He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do
you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you
love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love
you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.” (John 21:17)
Have
you ever heard of the Ecumenical Catholic Church? Probably not. It only has
somewhere between 2,000 – 3,000 members across the globe. It’s just like the Roman
Catholic Church in doctrine and liturgy, but it’s open to communing divorced
folks and welcoming same-gender couples. Pretty cool, huh? This tiny but worldwide
denomination got its start in California back in 1987 when an eccentric PhD
named Mark Shirilau decided that gay people and divorced people might like to
go to church without being made to feel like they deserved to roast on a spit
in purgatory for just being who they are.
Mark
was a friend of mine. We went to the same Lutheran church in Long Beach, and I
think I can attest without fear of contradiction that Mark was weird. He
was off the wall crazy brilliant, but spoke with a shrill, high-pitched voice and
was obsessed (or so it seemed) with historic Christian ritual. He would fume
that such classical liturgics were disappointingly lacking in our little
suburban congregation, so he fled to the greater grandeur of the Episcopal
Church, and, not satisfied there, founded his very own denomination.
I
could cite many examples of Mark’s peculiarities (such as his tendency to date correspondence
by the festival of the Catholic saint’s feast appointed for that day or his
copious use of Latin) but one incident seems to sum him up best. While I rode
shotgun for Mark as he sponsored our church youth group on a road trip to a
Lutheran Youth gathering in New Orleans, I heard him singing behind the wheel
as we rode through the night. Not pop songs or even hymns. He was chanting the canticles
from the service of Holy Communion. You know: “In peace let us pray to the
Lord. Lord have mercy.” Who does that? Obviously, the guy who started
his own denomination in his house and grew it to a three-thousand-member church
with congregations in the United States, Italy, Latin America, and Kenya. A guy
who, like Saint Paul, financed his ministry through his own secular work and
never took a dime in pay for his ministry[i].
Another
oddball I’ve admired but never met is Nadia Bolz-Weber, the ELCA’s first
ordained Pastor of Public Proclamation. Nadia, with several published books and
frequent media appearances to her credit, is something of a celeb in
ecclesiastic circles. She no longer pastors the alternative congregation House
for All Sinners and Saints she founded in an Episcopal church’s parish hall in
Denver, but preaches in women’s prisons, guest preaches around the country and the
globe, and is currently holding a series of events called Red State Revivals,
song and preaching events in historically conservative districts. The purpose
of these gatherings is, as she states on her webpage:
Nadia’s
the last person you might imagine as a Lutheran pastor. She was raised in a
conservative, fundamentalist household. She wandered away from the faith of her
childhood at a pretty early age, started getting tattoos at age 17, worked as a
stand-up comedian, and is a recovering alcoholic and drug addict with a tendency
toward depression. She found herself tugged back to the faith when she met Matt
Weber, at the time an ELCA seminarian. When Nadia was asked to preach a barroom
eulogy for a fellow comic who’d committed suicide, she realized that the mourners
who gathered were her kind of people—and a potential congregation. House For
All was founded as a haven for those who love God but might not love the church—LGBTQ+
folk, recovering addicts, the depressed, and anyone who feels outside of
society.
God
loves weird people. And God knows how to use them.
This
Sunday (June 29, 2025) is the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, two of the
weirder misfits from any religion. Peter is just a working slob. He’s
impulsive. He’s sometime frightened. He’s felt himself deeply unworthy of being
a follower of Jesus. At times he was stubbornly conservative and block-headed
in his thinking. According to Peter, Messiahs aren’t supposed to get crucified,
rabbis aren’t supposed to lower themselves to wash their students’ feet, and
non-Jews are to be avoided if you can help it. It’s safe to say Peter never
understood his buddy Jesus while Jesus was with him. But then Peter got slammed
by the Holy Spirit. The peasant fisherman started shooting his mouth off again,
but this time proclaiming the grace and love of God through Jesus Christ.
Paul
is also a wacky choice for sainthood. This guy hated the Jesus people. He hated
them so much he wanted to see them get their skulls crushed by rocks at a
public stoning rather than hear a doctrine he didn’t agree with. But God knew
this uber pious Hebrew so full of hate and violence could be used to proclaim
love and reconciliation. I don’t think it was Paul’s blinding that brought him
around. I think it was the love and forgiveness shown him by the Christians who
loved him even when he hated them. Paul found the power to preach to the ones
who would’ve been outcasts, to Gentiles. He found the poetry to write the great
love poem of 1 Corinthians 13. He stayed cranky and sometime irascible through
much of his ministry, but he found the compassion to be all things to all
people for the sake of the Gospel.
Feed those sheep. And come and see me again.
[i]
Sadly, Mark passed Away in January of 2014 while in Italy. I used to tease him
about living in the church of the 14th Century, but I have come to
believe he was ahead of his time. A gay man, he championed same-gender marriage
back in the 1980’s and, as an engineer, worked on developing sustainable, eco-friendly
energy.
[ii]
Check out Nadia’s website at https://nadiabolzweber.com/
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