Not just for kicks

Question:

      Who was described in a Washington Post headline as the ”most polarizing woman in evangelicalism,” and by Jason Byassee of the Vancouver School of Theology as the “most influential mainline theologian of her generation” and “the C.S.Lewis of her time” (The Christian Century, August 27, 2019)?

Answer:

      Rachel Held Evans.

  In her introduction to Evans’s third book, Searching for Sunday, author and non-profit executive Glennon Doyle Melton wrote: “Whenever I want to scare myself, I consider what would happen to the world if Rachel Held Evans stopped writing.”

  Little did Glennon know that Rachel’s untimely death last year would bring that distress upon her so soon.

  The titles of Rachel’s four books (2010-2018) tell us as much about her life and work as most of us could even think of asking. (Thomas Nelson published all except  Faith Unraveled, which Zondervan reissued after an earlier 2010 edition.)

  The books are A Year of Biblical Womanhood (How a liberated woman found herself sitting on her roof, covering her head, and calling her husband master); Faith Unraveled (How a girl who knew all the answers learned to ask questions); Searching For Sunday (Loving, leaving, and finding the church); and, Inspired (Slaying giants, walking on water, and loving the bible again).

      Those titles say it all, prompting even more questions than Rachel asked in the four books put together.

      Cleverly and amusingly they embrace the ground she covers—a swoop of anecdotes and stories told around mainline churches’ sacraments, including such areas as baptism, confession,  communion, confirmation, and—inevitably—marriage.

  Marriage, Rachel writes, is like a meal of bread and wine, and just one more ordinary, everyday circumstance that God transforms into an avenue through which to enter our lives.

  What makes a marriage holy, she says, isn’t the degree to which the partners reflect gender stereotypes, or stick to a list of rules and roles, or even reflect cultural norms and expectations, but the degree to which the love of Christ is present in one of the most challenging and rewarding commitments two people will ever make to each other.

  Rachel shares Alexander Schmemann’s observation  that every “family” [committed to love and submission] is like a little kingdom representing the kingdom of Jesus where the peacemakers and the merciful find a home, and where humility and self-sacrifice reign.

  Schmememann suggests that if two people stay together they are in a real sense king and queen to each other. This leads inevitably to a fair question about  Rachel and her husband Dan’s marriage during their eleven years together.

  With a twinkle in her prose, she suggests that sometimes their marriage looked like the kingdom, and sometimes not. Sometimes they fought to snatch the crown off each other’s head.

  But what made their relationship “set apart” and sacramental, she explains, wasn’t the marriage certificate, associated with rules and roles, so much as the way God showed up in everyday moments—loading the dishwasher, sharing a joke, hosting a meal, enduring an illness, working through a disagreement—giving them the chance to notice, to pay attention to the divine. “It’s the way the God of resurrection makes all things new.” 

  Along with her Twitter and Facebook followers, Rachel delighted in a study of people’s favorite bible stories and varied interpretations, concluding that the bible is not a static work but a living, breathing, captivating, if sometimes confounding book that is able to equip us to “join God’s loving and redemptive work in the world.”

  I suspect that book reviewers, columnists, public speakers, and essayists have had as much fun writing about Rachel’s writings as they enjoyed when first participating in her dizzying spiritual journey.

  For example, author and minister Brian McLaren spoke of her delight in giving us “a spiritual kiss on the cheek and a devotional kick in the pants”; minister and author Nadia Bolz-Weber described Rachel’s offerings as a “spiritual travel guide for religious runaways”; and Glennon Melton suggested Rachel’s battle-weary insights might help us forgive the church (and ourselves) and fall in love with God all over again.     

   It seems that there’s scarcely a topic Rachel hesitated to tackle as she labored through her frustrating experiences of church and churchgoing. Yet, as minister and public speaker Carol Howard Merritt confirms, Rachel never lost her gift for taking the treasures of the gospel off the high shelf and making them accessible. And Merritt’s so right.

  I might add that if Rachel were delivering that devotional kick in the pants upon any doubting bible explorer, I think she would have found a way to begin with herself, adding something solid in the toe of her boot!