Chapter 3
Good Monday Morning to this week 3 of 2023
Accidental Saints: Finding God in all the Wrong People by Nadia Bolz-Weber is a book about an unconventional pastor’s journey through the peaks and valleys of life as a Christian. Nadia Bolz-Weber uses stories from her life, and others’ lives, to convey messages about Christianity. The accounts deal with her own imperfections, how she tries to reach out to others in need, regardless of their background, and how others’ love and wisdom have helped her become a better Christian.
A few quotes to begin this week by Nadia Bolz-Weber
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. … And receiving grace is basically the best stinging feeling in the 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.
Sometimes help comes from unexpected places!
Without higher-quality material to work with, God resorts to working through us for others and upon us through others. Those are some weirdly restorative, disconcerting shenanigans to be caught up in: God forcing God’s people to see themselves as God sees them, to do stuff they know they are incapable of doing, so that God might make use of them, and make them to be both humble recipients and generous givers of grace, so that they may be part of God’s big project on earth, so that they themselves might find unexpected joy through surprising situations.
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. 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.
The adjective so often coupled with mercy is the word tender, but God’s mercy is not tender; this mercy is a blunt instrument. Mercy doesn’t wrap a warm, limp blanket around offenders. God’s mercy is the kind that removes the thing that wronged it and resurrects something new in its place.
The holy things we need for healing and sustenance are almost always the same as the ordinary things right in front of us.
Oh hey, God told me to tell you something: Get over yourself!
I have come to realize that all the saints I’ve known have been accidental ones — people who inadvertently stumbled into redemption like they were looking for something else at the time!
That’s the crazy thing about Christianity — the idea that the finite can contain the infinite. After all, what is the incarnation if not that? So there’s an incredible physicality to the spiritual within the Christian story. There’s not this weird sort of Greek separation, where there’s a higher spiritual world and a corrupted, bad world of flesh. It’s all one. Because if God chose to have a body, there’s a way in which spiritual things are revealed in the physical things that are all around us — bread, wine, people, tears, laughter.
Our ‘ministry’ is Word and Sacrament —everything else flows from that. We see a need, we fill it. We mess up, we say sorry. We ask for grace and prayers when we need them (a lot). Jesus shows up for us through each other. We eat, we pray, we sing, we fall, we get up, repeat. Not that complicated.”
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.
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.
Wishing you a week filled with the ordinary and the holy – right next to each other.
Philemon