Nadia Bolz-Weber Quotes & Sayings

If the quality of my Christianity lies in my ability to be more inclusive than the next pastor, things get tricky because I will always, always encounter people - intersex people, Republicans, criminals, Ann Coulter, etc. - whom I don't want in the tent with me. Always. I only really want to be inclusive of some kinds of people and not of others. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Oh hey, God told me to tell you something: Get over yourself. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

The beauty of our sky is really just a nice way for the earth to protect us from the terror of what's so vast and unknowable beyond. The boundlessness of the universe is disturbing when you think about it. It's too big and we're too small. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

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. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

I told them that when I heard Billy was bright, an artist and musician, and when I heard that he loved his family and loved people through difficulty in relationships, and when I heard that he struggled with heroin and booze addictions and an unhelpful brain chemistry, and when I heard that he was beautifully queer and passionate and sometimes played piano in his sister's dresses, I knew. I knew that Billy was pretty much exactly the kind of person Jesus would hang out with. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Maybe demons are defined as anything other than God that tries to tell us who we are. And maybe, just moments after Jesus' baptism, when the devil says to him, "If you are the Son of God ... " he does so because he knows that Jesus is vulnerable to temptation precisely to the degree that he is insecure about his identity and mistrusts his relationship with God. So if God's first move is to give us our identity, then the devil's first move is to throw that identity into question. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

The Bible is not God. The Bible is simply the cradle that holds Christ. Anything in the Bible that does not hold up to the Gospel of Jesus Christ simply does not have the same authority. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

But I cannot pretend, as much as sometimes I would like to, that I have not throughout my life experienced the redeeming, destabilizing love of a surprising God. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

God, please help me not be an asshole, is about as common a prayer as I pray in my life. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

It felt like a gift that had been caretaken by generations of the faithful and handed to us to live out and caretake and hand off. Like a stream that has flowed long before us and will continue long after us. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Church isn't perfect. It's practice. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Shit," I thought to myself, "I'm going to be late to New Testament class. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

What happens at the cross is a "blessed exchange." God gathers up all our sin, all our broken-ass junk, into God's own self and transforms all that death into life. Jesus takes our crap and exchanges it for his blessedness. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Every human community will disappoint us, regardless of how well-intentioned or inclusive. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Fear not, brothers and sisters, God, who is full of grace and abounding in steadfast love, meets us in our sin and transforms us for God's glory and the healing of God's world. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, your sins are forgiven, be now at peace. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

So are demons forces that are totally external to us who seek to defy God? Are they just the shadow side of our own souls? Are they social constructions from a premodern era? Bottom line: Who cares? I don't think demons are something human reason can put its finger on. Or that human faith can resolve. I just know that demons, whether they be addictions or actual evil spirits, are not what Jesus wants for us, since basically every time he encounters them he tells them to piss off. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

And always, always, it is worth it to sing alleluia in defiance of the devil, who surely hates the sound of it. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Sin is the self curved in on the self. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

But at the time I didn't know that it would take more to escape black-and-white thinking than just no longer attending your parents' church. The church had provided me a sorting system, which was now ingrained. It had containers into which every person and idea and event was to be placed. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Identity. It's always God's first move. Before we do anything wrong and before we do anything right, God has named and claimed us as God's own. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

The fact is, we are all, at once, bearers of the gospel and receivers of it. We meet the needs of others and have our needs met. And — Nadia Bolz-Weber

We have to hear again and again who God is for us and what God has done on our behalf. We must free each other from bondage through our confession and forgiveness. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

We had started out caring about each other, but in the end none of us knew how to care for each other. But this experience taught me that a community based on the idea that everyone hates rules is, in the end, just as disappointing and oppressive as a community based on the ability to follow rules. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

The crucifixion portrayed on our show was undertaken by the son of God, a trained professional. Do not try to crucify yourself at home. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Usually when you are grieving and someone says something so senselessly optimistic to you, it's about them. Either they want to feel like they can say something helpful, or they simply cannot allow themselves to entertain the finality and pain of death, so instead they turn it into a Precious Moments greeting card. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

As I wrote in Pastrix I, like any good middle-class mainline Protestant, tend to arrogantly look down my theological nose at talk of demon possession as superstitious snake-handling nonsense, as though it's the spiritual equivalent of a monster truck rally. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

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. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

It was in those first couple months that I fell in love with liturgy, the ancient pattern of worship shared mainly in the Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox, and Episcopal churches. It felt like a gift that had been caretaken by generations of the faithful and handed to us to live out and caretake and hand off. Like a stream that has flowed long before us and will continue long after us. A stream that we get to swim in, so that we, like those who came before us, can be immersed in language of truth and promise and grace. Something about the liturgy was simultaneously destabilizing and centering; my individualism subverted by being joined to other people through God to find who I was. Somehow it happened through God. One specific, divine force. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Good Friday is a stark and unapologetic display of remorse. Remorse for the way in which humanity kills ourselves and the creation and love and God him/herself. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

God is always present in love and in suffering. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

We bring the holy things of the church onto the holy streets of the city because on some level, the violence and despair of Good Friday is still a human reality. Unfortunately, we've never lacked an opportunity to pay such a visit. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

In the story, the eunuch was riding along the desert road in his chariot reading Isaiah, and he was returning from Jerusalem having gone there to worship. But I started to wonder if he was also familiar with Deuteronomy, specifically 23:1, which says, No one whose testicles are cut off or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord. (Why John 3:16 is the most popular verse in the Bible and not Deuteronomy 23:1 is beyond me.) — Nadia Bolz-Weber

This desire to learn what the faith is from those who have lived it in the face of being told they are not welcome or worthy is far more than "inclusion." Actually, inclusion isn't the right word at all, because it sounds like in our niceness and virtue we are allowing "them" to join "us" - like we are judging another group of people to be worthy of inclusion in a tent that we don't own. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Knowing all of this makes me love and hate Jesus at the same time. Because, when instead of contrasting good and evil, he contrasted truth and evil, I have to think about all the times I've substituted being good (or appearing to be good) for truth. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

It would seem that when we are sinned against, when someone else does us harm, we are in some way linked to that sin, connected to that mistreatment like a chain. And our anger, fear, or resentment doesn't free us at all. It just keeps us chained. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

The disciples' mistake was also my mistake: They forgot that they have a God who created the universe out of "nothing," that can put flesh on dry bones "nothing," that can put life in a dusty womb "nothing." I mean, let's face it, "nothing" is God's favorite material to work with. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

I need to be broken apart and put back into a different shape by that merging of things human and divine, which is really screwing up and receiving grace and love and forgiveness rather than receiving what I really deserve. I — Nadia Bolz-Weber

When the forces that seek to defy God whisper if in our ears - if God really loved me, I wouldn't feel like this ... If I really am beloved, then I should have everything I want ... if I really belong to God, things in my life wouldn't suck - to remember that God has named us and claimed us as God's own. When what seems to be depression or compulsive eating or narcissism or despair or discouragement or resentment or isolation takes over, try picturing it as a vulnerable and desperate force seeking to defy God's grace and mercy in your life. And then tell it to piss off and say defiantly to it, "I am baptized" or "I am God's," because nothing else gets to tell you who you are. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

The life changing seems always bracketed by the mundane. The quotidian wrapped around the profound, like plain brown paper concealing the emotional version of an improvised explosive device. Then, in a single interminable moment, when we discover the bomb, absolutely everything changes. But when we recall it from our now forever-changed lives, when we start with the plain brown wrapping, it looks like every other package, every other morning, every other walk. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Singing in the midst of evil is what it means to be disciples. Like Mary Magdalene, the reason we stand and weep and listen for Jesus is because we, like Mary, are bearers of resurrection, we are made new. On the third day, Jesus rose again, and we do not need to be afraid. To sing to God amidst sorrow is to defiantly proclaim, like Mary Magdalene did to the apostles, and like my friend Don did at Dylan Klebold's funeral,t hat death is not the final word. To defiantly say, once again, that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot, will not, shall not overcome it. And so, evil be damned, because even as we go to the grave, we still make our song alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

God's grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God's grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word ... it's that God makes beautiful things out of even my own shit. Grace isn't about God creating humans and flawed beings and then acting all hurt when we inevitably fail and then stepping in like the hero to grant us grace - like saying, "Oh, it's OK, I'll be the good guy and forgive you." It's God saying, "I love the world too much to let your sin define you and be the final word. I am a God who makes all things new. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

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. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Every time I go look for God amidst sorrow, I always find Jesus at the cross, in death and resurrection. This is our God. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

We weren't a ship of fools so much as a rowboat of idiots. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

On All Saints' Sunday, I am faced with sticky ambiguities around saints who were bad and sinners who were good. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

I've never fully understood how Christianity became quite so tame and respectable, given its origins among drunkards, prostitutes, and tax collectors. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

If becoming a person of faith were more like, say, receiving a personality transplant, life would be easier. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

This was the bonus to liberal Christianity: I could use my reason and believe at the same time. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

We want to go to God for answers, but sometimes what we get is God's presence. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Whenever people annoy me beyond reason, I can guarantee it's because they're demonstrating something I'd rather not see in myself. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

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. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

What they don't tell you when you get sober is that if you manage to stay that way, you will bury your friends. Not everyone gets to have a whole new shiny-but-messy life like I have, and I've never come up with a satisfying explanation for why that is. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

And the Word that had most recently come from the mouth of God was, "This is my beloved in whom I am well pleased." Identity. It's always God's first move. Before we do anything wrong and before we do anything right, God has named and claimed us as God's own. But almost immediately, other things try to tell us who we are and to whom we belong: capitalism, the weight-loss industrial complex, our parents, kids at school - they all have a go at telling us who we are. But only God can do that. Everything else is temptation. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

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 addictions. And God keeps loving us back to life over and over. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

We often behave as though Jesus is only interested in saving and loving a romanticized version of ourselves, or an idealized version of our mess of a world, and so we offer to him a version of our best selves. With our Sunday school shoes on, we sing songs about kings and drummers at his birth, perhaps so we can escape the Herod in ourselves and in the world around us. But we've lost the plot if we use religion as the place where we escape from difficult realities instead of as the place where those difficult realities are given meaning. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Jesus taught us to pray, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us" not forgive us and smite those bastards who hurt us. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

this God, is revealed in Jesus Christ, who became flesh and walked among us full of grace and truth and who is so for us and with us that he would go to the grave on our behalf - when — Nadia Bolz-Weber

There was something about hearing it that was so different than just imagining it to be true. To hear I was loved meant something very particular because of the context in which I heard it, as though Jay was saying, "You are a mess, and you are loved. You have a little issue with anger, and you are loved. I've not even known you that long, and you are loved. You think you are going through this alone but you are wrong, and you are loved. The thing you are experiencing right now seems so big, but what is bigger is that you are loved." This, like hearing you are forgiven, is something we need each other for. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

I can only look at the seemingly limited space under the tent and think either it's my job to change people so they fit or it's my job to extend the roof so that they fit. Either way, it's misguided because it's not my tent. It's God's tent. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

The eunuch sought God despite the fact that he had heard that there was no love for him there. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Getting sober never felt like I had pulled myself up by my own spiritual bootstraps. It felt instead like I was on one path toward destruction and God pulled me off of it by the scruff of my collar, me hopelessly kicking and flailing and saying, 'Screw you. I'll take the destruction please.' God looked at tiny, little red-faced me and said, 'that's adorable,' and then plunked me down on an entirely different path. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

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 is 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 not 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. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Jesus says, "Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me." He says, "The first shall be last and the last shall be first," and infuriating things like "if you seek to find your life you will lose it but those who lose their life will find it." And every single time I die to something - my notions of my own specialness, my plans and desires for something to be a very particular way - every single time I fight it and yet every single time I discover more life and more freedom than if I had gotten what I wanted. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

There's something about courting the darkness that makes some people see the truth in raw, twisted ways, as though they were shining a black light on life to illuminate the absurdity of it all. Comics tell you a truth you can only see from the underside of the psyche. At its best, comedy is prophesy and societal dream interpretation. At its worst it's just dick jokes. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

He said that there would be more information available in the narthex. I leaned over to Matthew and whispered, The Narthex? Isn't that a Dr. Suess character that speaks for the trees?? — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Repentance in Greek means something much closer to "thinking differently afterward" than it does "changing your cheating ways." Of course repentance can look like a prostitute becoming a librarian, but it can also look like a prostitute simply saying, "OK, I'm a sex worker and I don't know how to change that, but I can come here and receive bread and wine and I can hold onto the love of God without being deemed worthy of it by anyone but God. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

But the only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Truth. It can make me hate the person speaking it. Until the point at which I want to kiss them for setting me free. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Everything else is temptation. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

It's my practice to welcome new people to the church by making sure they know that House for All Sinners and Saints will, at some point, let them down. That I will say or do something stupid and disappoint them. And then I encourage them to decide before that happens if they will stick around after it happens. If they leave, I tell them, they will miss the way that God's grace comes in and fills in the cracks left behind by our brokenness. And that's too beautiful to miss. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

The holy things we need for healing and sustenance are almost always the same as the ordinary things right in front of us. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Sometimes help comes from unexpected places. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Sometimes the best thing we can do for each other is talk honestly about being wrong. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

The adjective so often coupled with mercy is the word tender, but God's mercy is not tender; this mercy is a blunt instrument. Mercy doesn't wrap a warm, limp blanket around offenders. God's mercy is the kind that kills the thing that wronged it and resurrects something new in its place. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

New doesn't always look perfect. Like the Easter story itself, new is 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 not 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 — Nadia Bolz-Weber

We met the next day for coffee and when I asked her what was up she said, "I think I'm having a crisis of faith." To which I thought, what the hell does that look like for a Unitarian? "Yeah," she continued, "I-I think I believe in Jesus." Oh. That's what it looks like. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

I say no when I should say yes. I say yes when I should say no. I stumble into holy moments not realizing where I am until they are over. I love poorly, then accidently say the right thing at the right moment without even realizing it, then forget what matters, then show tenderness when it's needed, and then turn around and think of myself way too often. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

As a teenager, I began to question the Great Christian Sorting System. My gay friends in high school were kind and funny and loved me, so I suspected that my church had placed them in the wrong category ... Injustices in the world needed to be addressed and not ignored. Christians weren't good; people who fought for peace and justice were good. I had been lied to, and in my anger at being lied to about the containers, I left the church. But it turns out, I hadn't actually escaped the sorting system. I had just changed the labels. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

From my father I heard only these words: "But you were born for such a day as this." He closed the book and my mother joined him in embracing me. They prayed over me and they gave me a blessing. And some blessings, like the one my conservative Christian parents gave to their soon-to-be-Lutheran pastor daughter who had put them through hell, are the kind of blessings that stay with you for the rest of your life. The kind you can't speak of without crying all over again. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Jesus always seems to be pairing God's forgiveness of us with our forgiveness of others. But why? Growing up, I thought it was a way of guilting us into forgiving others, like Jesus was saying, Hey, I died for you and you can't even be nice to your little brother? As though God can get us to do the right thing if God can just make us feel bad about how much we owe God. But that is not the God I see in Jesus Christ. That is a manipulative mother. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Because in the end, we aren't punished for our sins as much as we are punished by our sins. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Of course if no one had ever been exposed to dangerous ideas from scandalous women, Christianity itself would not have had its unique beginning nor its glorious history, but whatever. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

I know that people who don't believe in God might scoff at the idea that the creator of the universe has the time or inclination to try incessantly (and with not much long-term success) to change my heart. I get it. I just have no other explanation. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

The week that the gospel text was that awesomely weird story of Jesus casting a legion of demons out of a naked dude and into a herd of pigs, pigs who then threw themselves over a cliff and drowned in a lake? My pastor friend Heather posted the following question on my Facebook wall: Dear Pastor Nadia: how can I get on board with Jesus when so much pork was wasted in the lake? Signed: a bacon-loving Christian. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

I realized that I had been called to proclaim the Gospel from the place where I am and proclaim where I am from the Gospel. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Sometimes the fact that there is nothing about you that makes you the right person to do something is exactly what God is looking for. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

There's not enough wrong with it to leave and there's just enough wrong with it to stay," Matthew later told me. "Fight to change it. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

On some level, although we can't handle the pain of acknowledging it, Good Friday happens every day. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Many of us would pray not to die in a car crash before we were baptized, like other people pray to not get sick before their employee benefits kick in. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

People don't talk enough about what the freedom of a Christian looks like. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Those most qualified to speak the gospel are those who truly know how unqualified they are to speak the gospel. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

And I get it. I can be cynical myself. Every time I see some smiley TV preacher talk about God's plan for me or hear Sarah Palin say something irretrievably mean and stupid about poor people, or every time I pass an embarrassing billboard featuring Jesus and a fetus, I totally get why reasonable people would keep their distance. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

This is our God. Not a distant judge nor a sadist, but a God who weeps. A God who suffers, not only for us, but with us. Nowhere is the presence of God amidst suffering more salient than on the cross. Therefore what can I do but confess that this is not a God who causes suffering. This is a God who bears suffering. I need to believe that God does not initiate suffering; God transforms it. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

How is it that Judas, who betrayed Jesus once and was filled with remorse, became the villain, while Peter, who denied Jesus three times and wept bitterly, became the rock on which the church was built? When it comes down to it, what is the difference between Peter and Judas? Well, maybe nothing. And maybe there's not a whole lot of difference between us and them too. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

There are times when I hear my name, turn, and recognize Jesus. There are times when faith feels like a friendship with God. But there are many other times when it feels more adversarial or even vacant. Yet none of that matters in the end. How we feel about Jesus or how close we feel to God is meaningless next to how God acts upon us. How God indeed enters into our messy lives and loves us through them, whether we want God's help or not. And how, even after we've experienced some sort of resurrection, it's never perfect or impressive like an Easter bonnet, because, like Jesus, resurrected bodies are always in rough shape. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Forgiveness is a big deal to Jesus, and like that guy in high school with a garage band, he talks about it, like, all the time. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

It's about how God continues to reach into the graves we dig for ourselves and pull us out, giving us new life, in ways both dramatic and small. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Good Friday is not about us trying to "get right with God." It is about us entering the difference between God and humanity and just touching it for a moment. Touching the shimmering sadness of humanity's insistence that we can be our own gods, that we can be pure and all-powerful. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Standing in a large Minnesotan church hall I tried to muster up the interest and stamina it takes to greet each person with the honor he or she deserves. This always feels like a battle between my misanthropic personality (I don't actually care about you) and my values (you are a beloved child of God who deserves to be heard) and it's exhausting. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

When these kinds of things happen in my life, things that are so clearly filled with more beauty or redemption or reconciliation than my cranky personality and stony heart could ever manufacture on their own, I just have no other explanation than this: God. Nadia Bolz-Weber — Nadia Bolz-Weber