Maybe you saw the interview we posted in our last weekender, where she spoke at “Wild Goose Fest”…but Nadia Bolz-Weber is the real deal. I say this knowing I don’t give a whole lot of credence to “real deal”-speak. I guess I just mean that she is pretty unhinged. A Lutheran minister in Denver, she has just released her book Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint, from which she has received glowing reviews from several high-ups in the Emerging Church, that confusing non-denomination that generally leans more free-range than bound will. This is confusing though, because Bolz-Weber doesn’t really sound like that kind of church leader. I mean, yes, the book begins with the word “shit,” and she certainly doesn’t steer her sailor’s mouth elsewhere after, but the first chapter also begins with a frank telling of her failed comedy career, and “The Rowing Team,” the code word for her AA group, through which she came back to Christianity, after understanding that these were her people, those who cannot seem to help themselves. Her “call” to ministry was a literal phone call from a comedy friend before he committed suicide, asking whether or not he was “beyond the pale of God’s love.” She was asked to give his eulogy.
The memorial service took place on a crisp fall day at the Comedy Works club in downtown Denver, with a full house. The alcoholic rowing team and the Denver comics, the comedy club staff and the academics: These were my people. Giving PJ’s eulogy, I realized that perhaps I was supposed to be their pastor.
It’s not that I felt pious and nurturing. It’s that there, in that underground room filled with the smell of stale beer and bad jokes, I looked around and saw more pain and questions and loss than anyone, including myself, knew what to do with. And I saw God. 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. God, right there with the woman climbing down the stage stairs after sharing a little too much about PJ being a “hot date.” God, among the cynics and alcoholics and queers.
I am not the only one who sees the underside and God at the same time. There are lots of us, and we are home in the biblical stories of antiheroes and people who don’t get it; beloved prostitutes and rough fishermen. How different from that cast of characters could a manic-depressive alcoholic comic be? It was 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 brokenness of our lives. And having seen it, I couldn’t help but point it out. For reason I’ll never quite understand, I realized that I had been called to proclaim the Gospel from where I am, and proclaim where I am from the Gospel.
What had started in early sobriety as a reluctant willingness to start praying again had led to my returning to Christianity, and now had led to something even more preposterous: I was called to be a pastor to my people.
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4 responses to “Nadia Bolz-Weber’s Call to the Community of Underside Dwellers”
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Is Nadia Bolz-Weber Anne Lamott revisited?
High marks for Mercy.
Low marks for profanity.
She is a great speaker. Very witty. Yet, before you all go ga-ga over her it would be wise to check out this review of her theology here which argues that she essentially recycles mainline revisionist theology and substitutes the gospel of inclusivity for the Gospel of Christ.
http://jackkilcrease.blogspot.com/2013/03/grace-is-not-affirmation-plea-for.html
I’m still looking for the perfect theology. I don’t think I’m going to find it this side of eternity. I certainly have my deeply held beliefs and opinions–and can’t always distinguish between them. The only thing I am certain about is that I want to know Christ and to have him acknowledge me as his friend when I meet him face to face. I’m looking forward to meeting the sometimes quirky, always passionate believers who come from the darkest places who will have great stories of redemption filled with joy and wonder.
I’m in the odd position of counting both Nadia Bolz-Weber and Jack Kilcrease as friends (and one-time classmates, at different institutions), having spent a good amount of time with each of them this side of their internet personae.
Anyhow, I’d argue that my one friend (Nadia) is more deeply Lutheran in her theology than my other friend (Jack) realizes. They’re both grownups with their own theologies, and don’t need me to correct them. But it is possible to write an honest, full-throated critique of somebody on what seems like good evidence, and yet to have misjudged. Jack disagrees strongly with Nadia on 1)inerrancy, 2)women’s ordination, and 3)sexuality–that’s not hard to see, and those are not unimportant matters. But I think he’d be stunned how much else he agrees with her on. Heard Nadia speak at an event recently, and her answers to questions were, often as not, straight out of the Lutheran Confessions. There’s very little of “recycled mainline revisionist theology” to her when we speak of sin and redemption, what the church is, what the ministry of the gospel is, or most importantly who our God is.