The Life at the End of the Tunnel

an Easter parable

“God, be with everyone who is fighting addiction or trying to find a job or reunite with their kids.” His voice carried low across the intermittent shuffling of bodies packed into the room, following a familiar refrain of requests that often ring out like holy desperation.

Then came his closer. “Help us to keep going. Please help us to see the life at the end of the tunnel.”

photo: Cory Martin

I keep forgetting Easter is this weekend. It sneaks up on me, recedes, begins again. Easter is this weekend. It’s a hazard of leaving your church. Of leaving church. This is a hazard of being left for dead by (your) church.

Two years ago, after we’d ripped ourselves from the worn, wooden pews, I didn’t forget. Easter occupied its place in the most reliable cannon of my faith – my body. We put out a rusty open call like we used to do a weekly basis. Our sixteen guests sat with us on borrowed chairs around plastic tables, all of us shy, awkward, hungry, and grieving.

Years of welcoming people into our home sealed our fate as a shoes-on household, but sometimes I forget to put my shoes on before guests arrive. A man I barely knew took his cues from my own socked feet and left his shoes out on our stoop. He shuffled silently through our kitchen, smiling politely but not saying a word. He loaded his plate and got seconds. When I told our company they were welcome to do whatever felt most comfortable – shoes off or on – he snuck out and reemerged in sneakers.

Between small talk and two kinds of pie, we committed to a wobbly celebration that felt strangely like resurrection.

//

I swear I arrived screaming from the womb with John 3:16 pre-loaded into my long-term memory. It carried outsized weight in the formation of my faith, never mind that Jesus summarized the Gospel in just six words: “Love God and love your neighbor.” For most of my life, I believed the verse named Jesus’ execution as God’s great gift to the world.

The logic went something like this: God, the creator of our dark, demented selves loved us so much, he sent his son to be tortured as the atonement for his wrath which was caused by the sin that was hardwired in us from birth - by him.

God’s grace is free, but you have to want it, but every good thing comes from God, but we are from God, and we are worse than nothing. “The heart is deceitful and desperately wicked.” God’s love is unconditional, but grace without works is dead and if you really care about God, you will read your Bible daily and press play on the same tired prayers as evidence that you’re postmarked for Heaven when you die.

By the way, God owns the cattle on a thousand hills – nothing is really ours, but if we share that cow with someone who didn’t earn it, that’s socialism, which is almost communist, and we can’t quite shake the memory of Gorbachev being the antichrist of 1988, so it’s probably best to keep all the cows inside God’s fence looking like cute capitalists.

We swallowed it whole, stringing crosses around our necks instead of empty tombs and calling it faith. Watching this bad logic unravel is a mind trip. For most of my life, I comfortably identified with the disciples who, for all their clout, spent a lot of time scurrying around after Jesus, half-confused, tattling or bragging or reaching for a sword.

Letting it sink in that Jesus was most critical of those who were sure they were getting it right unsettles the paradigm. Which one was I? In Luke, Jesus admonishes religious leaders six separate times, bellowing, “What sorrow awaits you!” as he accuses them of spit-shining their greed and ignoring injustice. During a recent return to the dusty pages of my Bible, I smugly pumped a fist, forgetting my allegiances to my own reward systems and smart ideas.

A few verses later, when Jesus casually mentions the Pharisee’s herb gardens, my cheeks got hot. It’s easier to distance myself from a pious, powerful “pastor” than from someone who’s too heavy-handed with the flat leaf parsley.

Not long after our potluck two years ago, the friend who put his shoes back on and stayed until the end died from despair, a long way from Indiana. We lit a candle and spoke his name into the vapor.

Earlier this week, a message popped up from an old friend. “Plz pray for me I relapsed.”

“He had loved his disciples during his ministry on earth, and now he loved them to the very end,” John writes of Jesus. Are we disciples or Pharisees? I think that’s the wrong question. We just want to know God loves us enough to want us, shattering our fears with the weight of love. We just want to see the life at the end of the tunnel.

“Where is the kingdom of God?” we ask, as disciples and experts and betrayers and herb gardeners. “How do we get there? Do you take reservations?” Not once does Jesus say, “The kingdom of God is like Heaven. Trust me, it’s great.” Death is not the password to God’s kingdom. It turns out, God loves us so much, he sent Jesus into this traumatizing world to reverse the narrative, upgrading hypocrites into disciples and fishermen into yeast. The gift was not the death, but the life. Abundant and free.

It hides in familiar, entirely relatable elements of daily life. The kingdom of God is like a cup of yogurt with its trippy bacteria that makes us well. The kingdom of God is like a laptop which delivers our thoughts to the masses, so weigh them carefully. The kingdom of God is a Chinese buffet, where there’s a little bit of everything – tip well.

It’s the corner gas station that doesn’t run off the unhoused man sitting on their curb. It’s a recovery meeting. A desperate text that isn’t left on read. It’s shoes off, or on, whatever is most comfortable. It’s a candle, flickering.

We don’t have to die to experience God’s kingdom. This is excellent news. There is no escape hatch to a future heaven. We are invited to work for peace today, to reflect God’s love and catch its rebound. This moment is what we’ve got for now, so we gather for the feast right here, in one of God’s strange dwellings, with our good deals and our trace greed, caught between paradise and hell on Earth’s arc.

Easter is a promise that still rings true. God sent Jesus to a body, to this grungy, glorious place, because of love. Tradition, liturgy, and sacrament are woven into the fabric, but no matter how “badly” we do it, Christ waits for us, alive and complete. If faith cannot be lived in our frazzled, forgetful, grease-splattered weekdays, if it can’t thrive despite our misplaced intentions and carry us through relapses of infinite varieties, if the voice of God cannot be heard in the weeping of a child and if the touch of God cannot be felt in the Aldi “communion bread” ground dry between our teeth, then the problem looms larger than we feared.

Forgetting about Easter might be enough to make me renounce the Awana trophy I scored in 5th grade for memorizing the most Bible verses. I don’t know where to put my feelings about my empty Easter kitchen, or my numb Easter heart.

I am and will be the dozing disciples.

I am and will be the religious rule-keeper.

I am and will be the one throwing the stone, the one waving the palm, the one left standing conspicuously in a sports bra because I tore off my shirt to help pave Jesus’s way through my city.

I’ll be the one looking ahead for the life at the end of the tunnel and I’ll be the one repeating, this is the life. This, right here. This is it.

The tunnel has no end. The life we were promised is already ours if we build it together, awkward and grieving and soaked in love, shoes off or on, whatever feels most comfortable.

---

“The God of Easter is a God with dirt under his nails.” - Pastrix by Nadia Bolz-Weber

---

We recently added another stop to the Counterweights book tour! Join me and Kat Armas next Saturday, April 11th, at Gladly Gather in Nashville TN for a conversation about my book and hers, Liturgies for Resisting Empire. Get your tickets here. With two Enneagram 8’s it’s sure to be a fun night! :)

Also, I’m thrilled to announce that Counterweights landed on the USA Today bestsellers list. Thank you! This book is just getting started.

I’ll see you back here next week, for some notes from the road!