Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People

by Nadia Bolz-Weber

all the saints I’ve known have been accidental ones

Christianity has survived some unspeakable abominations: the Crusades, clergy sex-scandals, papal corruption, televangelist scams, and clown ministry.

He placed a matte black handgun and a box of ammunition on our kitchen table, and it felt as illicit as if he had just placed a kilo of cocaine or a stack of Hustler magazines on the very surface where we pray and eat our dinners as a family.

Because maybe if I show the right level of outrage, it’ll make up for the fact that every single day of my life I have benefitted from the very same system that acquitted George Zimmerman.

being awake and alert and expectant — all themes of Advent — has nothing to do with knowing or certainty or prediction, but has a lot to do with being in a state of unknowing.

Perhaps, during Advent, a season with pornographic levels of consumption in which our credit card debts rise and our waistbands expand, the idea that Jesus wants to break in and jack some of our stuff is really good news. There’s just a whole lot of crap in my house — again, both literally and metaphorically — that I could well do without.

It’s weird, but of all the characters in the Gospels who encounter Jesus, the ones who most reliably know who he is are not the religious authorities or even Jesus’s own disciples. They are the demons. The demons always recognize Jesus’s authority. And the demons are afraid.

I can go from zero to batshit crazy in no time at all.

We always love imperfectly. It is the nature of human love. And it is okay.

And the thing about grace, real grace, is that it stings. It stings because if it’s real it means we don’t “deserve” it.

“Church isn’t perfect. It’s practice.”

What if Jesus saying “blessed are the meek” is not instructive but performative — that the pronouncement of blessing is actually what confers the blessing itself ? Maybe the Sermon on the Mount is all about Jesus’s lavish blessing of the people around him on that hillside, blessing all the accidental saints in this world,

He was God’s Beatitude — God’s blessing to the weak in a world that admires only the strong.

stories of failure are so much more important than stories of success.