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)

"For many Christians, the 'biblical view' of salvation centers on Jesus's death. The doctrine of salvation ('soteriology') is defined in terms of how Jesus's death makes salvation possible. It is linked closely with atonement, which is commonly defined as 'how Christ accomplished our justification (i.e. being found just or righteous before God) through his sacrifice on the cross. I have attempted in this book to show that the Bible's portrayal of salvation actually does not focus on Jesus's death as the basis for reconciliation of humanity with God." (AK location 6523)

"I argue that the biblical story of salvation portrays God as reaching out to human beings with mercy. The God of the Bible responds to human brokeness, violence, and sinfulness with healing love. In telling the salvation story in this way, the Bible refutes the logic of retribution." (AK location 6535)

The basic argument starting at AK location 6546

"The point of the consequences is not punishment, nor is it that God is unable to forgive without the scale of justice being balanced. Rather, the consequences remind people that wholeness requires harmony with the God of the universe. The consequences themselves point toward God's healing love that must be trusted in for it to heal." (AK location 6591)

"Jesus's death reveals the logic of retribution to be the tool of evil, not the God-ordained rule of the universe." (AK location 6623)

"The differences between the Bible's salvation story and atonement theology are significant enough to conclude that we do not find an atonement model in this story." (AK location 6668)

"As David Brandos concludes, 'Jesus's death may have been seen as the center and starting point' of traditional atonement theology. However, for the Bible 'what was redemptive was the whole story, that is, all the events making up that story; the cross was redemptive only to the extent that it formed a part of that story.' (AK location 6668)

Starting at AK location 6695, Grimsrud addresses some of the violence that is in fact in the Bible. He asks, "How should one who reads the Bible in light of the way of Jesus best understand these materials?"