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An excerpt from Blessed Are The Rest of Us: How Limits and Longing Make Us Whole.

APRIL 2019

SAN FRANCISCO

I walk the length of Grace Cathedral holding a candle and wearing a white acolyte robe, hardly the religious garb of my adult churchgoing life. I pass by the faces of fellow conference-goers. This weekend I taught a small seminar on the spirituality of rest, and now I find myself leading this processional with the other speakers trailing along. I climb the stairs toward the altar and do my best to steady the candle into its brass votive stand. Then I find a seat among the others, who are settling into the choir stalls beside me. The ceiling rises high into dark Gothic angles, surrounded on all sides by early twentieth-century stained-glass images of Jesus’s ministry.

This is the last act of a beautiful weekend, during which people from all sorts of backgrounds—artists and speakers, theologians and writers—have told their stories of why they remain believers in the radical and inefficient Jesus. And how, despite our separation from the mainstream politics of American Christianity, despite the sex scandals and power grabbing of so many American Christian leaders, we are all still clinging to a faith revealed through the exceptional life of an ancient traveling rabbi who invited his followers to imagine a new way to God.

Nadia Bolz-Weber approaches the lectern to send us off. She stands at the center of the raised stage, just to the side of our crew of speakers, wearing the traditional robe of a high-church minister, white cloth tied in a bunch at the waist with a rope. The next time I hear her preach, six weeks later in Chattanooga, Tennessee, she will be shaken and deeply grieved at the funeral of her friend and conference collaborator, Rachel Held Evans. But at this moment, Rachel is sitting behind me, vibrant. And Nadia’s voice is light. She is jubilant, bringing a successful conference to a close. She reads the week’s gospel passage aloud.

The passage is from John, chapter 12: the story of Mary, the sister of Lazarus, breaking a jar of pure nard on the feet of Jesus. I listen as Nadia sets the scene, imagining Lazarus, newly raised from the dead, reclining beside his teacher, Jesus. The passage tells the story of Martha serving the meal, while Mary offers Jesus her most valuable possession, an unbroken jar of perfume, something likely intended for an intimate marital ceremony. Mary disrupts cultural expectations and breaks open that valuable jar of nard oil right there during the men’s dinner. She chooses to honor Jesus, despite the taboo, the judgments, and the whispers she would elicit. She honors him because she loves him.

Nadia points us to Lazarus, the quiet brother of Mary, sitting right there at the table next to Jesus. She is fascinated with Lazarus, who has barely scrubbed the stench of his own death off his body in the narrative before this one. In John 12, he is sitting at the side of the one who had miraculously pulled him out of the death gravity that we humans have spent all our existence resisting.

Nadia wonders about this man. Of all the people Jesus could have brought back to life, what made this one special? Why did Jesus choose Lazarus? Surely Jesus had encountered other deaths among the throngs of people begging him to bring his miracle powers their way. He’d been walking the countryside with his disciples and followers, coating blind eyes with mud and opening them up, sealing the broken flesh of lepers excluded by society’s cultural and social norms. He practiced the kind of loving touch that imparted dignity to those whose bodies refused to fit into societal norms. But this? A dead man who had already spent three days entombed and decomposing? There were dead people everywhere in the world every day. Why, of all the dead, did Lazarus deserve Jesus’s tears first and his God magic after?

Nadia quotes her friend, Scottish pastor and scholar Doug Gay, whom she had heard preach about Lazarus once before. He wondered why Lazarus, despite having so much written about him, never says a word in the scriptures, “not when he stumbles out of his tomb and not at this macabre little dinner party.”

While Nadia speaks, I spin my wedding ring in a circle, using only my left thumb and pinky, around and around. My thumb reaches the top of the diamond that once belonged to my husband’s great-grandmother, long before he lived, before he and I would meet, marry, have August, then Brooks, and eventually our youngest son, Ace.

“So my friend Doug wondered if perhaps Lazarus couldn’t speak,” she says. I think of my two older babies and their earliest words, how Brooks used to waddle bare legged and diapered, dragging the stuffed pup he called “Gawgy.” Speaking can sometimes feel like everything. It allows us to define ourselves, make ourselves knowable. If we can’t explain ourselves to the world, we lose control over the narrative of our lives. Can those among us who are silent ever be fully known?

“Maybe the one whom Jesus loved, maybe the one person we know Jesus cried over,” Nadia continues, “maybe the one person Jesus deemed so valuable that he would not allow death to take him: maybe this one person wasn’t verbal.”

I squirm a little in my seat. My heart picks up a quicker rhythm. Nonverbal is a word I know deeply but haven’t been using to describe my youngest son. Ace, four years old, plays in his own world at school, doesn’t get invited to the preschool birthday parties, and doesn’t say hi when old ladies stop us on the street to comment on his cuteness. Nonverbal isn’t a term I throw around. In fact, it is a term I mostly avoid. When I describe Ace, I say, “He doesn’t talk much, but he’s working on it!” I’ve been too afraid to use it, afraid it will forever seal the door, forever prove to the world—and to him—that he will never speak. But here I am, listening to this sermon, mother of a boy who at four years old still doesn’t call me mama. Nonverbal.

Nadia keeps going. “My friend Doug asked, ‘What if Lazarus was Mary and Martha’s wee brother with Down syndrome?’”

It’s a kick in the gut, really. I stare at my hands, my knee bouncing in my seat, half expecting Nadia to turn and face me, terrified that all four hundred people at the conference will shift their faces toward me, like in some creepy zombie movie, as if they know my story, my kid’s story. I raise my eyes from my hands to the congregation as slowly as I can. All faces are on Nadia, not me.

Her voice slows, and I feel the impossibility of the story she’s telling. Does she know she is talking about my boy? Does she know how deeply I understand what it is to carry on long, sweet conversations with a child who never talks back? Lazarus, I remind myself. This is about Lazarus. But also, she’s talking about my boy. She is preaching that he and Lazarus are the same. Lazarus, the one human so important, so significant, that the biblical Messiah sobs at his grave, that his sisters demand Jesus save him. I know, more fully than Nadia can know, more fully than those who sit beside me in robes in the speakers’ section, the grief and delight of loving Lazarus. And there, in the nave at Grace Cathedral, under the stained glass and in a white, ancient-looking robe, I imagine Jesus standing at my four-year-old son’s grave, weeping for my child.

“What if Lazarus was Mary and Martha’s wee brother with Down syndrome?” Nadia pauses after her words, and I hold all my fear and my love and my hope in that moment. Could it be possible that the most important person in Jesus’s life—his dearest friend, the one he chose to return to the living—might just be the one everyone else deemed least worthy of that gift? Could Lazarus share the same face as my son?

Nadia continues, “It just seems totally true to me given everything I know about Jesus, . . . [who] walked around like he definitely didn’t understand the rules, like he didn’t understand who supposedly mattered and who supposedly didn’t.

* * *

Who matters? That’s the question I’d been asking in the years since I answered a call from the genetic counselor four months into my pregnancy with Ace. We lived in San Francisco, and I had been pushing Brooks in a stroller from my parking space a few blocks from his gymnastics class. The voice on the phone was young and cheerful and spoke my name as if she were a barista calling for me in a crowded café.

I had given birth to two healthy little boys before that pregnancy. My older kids were developing as expected—strong, both in the ninety-fifth percentile in height, both good eaters and early talkers. I had no reason to think my third baby would be any different. I was thirty-five and healthy. My husband and I had hoped my twenty-week ultrasound would reveal that this time around it was a girl. It had to be—the pregnancy had felt exceptional, distinctive.

It turns out the baby was a boy and the pregnancy was “remarkable” (the word in a recent assessment report from our current school district used to describe Ace’s diagnosis). That’s not the word the doctor had used two weeks earlier when he showed us the calcium deposit in our baby’s heart, a common physical marker for Down syndrome. Still, based on my age, this child had only a 1 in 476 chance of carrying the extra twenty-first chromosome that characterizes the genetic condition. It was unlikely, the doctor had said. I had some blood work done to rule it out, to give me peace of mind for the rest of the pregnancy.

I had been expecting the geneticist to confirm my suspicions: Nothing unusual here. No reason to worry. I pushed the stroller around the big tree that bulged up the sidewalk near Lincoln Avenue. Brooks rocked back and forth to the awkward lift and shove of the stroller. I held the phone in place, my head tilted right to squeeze it against my shoulder. I remember making it to the crosswalk, pausing to wait for the light, looking down to see my toddler’s eyes locked on the cars moving past us. “We got your blood test results back,” she said. Then she used the word positive. “The test came back positive.” That word clanged around in my skull begging for clarification. Positive, the word we use for good news, cheery souls, kindhearted dog training. The test came back positive, she said. And the light changed. I wiggled the stroller off the curb while I mentally unraveled and reordered her word, neurons firing in every direction. Positive, positive, positive.

She said there was a 99.7 percent chance that my child would have Down syndrome. I stepped into the street. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I walked into the park, past the hollow log August and Brooks always crawled through, past the community garden, the old stadium on Frederick Street. I ended the call and slipped my phone into my pocket. The sky hardened and slanted, pressing in, tunneling me.

* * *

By the time Nadia preached that night in San Francisco, my “remarkable” pregnancy had turned into a blond, blue-eyed, tiny-glasses-wearing little boy, a four-year-old who didn’t speak. He was the size of a two-year-old and had passed the stage when it was still acceptable for us to pull out a diaper in public and call it normal. And at the time of the conference, in spring 2019, he was showing signs of autism, a diagnosis I had been terrified to pursue, as if naming his unique experience of the world might silence his voice forever.

That night at Grace Cathedral, Nadia’s words soar toward me like wild seeds, pressing themselves in the center of my chest, a planting for a future sturdy hope. Jesus, she is saying, lived out his inefficient view of the world—the conviction of who matters, who wins, whose life is most valuable—in his very friendships.His miraculous power gave back life to the nonspeaking brother of Mary and Martha, new life for the one he loved, his friend, who had Down syndrome. My chest tells me to wait. Something good will grow right there, in the soft center of me.

Whether or not it’s a fact that the man Jesus chose to raise from the dead shared my son’s intellectual disability, Nadia’s voice radiates with the fierce delight of the idea. “My Christian faith,” she says, “tells me that this is the most true thing I have ever heard.”

The most true thing. Of course, I think, of course. That’s what I’ve been trying to say about God; that’s what I’ve been wanting to write all these years since my youngest son arrived and I struggled to find words to explain his goodness to a world that continually questions his worth. I have been wanting to say that he is uniquely valuable. Even blessed.

* * *

This is a book about a poem, a poem that speaks to the question of what it means to be blessed, a poem uttered before a sermon, almost as a riff, spilling from the lips of a barely known spiritual teacher in the beginning of his ministry to a crowd of farmers and fishers on a hillside.

Jesus of Nazareth had already caused a commotion when he was baptized by the unruly and eccentric John the Baptist along the banks of the Jordan River. His emergence from John’s baptismal waters had blown a hole in the atmospheric divide between heaven and earth. The divine one’s voice slipped through the veil and into the ears of anyone who stood close enough to hear what was spoken from that other realm: “This is my Son.” Pay attention to him.

After his baptism, an intensive season of fasting in the wilderness, and the arrest of John, Jesus had packed up, left his hometown of Nazareth, and arrived in the bustling seaside city of Capernaum. His presence alone seemed to draw strangers into his vicinity, inviting people to a religious movement they surely didn’t know how to name. He had convinced a few vagabonds to leave their day jobs and join him in a mission that would eventually include telling stories to crowds on hills and near bodies of water, encountering many ordinary folks needing healing, and performing some wild miracles that would leave his followers stunned. All of this would lead to a confusing and violent end with a profound and unexpected postscript.

Some scholars place the setting of Jesus’s longest sermon on the grassy side of the Korazim Plateau, just a walk away from Capernaum. As he sat before his followers on that hill, before teaching what would later be called “The Sermon on the Mount,” Jesus offered a poem—a litany of blessings that followed the structure of the Greco-Roman virtue poets of his day. This poem, eventually known as the Beatitudes, was a touchstone, a concise declaration of his values and purpose, a preface to the message that would eventually serve as the foundational moral teaching of Christianity.

This is a book about that preface and what it reveals to us about human value, how we find our identity, and who deserves honor. It’s a book exploring what it means to be blessed, that overused, often trite, hashtag of a religious word no one ever really knows how to define, a word I recently found stitched into cotton pajamas on the rack in TJ Maxx, an adjective that some biblical scholars translate from the original Greek word makarioi as “happy,” “favored,” or even “flourishing.” Blessed is the word Jesus assigns to the weak, the weary, and the worn out. In a world that lived, and still lives, by a script that honors those who wield power, who live with ease, and who need not rely on relationships to survive, this little poem offers an entirely different perspective. This poem is how Jesus chose to answer the mysterious and seemingly eternal question of human happiness. It’s a revolutionary reimagining of authentic community in the form of provocations and surprising promises. As Jesus began his sermon, he played the role of both prophet and poet, inviting his listeners to a new way of being in the world, a way that would lead to both individual and communal transformation.

The crowd that gathered around Jesus that day was hardly full of winners. The stories we find in the gospels reveal that Jesus seems to have first attracted his own social class: blue-collar workers just trying to earn enough to provide for the little ones and keep the roof from leaking. Maybe that’s why they skipped out on work for the day, stretched themselves out on scratchy grass and rocky soil, and made the most of the sunshine, curious enough to show up for a makeshift religious experience. There must have been some vibrant sparkle to Jesus, something that caused folks to follow him up that hill and tune in to his longest recorded sermon.

Those who listened to his teaching surely had arrived with their own cultural understanding of how God acted in the world. The world was made of haves and have-nots, and an almighty power in the sky blasted some and bestowed riches and comfort on others. I imagine that those ancient god-in-the-sky beliefs probably weren’t too far from those of many North American Christians—we who spin colorful screens with our pointer fingers, scrolling through hashtag-blessed Facebook posts and finely curated Instagram feeds of happy, healthy, straight-A-earning children, three-car garages, and successful business ventures. The working class of ancient Palestine who lived with the wretched reality of Roman occupation couldn’t possibly be blessed, their lives full of daily reminders that they must be far from the honor bestowed by the divine.

Maybe that’s why they were there. With little freedom, Roman soldiers on their streets, and an outside empire that taxed what little income their day trade brought in, they might have hoped this religious leader would instigate a military force that could finally reckon with the oppressive power in their midst, crush the Roman forces that tyrannized their daily lives. Maybe whatever charisma Jesus had going for him ignited in the crowd an old hope for a leader who might restore Israel to the great nation once ruled by King David.

Or maybe they weren’t thinking about military power at all. Maybe they simply wanted to hear something new. When folks are bold enough to sit on the grass to hear an unapproved spiritual teacher interpret their scriptures, they tend to be hungry for something more than the old story of “the rich and the powerful must be important because they got what everyone else wants.” This crowd had lived a script that said blessing was equated with empire, wealth, and ease. Jesus was there to take their old script of what it meant to be human and toss it.

So he started with a poem of macarisms, a speaking device from the Greco-Roman virtue tradition that would have been very familiar to his audience. In that tradition, a teacher listed, based on observation, ways of being in the world that would produce happiness or authentic human flourishing. Jesus delivered an unexpected list, one that spoke intimately to his listeners’ daily struggles as oppressed people in a brutal empire. Those who practice wisdom. Those who will experience true and whole life. The ones who will flourish. “Wise, true, and whole,” Jesus said, “are the ones who suffer, the ones who have no power, the ones who are mistreated.” And so he began his ministry, inviting his listeners to use their spiritual imagination to reorder their notions of society, prioritizing the vulnerable above the powerful.

As he did so, Jesus used a phrase he would repeat throughout his ministry: the kingdom of God. It was the nucleus of his teaching, the central metaphor he used to explain the spiritual power, holy generosity, and sacred connection making its way into the world. The kingdom of God, or the reign of God, helped his listeners reimagine the divine at work among them, opening up a new way of being right there in the middle of their ordinary, not-so easy lives. This kingdom, he taught, was beyond human modes of power, violence, and tribal division. This kingdom would change everything, because it challenged notions of who was in or out, who got to claim the blessing of God, who had the honor of calling themselves important.

In the kingdom Jesus spoke of, true communion with God provides ordinary people with a different and beautiful way of being human—a way of justice, peace, and inclusion, a way that removes our natural inclinations to divide and defend and instead turns us toward one another. It’s a way that just might shake the systems of the world like a snow globe, releasing what has always lived on the bottom into the wild equality of the upside down, a way in which the powerful and the weak are equally necessary to the flourishing of everything.

Jesus used the word kingdom because that’s how his listeners understood reality. If their safety, health, and sustenance were controlled by whatever empire reigned, then he wanted them to imagine a world where a divine love was in charge, where every part of their lives pulsed around that love, even as their hardscrabble daily existence was dictated by violence and oppression. Perhaps today we don’t need that metaphor of “kingdom” in a culture in which our royalty looks more like celebrity, in which the system of democracy, while still overwhelmed by powermongers, provides us with notions of control over who rules us, something those listening to Jesus’s sermon could not have lived or known. Most of us don’t relate to a society ruled in the way Jesus’s audience would have understood it. But we do know that there is endless pain and suffering because of the misuse of power, because we humans are endlessly self-centered and attached to hoarding power for ourselves.

Author and Episcopal priest Stephanie Spellers suggests that instead of imagining a kingdom, a better way for us to understand what Jesus had in mind when he spoke of this script, this new way of living in the world, is to imagine “the dream of God.” What Jesus calls the kingdom of God is the dream that exists in the imagination of the divine. It’s the intention of God, the original hope for creation, and the ultimate reality for those of us willing to move our imaginations and intentions toward justice, peace, and inclusion, with the help of a divine love that propels us forward.

Richard Rohr uses the phrase the “really real” to communicate the same notion. In this world where systems of oppression sell us lies about our own value, about what it means to be human, God continues to point us toward ultimate truth, the truth Jesus calls God’s kingdom. This ultimate truth is our invitation to live lives of meaning, joy, and participation in the restoration of all things. It’s an invitation to allow the inclusive love of God to be the center of our orbits, drawing us in, keeping us in rotation around what’s most true, so that we can reform our distorted vision of power grabbing, our propensity for both internal and external habits of abuse, and our inclination to look past those who wield the least amount of power in this world. Jesus was restructuring more than his listeners’ social dogmas. He was restructuring their personal visions of what it meant to flourish. He was presenting a new vision of life as it is meant to be lived: in a community, whole and healthy, where those with the least power are given priority and honor. In this dream God is dreaming for the world, Jesus told the crowd, the ones who will receive the highest levels of honor are never the ones we would expect.

On that hill, surrounded by a crowd that may or may not have been tracking with these wild ideas about God, Jesus recited a radical litany of blessings, all of which have nothing to do with being good. He listed nine human experiences of suffering, generosity, and longing, then he pronounced blessings. He blessed those who have known what it is to be weak, to grieve, or to hope for a better world, calling them favored, whole, and drawn into the holy gravitational orbit of love. The ones who flourish, Jesus said, are the weak, the broken, the beat-up, and the burned-out. The blessed ones end up on top when the snow globe is turned over and everything is shaken up.

The Beatitudes, this poem that prefaces the Sermon on the Mount, still confuses and delights many of us coming to it two thousand years later. There’s no pep talk, no appeal to the people in power, no how-tos, no easy steps toward spiritual revelation. Instead, the words of Jesus are sad, focused on the weak and the poor and the broken. But if we embrace his vision, his poem offers us a new script, a new way of being human. Jesus reveals the really real underneath what we think we know about God and what we think we know about the world. His poem tells us that there is a dream that belongs to the divine one, and it’s a dream about blessing. And in the dream of God, blessing is rarely what we think it is.

* * *

The night Nadia preached, I understood that something transformative had been sowed in the center of me, wild seeds of hope pressed deep, promising to sink their roots into something true and good. Was Jesus dear friends with a nonspeaking man who had Down syndrome? And was this his way of living out the value system he presented in the Beatitudes? What if the dream of God was manifested in his love and privileging of Lazarus above all others? Lazarus, newly risen, next to Jesus at the table, silent except for the musical “aahs” he made when Martha presented his favorite meal, flapping his hands with joy when Jesus told a funny story?

What if that man—my son—was the most important of all of us, the one whose life most needed to be given back?

I left Grace Cathedral knowing, more deeply than I ever had, that loving my child was going to break my heart and that the brokenness would be my healing. I had lived most of my life striving to be worthy of blessing, longing to earn my value through performance, goodness, and hard work. But like Jesus’s first listeners, like Lazarus, maybe my script was being rewritten. What if, like Lazarus, like Ace, my value would be found in love, in my silence, and perhaps in the grave?

I imagine the rich baritone of Jesus’s voice calling his friend by name from the dark tomb. I picture divine love surging its power into Lazarus’s still heart, where it contracts and expands in a living rhythm that restores life back into his cold body and lifeless limbs. Outside the tomb, Jesus welcomed his least-likely friend into the sort of blessing I’ve spent my life longing to receive. He called his name: “Ace! Ace! Come forth, my friend.”

But maybe he was also calling me. Micha! You too; you come out too.

Thank you to anyone who read this far! I am so grateful for the support as I’ve worked to get this book into the world over the past four years. Some of you have been cheering me on all the way. If you’d like to keep supporting me, share my book on social media (especially on release day!), ask your library to carry it, create your own book club and maybe I can pop in virtually (just reach out). And most of all, preorder this book anywhere books are sold and encourage the people you love to order it too! And don’t forget that if you preorder at Baker Book House it’s 40% off!

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