In today’s world how to follow Jesus is a serious question – there are at least 5 groups or collections of groups that I can think of claiming to be the “one true church” that Jesus founded – two of them claiming to go back 2000 years and others claiming to be “restorations”. There are something in excess of 20,000 denominations all with different types of theologies and doctrines, almost all mutually exclusive and there are enculturated tracks where “normal” Christianity takes on the flavours of African or South American or Chinese or Indian or First Nation cultures. Does the Pope belong to the same religion as a Yoruban priestess who venerates the Virgin of Guadalupe and her son? Does Sara Miles worship the same Jesus as the OCA’s Mtr Jonah or Pat Robertson? Is there room in the company of Jesus’ friends for a gay Orthodox priest and a pentecostal preacher who, shall we say, is less inclusive? Keep reading.

If you read Sara’s earlier book, Take This Bread, (or my review of it) might intuit the answers – and you might reject the answers outright. But Jesus Freak took me to some surprising places.

In the intro, Sara asks the reader:

What does it mean to be a Jesus freak? Or, more to the point, what would it mean to live as if you – and everyone around you – were Jesus, and filled with his power? To just take his teachings literally, go out the front door of your home, and act on them?

It’s actually pretty straightforward, Jesus says. Heal the sick. Cast out demons. Cleanse the lepers. You give the people something to eat. You have the authority to forgive sins. Raise the dead.

Throughout the Gospels, as he roams through Palestine, these are the commissions Jesus repeatedly hands to the ordinary people around him. Each is a specific call to action, a task for his followers to carry out on the spot – and to repeat when he’s gone. They don’t always understand, but he insists. You can do this stuff, he tells them. Walk this way. Come and see, don’t be afraid.

Sara pulls us into the image of Jesus as the Divine Boyfriend – in replacement for “bridegroom” which she feels is culturally outdated. It works for her and her friend and pastor, Paul Fromberg, recotr of St Gregory of Nyssa parish (SGN) where Sara works. This image of the Boyfriend plays through the entire text. So hold that thought for a moment.

After the Introduction, the book is divided into six sections. As I was finishing up the second one, my boyfriend, Brodie, asked me how it was going. I was direct: “I’m hating it.” I said! Reading Take This Bread I’d gotten used to Sara’s journalist voice. Mindful – I know Sara and served on the Altar with her when I was a member of St Gregory of Nyssa parish. I know her voice personally. I recognise her nuances more and more as I listen to the sermons podcasted weekly from the parish. Her journalist voice is one I find rather comforting – telling stories, weaving Jesus in; or, we might better say, lifting up the weavings so that we can see Jesus already in the pattern. But the first two sections of the book, “Come and See” and “Feeding” were, to my eyes and heart, pure mysticism. My brain grew very weary. I wanted to ask, Where is my Sara and what have you done to her? Who are you using her name? I was confused. This new voice in the book scared me.

I should have expected it. Sara has changed from the Atheist that I first met at SGN. She has changed from the first Sundays of serving on the altar. Her faith is growing, her preaching is deepening. Of course things have changed! In the introduction she says the most profoundly Orthodox thing ever:

Sara sees that the Church is, truly, the Body of Christ – as literally true as the Bread is the Body of Christ. This is exactly as the saints say:

Let us rejoice then and give thanks that we have become not only Christians, but Christ himself. Do you understand and grasp, brethren, God’s grace toward us? Marvel and rejoice: we have become Christ. For if he is the head, we are the members; he and we together are the whole man…. The fullness of Christ then is the head and the members. But what does “head and members” mean? Christ and the Church. (Augustine)

Our redeemer has shown himself to be one person with the holy Church whom he has taken to himself. (Gregory the Great)

Head and members form as it were one and the same mystical person. (Aquinas)

About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they’re just one thing, and we shouldn’t complicate the matter. (Joan of Arc)

- My source for these quotations is a synchronistic series of posts on Inhabitatio Dei

So I plunged ahead. Yes. The first two sections are mysticism: they are knee deep in the kind of things I’m used to reading in certain decontextualized digests and collections of saintly texts. The message I took away was that Jesus speaks various commands and actually expects us to do them: Come, feed, heal, forgive. Do. These are easy commands – his yoke is easy. Sit down and do them or, more correctly – stand up, get off your butt, and do them. This is NOT about religion. Sara says another most Orthodox thing: that Jesus is the death of religion. Or, in her words, “Don’t idolize religion, Jesus reminds his disciples, impatiently.”

But she goes on to point out the major problem with this reading of Jesus: “Of course all of us long for religion. In Jesus’ time every part of life – hygiene, food, sex, money, agriculture, economics, child rearing, health, ethics, marriage, death, and temple practice – was governed by a catalog of religious laws that attempted to shape human life to please the Divine.” We long for religion, and Jesus was human… doesn’t Jesus long for religion? To insist on this particular reading of Jesus is to deny his Judaism in the midst of all the Judaisms that were being practiced in Judea, Samaria and Galilee at the time.

Sara says “it’s easy, at the distance of centuries, to mock a religion that specified exactly which fabrics were acceptable to God, we still share our forebears’ desire to codify our lives in order to manage God.” But, in fact, Judaism still says God is concerned with what kind of fabrics we wear – don’t dismiss it so easily.

Therein lies the complex dilemma. The various cool things that Sara is “discovering” have been there all along. They are part and parcel of the religious tradition she’s dissing. If they got lost it’s not the fault of “religion” or “the institution”. Both of these things are made of the “Laity” the “laos”, the People of God. Even the most pious and hyper-clerical priest in her ivory tower is a member of the Laos. She was raise a layperson by lay people. She was taught by laypeople. She has a family of (mostly) lay people. We can not paint the picture of “the institution” as if the laity are not part of the Church.

Just prior to reading Sara’s book, I picked up issue 16 of Geez magazine. I’ve been reading it right along – shart articles are good for some private time. This was subtitled “The Jesus Issue”. Each article in the issue is a different Jesus – the Activist, the failed activist, the preacher, the judgmental, etc. In his own article, editor Will Braun runs a list:

“If God created us in his image, we have more than reciprocated.” That’s what French philosopher Voltaire said of the human tendency to mould God into our own likeness. Similarly, God’s son has been adapted to a great variety of human-created roles. To capitalist Christians, Jesus was a model entrepreneur. To socialist Christians, he was a hardcore socialist. To eco-Christians, he was a lily-loving environmentalist.

To self-help Christians, he was a motivational guru. And to Christian activists, he was a revolutionary.

Like Will, I used to be in that last category. Early in the book Sara seems to be there as well. Like just about everyone in Geez magazine’s issue 16, Sara is convinced that she’s finally got it right. She’s shoveled off all the religious crap and found Jesus. Right there. AT LAST! Then she reaches out to all the (sadly misdirected) people with her finally-right Jesus as an evangelist.

So, for the first two sections, Sara is wrestling with understanding why people wait for permission to do what God wants them to do. She wonders why people don’t jump up and run away from all the powers that seek to control religion, or all the clergy…

But it’s that very power in the Church (the Holy Spirit, so the Church teaches) that makes all the things possible that Sara is talking about.

So I wrestled here. I wanted to sit down and give her a non-ironic lesson in Church history and doctrine. Non-irony seems to be missing from some of her comments. But there are reasoned answers for all her questions. Does she want to hear them? I know the attitude of her community at SGN to “traditional answers”. They don’t like them very often. But the Spirit is working there: weaving the very traditional into their lives in the guise of the very new. That’s what makes SGN so wonderful. That’ why I kept reading. Even in the words that make me roll my eyes I can see the Spirit’s action.

The Food Pantry is an example of such. Although the hows and whys and mechanics of it are not discussed in the book, the fact is that giving away hundreds of tons of food to poor folks is exactly the most awesome image of Christ I can imagine in an “outreach” mode. It’s like the scene where the Nuns open the doors to their Church in Sister Act, inviting the neighbours in and welcoming the world to God’s Banquet. And I know that the Food Pantry has become a model for others around the nation and the world! They are reaching out with Jesus’ hands to feed the hungry, to give hope to the poor.

Thus it is that having tossed out the baby with bathwater, or seemingly so, Sara rediscovers traditional religion along the way. Really traditional – with a modern twist. Going forward, I should note that in the most religious of Orthodox Christian homes – as well as in the various streams of Jewish Tradition – the head of the house is the priest in the house. Fathers give their blessing – not a metaphor – to their children, to the meals, to betrothals. This is not new, but very ancient. What is new (and I think right) is that this function, which rises from the idea of “the priesthood of all believers”, should, in fact, flow out to all believers. Sara takes us there: but it’s not new.

After the section on Feeding come sections called Healing, Forgiving and Raising the Dead. If the Feeding section can be read as a conversation on Eucharist, then here comes prayer, reconciliation and anointing/last rites. These chapters read much more like the Sara I know. They are more episodic and, to me, more meaty and meaningful. And – because of the priesthood of all believers – they are more traditional. I wonder if that would surprise the author.

Sara’s opening mysticism which seems to reject Tradition in favour of revolution as a model, evolved in succeeding sections into something that, theologically, is sort of a more-sacramental version of a Disciples of Christ style understanding of the priesthood of all believers. There are moments in the book where Sara skirts the line between Anglican Catholic understanding of the ministry (I was amused to hear some people call SGN priests “Father”) and Anglican Protestant ideas of “lay presidency”. Even though – let us be clear – Sara never presides at Eucharist, she acts in the role of “sacerdos” enough in the book that one man introduces her, in another context, as “a priestess of Jesus.”

I enjoyed these parts of the book – exploring the other sacraments. Sara introduces us to real people made of real flesh and blood, just like Jesus. These people are the sacraments: as the Body of Anibal becomes the Body of Christ, or the Body of Laura and Gloria, made of one flesh, become the Body of Christ. The curious image of Divine Boyfriend only has one problem with all this realism: Christ is not the Boyfriend of the Church, but her lover. The two are one flesh. Already. Now. In a sense Sara, translating Tradition into Post-Modern Irony, has presented an image that just isn’t as deep as the Tradition. Jesus is my boyfriend? No, thanks. I want mad, passionate love that leaves me screaming in ecstasy, writhing on the floor before the altar, not some chaste handholding with a chaperone along the garden path. Ravish me with the kisses of your mouth, don’t giggle at me in the malt shop!

In all of Sara’s discussion of sacraments, the “right parts” are done by “real priests”. Don’t worry. But it’s more real than that. It’s more like real life than liturgy. Or, more to the point, real life is liturgy. Liturgy – at its best – points out the holy, the heavenly, in real life. Sara (or some other person in the story) does the work and a priest comes by to be the holy hands at the end.

As a theological aside, consider: When does the Eucharist start? Is it when the presider says, “Blessed is the Kingdom…” or some other time? Perhaps when the congregation is all gathered and silent in their devotion and the bell rings? Maybe when the clergy and sundry get there and start the setup? Perhaps the liturgy begins at home when the laity start to bake the bread with all the right prayers? Is it when the flour is milled or when the grain harvested or planted in soil that has been blessed (or not)? Perhaps when the grapes are pressed or bottled? When the vines are trimmed? Can you draw a line and call it a boundary in the past? When does the Eucharist stop being Jesus? After you eat it? When you pass it out into the toilet? When you leave the Church?

Eucharist always is – it is what we are always to be about, says St Paul. The liturgical rite, lead by a priest, is only the marker in time and space. Feed the neighbours, Jesus is there. Host a food pantry, Jesus is there.

Sara’s priests, in the book, provide the marker for all the other sacraments are always happening as well. But Sara makes it clear: with or without a marker, we’re all called to be Jesus present in the situation. Be the peacemaker, be the blesser, be the healer, be the reconciler. Unlike the mystical section (which, as I noted, I wasn’t liking at all) this was very enjoyable to read. It’s needed. It’s important:

How many of us have ministries as laity? How many of us fail to see them or devalue them even when we do see them? How many of us are in Churches where all the lay ministry in the world means nothing if the priest isn’t around to say his piece. How many times have there been wonderful, growing lay ministries but, because of his own fragile ego, the priest felt threatened by them as if they were encroaching on his own prerogative? How many times have the laity decided something for their life together only to have the clergy shoot it down with their almighty veto power rather than living as if the priest just one more member of the community with his or her own duties and responsibilities? And remember what I said: the laity let this happen. The clergy are just differently-abled laity. (I’m reminded that in the Eastern tradition, the laity can fire bishops and priests – something that is much needed in Anglicanism.)

At the end of the book, Sara works her own reconciliation though. I should have seen it coming: Sara and the Pentecostal Pastor of one of Sara’s clients serving the funeral together at the altar in SGN’s rotunda. It’s not just that Sara’s found the right Jesus and the other folks have not. But I wish this wider, more-inclusive Jesus had been explored more.

Throughout the book I was totally engaged: I might disagree or agree, I might be moved forward or back, but I was never still. Sara calls us to sing and dance as Jesus leads and she’s moving with a fast beat here. The mysticism lost me at times – but I never stopped thinking and the conversation was wonderful.

I had wanted to learn the how of the food pantry – or see more of it. I’ve wanted a food pantry at every turn since leaving San Francisco: I don’t know how, or I can’t figure it out. I make due with feeding as many people as I can. But reading this book, if one wants to try and do the same thing one can’t. Perhaps that’s also an important point. Sara doesn’t imply that each of us needs to do what she does.

The scriptures counsel us to “Work out your salvation…” What is yours? Jesus calls each of us with a tune heard only between the self and the Divine Lover. Sara has showed us her dance – even as she’s not mapped out the exact steps on the floor. But she wants us each to move into our own waltz (or lamabada, or salsa or gigue or whatever) with Jesus. Read her thing – gather strength and hope and blessing to go and do yours!

There were moments when I was painfully envious. Sara is living in a city I love (but can not afford) attending a parish I love (but can’t quite embrace as fully as they embrace me) and she is clearly doing a priestly ministry. WTF am I, after 40 years of saying “I want to be a priest”?

While reading I received an email from a friend. It was not the first such letter or phone call; I get them all the time. The question is the same: where can a gay man or lesbian discover the Orthodox church? Through a network of connections I put a gay couple in touch with an Orthodox priest and parish that would welcome them. The priest, the couple, the person referring: I’ve met none of these in person but God has put me here and I can put them together. Reputation and friends, seminarians and priests, somehow, God has placed me in a nexus that can answer that question (although not in the way that conservatives would like). One of the ancient titles for priest is pontifex and it means “Bridge builder”. As Jesus destroys divisions so it is our place to do it. In the middle of an attack of envy for Sara’s priestly ministry, I had that moment of my own ministry and by God’s grace realised it for what it was. Time again for Eucharist, for Thanksgiving.

Sara reminds us, at the end of the Jesus Freak, that “Ordinary people still hope, suspect and believe they can be Jesus… Jesus is real, and so, praise God, are we. Everything the resurrected Jesus does on earth he does through our bodies.” The scriptures say of Jesus that he is “a priest, forever, after the order of Melchizedek.” The spirit of God is moving in you and through you in the Church. What is true of Jesus is true of you if you can but open your eyes to see it. Go and do!