Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People

by Nadia Bolz-Weber

But in the church, we do the very odd thing of proclaiming that the dead are still a part of us, a part of our lives, and are even an animating presence in the church. Saint Paul describes the saints as “a great cloud of witnesses,” so when they have passed, we still hold them up, hoping perhaps that their virtues — their ability to have faith in God in the face of an oppressive empire or a failing crop or the blight of cancer — might become our own virtue, our own strength.

Personally, I think knowing the difference between a racist and a saint is kind of important. But when Jesus again and again says things like the last shall be first, and the first shall be last, and the poor are blessed, and the rich are cursed, and that prostitutes make great dinner guests, it makes me wonder if our need for pure black-and-white categories is not true religion but maybe actually a sin. Knowing what category to place hemlock in might help us know whether it’s safe to drink, but knowing what category to place ourselves and others in does not help us know God in the way that the church so often has tried to convince us it does.

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.

I explained to Bill that what we celebrate in the saints is not their piety or perfection but the fact that we believe in a God who gets redemptive and holy things done in this world through, of all things, human beings, all of whom are flawed.

and when I end up changed by loving someone I’d never choose out of a catalog but whom God sends my way to teach me about God’s love.

Never once did Jesus scan the room for the best example of holy living and send that person out to tell others about him. He always sent stumblers and sinners. I find that comforting.

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.

I looked harder at Matthew 25 and realized that if Jesus said “I was hungry and you fed me,” then Christ’s presence is not embodied in those who feed the hungry (as important as that work is), but Christ’s presence is in the hungry being fed. Christ comes not in the form of those who visit the imprisoned but in the imprisoned being cared for. And to be clear, Christ does not come to us as the poor and hungry. Because, as anyone for whom the poor are not an abstraction but actual flesh-and-blood people knows, the poor and hungry and imprisoned are not a romantic special class of Christlike people. And those who meet their needs are not a romantic special class of Christlike people. We all are equally as sinful and saintly as the other. No, Christ comes to us in the needs of the poor and hungry, needs that are met by another so that the gleaming redemption of God might be known.

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.

The fact is, we are all, at once, bearers of the gospel and receivers of it. We meet the needs of others and have our needs met. And the strangeness of the good news is that, like those in Matthew 25 who sat before the throne and said Huh? When did we ever feed you, Lord?, we never know when we experience Jesus in all of this. All that we have is a promise, a promise that our needs are holy to God. A promise that Jesus is present in the meeting of needs and that his kingdom is here. But he’s a different kind of king who rules over a different kind of kingdom. 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.

I am certain there are more gracious ways of explaining the rapture, and not everyone who believes in it fits this description, but to believe in the rapture feels to me like it’s the same as believing that when Jesus comes back, he will do so as a judgmental, angry bastard who apparently underwent a total personality transplant since his resurrection. Or as a selective magician who will make all the good people float up to the sky like a million Evangelical Mary Poppinses and force the bad people to be “left behind” on earth to suffer terribly.

Apocalyptic texts were often code for speaking about the world the people at that time lived in; they were a way for people in politically dangerous situations to speak the truth about power — they were more commentary than prediction. And, yes, they are disturbing texts, but partly because they represent a genre we just aren’t familiar with. Sort of like if sci-fi ceased being a genre two thousand years from now but Battlestar Galactica was still able to be seen, and the people in the year 4000, rather than understanding it to be a commentary about hubris and what it means to be human, saw it as a prediction of the future and waited around staring at the sky anticipating Cylon attacks. That doesn’t mean all apocalyptic texts are invalidated because of genre, but it does mean that they’re not meant to be crystal balls.

When we find ourselves in a world where we see up-to-the-minute images of human suffering like parents running past the police tape outside an elementary school, their faces filled with primal panic not knowing if their child is alive or shot dead, can we really afford quite so much sentimentality in Christianity? Maybe soft-focus photos of doves flying in front of waterfalls, inspirational verses on coffee cups, and overproduced recordings of earnest praise music aren’t really helping us. I often wonder how Jesus responds to our ignoring of reality in favor of emotional idealism, but I know for sure that the church and those we might serve aren’t benefiting from it. Not when we live in a world where suffering is as real as Herod and Boko Haram and Sandy Hook, where people are longing for something to help make sense of their suffering. Pretending that everything is fine isn’t helping anyone.

We may be used to hearing some Christians say “let’s keep Christ in Christmas,” but my friend Joy Carroll Wallis wrote an essay called “Keeping Herod in Christmas,” and I have to say I’m with her, because the world into which Christ was born was certainly not a Norman Rockwell painting. The world has never been that world. God did not enter the world of our nostalgic, silent-night, snow-blanketed, peace-on-earth, suspended reality of Christmas. God slipped into the vulnerability of skin and entered our violent and disturbing world. This Christmas story, the story of Herod, the story of the Slaughter of the Holy Innocents, is as much a part of Christmas and Epiphany as are shepherds and angels.

But despite all the love in the world, when it comes down to it, none of us can know the reality of another. We can share circumstances, personality traits, even parents, yet as much as we move through our lives alongside each other, none of us can fully know the internal reality of another. These people sitting on those benches at Satchel’s, the people who loved Billy the very most and felt they knew him the very best, might never have known the type of pain Billy was in. Or the love he knew. Or the isolation he experienced.

But honestly, I’m much more tortured by my secrets, which eat away at me, than I am concerned about God being mad at me. I’m more haunted by how what I’ve said and the things I’ve done have caused harm to myself and others than I am worried that God will punish me for being bad. Because in the end, we aren’t punished for our sins as much as we are punished by our sins.

And sin is just the state of human brokenness in which what we say and do causes these sometimes tiny and sometimes monstrous fractures in our earth, in ourselves, in those we love, and sometimes even in our own bodies. Sin is the self curved in on the self. And it’s not something we can avoid entirely.

Sometimes just the simple experience of knowing this, of knowing that our sin is not what defines us, can finally set us free.

Because Good Friday is not about us trying to “get right with God.” It is about us entering the difference between God and humanity and just touching it for a moment. Touching the shimmering sadness of humanity’s insistence that we can be our own gods, that we can be pure and all-powerful. Some may think that spirituality means attaining a disembodied transcendent state somewhere up in the ether. But that’s not where we find God…that’s just where we try to be like God and that’s different. Good Friday is a stark and unapologetic display of remorse. Remorse for the way in which humanity kills ourselves and the creation and love and God him/herself.

But what do we mean when we say, “Lord have mercy”? Some may say we’re asking God to not punish us for our sin, to not rain down fury and violent retribution on us. And maybe there’s a place for that. Maybe asking for God’s mercy is like saying, we beg you for your mercy to be with us, because ours is not enough. We ask for your wisdom to be with us, your loving-kindness to be with us, because we just don’t have enough of our own. And we keep messing everything up. It seems that we are especially moved to beg this of God in situations where we are overwhelmingly aware of our shortcomings and smallness.

And to say “Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy” is to lay our hope in the redeeming work of the God of Easter as though our lives depended on it. Because they do. It means that we are an Easter people, a people who know that resurrection, especially in and among the least likely people and places, is the way that God redeems even the biggest messes we make —

sometimes say that we are religious but not spiritual. Spiritual feels individual and escapist. But to be religious (despite all the negative associations with that word) is to be human in the midst of other humans who are as equally messed up and obnoxious and forgiven as ourselves. It allows us, when confronted both with assholes in SUVs or by our own intolerances, to hold up bread in our mind’s eye and say, “Child of God.” And sometimes it can look a whole lot like using imperfect love to help keep each other’s guts from exploding. So I come to church with my churning gut and I hear that I am forgiven and I again hear of a God who climbs down from heaven to enter the pain and beauty of humanity. I come and hear of a God who climbs up from the earth still stinking of the grave and offers his body for us so that we might in turn be his body in the world because there are fields of blood all around us. There are the abandoned spaces of loss and loathing and remorse in which God’s beloved are isolated.

And this is it. This is the life we get here on earth. We get to give away what we receive. We get to believe in each other. We get to forgive and be forgiven. We get to love imperfectly. And we never know what effect it will have for years to come. And all of it…all of it is completely worth it.

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. No amount of my own movement or strength could have held up those plates I’d stacked way too high. I tried, and I failed, and Jeff and Tracy suffered for it, and then they extended to me kindness, compassion, and forgiveness out of their silo of hurt and grace.

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

The sting of grace is not unlike the sting of being loved well, because when we are loved well, it is inextricably linked to all the times we have not been loved well, all the times we ourselves have not loved others well, and all the things we’ve done or not done that feel like evidence against our worthiness. Love and grace are such deceivingly soft words — but they both sting like hell and then go and change the shape of our hearts and make us into something we couldn’t create ourselves to be.

I imagined Jesus standing there blessing us all because I believe that is our Lord’s nature. Because, after all, it was Jesus who had all the powers of the universe at his disposal but did not consider his equality with God something to be exploited. Instead, he came to us in the most vulnerable of ways, as a powerless, flesh-and-blood newborn. As if to say, “You may hate your bodies, but I am blessing all human flesh. You may admire strength and might, but I am blessing all human weakness. You may seek power, but I am blessing all human vulnerability.” This Jesus whom we follow cried at the tomb of his friend and turned the other cheek and forgave those who hung him on a cross. He was God’s Beatitude — God’s blessing to the weak in a world that admires only the strong.