From the Rev. Canon Natalie Hall:
I went to a conference recently – one sponsored by a church organization – and the first time I heard the word “Jesus” it was used ironically. The speaker said, “I don’t like to use the ‘J’ word…” I was taken aback. In a room full of people that included clergy and members of churches across the world eager to participate, the “J-word” would hardly be offensive. Perhaps it was more offensive NOT to say the name.
Then again, she had a point. Say “Jesus” in all sorts of settings outside of a church building or an especially friendly and forgiving crowd, you’re likely to get side-eye and cold-shoulder. Maybe because we’ve drunk the cultural elixir that says “religion and politics belongs in private.” Maybe because of the thousands of years behind us, swimming in religious warfare; wars of words, wars of weapons, wars separating friends, families, and communities. Christians – those who claim the J-word – are hardly innocent bystanders. Lots of junk, big and small, has been suffered by so many in the name of the J-word.
Author Rachel Held Evans wondered, then, what to do with it all. She didn’t really want to go to church, because “the hypocrisy, the politics, the gargantuan building budgets, the scandals – church culture seemed so far removed from Jesus.” But she felt continually called back to the conversation. Certainly Jesus isn’t the sole property of those who use his story as a weapon; to manipulate, subjugate, merely philosophize, or bore.
So, she wrote a book. It’s called “Searching for Sunday.” Pretty much all of us at the Mary Magdalene are searching for Sunday. We’re trying to figure out how to be in conversation with Jesus; how to be a community in which Jesus matters to us, our households, and to the wider world… preferably in ways that aren’t so cringe-worthy as the speaker at that conference understandably communicated.
“Searching for Sunday” follows the major landmarks of a life of faith – what our church calls a “sacrament”: Baptism, Holy Communion, Confirmation, Confession/Absolution, Marriage, Vocation, and Death. One description offers, this is “a memoir about making do and taking risks, about the messiness of community and the power of grace… overcoming cynicism to find hope and, somewhere in between, Church.”
We will meet at my home on Tuesday evenings beginning Tuesday, June 25 at 7:30 p.m.
No need to read ahead of our first gathering. To participate, send an email to me at nhall@episcopalpgh.org and I will reply with the address. Let us know that you’ll be there!
Cost for a book is $10.