Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church Read online

  On our baptism day, we followed my mother into the sanctuary’s stark bridal room where we pulled thin baptismal robes over T-shirts and jean shorts. I felt anxious about my breasts. My “stumbling blocks” had emerged early and generously, and I felt like the Whore of Babylon every time I caught a Sunday school classmate’s eye on them. (I didn’t learn to deconstruct modesty culture until after college, and by then it was too late.) Wet clothes would do me no favors, this much I knew. Fortunately, we were supposed to cross our arms in front of us before getting dunked anyway, and Mom had layered me up with a training bra, undershirt, and thick cotton tee. She ran a brush through my limp brown hair that hung like a mop strings beneath a tangle of artificially poofed bangs, and I watched her brown eyes scan the eczema breaking out on my arms, my stooped shoulders, the gap between my teeth. I refused to wear makeup, and it drove her crazy, especially on a day when any trace of color in my pallid face got washed out by a white robe. Amanda, of course, looked angelic with her hair curled and pulled into bouncy, asymmetrical pigtails—a Precious Moments figurine standing next to a frightened, busty ghost.

  “Good news,” Mom said, her cheeriness pronounced against the nervous tension. “I remembered to bring a hair dryer.”

  Well, that was a relief.

  With my father overseeing my theological development, my poor mother was left to steer me through the social nuances of church life, a task I made considerably more difficult for her by taking the former far more seriously than the latter. It’s one thing to explain to an eleven-year-old that there’s no way to know if Anne Frank went to heaven or hell, quite another to explain why such a question might have been an inappropriate one to pose at a bridal shower in front of the church ladies. But such was the nature of my small talk. Had I inherited more of my mother’s beauty and charm or shared some of my sister’s virtue, I might have gotten away with it, but instead I struggled through the trappings of Southern religious culture where a good Christian girl is expected to at least talk about the weather or football before getting to eternal damnation. A lifelong introvert, I never mastered the art of the schmooze. In addition, I purposefully defied my mother by refusing to wear lipstick or carry a purse or care much at all about what I wore to church, precisely because I knew these things were important to her. I liked to think of myself as a tomboy (like my hero Laura Ingalls Wilder), but without the interest in competitive sports or the outdoors. Fortunately, my mother has a weakness for rooting for the underdog, and so I never doubted she was rooting for me.

  I remember very little from the baptism service, except that the sanctuary looked so different from high up in the baptistery, like I was looking at it through a wide-angle lens. And I remember how comforting it was to wade out into the lukewarm water and meet my father there, familiar arms guiding me in, familiar hands clinching tight my nose, a familiar voice saying something about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a familiar force pushing me down and pulling me back up again, like when he swung me in his arms. And I remember how I was glad to see my mother waiting with open arms to wrap me in a towel, and how we watched together as Amanda took her turn and waded in, the water so much deeper around her little shoulders. There was a reception after, and someone had thought to make deviled eggs because they knew they were my favorite.

  But most of all, I remember wondering why I didn’t feel cleaner, why I didn’t feel holier or lighter or closer to God when I’d just been born again . . . again. I wondered if perhaps my Pentecostal classmates were right and I needed a second baptism of the Holy Spirit, or if I had not been solemn enough or prepared enough for the baptism to work. I hadn’t yet learned that you tend to come out of the big moments—the wedding, the book deal, the trip, the death, the birth—as the exact same person who went in, and that perhaps the strangest surprise of life is it keeps on happening to the same ol’ you.

  It is said that when Martin Luther would slip into one of his darker places (which happened a lot, the dude was totally bipolar), he would comfort himself by saying, “Martin, be calm, you are baptized.” I suspect his comfort came not from recalling the moment of baptism itself, or in relying on baptism as a sort of magic charm, but in remembering what his baptism signified: his identity as a beloved child of God. Because ultimately, baptism is a naming. When Jesus emerged from the waters of the Jordan, a voice from heaven declared, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” Jesus did not begin to be loved at the moment of his baptism, nor did he cease to be loved when his baptism became a memory. Baptism simply named the reality of his existing and unending belovedness. As my friend Nadia puts it, “Identity. It’s always God’s first move.”9

  So, too, it is with us. In baptism, we are identified as beloved children of God, and our adoption into the sprawling, beautiful, dysfunctional family of the church is celebrated by whoever happens to be standing on the shoreline with a hair dryer and deviled eggs. This is why the baptism font is typically located near the entrance of a church. The central aisle represents the Christian’s journey through life toward God, a journey that begins with baptism.

  The good news is you are a beloved child of God; the bad news is you don’t get to choose your siblings. Nadia is a Lutheran pastor who grew up in a fundamentalist Churches of Christ tradition that, like mine, prohibited women from becoming pastors. When she converted to Lutheranism, she asked her Lutheran mentor to rebaptize her. Her mentor wisely declined, reminding her that an act of God cannot be undone or redone. Though she had left the company and the ways of her first church, she couldn’t blot them out of her spiritual genealogy. They were still her family.

  Like Nadia, I’ve wrestled with the evangelical tradition in which I was raised, often ungracefully. At times I’ve tried to wring the waters of my first baptism out of my clothes, shake them out of my hair, and ask for a do-over in some other community where they ordain women, vote for Democrats, and believe in evolution. But Jesus has this odd habit of allowing ordinary, screwed-up people to introduce him, and so it was ordinary, screwed-up people who first told me I was a beloved child of God, who first called me a Christian. I don’t know where my story of faith will take me, but it will always begin here. That much can never change.

  I was baptized by my father. And by my mother. By Pastor George, by my Sunday school teachers, by my sister, by that used car salesman who sang a sauntering gospel version of “The Old Rugged Cross” every Easter, by the boy who put boogers in my hair, by the little girl in the wheelchair who couldn’t speak. I was baptized by Alabama, by Reaganomics, by evangelicalism, by Parkway Christian Academy, and Bible Chapel. I was baptized by Martin Luther King Jr. and George Wallace and Billy Graham. I was baptized by the sort of people who turn fish stories into sermons and listen to Rush Limbaugh and sometimes love me the wrong way. I was baptized by water and by spirit and by this strange bundle of atoms and genes and experiences God has assembled, delighted in, and in an act of absurd mercy named Beloved.

  THREE

  Naked on Easter

  How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.

  —Sigmund Freud

  IN THE EARLY 1920S, ARCHEOLOGISTS EXPLORING THE desert ruins of Dura-Europos, a Roman border city in modern-day Syria, uncovered a series of crude frescoes on the walls of a Roman home. The frescoes surrounded a bathing pool and depicted several distinct scenes: a shepherd carrying a lamb on his shoulders, a woman at a well, two figures walking across the sea as their comrades watch from a ship, three women approaching a tomb. The archeologists had discovered the baptistery of what remains the oldest known church building in the world.

  Nearly two thousand years earlier, on Easter morning just before the sun rose, flickering lamplight would have illuminated the drawings as new converts to Christianity kneeled, stark naked, in the water of the baptistery. One by one, the men separated from the women, each publicly affirmed the tenets of the faith and renounced Satan and his demons before being submerged three times in the cold water—in the name of the F
ather, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

  “Dost thou renounce Satan, and all his angels, and all his works, and all his services, and all his pride?” Orthodox priests ask adult converts to this day.

  “I do,” says the convert.

  “Dost thou unite thyself unto Christ?”

  “I do.”

  “Bow down also before him.”

  “I bow down before the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

  After baptism, converts were given white robes to signify their new life in Christ and anointed with oil, marking them as members of the royal priesthood. They then joined their fellow believers to celebrate the eucharistic meal for the first time. The process was repeated every year, after several days of fasting and at the culmination of the solemn Easter vigil.10

  These days, most churches don’t begin their Resurrection Sunday service with a bunch of wet, naked people renouncing Satan and his demons at six o’clock in the morning. Such an approach would draw far fewer visitors than elaborate passion plays or Easter egg hunts promising cash prizes. Yet historically, the Christian life began with the public acknowledgment of two uncomfortable realities—evil and death—and in baptism, the Christian makes the audacious claim that neither one gets the final word.

  Now, I’m as uncomfortable as the next Honda-driving, NPR-listening, New York Times–reading progressive with the notion of exorcising demons. When I get to those stories in the New Testament, I’m inclined to take the sophisticated approach and assume the people who had demons cast out of them were healed of mental illness or epilepsy or something like that (which, when you think about it, simply requires exchanging one highly implausible story for another). But lately I’ve been wondering if this leaves something important out, something true about the shape and nature of evil, which, as Alexander Schmemann puts it, is not merely an absence of good but “the presence of dark and irrational power.”11

  Indeed, our sins—hate, fear, greed, jealousy, lust, materialism, pride—can at times take such distinct forms in our lives that we recognize them in the faces of the gargoyles and grotesques that guard our cathedral doors. And these sins join in a chorus—you might even say a legion—of voices locked in an ongoing battle with God to lay claim over our identity, to convince us we belong to them, that they have the right to name us. Where God calls the baptized beloved, demons call her addict, slut, sinner, failure, fat, worthless, faker, screwup. Where God calls her child, the demons beckon with rich, powerful, pretty, important, religious, esteemed, accomplished, right. It is no coincidence that when Satan tempted Jesus after his baptism, he began his entreaties with, “If you are the Son of God . . .” We all long for someone to tell us who we are. The great struggle of the Christian life is to take God’s name for us, to believe we are beloved and to believe that is enough.

  Whether they come from within us or outside us, whether they represent distinct personalities or the sins and systems that compete for our allegiance, demons are as real as the competing identities that seek to possess us. But rather than casting them out of our churches, we tend to invite them in, where they tell us we’ll be children of God when . . .

  we beat the addiction.

  we sign the doctrinal statement.

  we help with the children’s ministry.

  we get our act together.

  we tithe.

  we play by the rules.

  we believe without doubt.

  we are married.

  we are straight.

  we are religious.

  we are good.

  But “the first act of the Christian life,” says Schmemann, “is a renunciation, a challenge.” In baptism, the Christian stands naked and unashamed before all these demons—all these impulses and temptations, sins and failures, empty sales pitches and screwy labels—and says, “I am a beloved child of God and I renounce anything or anyone who says otherwise.”12 In some Orthodox traditions, the convert literally spits in the face of evil before going under the water.

  It’s a brave, defiant thing to do. And Christians ought to do it more often, if not in our baptisms, then in our remembrance of them. Or maybe every time we take a shower.

  In addition to proclaiming God’s power over principalities, the oldest baptism rites declared God’s power over death. Many of the first baptismal fonts were shaped as coffins, and baptisms took place just before sunrise on Easter morning to recall Christ’s triumph over the grave. The Christian’s descent into the water represents a surrender, a death, to the old way of living. Emergence represents a resurrection, a starting over again.

  “Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” the apostle Paul wrote the Romans. “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life” (Romans 6:3–4). Cyril of Jerusalem told the newly baptized that “by this action, you died and you were born, and for you the saving water was at once a grave and the womb of a mother.” Luther described baptism as the drowning of the old, sinful self which he notes “is a mighty good swimmer,” and Argentinian preacher Juan Carlos Ortiz has been known to use a startling baptismal formula: “I kill you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and I make you born into the kingdom of God to serve him and to please him.”13

  Death and resurrection. It’s the impossibility around which every other impossibility of the Christian faith orbits. Baptism declares that God is in the business of bringing dead things back to life, so if you want in on God’s business, you better prepare to follow God to all the rock-bottom, scorched-earth, dead-on-arrival corners of this world—including those in your own heart—because that’s where God works, that’s where God gardens. Baptism reminds us that there’s no ladder to holiness to climb, no self-improvement plan to follow. It’s just death and resurrection, over and over again, day after day, as God reaches down into our deepest graves and with the same power that raised Jesus from the dead wrests us from our pride, our apathy, our fear, our prejudice, our anger, our hurt, and our despair. Most days I don’t know which is harder for me to believe: that God reanimated the brain functions of a man three days dead, or that God can bring back to life all the beautiful things we have killed. Both seem pretty unlikely to me.

  Everyone’s got an opinion these days about why people are leaving the church. Some wish to solve the problem by making Christianity a little more palatable—you know, cut out all this weird, mystical stuff about sin, demons, and death and resurrection, and replace it with self-help books or politics or fancy theological systems or hip coffee shops. But sometimes I think what the church needs most is to recover some of its weird. There’s no sense in sending her through the makeover montage of the chick flick when she’ll always be the strange, awkward girl who only gets invited to prom on a dare.

  In the ritual of baptism, our ancestors acted out the bizarre truth of the Christian identity: We are people who stand totally exposed before evil and death and declare them powerless against love.

  There’s nothing normal about that.

  FOUR

  Chubby Bunny

  It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.

  —Arthur C. Clarke

  I WENT TO SCHOOL THE DAY AFTER THE MASSACRE AT Columbine High School, even though most of my classmates skipped.

  “It’s the perfect witnessing opportunity,” I told my mother on my way out the door to catch the bus. “Everyone’s scared.”

  Rhea County High School in Dayton, Tennessee, was exactly 1,318 miles away from Columbine High School, where the day before, on April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had pulled two assault rifles, ninety-nine explosives, and two shotguns from beneath their black trench coats to kill a dozen of their classmates and a teacher before committing suicide. I’d heard on the news that some of the victims had been asked if they believed in God before they got shot, so as t
he first blue light of morning glowed in the bus windows, I prayed God would give me the strength to affirm my faith in the event of a dreaded copycat scenario that had so many parents, students, and teachers worried that morning.

  As a senior and president of the Bible Club, I felt it my duty to lead the revival I felt certain the tragedy would ignite among high school students across the country. I’d been gunning for a revival ever since I entered the public school system when we moved to Tennessee two years after my baptism, a plan made considerably more difficult by the fact that nearly everyone in Dayton—home to the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925—already identified as Christian. There were prayers before each football game and Bible verses on every business marquee. McDonald’s and Hardee’s hosted rival gospel sings for old-timers on alternating Thursday nights, and later, a lone bronze statue of William Jennings Bryan, legendary defender of fundamentalism, would be erected to guard the courthouse lawn. We had to form a double circle around the flagpole for See You At the Pole because so many of us showed up to take a stand for Jesus. Revival found the Tennessee Valley long before I arrived and had settled in, like a fog.

  Still, I went to school every day determined to transform all the Christians there into evangelical Christians and set them on fire for God. I psyched myself up in the morning with Christian music from DC Talk and Audio Adrenaline. I wrote “GOD IS AWESOME” with magic marker on a strip of red duct tape and plastered it across my JanSport backpack like a bumper sticker. I looked for ways to redirect conversations about Friday night’s football game into discussions regarding Jesus Christ’s atoning death for our sins. I debated evolution with my lab partner. And the day after the Columbine massacre I found myself competing with Julie Andrews and the cast of The Sound of Music (I should have known we’d watch movies all day) as I hissed to the cheerleader two seats in front of me, “Do you know where you would spend eternity if you died today?” Had I not been so utterly sincere, so genuinely devoted to the eternal well-being of my fellow human beings, I would have deserved the glare she sent back. But for the most part my classmates were patient with me, even kind. A few of them, mostly boys who I now suspect had vested interests on account of my “stumbling blocks,” humored me and showed up at my locker in between classes to talk about the merits of faith and whether I planned to be at the homecoming dance Saturday night. There were exactly two self-avowed atheists in my graduating class, and I’m pleased to say I converted one of them.