Nadia Bolz-Weber Met Me in St. Louis
Church of the Future
Nadia Bolz-Weber was scheduled in St. Louis, the kids were off school for parent-teacher conferences, and the satisfied junior high teachers never seem to have much to say to us except that Sheridan should talk more. That’s an old story I heard about myself ten thousand times in this sickening world’s course of education that values loud people and frustrates the rest of us. So, we hit the road on a Friday morning down towards St. Louis, Missouri.
Down to our neighboring red state and the Red State Revival super pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber embarked on to prayerfully give hope, solace, gathering togetherness, a soulful acapella reminder of old hymns from our scriptural youth, and the solidarity truth that we shall overcome someday.
We stopped in Springfield and ate a delicious horseshoe. That’s right, a horseshoe, the regional liquid cheese drenched dish of meat, fried accoutrements and wet bread. We viewed antique cars and random relics and a little adorable shop with sunshine windows and beautiful breathing plants with peace signs aplenty. Blessings on the proprietors.
We journeyed forward and downward and it was warmer by the minute. Four hours is not a long drive, though people say that. People say a lot of things.
The big tent was a big church in Manchester, the neighboring suburb, Methodist and full of the faithful and free-thinking. We took pew seats on the right side near middle back, and soon, babies and small children piled in near us. Mothers seeking to quiet the sounds Jesus embraced when he said let the children come to me.
Erik was annoyed by these mothers and children, and I felt it. Can he meditate, transcend, or otherwise befriend the holy sniffling children who speak out loud at any impulse? Oh, ungenerous man who only shortly ago had such children himself. Now he stands next to his wife and two awesome adolescents who sang beautifully through the whole thing with freer voices than we were ever raised to have.
We learned a Rumi-derived Unitarian hymn saying, “Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. Ours is not a caravan of despair” and when Nadia said it was also a round and some people groaned, my voice box leaped with the zeal of my overgrown summer camp soul. I remembered it all. The folk singing, the acapella majesty, the oral tradition, the blessed togetherness and free oxytocin. Yes, raise up your voices and sing. Children go quiet in the embrace of such singing. I remember that too.
After Nadia shared her testimony, lamentations, sobriety, and the question suggestion God gave her, “But what if you've already been forgiven of all of that?”—she asked us to share our own testimony with the strangers next to us.
Yikes. Horror. Adrenaline. Cortisol.
It is time to share our faith was the point – and the way I sweated this and hesitated, is the telling importance. We didn’t do it. We talked amongst ourselves and heard the people behind us do the same. Sharing testimony is not a familiar place for those of us not evangelical-trained to do so and we panic thinking we need to prepare it first and create the familiar story arc. Like, I surrendered to God, God saved me, and now I know, and I’m proclaiming. We also think it needs to be complete. My story is now complete. This is frightening, because I’m not complete! I am on the journey.
We don’t dismiss this request, but we hesitate, and we take three mighty revelations with us from there. They are three, triune, and they are:
One, the need to sing together.
Humans sing. It’s a biological chemical blessing for free and I appreciate the bold reminder. We sang hymns together and, Nadia, your instinct to sing together is rising everywhere. This is called for and beyond one soul to another. It’s all together. Garrison Keillor preaches this gospel too. Sing. The holy souls of overgrown campers need this. The most beautiful acapella resonance and even, or especially, when I don't know the words. I know the melody and to hum in volume gives my frame the primitive, basic, and eternal Om that pitches me up and through like a musical instrument built for resonance, built for tunes, the folkway. The way that Come Though Fount of Every Blessing becomes Will the Circle be Unbroken and singing through the nighttime sleep I find it in the morning still resounding, and weeks later still humming. The blood tissue inside still reverberating. We are made to sing and so many millions walk around saying “I cannot sing.” What lies and what deceit. What amputation. You are human. You can sing. You are imago dei created to be here now like the sun in the sky in the light of the day, but we spend the day sleeping and call it awake.
Two, the need to share our faith.
And if it starts with testimony, what will we say? Can we blow up the format and the thought that testimony has to be complete? Am I a believer? Absolutely. Do I want to proclaim like I know anything? No.
Yes, Nadia, I believe it is time to share faith. Do not hide, blend, underscore and talk amongst ourselves. I believe everyone is on their own spiritual journey and the church of the future is simply saying, yes. Yes, I am on the journey. So it is time to share faith. All faith, all oneness, and each day a step further to do that with the full leaning on God to enable it. Lord, help me testify from this love I know and feel. Help me speak the true word from my one sacred beating heart connected in primal reminder to everyone else’s, that we are one in the spirit, we are one in the Lord, and this is not a Christian Nationalist song.
And speaking of that, there is one last revelation and I’m going to whisper it. It is a terrible challenge, worse than turn to your neighbor and share your testimony. A really horrible thing to say.
Three, the need to pray for Trump.
I hate to say this and feel this as truth, but there it is. There it is -- that horrendous reactionary feeling is the stripping of defenses to the truth, raw, obvious, and unacceptable in the fierce and dichotomous world of man. A spiritual, not political statement. As unwelcome as Jonah’s directive, as horrifying as every “Why me, Lord, why me?” It came to me in St. Louis and I'm very sorry to say it, but I have to pray for Trump. The resistance aghast I feel when considering this is where I must sit down, and sit now, and be still. I am feeling the tension I know from innocence, experience, and the center that shakes me. Oh, shudder. Oh, yes. I've encountered enough God truth to recognize when I'm encountering it again. We are one humanity and Trump appears to be a human, so we are one with him. That stings. It hurts. One holy humanity includes the orange occupant, the monster, the evil, the enemy of the people.
This phrasing falls to the ground in pieces. There is one in the White House Mar-a-Lago who needs my prayer and open beating sacred heart oneness and if I don't have the words, the spirit will groan for me as I try by giving up, that familiar surrender. Donald Trump, a holy child of God no less precious to the maker than you, me, and all the children sniffling, breathing and treading life in this time. So, knowing that God is good all the time, all the time, all the time, all the time…
I take these three weighty messages with me on my journey. Big sacks of pounded, milled and tireless truth and I carry them out of the Manchester United Methodist Church and back up the mountain, home to my seat of contemplation, and I consider their weight, their burden, their gift, their trouble.
“Oppositional energy only creates more of the same,” says Richard Rohr, and I vowed to pay less attention to the second Trump administration, however, the chaos rises and expands to meet the challenge. There is a clue that our faith in principalities and powers is supposed to be crumbling right now.
It is time, inevitable clear beseeching time, to turn inward. Yet from inward during the first administration, now I also feel outward. Outward this time, as Nadia does. She said, “I don't want to be alone and I don't want to be scared.” So the answer is the Lord, it is always the Lord and the spirit moved her to tour, to find me, to find the others, and so we gathered for one beautiful soul-serving night in a manner that demonstrates, resonates and reminds us that, yes, we need this. Every week or fairly frequently. Small gatherings of singing and that encouraging word, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied," alongside that challenging word, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
Thank you, Nadia Bolz-Weber, for walking humbly against the wind of a sick Christofascism created by man and twisted by poisonous deplorable sin. Thank you for being a pastor who does not hide the authentic self. Thank you for inviting us to share with each other, even if we did not do so. I pray we will next time. Thank you for the singing and thank you for the weighty revelations we take with us in our arms.
God, help me open to love. Show me and teach me to be sincere in my seeking. Lord, I pray for the soul of a man, who is after all a man, and your own creation, child of God, beloved as I am, beloved as you have shown us to be. Please summon the honest love in my holy heart beating with yours and let me find a way to open love to the other, united in sin and forgiveness, forever and ever.
This is hard for me, but all things are possible with God.
