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)

Chapter 6: Hurricanes and Humiliation

• In this chapter Nadia writes about how she was conned, willingly and unwillingly
• “I had rescued a pregnant, disadvantaged, teenaged African American girl… and I was about to give them a new life. This was a white privileged liberal’s dream, and I was riding high on it.” (Page 59)
• “Still, of all the betrayals in that circumstance, it was my betrayal of myself that stung the most.” (Page 66)
• “Jesus calls us to welcome the stranger and serve our neighbor. … Who is that neighbor? Being Christian is much harder than I wish it was.” (Page 67)
• “I’m haunted by how much my love was based on my need to be seen as heroic, and yet I can’t deny that it did feel like love. A better Christian would love her anyway and still want to help her. A lousy Christian is conflicted and maybe a little hurt.” (Page 67)
• “God uses our humiliations as much as our victories.”

Chapter 7: I Didn’t Call You for This Truth Bullshit

• In this chapter Nadia writes about a friendship with Candace that does not work out
• “We met in an alcohol recovery meeting a few years earlier and became friends based purely on the unlikely number of things we had in common.” (Page 70)
• “Being a loyal friend is something I haven’t always been good at, so at the time, I was trying to make up for my past dis-loyalties by being (or just making it look like I was) selfless.” (Page 71)
• Nadia writes about a conversation with her sister after visiting Candace in which her sister says, “you have a limited amount of time and emotional energy in your life, and you are squandering tons of it on this one situation just so you can maintain the idea you like to have of yourself as being a loyal friend.” Nadia responds..”I didn’t call you for this truth bullshit.” (Page 71)
• “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)
• “The truth does crush us, but the instant it crushes us, it somehow puts us back together into something honest. It’s death and resurrection every time it happens. This, to me, is the point of confession and absolution in the liturgy.” (Page 73)
• Writing about the first time she experienced absolution in liturgy she says she thought it was hogwash. “Why should I care if someone says to me that some God I may or may not really believe in has erased the check marks against me for things I may or may not even think are so-called sins? This obviously is the problem with religion for so many: It makes you feel bad enough that you will need the religion to help you feel good again.” (Page 73)
• Then she says absolution in liturgy came to mean everything to her. “It gradually began to feel like a moment when truth was spoken, perhaps for the only time all week, and it would crush me and then put me back together.” (Page 73)
• In talking about the last time she meet with Candace and not being able to tell the truth. “I wish I could say that I had learned how powerful the truth is and that I am unwavering in my commitment to it. But in that moment I couldn’t manage to be good or tell the truth. Instead, I said that I had the friends that I needed. Sometimes we can’t manage to choose the truth or to be good, and in those moments I just hope God comes and does that thing where something is transformed into healing anyway.” (Page 76)

Chapter 8: Clinical Pastoral Education

• In this chapter Nadia writes about her experience as a hospital chaplain
• During her first experience in a trauma room she asked a nurse what her job was, and the response was “Your job is to be aware of God’s presence in the room while we do our jobs.” (Page 80)
• “It wasn’t long before I found myself sensing God’s presence in other rooms, too.” (Page 81)
• “I was the chaplain, but I didn’t have answers for anyone.” (Page 82)
• She writes about her emotions of dealing with two young boys who just lost their mother. “You hear a lot of nonsense in hospitals and funeral homes. .. But this is the nonsense spawned from bad religion. And usually when you are grieving and someone says something so senselessly optimistic to you, it’s about them” (Page 83)
• She writes about reading Marcus Borg’s “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time.” “This was the bonus to liberal Christianity: I could use my reason and believe at the same time. But it only worked for me for a short while. And soon I wanted to experiment with the harder stuff. Admiring Jesus, while a noble pursuit, doesn’t show me where God is to be found when we suffer the death of a loved one or a terrifying cancer diagnosis or when our child is hurt. Admiring and trying to imitate a guy [Jesus] who was really in touch with God just doesn’t seem to bridge the distance between me and the Almighty in ways that help me understand where the hell God is when we are suffering.” (Page 74)
• Nadia then writes about the image of God she was raised to believe and writes, “this type of thinking portrays God as just as mean and selfish as we are, which feels like it has a lot more to do with our own greed and spite than it has to do with God.” (Page 84)
• She then writes about being at Good Friday service, which was three days after the accident involving the two young boy and hearing the passion story in John’s Gospel with changed ears. “I listened with the ears of someone who didn’t just admire and want to imitate Jesus, but had felt him present in the room where two motherless boys played on the floor.” (Page 85)
• “I realized that in Jesus, God had come to dwell with us and share our human story. Even the parts of our human story that are the most painful. … Maybe the Good Friday story is about how God would rather die than be in our sin-accounting business anymore.” (Page 85)
• “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)

Chapter 3: Albion Babylon

• In this chapter Nadia writes about being part of a community.
• “Church, for all its faults, was the only place outside my own home were people didn’t gawk at me or make fun of me.” (Page 23)
• “Which is why it sucked that there were other reasons I’d eventually not fit in.” (Page 23)
• “Belonging to the Church of Christ — and therefore, being a Christian — mostly meant being really good at not doing things. … The better you were at not doing these things, the better a Christian you were.” (Page 23)
• “..the Church of Christ I was raised in was a community. As churchgoers, our lives were shared.” (Page 26)
• “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)
• Nadia writes about sneaking off to a nearby Quaker meeting, and notes, “Still, although the Quakers were a community, I wasn’t really part of it. I was more of a spectator.” (Page 28)
• “This experience (living at Albion Babylon) taught me that a community based on the idea that everyone hates rules is, in the end, just as disappointing and oppressive as a community based on the ability to follow rules.” (Page 29)

Chapter 4: La Femme Nadia

• In this chapter Nadia writes about how she believes God “plunked her down” on a different path, and allowed not to die in exchange for working for God.
• Have you watched Le Femme Nikita?
• “When you can’t control something — like how if I take one drink all bets are off no matter what motivation I have for controlling myself — it’s easier to arrange life in which it looks like you’ve chosen it all, as opposed to facing the truth: You have lost your ability to choose any of it.” (page 36)
• “I was still looking for an affirmation that I wasn’t an alcoholic, so that, dear Jesus, I could go drink again.”
• “And these people talked about God a lot. But never about an angry God who judged or condemned or was always disappointed in people. The God they spoke of was not the God I was taught to fear.” (Page 36)
• “Her relationship to God wasn’t doctrinal. It was functional.” (Page 36)
• “..I was sitting in a twelve-step meeting in an upstairs Masonic lodge when someone shared about something he had rad in the Bible that week that really spoke to his sobriety. I stood up and walked out. The Bible had been the weapon of choice in the spiritual gladiatorial arena of my youth.” (Page 37)
• “..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)
• “Getting sober never felt like I had pulled myself up by my own spiritual bootstraps. It felt instead like I was on one path toward self-destruction and God pulled me off of it by the scruff of my collar, me hopelessly kicking and flailing and saying, ‘Screw you, I’ll take the destruction please.'” (Page 40)

Chapter 5: Thanks, ELCA!

• In which Nadia sums up Lutheran theology in one chapter at less than the cost of a Lutheran seminary education.
• “At the time I didn’t know it would take more to escape black-and-white thinking than just no longer attending your parent’s church. The church had provided me a sorting system, which was now ingrained. (Page 43)
• Nadia writes about her first date with her future husband. He says, “Well, my heart for social justice is rooted in my Christian faith.” Nadia responds, “Um, what? I just stared at him saying nothing.” (Page 43)
• “I soon learned that there were actually a whole world of Christians who take Matthew 25 seriously.” (Page 44)
• “I had never experienced liturgy before. But here the congregation said things together during the service. And they did stuff: stood, sat, knelt, crossed themselves, went up to the altar for communion, like choreographed sacredness.” (Page 45)
• “Something about the liturgy was simultaneously destabilizing and centering: my individualism subverted by being joined to other people through God to find who I was. Somehow it happened through God. One specific, divine force. (Page 46)
• “Most of what I had been taught by Christian clergy was that I was created by God, but was bad because of something some chick did in the Garden of Eden, and that I should try really hard to be good so that God, who is an angry bastard, won’t punish me. Grace had nothing to do with it. I hadn’t learned about grace from the church.” (Page 47)
• On page 48 she writes what Pastor Ross taught her about grace.
• “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)
• Nadia then writes about learning how Pastor Ross was removed from the official clergy roster of the ELCA, and how this made her feel: “It feels like the rug of hope that the church might actually be something beautiful and redemptive was pulled out from under me.” (Page 51)
• Pastor Ross responds: “God is still at work redeeming us and making all things new even in the midst of broken people and broken systems and that, despite any idealism otherwise, it had always been that way.” (Page 51)
• Her husband Matthew says, “There’s not enough wrong with it to leave and there’s just enough wrong with it to stay…. Fight to change it.” (Page 52)
• “Every human community will disappoint us, regardless of how well-intentioned or inclusive. But I am totally idealistic about God’s redeeming work in my life and in the world.” (Page 54)
• “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)