Not Your Average Pastor:

The Universalist Christianity of

the Rev. Nadia Bolz Weber

The Rev. Heather Janules

December 6, 2015

Winchester Unitarian Society

Reading From Some Modern Beatitudes (Abridged) by the Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber[1]

“Because I like to imagine Jesus here standing among us saying:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven…

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are they for whom death is not an abstraction. Blessed are they who have buried their loved ones, for whom tears are as real as an ocean. Blessed are they who have loved enough to know what loss feels like.

Blessed are the mothers of the miscarried. Blessed are they who don’t have the luxury of taking things for granted any more. Blessed are they who can’t fall apart because they have to keep it together for everyone else. Blessed are the motherless, the alone, the ones from whom so much has been taken.

Blessed are those who “still aren’t over it yet” Blessed are they who laughed again when for so long they thought they never would…

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who no one else notices. The kids who sit alone at middle-school lunch tables. The laundry guys at the hospital. The sex-workers and the night shift street sweepers. Blessed are the losers and the babies and the parts of ourselves that are so small. The parts of ourselves that don’t want to make eye contact with a world that only loves the winners.

Blessed are the forgotten. Blessed are the closeted. Blessed are the unemployed, the unimpressive, the underrepresented. Blessed are the teens who have to figure out ways to hide the new cuts on their arms. Blessed are the meek. You are of heaven and Jesus blesses you.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the wrongly accused, the ones who never catch a break, the ones for whom life is hard – for they are those with whom Jesus chose to surround himself. Blessed are those without documentation. Blessed are the ones without lobbyists. Blessed are foster kids and trophy kids and special ed kids and every other kid who just wants to feel safe and loved and never does…Blessed are they who know there has to be more than this. Because they are right.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy…Blessed are the burnt-out social workers and the over worked teachers and the pro-bono case takers. Blessed are the kids who step between the bullies and the weak…Blessed are the ones who have received such real grace that they are no longer in the position of ever deciding who the ‘deserving poor’ are. Blessed is everyone who has ever forgiven me when I didn’t deserve it.

Blessed are the merciful for they totally get it.”

Reflection

Imagine that you did not come to worship in Winchester, Massachusetts this morning but, instead, were one of about 35 thousand Lutheran teenagers in the New Orleans Superdome, waiting for the keynote speaker to address the conference. In years past, the keynoter was a sports figure or television celebrity. But this year, it is just a Lutheran pastor from Denver.

But then the Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber takes the stage, wearing all black. Not all black as in a clergy robe or even a clerical shirt. Nadia Bolz-Weber emerges wearing black jeans and a sleeveless black tank top, revealing muscular arms from her regular Crossfit regimen and her perpetual sleeves of large tattoos, up and down both of her arms.

When asked how she defies the expectations of the average pastor, Nadia Bolz-Weber once responded:

I have sleeve tattoos…and very short hair and I’m…6-feet-1-inch [-es tall]. I don’t actually act like a pastor either…I’m kind of cranky and a little bit sarcastic…

Nobody ever meets me and guesses. The best thing is on airplanes… Eventually if you talk to [people], which I try not to do, but if it has to happen, then they’ll say, “What do you do?”…never once have they guessed. I did get “burlesque dancer” once… If you’re a middle-aged Lutheran pastor and someone guesses you’re a burlesque dancer that feels like a win for the day.[2]

Before the thousands of young Lutherans, Bolz-Weber tells part of her story, a story of growing up in a fundamentalist Christian church, where she learned that to truly believe meant self-denial – of pleasure, of sexuality, of fun in this life. Jesus in Bolz-Weber’s childhood represented guilt and shame. If you weren’t so bad, God wouldn’t have to kill his only Son. And in this branch of Christianity, women are barred from the ministry but also from the simple acts of teaching men and praying out loud. A bright and confident girl, Nadia Bolz-Weber saw early on that she did not fit in.

Bolz-Weber’s childhood also included an auto-immune disorder that caused her eyes to bulge, making her school experience one of perpetual bullying and eating alone in the cafeteria. She emerged from childhood an angry adolescent, abandoning Christianity and finding her solace in drugs and drinking. By age eighteen, she was an alcoholic, dropping out of college to live in a crowded apartment with other young addicts.

But while she left Christianity, Nadia Bolz Weber was still hungry for spiritual community. She remembers sneaking out of her squalid apartment on Sunday mornings and worshipping at Quaker meeting. She also connected with an earth-based community. Nothing felt right. Bolz Weber also attended a Unitarian Universalist congregation. As she shared with the youth, she really liked “the Unitarians,” as they were “smart and fun to hang out with” but she couldn’t embrace our positive view of human nature. “It’s kinda dark in here,” she affirms, [pointing to her heart.] She wonders if perhaps Unitarian Universalists “don’t read the [news]paper.”[3]

At age twenty-two, Nadia Bolz-Weber entered sobriety through another spiritual tradition, Alcoholics Anonymous. Four years later, she met her future husband, Matthew, at a volleyball game, “the sacred breeding ground for tall people.” On their first date, they shared their mutual passions for social justice and women’s rights. Matthew revealed that he was a Christian, a Lutheran seminarian in fact. A Christian who practices serving the stranger and affirming women. “What is he, a unicorn?” she thought. [4]

In time, Bolz-Weber began attending Matthew’s church where she met his pastor, a man she lovingly refers to as “the vampire who turned me.” As the Rev. Ross Merkel articulated the basics of Lutheran theology in a newcomer workshop, Bolz-Weber first heard religious language that reflected her experience of human depravity and divine grace.[5]

It was grace that brought her to sobriety. It was grace that brought her to community – reconciliation with her family, belonging to a family of faith, finding the partner who would become her husband and the father of their two children. As Lutherans proclaim and Nadia Bolz-Weber preaches, we human beings are, one and the same, perpetually sinners and saints. God’s grace is a gift we can neither work for nor earn. God’s story, lived out through human lives, is a story of perpetual death and resurrection. We humans may hit the depths of our suffering and depravity yet never become unworthy of love or new life.

Nadia Bolz-Weber concludes her keynote testifying to her experience of God:

Some of your parents and some of your pastors were really upset that I was your speaker tonight.  They felt like I was someone who should not be allowed to talk to tens of thousands of teenagers. And you know what I have to say to that? They are absolutely right. Somebody with my past of alcoholism and drug abuse and promiscuity and lying and stealing should not be allowed to talk to you. But you know what? Someone with my present…should not be allowed to talk to you. Because I am…sarcastic…I swear like a truck driver…I am a flawed person…But you know what? That’s the God we’re dealing with here, people!

To which, the crowd of young Lutherans explode in applause.

When Nadia Bolz-Weber first heard the call to ministry, she did not imagine preaching before thousands of teenagers. The call came when one of her friends hanged himself and the circle of survivors turned to her to lead the memorial service. Her only qualification was that she was the sole religious one in the group.

As the comedy club where this friend, PJ, once performed, filled for the service, Bolz-Weber looked out and saw “her people.” She also saw that these people – as she describes them: “underside dwellers – cynics, queers, comics and other recovering alcoholics” – didn’t have a pastor. “It’s not that I felt pious and nurturing,” she remembers. “It’s that there…I looked around and saw more pain and questions and loss than anyone, including myself, knew what to do with. And I saw God…right there with the comics standing along the wall with crossed arms, as if their snarky remarks to each other would keep those embarrassing emotions away.”[6]

Bolz-Weber pursued a seminary degree. Early on, it was clear to both denominational leaders and Bolz-Weber that, despite her solid scholarship in Lutheran theology, she would not fit in the average congregation, a place where she and “her people” would need to, as she puts it, “culturally commute.” So, in 2008, she founded House for All Sinners and Saints or House for All or HFASS for short.

Meeting in the parish hall of an Episcopal church on Sunday afternoons, House for All, is defined by simplicity. It follows an “anti-excellence, pro-participation” philosophy.[7] The liturgy is printed on cards for participants to spontaneously pick up and read at the appointed time. All music is acapella. Bolz-Weber quotes one of her parishioners in describing House for All. This quote has been adapted for pulpit-appropriate language:

“…our ministry is word and sacrament; everything else flows from that…We see a need, we fill it; we [goof] up, we say sorry. We ask for grace and prayers and we need them a lot. Jesus shows up for us through each other. We eat, we pray, we sing, we fall, we get up. Repeat.” Bolz-Weber continues, “Christianity has survived some unspeakable abominations: the Crusades, clergy sex-scandals, papal corruption, televangelist scams, and clown ministry. But it will survive us, too.”[8]

House for All is defined by embodiment. Every Good Friday, the congregation travels to a place in the city where a violent event has occurred in the past year to pray and worship at the site. Every Thanksgiving, through Operation Turkey Sandwich, the congregation hand-delivers hundreds of bagged lunches to people working on the holiday. And the community regularly assembles bleach kits for needle exchange programs, complete with notes that read “You are loved as you are.” Outreach by House for All is creative, tangible, prophetic and public, perhaps best illustrated by a photo on their website of Pastor Nadia standing on the sidewalk with a full communion table in the bike lane, waiting for someone to come forward for the Eucharist.

But House for All is not a “social justice” congregation. As Bolz-Weber explains, to create a community where all are welcome, is, in itself, the creation of justice.

A pivotal event in the life of House for All occurred when Bolz-Weber preached at a public Easter service and the story was picked up by the local paper. As she explains, the people who get their news from the paper are “60-year-olds in the suburbs.” When an influx of doctors and lawyers showed up the next Sunday, she didn’t know what to do. And these “normal” people, as she calls them, people who could fit in at any mainline Protestant church, kept coming.

To Bolz-Weber, this spike in church growth was a problem. She called a meeting so the community could discuss the sudden demographic shift in the congregation. There she heard powerful testimony – from the middle-aged mom who drives a great distance to attend because it is the only place where she really feels the presence of God to Asher, the young transgender man, who loves having people who look like his parents in church because they care for him in a way that his own parents can’t right now. As Bolz-Weber told the teenagers in the Superdome, by welcoming the “normal” people into the life of the church, visitors can see “ex-cons next to elected officials and soccer moms and transgender kids next to aging hipsters” leading one to think, “’I am unclear what all these people have in common.’”

Nadia Bolz-Weber remembers receiving a “heart transplant” in this church meeting when she realized that to live a gospel of welcoming the stranger means truly welcoming everyone. This is what makes Christianity so difficult, she affirms, “being forced to look at your own stuff and being pushed into a space of grace that is really uncomfortable.”[9]

House for All is also defined by the role of its pastor. As Nadia Bolz-Weber describes her ministry with the congregation, there is a permeable line between who leads and who is being served in community. Bolz-Weber is very public with her humility – not a meek and modest humility but the moments when she fails – from overfunctioning to feeling resentful to acting from a place of spiritual poverty.

Here, also after adaptation, Bolz-Weber describes the leadership model she embodies:

being the person who is the best Christian…it’s simply never been who I am or who my parishioners need me to be…I am a leader, but I’m leading them onto the street to get hit by the speeding bus of confession and absolution, sins and sainthood, death and resurrection—that is, the gospel of Jesus Christ. I’m a leader, but only by saying, “Oh, [forget] it. I’ll go first.”[10]

Despite her clear Christian identity, Bolz-Weber is not striving to make people believers; believing does not create belonging. As a result, like many Unitarian Universalist congregations, there are athiests, agnostics and people with many different faith affiliations in her congregation.

But, in her words, she is not a “crypto Unitarian” but an orthodox Lutheran theologian, whose only job is to “preach the gospel,” to “point to Christ,” to remind people they are loved and to proclaim that they belong to something beyond “late stage capitalism.”[11]

But you did come to worship this morning in Winchester, Massachusetts, to a Unitarian congregation, in fact. If, at this point, there is any doubt, rest assured. I am not a “crypto Lutheran” minister. I am merely a Unitarian Universalist minister, wondering what the spiritual odyssey and ministry of the Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber means to me and could mean for us.

As we gather, this second Sunday of Advent, we begin to turn towards the Christian holiday of Christmas. If we are to honor this holiday as something beyond the cultural experience of gift-giving, feasting and socializing, we are invited to consider our relationship to the Christian tradition.

As Bolz-Weber leads from the vulnerable position of needing grace more than embodying it and sharing her testimony, I hear the Christian story proclaimed in language I understand and embrace. I observe a Christian ministry that resonates with my own hunger to welcome and serve the stranger and, through my observation, feel the distance between this hunger and how I act in the world. To create a community that includes “ex-cons next to elected officials and soccer moms and transgender kids next to aging hipsters” is to create the Beloved Community. We who affirm “the inherent worth and dignity of every person,” are also commissioned to this creation.

I see in Bolz-Weber’s ministry a contemporary and physical manifestation of Universalism. This is no accident as, in an interview, she “confess[es] that I am a Christo-centric universalist…whatever God was accomplishing…was for the restoration and redemption and reconciliation of all things and all people and all Creation – everyone.”[12] In our community and by our congregation, what is the equivalent of praying at scenes of violence on Good Friday? Instead of offering communion on the street corner, how might we embody belief in the “restoration and redemption and reconciliation of all things” in our shared ministry?

Nadia Bolz-Weber’s ministry also invites us to revisit our understanding of human nature. I remember my chaplaincy training, participating in an interfaith group of seminarians. In the group was a Lutheran student named Ian. He and I would often get into lively yet respectful theological debates about the state of the human soul.

Our debates began when I shared my appreciation for a small notation in our hymnal. In our publication of Amazing Grace, an asterisk invites us to substitute the word “soul” for “wretch” – “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a soul like me.” This opportunity to publically reject the mantle of “wretch” in worship is empowering. Original sin has never made sense to me and the world we inhabit seems to denigrate the human spirit in such a way that this denigration is, itself, the sin.

But I do read the newspaper. As I turn towards Christmas, I wonder how I can proclaim, in one breath, the words of Sophia Lyon Fahs, that “each night a child is born is a holy night” while also seeing what we humans inflict upon one another – Syria, Beirut, Paris,  Colorado Springs, San Bernadino. The places we inhabit in our own communities, in our own lives.

And I am not alone. Last week, in family worship, I recalled the creation story from Genesis, inviting our circle to shout after each of God’s creations, “and it was good!” When I got to the creation of human beings and we shouted, “and it was good,” I heard one adult voice say, quietly, “well, maybe not.”

In a conversation with other Unitarian Univeralist ministers, one colleague observed that the first hymn in our hymnal, May Nothing Evil Cross This Door, assumes that evil is something that lives outside – outside of us as individuals and as a community. We may not be wretches but we human beings are not solid saints and we who are Unitarian Universalists are not exempt from this painful middle path, a path that calls for grace.

When asked about my own theology, I often quote another minister, Gordon Atkinson: “Whether God exists or not is none of my business, really.” But, if I were to sing hymns of gratitude to God this season, I could sing to the God Nadia Bolz-Weber speaks of before tens of thousands of Lutheran teenagers:

“This is a God who has always used imperfect people

This is a God whose loving desire to be known overflowed the heavens and became manifest in the rapidly-dividing cells inside the womb of an insignificant peasant girl…

This is a God who slipped into skin and walked among us full of grace and truth with sand between his toes and

Who ate with all the wrong people and kissed lepers and touched the unclean and spoke through thirsty women and hungry men.

Who, from the cross, did not even lift a finger to condemn the enemy but instead said “I would rather die than be in the sin-accounting business anymore.”

This is a God who…is especially present to us in the most offensively ordinary things: wheat, wine, water, word.

This God has never made sense and you don’t need to either

Because this God will use…all of you

And not just your strengths

But your failures and your failings and your brokenness

And God’s strength is perfected in human weakness

So your brokenness is fertile ground

For a forgiving God to make something new

To make something beautiful.”[13]

Topics: Expectation