Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People

by Nadia Bolz-Weber

And anyway, it has been my experience that what makes us the saints of God is not our ability to be saintly but rather God’s ability to work through sinners.

Christianity has survived some unspeakable abominations: the Crusades, clergy sex-scandals, papal corruption, televangelist scams, and clown ministry. But it will survive us, too.

“You’re only as sick as your secrets, kid.”

Sometimes the fact that there is nothing about you that makes you the right person to do something is exactly what God is looking for.

No one gets to play Jesus. But we do get to experience Jesus in that holy place where we meet others’ needs and have our own needs met. We are all the needy and the ones who meet needs. To place ourselves or anyone else in only one category is to lie to ourselves.

Being part of Christ’s bizarro kingdom looks more like being thirsty and having someone you don’t even like give you water than it looks like polishing your crown. It looks more like giving my three extra coats to the trinity of junkies on the corner than it looks like ermine-trimmed robes.

That’s how God works sometimes. Not through the things we are prepared for but through the things we don’t expect.

So are demons forces that are totally external to us who seek to defy God? Are they just the shadow side of our own souls? Are they social constructions from a premodern era? Bottom line: Who cares? I don’t think demons are something human reason can put its finger on. Or that human faith can resolve. I just know that demons, whether they be addictions or actual evil spirits, are not what Jesus wants for us, since basically every time he encounters them he tells them to piss off.

that trying not to need others isn’t about strength and independence; it’s about fear. To allow myself to need someone else is to put myself in a position to be betrayed or made to look weak.

Until the late nineteenth century, the front room in houses, called the parlor, was where one would receive guests, but it was also where the bodies of the dead would be laid out for visitation. People used to die at home, at which point their loved ones would wash and prepare the body and lay it in the parlor. Neighbors, friends, and family would come to see the body and perhaps stroke the hair or kiss the forehead of those who had gone to their rest. Death was a part of life. That is, until the advent of the funeral parlor, a local for-profit business that took over all that unpleasantness for us. (This is when and why the front room in our home started to be called the “living” room and not the parlor.)

In the end, the only real love in the world is found when you let yourself be truly known.

Because in the end, we aren’t punished for our sins as much as we are punished by our sins.

Sometimes I wonder if that is what faith is: risking an openness to something bigger than ourselves — something from which we are made and yet without which we are not complete, our origin and our completion.

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.