#hfass

Resurrection never feels like being made clean and nice and pious like in those Easter pictures. I would have never agreed to work for God if I had believed God was interested in trying to make me nice or even good. Instead, what I subconsciously knew, even back then, was that God was never about making me spiffy; God was about making me new. New doesn't always look perfect. Like the Easter story itself, new if often messy. New looks like recovering alcoholics. New looks like reconciliation between family members who don't actually deserve it. New looks like every time I manage to admit I was wrong and every time I manage to mention when I'm right. New looks like every fresh start and every act of forgiveness and every moment of letting go of what we thought we couldn't live without and then somehow living without it anyway. New is the thing we never saw coming - never even hoped for - but ends up being what we needed all along. "It happens to all of us," I concluded that Easter Sunday morning. "God simply keeps reaching down into the dirt of humanity and resurrecting us from the graves we dig for ourselves through our violence, our lies, our selfishness, our arrogance, and our addiction. And God keeps loving us back to life over and over."

I can't imagine that God doesn't reveal God's self in countless ways outside of the symbol system of Christianity. In a way, I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.

I'm a lousy Christian, and I hope that's good enough since our call o be compassionate has to include ourselves, too

I mistakenly had been thinking that the kingdom of heaven was something I should be able to find an illustration for on this side of my life. Things are better now. I'm Christian and I'm clean and sober, so surely any example I might have of the kingdom of heaven would not come from Ben or PJ or my young, messy self. Any preachable image of the kingdom would surely come from gardening and being a mom and a pastor and an upstanding citizen. But that's not what Jesus brings. Jesus brings a kingdom ruled by the crucified one and populated by the unclean and always found in the unexpected. I'd expected to look at the past and see only mistakes that I'd moved on from, to see only damage and addiction and tragic self-delusion. But by thinking that way, Id' assumed that God was nowhere to be found back then. But that's kind of an insult to God. Its like saying, "You only exist when I recognize you." The kingdom of heaven, which Jesus talked about all the time, is, as he said, here. At hand. It's now. Wherever you are. In ways you'd never expect.

My heart may be dark, but I choose to try to act according to what I believe, not what I feel.

For far too long, I believe that how the Church of Christ saw me, or how my family saw me, or how society saw me, was the same as how God saw me. But I began to realize something that is painfully obvious on the surface, but something that almost all of us are blind to: Our identity has nothing to do with how we are perceived by others. But it's still tempting to believe. I mean, if Jesus was vulnerable to temptation, the rest of us certainly are, whether it be temptation to self-loathing or self-aggrandizement, depression or pride, self-destruction or self-indulgence. We are tempted to doubt our innate value precisely to the degree that we are insecure about our identity from, and our relationship to, God.

In my sermon I told the story of me and Chris and how loving our enemies doesn't require the right feelings of niceness or generosity. It requires that we commend them for the one who has perfected the love of an enemy. It requires being in the prayerful presence of a God who was killed by God's enemies and then, rather than retaliation, rather than violence, rather than an eye for an eye, Jesus said, "Forgive them." I titled the sermon "Loving Our Enemies, Even When We Don't Mean It" and sent it to Chris.

I realized that sometimes the best thing we can do for each other is talk honestly about being wrong.