Accidental Saints: Part ‘Who Pastors the Bishop?’

i am busy reading Nadia Bolz-Weber’s Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People and being completely inspired by it.

For those of you who don’t know her, Nadia is the tattoo-covered ex-addict F-bombing Lutheran pastor who wrote the amazing Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint [do yourself a favour!] and she is back with this, her second book.

Short chapters that really kick you in the chops and it’s not her language [which can be a wee bit sailory at regular times] which does it, but more the fact that she is constantly pointing the lessons at herself, as if she is the only one yet to get them. She has kind of a diary this-is-what-I-learnt-or-realised-I-needed-to-learn-along-the-way style which draws you in and then spits you out gasping for a sense of the grace, love and deep understanding of the compassion of Jesus for those who we throw to the side.

We definitely have some different ideas on some things, but that doesn’t stop me for a second from recomending both of these books and encouraging you to dive into them with an open mind. Unless you are a completely closed minded ridiculous person, i don’t think you’ll be sorry.

In the chapter ‘You are not “The Blessing”‘, Nadia speaks about her friendship with a bishop named Bruce. She meets him at a conference and then there is a moment when someone hands him a letter telling him that they are all praying for his wife:

“Bruce”, I finally said after the woman left, ‘is your wife sick?” It’s the kind of question that has to be asked while maintaining eye contact even if you feel like you’d rather just disappear. 

It took him a few minutes of looking at his knees before he looked in my eyes. And when he did, he said, “Yes. Just three weeks ago she was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, which has spread to her liver.”

So there I was. What was I gonna do? There was no way I was going to presume to start pastoring a bishop I had just barely met. I was relieved that the organ music started, saving me from having to figure out what to say.

As the liturgy went on, I sat there selfishly distracted by what felt like the complete unsingability of the opening hymn when I realised that this bishop sitting next to me was also not singing. He was weeping. And in that moment it didn’t matter that he was a bishop and I a pastor with a bad attitude. I put my arm around him and just kept singing – and I tried to sing that hymn I never would have chosen even louder. I sang louder because my brother in Christ couldn’t sing himself. I had to sing for both of us. And then I took his hand. 

After the liturgy, I asked Bruce if he would like me to pray for him and anoint him with oil. His eyes teared up and he said, “Thank you, yes.”

I committed to pray for him every day after that and did so over the course of the next nine weeks, until the untimely death of his wife. During those nine weeks, I prayed and checked in regularly via phone, text message, and e-mail. In some way, Bruce leaned on me, sending really honest text messages about how much pain he was in or how hard it was. 

Years ago, after pagers were popular but before cell phones came around, my parents’ church had prayer pagers that were carried by people going through crisis. Folks at church would have the pager number, and every tme they prayed for the person who had just lost a loved one or who was going through a difficult course of chemo, that person would feel the pager buzz with each prayer offered. This always stayed with me as a powerful idea, so I tried to let Bruce know, with some regularity, that I was praying for him.

As the days passed and his wife grew increasingly ill, the messages continued. “Just prayed for you,” I’d text or e-mail, and he’d inevitably answer with “Thanks. This is so hard. I’m not sure how to do this.”

“You’ll do it,” I’d reply, “but it will feel like shit and it won’t be easy.”

What else could I say that wouldn’t be complete nonsense? If nothing else, I admired his honesty and his ability to reach out for support. 

The morning after Cynthia died, I received a call from someone in Bruce’s office letting me know the funeral would be held near where they live in Madison, Wisconsin. Getting on the plane a few days later, I wondered what I was doing attending a funeral for a woman I’d never met. Yet I had made a promise to care about her husband, and so that night when Bruce approached me at the funeral reception and asked if I would stay until everyone had left, I said yes. As we stood in an empty church fellowship hall next to the drained coffee pots and empty cheese trays, I asked, “So, Bruce, who pastors bishops?”

“No one,” he said in almost a whisper, not out of secrecy or shame but out of the weighty truth of it. 

On the drive back to the house of my friends Jay and Annie, where I was staying the night in Milwaukee, I thought about what Bruce had said, and it made me think that maybe we simply don’t want our leaders to have needs. Maybe it’s not only the leaders who think they should be perfect; maybe it’s also their followers who expect them to have it all together. Maybe we want the people who care for us and lead us to not be like us, to not struggle like us, because if we realise they, too, are hurting and needy, then maybe the spell – the illusion that we’re okay, that we’re in good hands – breaks. Like how distressed I was when I saw Miss Kramer, my third grade teacher, walking out of the teacher’s bathroom. Wait. You mean teachers also go to the bathroom? You mean, like me? I never saw her the same again.

I drove in the dark through small town Wisconsin thinking about how I had inadvertently become one of Bishop Bruce’s pastors during the time of his wife’s death and how it was an honour, but that if I was totally honest, I also felt some kind of weird pride about it. He is easy to love and I was happy to get to be one of the people who, in a small way, was able to help carry him through. We call this kind of thing “serving others” as though it’s an entirely selfless thing, but to tell the truth, I’ve never known how to keep from feeling self-important when I help people. Being the one who gets to serve is a position of power. No matter how selfless I’d like to think I am, there’s always something in it for me – even if it’s the satisfaction of knowing I am a good Matthew 25 Christian, that I am “being Christ” to someone else.

While we as people of God are certainly called to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, that whole “we’re blessed to be a blessing” thing can still be kinda dangerous. It can be dangerous when we self-importantly place ourselves above the world, waiting to descend on those below so we can be the “blessing” they’ve been waiting for, like it or not. Plus, seeing myself as the blessing can pretty easily obscure the way in which I am actually part of the problem and can hide the ways in which I, too, am poor and needing care. Seeing myself or my church or my denomination as “the blessing” – like so many mission trips to help “those less fortunate than ourselves” – can easily descend into a blend of benevolence and paternalism. We can start to see the “poor” as supporting characters in a big story about how noble, selfless, and helpful we are.

After meeting Bruce and struggling with what it means to be the hands and feet of Christ in the world when I am so prone to pride, I looked harder at Matthew 25 and realised 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 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 needy and the ones who meet needs. To place ourselves or anyone else in only one category is to lie to ourselves. 

Of this much I am sure: I wasn’t the one who allowed Christ to be revealed in the encounter of the sarcastic pastor and the weeping bishop. It was Bruce’s need that revealed Christ. Bruce didn’t get to play Jesus and neither did I, but Bruce did allow himself to bear a need that someone else could, however imperfectly, meet. And when the grief of our brother was cared about, Jesus was cared about.

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 didn’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 is the surprising scandal of the gospel, the surprising scandal of the kingdom: it looks like the same crappy mess that bumps us out of our unconscious addiction to being good, so that we can look at Jesus as he approaches us on the streets and says, Man, you look like you could use a good meal.

Do yourself a favour and get hold of Accidental Saints.