So here's the thing: I grew up in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, was baptized, confirmed, and then went to high school and found nothing in the liturgy or the service to make me stay in the church.
And then I went to live in Japan and had to wrestle with a WHOLE COUNTRY of folks with a 1000 year old history that has absolutely nothing to do with Jesus.
So I stopped believing the church or Christianity had anything to do with me. I'm a flaming liberal, and a religion that makes outsiders of people is not for me. I wanted religion that was inclusive, and active...and so I left.
But somewhere along the lines, I wanted to sing in a choir again. So I started coming back to church. And somewhere along the lines I realized I could say the words of the Apostles Creed, sing the hymns, and say the Lord's Prayer and it didn't matter one bit whether I believed it or not. It was about doing things that helped me be a better person.
And then I got breast cancer and had to go through chemo and yadda yadda yadda, I couldn't be a strong, independent person anymore, and had to accept help. And somewhere along the lines of accepting help, of being weak, and needing others-- I found friendship. I found a church community.
But my terrible secret remained: I'm not sure the God in the ELCA liturgy is the god I believe. I mean, I certainly don't think 1000s of years of Japanese people are condemned to a fiery pits of hell because Jesus happened to live in the Middle East. A God of love would not work that way.
And that's the long way of saying Nadia Bolz-Weber's book speaks strongly to me. She writes about her failures as a person, and as a PASTOR to love the people around her, the very people who show here the most grace when she commits to speaking in Australia instead of officiating at good friends' weddings, or avoids a parishioner with halitosis and boring stories.
And she verbalizes the twin sides of the "blessing" and "neediness" issue that have been a thorn in my mental side since the first time I did volunteer work in high school. If you go out to do mission and give service, it's so very easy to fall into a mental trap. Here, she explains it better than me:
"While we as people of God are called to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, the whole "we're blessed to be a blessing" thing can still be kind of dangerous. It can be dangerous when we self-importantly place ourselves above the world, waiting to descend on those below so we can be a "blessing" they've been waiting for, like it or not. Plus, seeing myself as the blessing can pretty easily obscure the way in which I am actually part of the problem and can hide the ways in which I, too, am poor and needing care."
How do we go about doing service without making a distinction between those who are receiving and those giving? I think part of the answer lies in stop giving into the sin of pride about being strong, or independent or being a go-getter or organizational maven or the one who knows where all the spoons go in the church kitchen. It's about being open to the help we all need. We are all broken in our own ways. And about this other side of the service coin, Nadia writes:
"And receiving grace is basically the best shitty feeling in the world. I don't want to need it. Preferably I could just do it all and be it all and never mess up. That may be what I would prefer, but it is never what I need. I need to be broken apart and put back into a different shape by the merging of things human and divine, which is really screwing up and receiving grace and love and forgiveness rather than receiving what I really deserve. I need the very thing that I will do everything I can to avoid needing."
So this is a super-easy book of anecdotes and stories and vignettes about her parishioners and people she's encountered who forced her to confront grace. And I much appreciated the down-to-earth tone.
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 2017
- Reviewed in the United States on October 12, 2015
- Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2017
Top reviews from other countries
- Henry IveyReviewed in Australia on July 8, 2017
The author touched some very pertinent and often unsaid theological matters
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