Pastrix Page 5

  Many of the folks at House for All had been hurt by the church in one way or another. Several, like Stuart himself, had been victims of so-called ex-gay reparative therapy at the hands of Christians, some had been told they were not up to snuff in the eyes of God, and, needless to say, the vast majority of the folks at House for All were not regularly attending a church when they joined us. In other words, they were just like me in the spring of 1996 when I first walked into St. Paul’s in Oakland.

  It was important to me that the House for All Sinners and Saints be a place where no one had to check at the door their personalities or the parts of our stories that seemed “unchristian.” I wanted a place where something other than how we responded to rules was at the center of our life together. Yet, in the end, despite how much I love HFASS, I am still not an idealist, not when it comes to our human projects. 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.

  As a matter of fact, at our quarterly “Welcome to HFASS” events, we ask the question, What drew you to HFASS? They love the singing, people often say, and the community, and the lack of praise bands, and the fact that they feel like they can comfortably be themselves. They love that we laugh a lot and have drag queens and that it’s a place where difficult truths can be spoken and everyone is welcome, and where we pray for each other.

  I am always the last to speak at these events. I tell them that I love hearing all of that and that I, too, love being in a spiritual community where I don’t have to add to or take away from my own story to be accepted. But I have learned something by belonging to two polar-opposite communities—Albion Babylon and the Church of Christ—and I wanted them to hear me: This community will disappoint them. It’s a matter of when, not if. We will let them down or I’ll say something stupid and hurt their feelings. I then invite them on this side of their inevitable disappointment to decide if they’ll stick around after it happens. 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.

  Welcome to House for All Sinners and Saints. We will disappoint you.

  A few months after the ELCA policy change, an email from the Lutheran bishop in Northern California arrived in my inbox.

  Pastor Nadia,

  We are currently planning a festival Eucharist and rite of recognition here in San Francisco for six GLBTQ [gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer] clergy to be officially brought onto the ELCA clergy roster. At that time, Pastor Ross Merkle of St. Paul Lutheran will be reinstated onto the clergy roster. They have asked that you be the preacher for the event. Would you preach for us?

  My reply: “All day long.”

  But then they sent me the text from which I was to preach, and my heart sank. It was a Kingdom of God parable from Matthew’s Gospel. The Kingdom of God is a tricky concept, and I was always taught it referred to our heavenly reward for being good, which, now that I actually read the Bible for myself, makes very little sense. Others say that the Kingdom of God is another way of talking about the church, and still others say that it’s the dream God has for the wholeness of the world, a dream being made true little by little among us right here, right now. My answer? All of the above.

  What happens in the Kingdom of God parable I was given is that a landowner goes out and hires laborers in the morning and agrees to pay them the daily wage. But then every few hours he goes and finds more workers and brings them in. In the afternoon he goes again to the marketplace and sees folks standing around and is like, “Why aren’t you working?” and they say, “because no one would hire us,” and he sends them into his vineyard to work the last two hours of the day. When the work is done he pays everyone the same thing, which pisses off the upstanding early risers who worked all day in the scorching heat because he has made the slept-till-noon new hires equal to them. The landowner is like, “Seriously? You’re angry because I am generous?” and then the final line of the parable is, “The last shall be first and the first shall be last.” This is exactly, when it comes down to it, why most people do not believe in grace. It is fucking offensive.

  But the job of a preacher is to find some kind of good news for people. And that good news really should be about who God is and how God works and what God has done and what God will do. (What passes for preaching in many cases is more here’s the problem, and here’s what you can do about it, which I myself have never once heard as being “good news.”) So here’s why my heart sank when I received the text for the Eucharist: I worried that it might have been chosen in the hope that I would preach a different kind of good news, namely a sermon that said, “All those who are pissed that God is generous to GLBTQ folks can suck it. We’ve been last, but now we get to be first! [fist pump]”

  Yet that’s the problem with the whole concept of grace that the Lutherans themselves taught me. It can both sting and comfort. My own fundamentalist wiring will always lead me to want two sets of labeled containers—in this case, Bad: the conservative people who hate the gays and Good: the liberal people who love the gays. I might always put people and things in those containers, but the problem comes when I start believing that God uses the same sorting system.

  Matthew once said to me, after one of my more finely worded rants about stupid people who have the wrong opinions, “Nadia, the thing that sucks is that every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.” Damn.

  I want the kingdom of God, and myself, and the ELCA, to be more impressive, more… spiritual. To look like I think it should. But I have learned that like this parable the kingdom of God is more like a workplace—filled with type A personalities, whose sense of entitlement would rival Paris Hilton’s, alongside slackers, who take too many smoke breaks and spend their money on scratch tickets.

  But here’s one of the things that sealed the deal for me with Lutheranism and set the tone for the kind of pastor I would try to be: What makes this the kingdom of God is not the quality of the people in it. 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 as we are, smart and faithful as we are, just as we are. Which is just what I preached that day.

  As I stood in the imposing pulpit of St. Mark’s Lutheran church in San Francisco, I looked out into the faces of those who had been unfairly denied entrance into the leadership of the church. I looked out into the faces of Stuart and Jim, who had come from Denver to witness the celebration (and who, moments earlier, when standing outside with over a hundred clergy ready to process in full vestments, had looked at me and laughed, saying, “This looks like such a big deal, and you’re the preacher?”). I looked at sweet Ross Merkle who winked at me.

  I swallowed and began to preach. I said that the text for the day is not the parable of the workers. It’s the parable of the landowner. What makes this the kingdom of God is not the worthiness or piety or social justicey-ness or the hard work of the laborers… none of that matters. It’s the fact that the trampy landowner couldn’t manage to keep out of the marketplace. He goes back and back and back, interrupting lives… coming to get his people. Grace tapping us on the shoulder.

  And so, I reminded those seven pastors specifically, including the man who introduced me to grace, that the kingdom of God was just like that exact moment in which sinners/saints are reconciled to God and to one another. The kingdom of God is like that very moment when God was making all things new. In the end, their calling, and their value in the kingdom of God comes not from the approval of a denomination or of the other workers, but in their having been come-and-gotten by God. It is the pure and unf
athomable mercy of God that defines them and that says, “Pay attention, this is for you.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Hurricanes and Humiliation

  How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?

  Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.

  —1 John 3:17-18

  Driving back from Lowry Air Force Base on a fall day in 2005 (when I was just starting seminary and our kids, Harper and Judah, were five and seven), I was giddy with self-congratulations. I had rescued a pregnant, disadvantaged, teenaged African American girl (and her father)—victims of a natural disaster—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, when suddenly a thunk the likes of which no car owner ever wants to hear, came out of my Honda like a bitch slap.

  The interior of the car became suspiciously warmer and warmer until I could no longer deny that my air conditioner had just broken. If I believed in portents, which I do, but only in retrospect and never as something to heed in the moment (which basically neuters their usefulness as portents), I would have perhaps taken notice—sort of like that tiki from the Brady Bunch episode in Hawaii, but I generally ignore my personal tikis until well into syndication.

  We were driving away from the decommissioned air force base outside of Denver where many Hurricane Katrina evacuees were being housed. Earlier that week, I, like the rest of America, had watched in horror as images of death and disaster had been splashed across our TV screens, and this time they were domestic. We got the smallest glimpse of what most of the world suffers on a daily basis and we were scandalized. Folks from my husband Matthew’s congregation had been calling us all week with offers of assistance—free housing, kitchen supplies, clothing, money, and employment for the evacuees—but no one could figure out how to get these resources to those who needed them. That our only option was to list our offers of help on a national Web site and just wait seemed silly to me. People were being evacuated to our own area who could use these things right now, not three months from now when some bureaucrat finally connects the dots. I was going to take care of this now.

  I, like others, could not abide the images of people stranded on rooftops, of lifeless bodies floating in debris-filled water or covered with sheets in the hallway of a purgatorial sports coliseum. If I could help a family set up a new life here in Colorado, then I could exonerate myself from the charges leveled by these images and right a wrong at the same time. In light of our government’s anemic response, I wanted to heroically rescue a victim from this unthinkable disaster.

  I went looking for the perfect family; a single man wouldn’t do. When I saw Amerie, I knew she was the one: a sixteen-year-old from New Orleans who was almost eight months pregnant. We met at the air force barracks where she was in line to ask the Red Cross volunteers if they could find her a place to live that wasn’t… in a barracks. They couldn’t, but [insert superhero sound here] I could.

  Soft spoken and polite with coffee ice cream skin, Amerie was interested in what I had to offer: a fully furnished apartment, rent free for six months, with money for groceries and expenses (after a single announcement at Matthew’s church a few days earlier, I collected a cool two thousand dollars in cash). Her dad was with her, and I assured her that the offer extended to him as well. Later that afternoon she called me and said they’d take it. I picked up them and their two Hefty bags full of stuff, and the three of us drove silently toward my house in a blistering hot Honda. The high of the rescue then wore off, and I was left with a blank feeling of slight dread, like Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross riding away on a city bus in the last scene of The Graduate.

  Amerie’s mother was a drug addict who had been MIA for the last four months, so her father, Howard, a dark-skinned man of few words, had come from the Bronx to look after her. Her parents had never married, but Amerie explained that Howard had always kept in touch, sending money when he could, which had been difficult during his time as a guest of the state of New York after being convicted of being a “street pharmacist.”

  Howard had only been in New Orleans for a month when the hurricane hit. “She was dumb enough to get herself in this condition, so I should have just left her,” he said to me, waving his hand in the direction of his pregnant daughter, who sat in the blazing hot backseat of my car. They had made it to Houston before their car broke down, and from there, a friend drove them to Denver.

  For the next six weeks, I, along with two other women from church, took care of Amerie. We got her into birthing classes and a teen parenting program in a Boulder high school and made appointments with a great ob-gyn at the hospital. She often stayed at our house. Howard had a job in Denver and almost always stayed at the barracks.

  Amerie was wonderful with my kids. She spent hours playing board games and sitting contentedly petting the cat. But I worried about how she was left alone so often by her father this close to her due date and without a car of her own. She never talked much about her previous life except to say that she wanted something different from drug addiction and public housing. She wanted to stay in Colorado.

  But there were things that didn’t quite add up. Amerie never tried to contact her mother. Her father was mostly absent, and when he was around he was completely unkind to her. They had four thousand dollars from FEMA and a free apartment and lots of grocery store gift cards, but still kept asking every few days for more money. And unlike most teenagers, the urgent way Amerie always reacted when she got a text seemed more like she had just received a telegram during wartime than a frivolous exchange between locker partners. But whenever I started questioning the situation, I told myself that I just didn’t understand black poverty culture.

  Howard soon had a girlfriend near the barracks, and when we met, she made me uncomfortable. She smelled of menthol cigarettes, was a decade too old for a bleach-blond ponytail, and the ten-year-old son by her side never seemed to be in school. To my eyes this woman was totally unstable, and why Amerie would want to be around her was beyond me. But she apparently liked the woman, and I couldn’t stop that.

  Amerie went into labor on the first day of Advent. It seemed perfect that this unwed, homeless teenager was having this baby at the beginning of the season in which the church remembers another homeless, unwed teenage mother. She was so brave in labor, refusing drugs and filling the room with such calm and strength as she faced each contraction.

  Two church ladies, the childbirth instructor, and Howard’s girlfriend (with her ten-year-old, of course) were all there, but Howard, I was told, “was out drinking somewhere.” After hours of labor, Amerie wasn’t progressing, so everyone but me went home, having been told that nothing would be happening until at least the morning. A couple of hours later, Amerie was advised to consider an epidural, which she welcomed. But relief from the pain soon gave way to panic. The epidural had not gone well. Within ten minutes the baby’s heart rate had dropped to dangerous levels, and a set of scrubs was being thrust in my face as we were rushed into the bright noise and uncertainly of an operating room. I kept caressing Amerie’s face and telling her that I was right there and she was going to be fine, something Matthew had done for me in both of my labors. The fetal monitor provided a cruel soundtrack to the chaos around us, like an uneven and slowing time clock. It felt like it took the doctors and nurses a lifetime to complete the C-section. Finally they pulled a beautiful screaming child out of the body of a beautiful screaming child, and they were both fine. Amerie and I both wept in that moment of new life that marks the souls of those who share it. We’d take care of her and her baby. Even if her dad couldn’t, we’d make sure this little girl had a good life. The first question she asked when the baby was born was, “Is she OK?” The second question she asked was, “Is she dark?”

  Amerie and her baby girl came and stayed a couple of nights with us before she planned (much to my dismay) to stay with he
r father’s girlfriend for a while. She left on a Thursday. That same night, as I was about to go to bed, the phone rang. Amerie was hysterical for the first time since I’d known her.

  “We’re in trouble. You have to meet us,” she said. I panicked, sure something had happened with the baby. She assured me the baby was fine and that she had to speak to me in person. I had to help her, she said. Suddenly I wasn’t the helpful Nellie I’d been until then, and all I could think was, are you kidding me? I’ve done nothing but help you for a month and a half. I’m exhausted, and if I don’t sleep soon I’m going to become subhuman. Instead I said, “I’ll be there, just hold on.” We got a neighbor to come over and babysit the kids, and then Matthew drove us to an exit off the highway where Amerie had said they’d be waiting for us.

  It was raining when Amerie and Howard’s girlfriend climbed into the backseat with the baby. Amerie was crying, but the baby was quiet.

  “We’re in trouble,” she said again. “You have to help us.”

  She proceeded to tell me that her name is not Amerie, but Ashley. Howard is not her father, but the father of the baby. This is not Howard’s girlfriend; she’s Amerie’s mother. Howard is her mother’s pimp, and he raped Amerie. She is not sixteen; she’s only fifteen, meaning she was fourteen at the time of the rape. They are not even from New Orleans; they’re from Denver. Howard put her up to the fraud, and he ended up with four thousand dollars in a bank account thanks to FEMA, which was his plan all along. Her phone buzzed repeatedly as she told me the story, and she jumped a little each time. Howard was texting.