Accidental Saints, Anyone?

For this essay that I am writing BEFORE the 2024 election, for publication AFTER the election occurs, it is very difficult to know what to say or how to write something that will be helpful no matter what happens. As an optimist, I am always hopeful any circumstance will call forth the best in all of us. As Americans, we have survived a great deal and kept the democracy we inherited from our forebearers intact, even with all its flaws.

Among those flaws, some would name the Electoral College, which keeps the popular vote from determining the President of the United States (and Vice-President), and instead replaces it with a (for the most part) winner-take-all, state-by-state vote, with the votes allocated by the numbers of members of Congress in each state.

Others would name as the greatest flaw the failure of the Constitution to outlaw slavery from the outset, with the outright discrimination against “one person: one vote,” which persists even today in the determination to challenge the right to vote of citizens who “don’t look like a citizen” (meaning white, or middle class, or educated, or whatever).

The biggest bugaboo of all, I believe, is that although the Constitution specifically says the government cannot grant special favoritism to ANY religion, most of us call ourselves Christians, and some even believe we must be a “Christian” nation (despite what the Constitution says), and yet many of us are determined to single out ones who “don’t belong here” for one reason or another.

I have just finished reading and discussing with my reading group at church a book by a Lutheran woman pastor, Nadia Bolz-Weber, entitled “Accidental Saints.” For Pastor Nadia, who from the start has issues with a lot of the people who show up at her church in Denver, CO, the book ends with her having come to realize that God puts strange people in front of her to show her that there is NO ONE WHO DOESN’T BELONG.

Druggies, for example? Alcoholics or the mentally ill? Undocumented immigrants, a drunken bishop who has killed a 35-year-old mother of young children in a car accident, or a smarmy tatoo artist? How about a “too-goody-goody-two-shoes” church lady, or an atheist who questions everything his church does, or the soul-less corporate senior VP who is emotionally dead to everyone else? What about a paroled felon, the couple who chose to abort what would have been their third child, or the guy who spends all his free time shooting up ammunition at blank targets at the range? They ALL BELONG at church because GOD says so!

Pastor Nadia unbelievably finds a glimmer of a saint of some sort in every one of these despicable types whom she meets, as she is forced to interact with them over her years serving that congregation in Denver’s hardest-core area. Likewise, she finds them calling forth a degree of sainthood in herself that she can’t imagine was or is actually there, a capacity to love and respect and minister to others that she never thought she truly had in her.

In these days after our 2024 national elections, please look for the saintliness in people you don’t want to see, don’t want to interact with, don’t want to believe are like you in any way. We are all here for a reason, even if we don’t know why: God has put us together in this place, and we need to learn how to live alongside one another in community, for the sake of our children and the future of this country.

After all, God will have us all sitting together at the Great Feast to Come, in any case, so we might as well get acquainted now and be civil to one another.

Thanks for reading, dear friends, and please go out and see if you can, like Pastor Nadia, identify an “Accidental Saint” in your neighborhood or community this week.