Every few years, Easter and Passover—two great holidays of the Christian and Jewish traditions—occur over the same week. It’s a fitting coincidence, because, as I have preached in countless sermons over the years, Jesus celebrated Passover in what became for Christians the Last Supper, sharing unleavened bread and wine with his disciples. The Easter journey replicates Christ’s last week of earthly life, beginning with his triumphant entry into Jerusalem, the Last Supper and his washing of the disciples’ feet on Holy Thursday, his crucifixion and death on Good Friday, and his glorious resurrection on Easter Sunday. Passover is an eight-day festival, divided into two parts, that also commemorates a holy journey: this one the Exodus—the emancipation of the Hebrew people from slavery in ancient Egypt.
The all-church council of Nicaea in 325 determined Easter would always fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. Passover, on the other hand, would always start on the fifteenth day of the Hebrew month Nissan. In 2017, during the week of April 10, I began with a Palm Sunday service at a historic church in Oxford, England, while on a speaking engagement there. That afternoon I flew home and the next night, the first night of the Jewish feast, I went to Alexandria, Virginia, to observe the seder in the home of a Conservative rabbi. I would often celebrate Passover in church or at our ministry center, using it as an instructional tool for fellow evangelicals, but this was very different. My place at this Passover table emerged more from a budding friendship than from a professional affiliation.
Cheryl kept counseling hours on Monday nights, so I arrived alone at the front door of the home of Jack and Ann Moline. After heading a congregation for over twenty-five years, Jack took over the Interfaith Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy organization that was generally liberal in orientation but eager to bridge divides among people of faith. In the political sphere, we fell on opposite sides of the spectrum, and in years past I would never have accepted the invitation—not that I would have expected to receive it. But my hosts knew that my attitudes had changed a lot over recent years.
Every seder is unique, the host family’s special gift to their guests. In true rabbinical fashion, Jack makes his seder a kind of teaching opportunity, expanding the lessons of the Exodus with an additional theme for discussion. This year their topic was the stranger, and the Molines sent around several questions that they wanted the guests to think about in anticipation of the conversation. When do you feel like a stranger? When do you feel at home? What does the stranger gain? What are our obligations to the strangers among us, and what are the limits of those obligations?
It was decided that the evening would be free of politics. Our thoughts should come from the heart, Jack said, not from the troubling headlines. His questions affected me deeply for many personal reasons, but also because I had received them while I was thinking about a sermon I would deliver later in the week, on Good Friday, at a large church in New Jersey. Jack’s questions had inspired me to write about Jesus, who, as a man without a grave in which to be buried, was a stranger among his own. When I sat down at the Molines’ table to ponder the questions at hand, I was already in this rabbi’s debt.
I’ve identified as an evangelical Christian nearly three times longer than I identified as a Jew, but it didn’t matter. I put on a yarmulke and immediately felt the comfort of belonging. Distant memories of seders gone by, with family and friends, came rushing back to me: the prayers, the Hebrew, the brisket, the giggles of children looking for the afikomen—the hidden part of the matzo broken at the beginning of the ceremony and retrieved at its conclusion—were all familiar. I heard the voice of my father telling me that, even in the camps, Jews found a way to conduct secret seders without food or wine, such was the importance of God’s command: “You shall keep it as a feast to the Lord; throughout your generations, as a statute forever.”
Jack emphasized one question that had become almost a fixation for me, “When have you felt like a stranger?” One guest, who had lived in China for many years, spoke about what it was like to always feel like an outsider, from not ever being able to master the language, to her physical appearance immediately setting her apart as “other.” Someone else grew up in an immigrant home where her parents didn’t teach her their native language, in many ways building a lifelong wall between them. I was lost in thought when my turn came. I had so much to say about this subject that editing it for a brief answer was a challenge.
I felt like a stranger, I said, when I could not reveal my true thoughts, express what I really believe, or tell people who I really am. I was thinking of the night I came home from the little Emmanuel Church, or the first time I realized my community had a gun problem, or my service on the ECA board, or my sense of not really belonging in the jam-packed arenas of either Cleveland or Philadelphia—or, most imminently, my evolving stand on the explosive issue of same-sex marriage. One place I didn’t feel like a stranger was at Jack and Ann’s table. I felt welcome.
After the main meal was served, a few of the participants spoke with me and thanked me for sharing my experiences. We got up to stretch our legs and talk with others out of range for table conversation. After Jack circulated through the room, he returned to sit by me. He mentioned he had watched The Armor of Light and was impressed with the film and my work on gun control advocacy. He then asked me if I had ever heard of a man named Garson Romalis. The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t quite place it. He then told me the man’s story. Romalis was a Canadian OB-GYN whose greatest joy in life was successfully delivering babies to bright and hopeful new parents. He considered bringing new life into the world a privilege that provided more fulfillment than nearly anything else he did. But as part of his job, he also performed abortions. As glorious as it was to bring life into the world, he had also seen the dire effects of illegal abortions as an intern in Chicago in the early sixties and became determined to offer safe and legal procedures in his practice.
When Canada legalized abortion in 1969, Romalis became one of the first providers in the province of British Columbia. His clinic was picketed regularly by the increasingly active pro-life movement in Canada. In November 1994, a sniper fired a bullet through the doors of his home kitchen; it lodged in his left thigh, severing an artery. He nearly bled to death and spent months in the hospital recovering. For security reasons, the family was forced to find a new home, where they lived with round-the-clock guards. Although Romalis would eventually continue practicing as a gynecologist, the injury left him so impaired that he couldn’t stand for long periods of time. His days of delivering babies were over, but his days of performing abortions were not.
Six years later, another anti-abortion extremist ambushed Romalis in his clinic and stabbed him in the back. He again evaded death and recovered quickly, but his family begged him to take himself out of harm’s way. This time he listened, and the women of Vancouver lost a beloved doctor. Of course, I had heard about this man—and the memories came rushing back. At the time of the first shooting, I had appeared on a daytime talk show in Toronto to discuss the case and do damage control for the pro-life movement, distancing us from the radicals who had become so dangerous and disruptive. I remembered it all vividly and told Jack.
“Garson was my cousin,” Jack said.
The world froze for a moment. I was stunned. Jack wasn’t blaming me, but I could not help but feel culpable. Jack had seen the old footage of me during the Spring of Life demonstrations in Buffalo. Jack’s own family had been a casualty of the violence I had done so little to thwart. And now I was a guest at his home table.
He didn’t ask me to take responsibility for those deaths or injuries, but he gave me another opportunity to see them for what they really were: not blips on a timeline, not so-called regrettable occurrences, but real people experiencing real suffering, with names, with hearts, with families. By sharing that story with me in the context of a Passover meal, an event that had been such a part of my childhood, I felt that my Jewish past and my evangelical present had been reconciled in a way that they never had been before. Jack left me feeling not guilty but forgiven—not condemned but understood—as a deeply flawed human being. But he also left me understanding better his side of this equation. Abby had started that process, and, with tact and care, Jack continued it. I was reminded of sitting in a pew at the beginning of another Holy Week, forty-three years earlier, in a Methodist church sanctuary, being bidden to the altar by the voice of a minister. This time that voice of invitation and forgiveness belonged to a rabbi.
Something had gone terribly wrong with American evangelicalism, or, perhaps, I thought, it had always been wrong and I was simply seeing the problem only now. Over the forty-three years I had been a Christian, the orientation of American evangelicals had shifted from what many theologians call the ultimate to the penultimate. We had descended from the high and heavenly calling in Christ to earthly politics, partisanship, and nativist rhetoric and behavior. We had traded a universal Savior for all people, all humanity, in all times, at all places, for a kind of tribal deity whose only interest was to preserve and protect a single group and their peculiar culture.
The next day I continued to work on my Good Friday sermon. I deliver most of my messages extemporaneously, without notes, fresh and in the moment. As an itinerant preacher, I’ve enjoyed the benefit of rarely being in front of the same congregation more than once a year, so I could repeat a message, perfecting it over time, until I was able to deliver it flawlessly, expanding themes congregations connect with or editing those they don’t.
But this year I could take no chances, and wrote down every word. My focus was not going to be on the usual scene of Jesus on the Cross, the meaning of his death and suffering, or his Seven Last Words. Instead, I wanted to look at what happened afterward when a stranger, Joseph of Arimathea, donated his grave for Jesus, who didn’t have a prearranged place of burial. Playing in the background was the controversy surrounding President Trump’s travel bans that blocked certain people, mostly Muslims, from entering the United States. A few evangelical organizations had objected, but once again, their voices were drowned out by the hallelujah chorus of supporters. In Jesus’ day, most people, especially Jews, had arranged where they would be laid to rest well in advance, and it was almost always in a family crypt of some kind. The fact that Jesus didn’t make such arrangements was significant: it suggested not only that He may have been impoverished, but also that He was estranged from his community. A wanderer among his own.
Aren’t we all?
This was the message I wanted to share on Good Friday with the people in New Jersey. During such difficult times, with a figure in the White House who had recently enacted a Muslim ban, I felt I had so much to say to those who wondered whether they would soon become pariahs, ejected from the country that had become their adopted home. Even members of Christian refugee communities, who, like my grandfather’s family, had fled terrible persecution in their homelands, were vulnerable and afraid. I was beginning to feel closer to them. My suffering was far from theirs, but, I, too, had become a stranger in what had been, for me, a secure community for over forty years.
The sanctuary was packed. The momentous nature of Good Friday, the day that Christ died for our sins, often inspires even those who rarely go to church to attend. I came to the pulpit and began with a passage from Matthew. “As evening approached, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who had himself become a disciple of Jesus. Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus’ body, and Pilate ordered that it be given to him. Joseph took the body, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and placed it in his own new tomb that he had cut out of the rock.”
I went on to talk about my Jewish background and the importance of burial in Jewish life. How the place of interment in ancient times was planned relatively early in life, which is what made Jesus’ lack of a tomb particularly striking. Jesus came for the outcast, I told the congregation—and was one Himself. He was the alien—and He came for the alien. He was homeless—and He came for the homeless. He was a foreigner—and He came for the foreigner. Jesus, a man without a grave, a man dispossessed, a man alone, a man despised, a man on the outside.
I wasn’t sure if this was resonating with a crowd that had been bombarded with messages about the threat of “radical Islamic terrorists” and the dangers of Syrian refugees. Had my sermon just alienated the very people I sought to comfort? Were they all Trump supporters and sensitive to the implicit criticism in my words? The congregation seemed paralyzed in silence for those fifteen minutes as I spoke about feeling lost or estranged, about being the black sheep in a family or a community. “If you’re lost, you have a Savior,” I concluded. “If you’re orphaned, you have a Heavenly Father; if you’re an alien, you have a country; if you’re alone, you have friends.” There was what I at first read as a tense silence. As I stepped back from the pulpit, I looked around the sanctuary, wondering if I had crossed a line. I glanced over at the pastor; he looked concerned.
Then someone began to clap.
Then someone else. Slowly, the entire congregation, one row after another, rose in their pews and delivered a long ovation. Even in the most demonstrative churches, Good Friday is generally subdued, but the people in that service were ebullient that day. I had never seen anything like it. The pastor bounded onto the altar and hugged me, thanking me under his breath. Then he turned to the congregation and said, “I promise you I won’t put a sermon on a sermon, especially after that one.” Another explosive round of applause followed. I can’t know what was going on in the minds of those 1,200 people, but I hoped in that moment they saw and understood something about themselves and about all of us. We are all in the same boat; we need each other as much as we need God. There is no difference between me and the person next to me, in front of me, behind me. It doesn’t matter who they are, where they came from, what they believe or don’t believe, who they love or don’t love. We are creations of God, every single one, from the best to the worst.
On Easter Sunday, I had no preaching assignment, so Cheryl and I attended services at a local church. I was awed by the power of the resurrected Christ’s intersection with the reality of our everyday lives. During a very new reality in the United States under President Donald Trump, when many days seemed dark, the Resurrection provided comfort and hope in the knowledge that Jesus could not be relegated to the past or reserved for an idealized future. Through his resurrection, he is present here and now, in our immediate reality. For me, there is no more optimistic or enduring message on earth. Christ has risen. He is risen indeed.
* * *
In my travels, I have met many people who have shared with me their discomfort with the co-optation of Jesus’ beautiful message by political forces. They know that something important has been lost but have no idea what to do about it. It has resulted in a restlessness and discontent that is emptying our churches. We’ve lost millions of young people because they do not see in our eyes or hear from our mouths the words or love of a Christ they know, deep in their souls, is the only source of human improvement. For them I hope to create and inhabit a new space in which conversations about the moral and spiritual content of our painfully human and social struggles are not acrimonious, contentious, hostile, and hateful but Christlike in love, in respect, and in honor of one another.
Once again, it would be my most unlikely benefactor, Abigail Disney, who would help me take this vision from concept to reality. With Cheryl beside me, Abby asked, “If you could do anything with your life at this stage, what would it be?” I was too shy to say what I was thinking, but Cheryl blurted out, “Honey, that would be your Bonhoeffer Institute.” That was exactly how I had answered the question silently in my mind. Since the time in 2010 that I stood in the yard at the Flossenbürg concentration camp where Bonhoeffer was hanged, I harbored a dream of someday launching an institution that would apply his insights into ethics to social crises in our own time. “If that’s it, Rob,” Abby said matter-of-factly, “let’s make it happen.” With a generous start-up grant from Abby, followed by operational grants from other individuals and foundations, the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Institute was born. Its vision statement begins, “We settle for nothing less than a just society infused with collaboration and equity.”
One of my favorite moments in the gospels is when Jesus told his disciples what would be the hallmark of a Christian, “By this shall all people know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” I long to return to that courageous kindness, to a spiritual simplicity based on that divine common denominator of love.
I can say three things about my spiritual journey: I was born again and professed Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. It was the beginning of something new, something hopeful, something beyond the limitations of our humanity. It led to a path filled with faith, hope, and love. But then I listened to a beguiling voice—mixed with others, of course, but it was not the voice of my Lord. This voice was determined not to lead souls to a savior but to capture them for a self-serving end. I was seduced by that voice, and it led me into that dark wood. I did some good in that place, but it was contaminated by ambition, hubris, and disregard for the other, the stranger. No longer were the addicts in the halfway house my flock. I surrendered too often to that same temptation and was blinded to the real work of caring for souls. To engage in the scrum of the debate, score a win, maneuver for domination, exercise influence, and leave it there, or worse, cloak it as gospel, is to do no good at all, but instead, to inflict great harm.
After a long period of preparation, like Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness, or the apostle Paul’s three years in the desert, I had reencountered Bonhoeffer, whom I thought I knew, but didn’t. I reread his Call to Discipleship, and his other work, Christ the Center, and they recalibrated my spiritual compass. If I have lost friends in one community, I have found many others, and—secure in the love of my marriage, my family, and my Redeemer—I am on my way back to that original call and that critical center.
It is my hope and my prayer that others will join me in a place where we might try to discern the will of God, for each of us, no matter what church, what altar, what form of prayer leads us to salvation. What kind of world would it be if we returned to the curiosity and humility of the pilgrim? Where we tried to more fully understand and act on what the gospel says to us, to our communities, to our country, to the stranger?
As I emerged from my period of darkness, of succumbing to politics and power, I saw how expansive God’s grace is and how universal his invitation is to it. I no longer believe you’re excluded if you’re homosexual, or if you’ve had an abortion, or if you perform them. I no longer believe Muslims are dangerous marauders, or that Democrats and liberals are apostates. I no longer believe Jesus is a Republican or that Ronald Reagan spoke for God and Jimmy Carter didn’t. That gracious space is so vast, so much more complex, so much more beautifully mysterious than any of us could ever imagine.
I do believe we are better off when we listen more and talk less, and that especially includes our conversations with God. And I do believe we need to seek deeply and risk greatly to act courageously in obedience to the will of God as best as we can. My new journey is far more gratifying than a plane flight around the world, or a two-thousand-mile trek to Mexico, or a confident stroll through the corridors of political power. My destination is clear. I am on a journey to find the reality of God, every day, day after day, in this moment, in whomever I encounter.
“Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our Church,” Bonhoeffer wrote. I’ve also learned it’s the mortal enemy of our politics, our self-perception, our identity. “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession,” he wrote. “Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” But then Bonhoeffer reassures us: “Our struggle today is for costly grace.”
Of course it is a struggle. Of course it is costly. But how magnificent, how unearned, how surprising is that grace.