

“What we see here is a concrete example of how the freedom to pursue our highest ambitions is often not experienced as a freedom from an oppressive system but is itself felt to be oppressive.” (page 79)

How does the internal protest that Rollins describes on page 80 relating to parents, children and church?

Page 86, Rollins says the Good News of Christianity is, “You can’t be fulfilled; you can’t be made whole; you can’t find satisfaction.” Do you agree that this is good news?

Any comments on the reference to Ecclesiastes on page 91?

Any comments about Rollins’ take on atonement theories on page 93?

All the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves have a fictional quality. “A legend in our own mind.”

That which we are conscious of in ourselves is called the ego. This ego is the image we have of ourselves, the image that we present on a daily basis through work, recreation, and social medial. (page 54)

Our real beliefs are generally not to be found at the level of ego; rather they are more like the operating system of a computer they are the heart of the machine that causes it to act in certain ways.

We all have mythologies that we have constructed and adapted from infancy. The problem arises when we fully identify with these mythologies, viewing them as a complete and accurate description of who we are and how the world works. These narratives help us prop up the fantasy that we are in control of our destinies and are masters of our own actions. (page 60)

What do you think of Rollins’ explanation for Matthew 23:27-28? (page 62)

When we encounter a worldview different from our own, there are four common responses:

• One is a form of consumption, by which we attempt to integrate the other into our social body. We attempt to persuade them that they should believe and practice in a particular way.
• The second is a process of exclusion whereby we condemn and reject the other who cannot be consumed by us. “Vomiting the other out.”
• The third is toleration. There is an attempt to accept the other, even they they seem strange to us.
• The fourth is a dialogue aimed at finding agreement. It is the idea that beneath all our little differences, we’re really pretty much the same.
• In each of these we stand over the other

A different way to approach the other involves placing ourselves beneath them in the sense of allowing their views to challenge and unsettle our own.

Literalistic listening is different than what we normally do where we filter what a person is saying through our own experiences. Example of what we normally do on page 68. In literalistic listening we take careful note of everything the other says from their position instead of quickly interpreting it in relation to our own position.

It means that we don’t simply look at the other through our own eyes, but we attempt to look at ourselves through the eyes of the other.

The church often turns out to be the most extreme agent of this myth-making: it doesn’t simply offer a narrative that tells us who we are, why we are here, and where we are going, but it tells people that this narrative has been directly delivered by the divine. (page 71)

The question that faces us, then, is how Christianity, in its most radical and subversive form, critiques the church and offers real freedom.

In this chapter Rollins spends more time deconstructing what is traditionally taught about Original Sin, Idolatry and the Law.

• Original Sin: A sense of a gap in our lives
• Idolatry: that which we believe will fill the gap, the answer to all our problems

Rollins says (on page 26) that “What we see taking place in the church today is the reduction of God to an Idol…the church ends up mimicking every other industry by claiming that they can take away the sense of loss that marks our life. Do you agree or disagree?

What is your understanding of the Law and its relationship to sin?

Page 28, According to Rollins, Paul writes about how the Law and sin are actually intertwined and exist on the same side. “For Paul, the Law is the ‘no’ that appears to be opposed to the very structure it actually creates and upholds.”

Formula on page 29

Reaction to the following: “the ‘no’ that we are confronted with — the Law — turns what was previously an object that satisfies basic needs into an object of veneration. From that time forth we become little industries dedicated to the creation of Idols.

What is you understanding of the notion of “Total Depravity?”

• Rollins says the phrase does not mean there is no good within us, but instead refers to the idea that there is no part of our existence that is not marked by and influenced by the effect of this separation (Original Sin) and alienation (Law). (page 30)

Why are movies based on the chase for the MacGuffin so popular?

Page 37, “One of the primary fuels for hatred of others in the fantasy that they have access to the pleasure that we unsuccessfully seek.”

Page 39, “If we cannot have the Idol, then we wish to prevent the other from having it.”

On page 40 Rollins defines sin within the context of what we have been discussing, “sinful acts are simply acts dedicated to helping us grasp the ever elusive Idol.” Could include charitable work, marriage, church attendance, prayer, and random acts of kindness. Agree?

Page 41, “If an act is designed to bridge the gap between Original Sin and the Idol, then it falls into the theological category known in the biblical text as ‘works.'”

Jesus bridges the gap. Really? Does it work?

• Deferment
• Repression
• Disavowal

Three characteristics of the Idol:

• We experience it as existing
• It is felt to be sublime
• That which is ultimately meaningful

Creatio ex nihilo

• God creates out of nothing…. or
• Out of nothing (Original Sin), a god is created (the Idol).

“the God testified to in Christianity exposes the gap for what it is, obliterates it, and invites us to participate in an utterly different form of life, one that brings us beyond slavery to the Idol.” (page 48)

The full title of this book is: “The Idolatry of God, breaking our addiction to certainty and satisfaction.” What does this tell us about what this book is about? What are your expectations of the author?

Rollins starts the introduction by describing a commonly held belief about the apocalypse, is what he describes consistent with your understanding? (Page 1)

What is the “Good News” of Christianity?

Page 3: Did Jesus come to abolish religion or set up a new one? Did he seek to show us a way of escaping the world or of embracing it?

Page 4: “It is the claim of this book that Christ signals a type of apocalyptic event much more dramatic than the one we find in fundamentalist literature. For in the figure of Christ we are confronted with an atomic event that does not destroy the world, but rather obliterates the way in which we exist within the world.”

How do you feel about not knowing, and not being satisfied?

Chapter 1: The Church Shouldn’t Do Worship Music, the Charts Have It Covered

Creatio ex nihilio: something coming from nothing

In Chapter 1, Rollins suggests that infants undergo two births. The first is their physical entry into the world, the second is the birth of self-consciousness. Rollins says:

• “One of the fundamental experiences that arises from this second birth is a profound and disturbing sense of loss, for as soon as we experience our inner world, we encounter for the first time an outer world.” (page 12)

Page 12: “..for when we feel separated from something we assume there was something we once had.”

On page 15 Rollins introduces the concept of prohibition, and states that this is what Paul called “The Law.”

Can you think of any examples of a MacGuffin?

Rollins says that this sense of loss is a gap we spend our lives trying to fill, and that this gap at the core of our being has an ancient theological name: Original Sin. (page 19)

• Original Sin is parsed, “sin” meaning separation” and “original” referring to that which comes first.

On page 19 Rollins writes:

• “But this belief in something that would finally bring satisfaction is nothing more than a fantasy we create, a fantasy that fuels the obsessive drive we have for books, talks, and people who promise a life of total sexual, emotional, and/or spiritual fulfillment. This Original Sin is the very thing that causes us to falsely think it is not original at all. This sense of gap makes us think that there must have been something before it, an original blessing that we somehow lost.”

I am a bit uncertain about what Rollins is getting at in the bold sentence above. Is Rollins suggesting here that what we think we have lost, we in fact have not lost? It seems so, he goes on…

• “Sadly, almost the entire existing church fails to embrace the full radicality of what Original Sin actually means, for they presuppose that there is something we are separated from, something that will bring wholeness and insight.”

Rollins suggests that contemporary church worship music is really not too different from secular music. Do you agree or disagree?

Rollins then goes on to make a pretty strong statement about the church today. In observing how contemporary worship music tends to replace secular objects of desire with Jesus, he writes:

• “When such music is used in a church context, it renders the source of faith into just one more product promising us fulfillment, happiness, and unwavering bliss. The church then takes its place beside every other industry that is in the business of selling satisfaction.” (page 22)

The statement above raises the questions:

• why does the church exist?
• what is the church’s purpose?
• why am I a member of a church?
• what’s in it for me?

I’ve just started reading The Idolatry of God by Peter Rollins. Of all the books that we have read the last couple of years, Peter Rollins’ Insurrection was the most challenging. Rollins’ writing is the type you have to read twice, maybe more, to fully understand.

Rollins’ main motivation in his work appears to be to challenge our commonly held beliefs and practices.

In Chapter 1, Rollins suggests that infants undergo two births. The first is their physical entry into the world, the second is the birth of self-consciousness. Rollins says:

• “One of the fundamental experiences that arises from this second birth is a profound and disturbing sense of loss, for as soon as we experience our inner world, we encounter for the first time an outer world.” (page 12)

Rollins says that this sense of loss is a gap we spend our lives trying to fill, and that this gap at the core of our being has an ancient theological name: Original Sin. (page 19)

• Original Sin is parsed, “sin” meaning separation” and “original” referring to that which comes first.

On page 19 Rollins writes:

• “But this belief in something that would finally bring satisfaction is nothing more than a fantasy we create, a fantasy that fuels the obsessive drive we have for books, talks, and people who promise a life of total sexual, emotional, and/or spiritual fulfillment. This Original Sin is the very thing that causes us to falsely think it is not original at all. This sense of gap makes us think that there must have been something before it, an original blessing that we somehow lost.”

I am a bit uncertain about what Rollins is getting at in the bold sentence above. Is Rollins suggesting here that what we think we have lost, we in fact have not lost? It seems so, he goes on…

• “Sadly, almost the entire existing church fails to embrace the full radicality of what Original Sin actually means, for they presuppose that there is something we are separated from, something that will bring wholeness and insight.”

Rollins then goes on to make a pretty strong statement about the church today. In observing how contemporary worship music tends to replace secular objects of desire with Jesus, he writes:

• “When such music is used in a church context, it renders the source of faith into just one more product promising us fulfillment, happiness, and unwavering bliss. The church then takes its place beside every other industry that is in the business of selling satisfaction.” (page 22)

The statement above raises the questions:

• why does the church exist?
• what is the church’s purpose?
• why am I a member of a church?
• what’s in it for me?

Preface

• This book is about the last week of Jesus’s life.
• “Passion” is from the Latin noun passio, meaning “suffering.”
• In everyday English we also use “passion” for any consuming interest, dedicated enthusiasm, or concentrated commitment.
• “In this book we focus on ‘what Jesus was passionate about’ as a way of understanding why his life ended in the passion of Good Friday.” (page 5)
• “We do not in this book intend to attempt a historical reconstruction of Jesus’s last week on earth.” (page 5)
• “tell and explain, against the back-ground of Jewish high-priestly collaboration with Roman imperial control, the last week of Jesus’s life on earth as given in the Gospel According to Mark.” (page 5)
• “Mark alone went out of his way to chronicle Jesus’s last week on a day-by-day basis, while the others kept some but not all of those indications of time.” (page 6)
• “Christian liturgy has started to collapse Holy Week into its last three days and renamed Palm Sunday as Passion Sunday.” (page 7)
• “the loss of Palm Sunday’s enthusiastic crowds and all those days and events in between may weaken or even negate the meaning of the death and therefore of that resurrection (page 7)

Chapter 1: Palm Sunday

• Mark 11:1-11
• Two processions. One was a peasant procession, the other an imperial procession. The two processions embody the central conflict of the week that led to Jesus’s crucifixion. (page 9)
• Standard practice of Romain governors of Judea to be in Jerusalem for the major Jewish festivals to be in the city in case there was trouble.
• “Pilate’s procession displayed not only imperial power, but also Roman imperial theology. According to this theology, the emperor was not simply the ruler of Rome but the Son of God.” (page 10)
• As Mark tells the story in March 11:1-11, it is a prearranged ‘counterprocession.’ Jesus planned it in advance.
• “The meaning of the demonstration is clear, for it uses symbolism from the prophet Zechariah (9:9) in the Jewish Bible.” (page 11)
• “This contrast — between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Ceasar — is central not only to the gospel of Mark, but to the story of Jesus and early Christianity.” (page 11)
• Jerusalem
• By the first century, Jerusalem had been the center of the sacred geography of the Jewish people for a millennium.
• “It is the city of God and the faithless city, the city of hope and the city of oppression, the city of joy and the city of pain.” (page 12)
• “Jersualem became the capital of ancient Israel in the time of King David, around 1000 BCE. Under David and his son Solomon, Israel experienced the greatest period in its history.” (page 12)
• “So revered did David become that the hoped-for future deliverer, the messiah, was expected to be a ‘son of David,’ a new David, indeed greater than David. (page 12)
• “Within the theology that developed around it (the temple), it was the ‘navel of the earth’ connecting this world to its source in God, and here (and only here) was God’s dwelling place on earth.” (page 12)
• “The temple mediated not only God’s presence, but also God’s forgiveness. It was the only place of sacrifice, and sacrifices was the means of forgiveness.” (page 12)
• Beginning in the half century after King David, Jerusalem became the center of a ‘domination system.'” (page 13)
• Domination system (page 13):
• 1. Political oppression
• 2. Economic exploitation
• 3. Religious legitimation
• “In this sense ‘domination systems’ are normal, not abnormal, and thus can also be called the ‘normalcy of civilization.'” (page 14)
• “As the home of the monarchy and aristocracy, of wealth and power, Jerusalem became the center of injustice and betrayal of God’s covenant.” (page 14)
• Micah 3:1-2, 9-10
• Isaiah 1:21, 23
• Jeremiah 5:1; 7:11; 6:6
• “Yet even among the prophets who indicted it so sharply, Jerusalem also retained positive associations as the city of God and the city of hope. Moreover, Jerusalem’s future was not just about itself; rather, it was a hope for the world, God’s dream for the world.
• Isaiah 2:2-3; 2:4
• “These are images of justice, prosperity, and security. And the creation of this world of justice and peace, in which fear will be no more, will come from the God whose dwelling place is Jerusalem.” (page 16)
• Jerusalem In The Centuries Before Jesus
• After a dreadful siege of over a year, Jerusalem was conquered by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. (page 16)
• After about fifty years in exile, the Jewish people were permitted to return to their homeland. In the late 500s, within a few decades of their return, they rebuilt the temple.
• For several centuries Judea with its capital in Jerusalem was ruled by foreign empires. (page 17)
• It fell under the control of Rome in 63 BCE.
• Rome appointed as king of the Jews a man named Herod, an Idumean whose family had only recently converted to Judiasm. Herod had a long reign, until 4 BCE, and eventually became known to history as Herod the Great.
• Herod ruled from Jerusalem, and the city became magnificent during his reign. He rebuilt the temple. Beginning in the 20s of the first century BCE, Herold “remodeled” the modest postexilic temple, but in effect built a new temple surrounded by spacious courts and elegant colonnades, with sumptuous use of marble and gold.
• Though history knows him as “Herod the Great,” he was not popular among many Jews. (page 19)
• When Herod died in 4 BCE, revolts erupted. They were so serious that Roman legions had to be brought south from Syria to quell them.
• Jerusalem In The First Century
• The events of 6 CE significantly changed political circumstances for Jerusalem and the temple (page 19)
• The temple replaced Herodian rule as the center of the local domination system. The temple was now the enter of local collaboration with Rome.
• At the top of the system were temple authorities, headed by the high priest, and included members of aristocratic families. Mark called these “the chief priests, the elders, and the scribes.” (For example Mark 14:53)
• Temple authorities came from wealthy families.
• “The issue is not their individual virtue or wickedness, but the role they played in the domination system. They shaped it, enforced it, and benefited from it.” (page 22)
• “Their role was to be the intermediaries between a local domination system and an imperial domination system.” (page 22)
• “The temple’s role as the center of a domination system was legitimated by theology: its place in the system was said to have been given by God.” (page 23)
• Jesus was not the only Jewish anti-temple voice in the first century. Among other voices were the Essenes, identified with the community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls.
• The Jewish revolt in 66 CE was directed as much against the Jewish collaborators in Jerusalem as it was against Rome itself.
• Forgiveness was a function that temple theology claimed for itself, mediated by sacrifice in the temple. (page 23)
• Mark 2:7, “Their point is not that Jesus is claiming to be God. Rather, their point is that God has provided a way to forgive sins — namely through temple sacrifice. And here is Jesus, like John, proclaiming forgiveness apart from the temple.” (page 24)
• In 70 CE Roman legions shattered the great revolt by reconquering the city and destroying the temple, leaving only the part of the western wall of the temple platform.
• “The destruction of the temple changed Judaism forever. Sacrifice ceased, the role of the priesthood was eclipsed, and the central institutions of Judaism became scripture and synagogue.” (page 25)
• Jerusalem In The Gospel of Mark
• Six of Mark’s sixteen chapters are set in Jerusalem; almost 40 percent of the whole
• “In Mark, Jesus’s message is not about himself — not about his identity as the Messiah, the Son of god, the Lamb of God, the Light of the World, or any of the other exalted terms familiar to Christians.” (page 25)
• “In Mark only voices from the Spirit world speak of Jesus’s special identity.”
• “In response to Jesus’s question to his disciples, ‘Who do people say that I am?’ Peter says, ‘You are the Messiah.’ This is the only time in Mark’s gospel that a follower of Jesus says anything like this. Jesus’s response confirms that this has not been part of Jesus’s own message: “And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.'” Mark 8:27-30
• Second occasion, on the night before his execution, during interrogation by the high priest, who asks him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” The response of Jesus is commonly translated “I am.” (Mark 14:61-62).
• “In Greek, the language in which Mark writes, the phrase is ambiguous. Green does not reverse word order to indicate a question rather than a statement. Thus Jesus’s response, ego eimi, can mean either “I am” or “Am I?” (page 26)
• The way that Matthew and Luke revise this scene suggests they understood the later mean. Matthew 26:64; Luke 22:70
• “If Jesus’s message in Mark was not about himself, what was it about? For Mark, it is about the kingdom of God and the way.” (page 26)
• The Greek word for “way” is hodos and Mark uses it frequently throughout his gospel. Hodos is translated with a number of words: “way,” “road,” “path”
• “Repent, and believe in the good news.” Mark 1:15
• Repent has two meanings here:
• From the Hebrew Bible, it has the meaning of “to return,” especially “to return from exile”
• The roots of the Greek word for “repent” mean “to go beyond the mind that you have”
• The word “believe” has a meaning quite different from the common Christian understanding. For Christians, “to believe” often means thinking that a set of statements, a set of doctrines is true. But the ancient meaning of the word “believe” has much more to do with trust and commitment. (page 27)
• To whom did Jesus direct his message about the kingdom of God and the “way”? Primarily to peasants
• Why? The most compelling answer is that Jesus saw his message as to and for peasants. (page 28)
• The two chapters of Mark following Peter’s affirmation that Jesus is the Messiah, leading up to Jesus’s entry in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday are about what it means to follow Jesus, to be a genuine disciple. (page 28)
• After Peter’s affirmation Jesus for the first time speaks of his destiny. Commonly called “the first prediction of the passion,” it is followed by two more solemn announcements anticipating Jesus’s execution.
• Each of these anticipations of Jesus’s execution is followed by teaching about what it means to follow Jesus.
• In first-century Christianity, the cross had a twofold meaning:
• Execution by the empire
• By the time of Mark’s gospel it had also become a symbol for the “way” or the “path” of death and resurrection, of entering new life by dying to an old life.
• To underline the centrality of the chapters that speak to what it means to follow Jesus, Mark frames them with two stories of seeing
• Mark 8:22-26; 10:46-52
• “The framing is deliberate, the meaning clear: to see means to see that the way involves following Jesus to Jerusalem.” (page 30)
• “Thus we have the twofold theme that leads to Palm Sunday. Genuine discipleship, following Jesus, means following him to Jerusalem, the place of (1) confrontation with the domination system and (2) death and resurrection. These are the two themes of the week that follows, Holy Week. Indeed, these are the two themes of Lent and of the Christian life.” (page 31)
• “Which procession are we in? Which procession do we want to be in? This is the question of Palm Sunday and of the week that is about to unfold.” (page 31)

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)

Chapter 9: Eunuchs and Hermaphrodites

• In this chapter Nadia proposes that the story of Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch in Acts 8:26-40 is the story of the conversion of Philip.
• In talking about this passage in Acts, Nadia says, “The first gentile convert ended up being a black sexual minority.” (Page 89)
• “I was always told that the message of this text was that we should tell everyone we meet about Jesus because in doing so we might save them. We might convert them.” (Page 89)
• Nadia is working on a sermon about this text when she encounters a hermaphrodite at a coffee shop.
• “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 began to realize that maybe the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch was really about the conversion — not of the eunuch, but of Philip.” (Page 92)
• The law strictly forbids a eunuch from entering the temple.
• The eunuch sought God despite the fact that he had heard there was no love for him there.
• The only command that we know came from God in this instance was for Philip to go and join.
• “This desire to learn what the faith is from those who have lived it in the face of being told they are not welcome or worthy is far more than “inclusion.” Actually, inclusion isn’t the right word at all, because it sounds like in our niceness and virtue we are allowing “them” to join “us” — like we are judging another group of people to be worthy of inclusion in a tent that we don’t even own.” (Page 93)
• “I continually need the stranger, the foreigner, the “other” to show me water in the desert.” (Page 93)
• “I can only look at the seemingly limited space under the tent and think either it’s my job to change people so they fit or it’s my job to extend the roof so that they fit. Either way, it’s misguided because it’s not my tent. It’s God’s tent.” (Page 93)
• “So in the story of the conversion of Philip and the eunuch is some hope for the church and maybe society itself.” (Page 95)

Chapter 10: Cotton Candy

• In this chapter we see Nadia so wrapped up with Rally Day that she is unaware of how the Spirit had healed her hurting back
• “A quaint tradition in Lutheran churches, Rally Day is an effort to get all the families together after the end of the summer to celebrate the beginning of a new year of Sunday school.” (Page 100)
• “Having a Rally Day event, complete with a cotton candy machine at a church without children, was just the sort of random thing that started getting House for All Sinners and Saints noticed by the ELCA.” (Page 100)
• There was:
• A cotton candy machine
• Six dozen burgers and buns with all the fixings
• An industrial-size bag of Doritos
• A couple of cases of soda
• And Nadia could barely stand up
• Twenty six people show up
• Nobody donates money for the food
• Nadia was pissed
• “It sounds crazy, and if someone told me this story I’d assume they were lying or delusional. As Stuart’s big drag queen hands lovingly rubbed my lower back and he sweetly asked God to heal me, the muscles in my back went from being a fist to an open hand. The spasms released.” (Page 103)
• “But then at two a.m. I was startled awake with what can only be described as a bitch slap from the Holy Spirit. My eyes sprang open and out loud I said, “Oh wow.” The force of the realization hit me: My back didn’t hurt. It hadn’t hurt after they prayed for me and it didn’t hurt now as I laid in my bed, startled awake.” (Page 104)
• Nadia also recalls all of the unexpected outcomes that had occurred during that Rally Day.
• “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)
• “People at my table didn’t ask me questions about how they could do HFASS-type stuff at their churches. Instead, they told their own failure stories. With heart and humor I was regaled with tales of badly handled firings and church secretaries with drinking problems and Vacation Bible School nepotism, and I realized that sometimes the best thing we can do for each other is talk honestly about being wrong.” (Page 107)

Chapter 11: Pirate Christian

• In this chapter Nadia writes about learning to love her enemy
• “Chris, under the name of Pirate Christian, has a large public following as a heresy hunter. His Pirate Christian Internet radio show broadcast attacks all kinds of Christians who depart even slightly from his own understanding of the faith.” (Page 108)
• “My liberalness and femaleness and gay-lovingness made me easy plunder for the Pirate.” (Page 109)
• “Ego and anger often compete for stage time in my head, and inevitably anger cannot be kept under the curtain for long.” (Page 110)
• Nadia writes about her meeting Chris, the Pirate Christian in a receiving line at a conference.
• “It’s weird Nadia,” he said. “We obviously disagree about a lot, but something tells me that out of all these liberal Christians, you and I have a couple things we might agree on.” (Page 111)
• “I looked him in the eye and said, “Chris, I have two things to say to you. One, you are a beautiful child of God. Two, I think that maybe you and I are desperate enough to hear the Gospel that we can even hear it from each other.” (Page 112)
• “When these kinds of things happen in my life, things that are so clearly filled with more beauty or redemption or reconciliation than my cranky personality and stony heart could ever manufacture on their own, I just have no other explanation than this: God.” (Page 112)
• Love your neighbor and hate your enemies is not in the Old Testament
• “‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy’ sounds so familiar.. I’m pretty sure it’s in my heart. It’s link in my DNA.” (Page 114)
• “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)
• Nadia then goes on the write about being “attacked” by liberal Christians because she supported Sojourners magazine’s decision to not sell ad space to Believe Out Loud.
• “I may have gotten an ego boost from being attacked by a conservative heresy hunter, but it felt awful to be attacked by my own people.” (Page 118)
• She then describes getting a phone call of support from Chris. “Chris said that he loved me and would pray for me. His enemy.” (Page 119)