The Wisdom of Rachel Held Evans

On Saturday I was in the midst of my beloved's and my annual jaunt to Tribeca Film Festival, in which we run around Manhattan, eat great food, see my son, and watch at least eight movies in four days. This year's trip also included a morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, another at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a long ramble through Central Park.

It was pretty perfect. It always is.

But on Saturday afternoon, as I checked my phone between seeing a beautiful film called "Driveways" (about unlikely friendships) and a devastating film called "XY Chelsea" (about the trans heroine who exposed U.S. war crimes), I read something that was impossible.

I read that Rachel Held Evans had died.

Rachel was 37. She was what some have called an "exvangelical," someone who came to understand that some essential tenets of the church that gave birth to her faith in Jesus Christ were actually harmful, human-made vehicles keeping some in the position of power and others in oppression.

She left. She grieved. She found faith-in-community anew. She wrote about it, and in doing so, she became a fresh, intelligent, and compassionate voice for those who were learning a new way to follow Jesus.

My first encounter with Rachel's writing was "Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church." It's a memoir chronicling her faith journey through childhood and young adulthood, and her disillusionment with a church that seemed more concerned with law and exclusion and building maintenance than love and feeding Christ's sheep and healing the world. But it also reveals the core of what kept drawing her back: Jesus. Something precious she found in the scriptures. And, structured as the book is around both the two great sacraments (Baptism and Communion) and the additional traditional five markers of the life of faith (Confirmation, Reconciliation, Marriage, Orders/ Ordination, and the Sacrament of the Sick), her crisp and beautiful theological language revels in the power of a life formed by faith.

I wanted more. So I went back to an earlier book "A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How A Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband Master."  At the link, you'll find this description:

Strong-willed and independent, Rachel Held Evans couldn't sew a button on a blouse before she embarked on a radical life experiment--a year of biblical womanhood. Intrigued by the traditionalist resurgence that led many of her friends to abandon their careers to assume traditional gender roles in the home, Evans decides to try it for herself, vowing to take all of the Bible's instructions for women as literally as possible for a year.

Pursuing a different virtue each month, Evans learns the hard way that her quest for biblical womanhood requires more than a "gentle and quiet spirit" (1 Peter 3:4). It means growing out her hair, making her own clothes, covering her head, obeying her husband, rising before dawn, abstaining from gossip, remaining silent in church, and even camping out in the front yard during her period. 

Rachel was trying to prove a point, and man o man, did she ever. She confirmed what she'd suspected, that despite the claims of some that they prioritize scripture above all, evangelical notions of Christian womanhood are, in fact, choosy about which behaviors they require, and--surprise!-- they all involve keeping women in submissive and subservient roles.

Near the end of "Biblical Womanhood," Rachel writes about searching the scriptures:

If you are looking for verses with which to support slavery, you will find them. 
If you are looking for verses with which to abolish slavery, you will find them. 
If you are looking for verses with which to oppress women, you will find them. 
If you are looking for for verses with which to liberate or honor women, you will find them. 
If you are looking for reasons to wage war, you will find them. 
If you are looking for reasons to promote peace, you will find them. 
If you are looking for an out-dated, irrelevant ancient text, you will find it. 
If you are looking for truth, believe me, you will find it. 
This is why there are times when the most instructive question to bring to the text is not "what does it say?", but "what am I looking for?" 
I suspect Jesus knew this when he said, 
"Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened." 
If you want to do violence in this world, you will always find the weapons. 
If you want to heal, you will always find the balm.

Rachel lived a life of faith and intellectual and theological inquiry, and that life was cut short by a disastrous convergence of illness and allergic reaction. Her husband Dan, her two children (ages 3 and 1), her entire family, and a community of like-minded Christians (and even some who were not like-minded) are grieving. Her compassionate, articulate voice encouraged countless "wanderers" from the church-folds of their childhood to find a faith they could live with integrity.

And she did it all as one soaked in the fruits of the Spirit-- love, joy, peace; patience, kindness, generosity; faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

I have been home from my trip for a little less than a day, and I am still as heartsick as when I was crying in the Regal Battery Park lobby.

This is not possible. I don't know how to reckon with it. All I can do is turn to my own faith in the God who brings life from death.

Each morning of the Easter season I have said this prayer from the PCUSA Book of Common Worship, a prayer of thanksgiving for baptism. Today I share it in the hope and wonder of the faith we proclaim... in hope that, for any who might, like me, be reeling with loss, it offers some slight balm for the soul... and in the hope expressed by Rachel in her most recent book, "Inspired":

"The story is not over."

O Lord our God, we give you thanks
for the new life you raise up in us
through the mystery of our baptism--
the sorrow of the heavy cross,
the surprise of the empty tomb,
the love that death could not destroy.

By the power of your Holy Spirit
poured out upon us in baptism,
fill us with the joy of your resurrection,
so that we may be a living sign
of your new heaven and new earth
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Lent Day 28: Sparking Love

There is something about Lent that brings an intensity of purpose to my work, and that is all for the good. I am glad and grateful that the church sets aside this time for us to aspire to a spiritual journey to the cross.

Yesterday's gospel reading did it for me. (John 12:1-8; you can find it here.) It brought the cross near. We witnessed Mary of Bethany anoint Jesus, as a tender act of both extravagant love and gratitude (Jesus had raised her brother from the dead! That calls for something big).

But it was also a prophetic act.

It was an anointing for Jesus' burial, even before he is dead. Jesus recognizes the act for what it is.

I witness in our culture, on a regular basis, real unease with the death of Jesus-- the pain, the blood, the real, human cost of a brutal system that saw all but the official state religion as a threat.

(Sounds familiar, in these days when some seek to make a bizarre, unrecognizable version of "Christianity" the law of the land.)

But Mary nails it (if you could, um, excuse that expression). She recognizes Jesus' death-- even before it has occurred-- as a supreme act of love. As the supreme act of love. And so, she responds in kind, with an act that also recognizes the human Jesus-- the feet that carry him on his journey, this journey to the cross. She responds in kind, in kindness, with extravagant love, love fragrant and pure, love that doesn't count the cost.

What good is religion if, in the end, it doesn't come to love?

These words, then, from today's reading from Hebrews, speak to me:

And let us consider each other carefully for the purpose of sparking love and good deeds.  Don’t stop meeting together with other believers, which some people have gotten into the habit of doing. Instead, encourage each other, especially as you see the day drawing near. ~ Hebrews 10:24-25

Spark love in one another, my beloveds. Spark love, kind acts, and encouragement.

What good is our faith, if it doesn't come to love?

Lent Days 23-24: Oil

This morning I read a story I did not remember, from the life and work of the prophet Elisha.
(2 Kings 4:1-7, you can find it here.)

An unnamed widow goes to the prophet-- they seem to know one another, because her late husband belonged to "the company of prophets" (a union? a Bible Study? I must find out more...).

She tells Elisha that someone she is indebted to has come to take her two children-- sons-- as slaves, as repayment of her debts.

Elisha asks the most wonderful question: "What shall I do for you?"

It's so easy to assume we know what people need; it's respectful and kind to simply ask.

He adds, "What do you have in your house?", i.e., what have I got to work with?

She has only some oil.

Oil in scripture:

"Lampkoliwna," Oil lamp, Poland. 

It is used for anointing prophets, priests, and kings.

It lights the lamps that allow for sight in the night.

It is used in cooking, in baking-- oil for cakes, oil for bread, for sustenance.

And then there's that psalm that speaks of people living together in peace and unity:

How very good and pleasant it is
    when kindred live together in unity!
It is like the precious oil on the head,
    running down upon the beard,
on the beard of Aaron,
    running down over the collar of his robes.  ~Psalm 133:1-2

Oil is valuable. Everyone needs it.

Elisha is about to perform a miracle of abundance.

He tells her to get as many vessels-- containers, jars, find them, borrow them, bring them all in, and shut the door, shutting herself in with her sons, and fill them all with oil.

And she does. She pours and pours. "They (the children) kept bringing vessels to her and she kept pouring."

In the end, her vessel, her original source of oil, does not run out.

This unnamed woman, through the intervention of the prophet, has enough oil for all the anointing and blessing, for all the cakes and bread, for all the lamps that will flicker comfort and vision in the night, for all the oil that will speak to her neighbors of everything that is good, and needed, and holy.

She has just become an oil merchant.

Her sons are safe.

I see her, this very same night as the night of the miracle, the night of her first day as an oil merchant. She tucks the coins-- heavy, a bagful, all that's left over after paying her debt-- beneath the matt where she sleeps.

Then she takes a lamp filled with oil, a lamp glowing and bringing light to her home, and sits with her sons, and sings them to sleep.