Nadia Bolz-Weber Quotes

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

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.

~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

I cared about Ben, but I was never in love with him. I was in love with what it said about me that I had a boyfriend like Ben, and that's just different.

~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

My former bishop Allan Bjorberg once said that the greatest spiritual practice isn't yoga or praying the hours or living in intentional poverty, although these are all beautiful in their own way. The greatest spiritual practice is just showing up. And Mary Magdalene is the patron saint of just showing up. Showing up, to me, means being present to what is real, what is actually happening. Mary Magdalene didn't necessarily know what to say or what to do or even what to think when she encountered the risen Jesus. But none of that was nearly as important as the fact that she was present and attentive to him.

~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

I carried a bravado about my drinking like I was a hero of debauchery. But on that Christmas Day, I felt like shit. I had a vague realisation that I was just trying to keep up with some version of myself that I had decided was accurate.

~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

Of course, Mary Magdalene would have very little tolerance for the Christian platitudes and vapid optimism that seem to swirl around these kinds of tragic events. Those platitudes are tempting, but they're nothing but luxuries for people who've never had demons (or at least have never admitted to them). But equally, she would reject nihilism, or the idea that there is no real meaning in life or death - ideas present in so much of postmodernity. Those ideas, too, are luxuries, but they are for those who have never been freed from demons.

~ 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....Jesus could have hung out in the high-end religious scene of his day, but instead he scoffed at all that, choosing instead to laugh at the powerful, befriend whores, kiss sinners, and eat with all the wrong people. He spent his time with people for whom life was not easy. And there, amid those who were suffering, he was the embodiment of perfect love.

~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

No one is climbing the spiritual ladder. We don't continually improve until we are so spiritual we no longer need God. We die and are made new, but that's different from spiritual self-improvement.

~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

The movement in our relationship to God is always from God to us. Always. We can't, through our piety or goodness, move closer to God. God is always coming near to us. Most especially in the Eucharist and in the stranger.

~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

As a teenager, I loved how I looked in the outfit of using drugs and exercising poor judgement. I had tried it on, spun around in the mirror, and decided I would choose this look, this image, this identity. But eventually and without realising it, the ability to choose had gone. I had become what at first I had only pretended to be.

~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

Every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.

~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

Church isn’t perfect. It’s practice.

~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

What makes us saints of God is not our ability to be saintly but rather God’s ability to work through sinners.

~ 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

That's the crazy thing about Christianity — the idea that the finite can contain the infinite. After all, what is the incarnation if not that? So there's an incredible physicality to the spiritual within the Christian story. There's not this weird sort of  Greek separation, where there's a higher spiritual world and a corrupted, bad world of  flesh. It's all one. Because if God chose to have a body, there's a way in which spiritual things are revealed in the physical things that are all around us — bread, wine, people, tears, laughter.

~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

So often in the church, being a pastor or a spiritual leader means being the example of  godly living. A pastor is supposed to be the person who is really good at this Christianity stuff — the person others can look to as an example of righteousness. But as much as being the person who is the best Christian, who follows Jesus the most closely can feel a little seductive, it's simply never been who I am or who my parishioners need me to be. I'm not running after Jesus. Jesus is running my ass down. Yeah, I am a leader, but I'm leading them onto the street to get hit by the speeding bus of confession and absolution, sin and sainthood, death and resurrection — that is, the gospel of  Jesus Christ. I'm a leader, but only by saying, Oh, screw it. I'll go first.

~ 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

God did not enter the world of our nostalgic, silent-night, snow-blanketed, peace-on-earth, suspended reality of  Christmas. God slipped into the vulnerability of skin and entered our violent and disturbing world.

~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

There is a reason Mary is everywhere. I've seen her image all over the world, in cafés in Istanbul, on students' backpacks in Scotland, in a market stall in Jakarta, but I don't think her image is everywhere because she is a reminder to be obedient, and I don't think it has to do with social revolution. Images of  Mary remind us of  God's favor. Mary is what it looks like to believe that we already are who God says we are.

~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

I'm surprisingly unconcerned with what people in my church believe. Belief is going to be influenced by all sorts of things that I have nothing to do with, so I don't feel responsible for that. I'm responsible for what they hear — and hearing the gospel, the good news about who God is, slowly forms us over time.

~ 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

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

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

~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

When all of  it is given meaning in the larger story of  Jesus Christ, it destroys us, then pours our melted selves back into another form that still bears the marks of  how we got there. Then we become something that can bear light, the brightness of which is not diminished, even when divided and borrowed.

~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seeing myself or my church or my denomination as the blessing — like so many mission trips to help those less fortunate than ourselves — can easily descend into a blend of  benevolence and paternalism. We can start to see the poor as supporting characters in a big story about how noble, selfless, and helpful we are.

~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

And the thing about grace, real grace, is that it stings. It stings because if it's real it means we don't deserve it. ... And receiving grace is basically the best shitty feeling in the world.

~ 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

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

But inevitably, when I can't harm the people who harmed me, I just end up harming the people who love me. So maybe retaliation or holding on to anger about the harm done to me doesn't actually combat evil. Maybe it feeds it. In the end, if we're not careful, we can actually absorb the worst of our enemy and on some level even become them.

~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

The Bible had been the weapon of choice in the spiritual gladiatorial arena of my youth. I knew how, wielded with intent and precision, the Bible can cut deeply, while on the one holding it can claim with impunity that this is from God.

~ 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

I'm more haunted by how what I've said and the things I've done have caused harm to myself and others than I am worried that God will punish me for being bad. Because in the end, we aren't punished for our sins as much as we are punished by our sins.

~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

Maybe the Good Friday story is about how God would rather die than be in our sin-accounting business anymore.

~ Nadia Bolz-Weber