Technically, very technically, Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 17 September 1179) is not a saint. While she hasn't been formally canonized she has been beatified and made a doctor of the church. I'm told that that amounts to being a saint but isn't quite there. She does have her own feast day though so that pretty much validates it for me. She wrote music, had visions and advised high church leadership among a bunch of other stuff. One source called her a polymath. That's a great word that I hope you have fun looking up.
I once saw Johnathan Edwards described as a better Calvinist than Calvin, or at least a better reasoned one. He wrote a number of blistering sermons but two of my favorites of his are, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" and "On the Future and Just Punishment of the Wicked." I'll bet he had some great jokes to open his sermons so he could draw everyone in. I might be wrong be wrong about that though. He was a leading figure in The First Great Awakening in the United States. One contemporary said that he delivered his sermons to the bell rope at the back of his church down the center aisle from his pulpit. The contemporary said that after church, people often expected to see the bell rope charred and smoking from the intensity of his delivery.
Blaise Pascal in his early years was a curious combination of Stephen Hawking and Mick Jagger. One day, he encountered God and everything changed instantly and profoundly. It was such a huge thing for him that he wrote it down in a couple places. One of them was discovered to have been sewn inside his coat after he died. He died young, probably because he spent his money and health taking care of the desperately ill in Paris.
Joel Osteen has great hair, a TV show a smile that is hard to loathe (I know, I've tried) and is often criticized for not being complete in his delivery of the biblical message. He also has one of the biggest protestant churches in the known universe and seems to love God.
Robert Schuller built the Crystal Cathedral, the "Hour of Power" TV show and apparently a bunch of fairly unhealthy relationships. He's suing his old church right now for something like 5 million dollars. Of course, he's also had Henry Nouwen to the Crystal Cathedral, supported foreign missions and admits from time to time that he doesn't completely "get" God.
Mother Theresa was pretty much the gold standard of Christian reality in the 20th century. One of he quotes that I really like is to the effect of: "Killing a child because it is unwanted is a peculiar form of poverty." She confessed at one point to going a year, while living in poverty, caring for orphans and mentoring her staff, without being sure whether God actually existed.
I could go on like this for a very long time. I remember just enough of this stuff to be able to Google it endlessly. (Anybody want to hear the dirt between John Wesley and Zinzendorf?) However, this sort of bone jarring jerking to and fro from person to personage has a point other than winning a Red Bull off of one of your buddies after a particularly vicious church basketball game. The point is that the body of Christ covers a lot more ground than can be covered in one person, one church, one generation or even one millennium. The body of Christ because of the love and grace of Christ is about the biggest tent ever conceived. How big is it? Damn big.
Apparently it's a lot bigger than our memories or our tastes. I hear people complain about Osteen; I hear people dis Edwards; I hear people dis all Catholics that ever lived. Confession: I used to hear myself doing some of this sort of dis'sing from time to time.
I've pretty much stopped listening to this stuff and my great aspiration is to stop talking, thinking or fretting about it. Jesus, who invented all those people mentioned up there, is in charge of them. Not me. If you know the story of the Prodigal Son, look at it this way: Do you like the idea of being the older brother? I've discovered you have to shut up to avoid the possibility and even that doesn't help sometimes.
Occasionally, I'll decide that someone isn't the best influence on me. These days when that possibility presents itself I just stop listening to them. Recently and happily, I've discovered that my mouth isn't involved in listening. I don't have to run my cake hole to have an opinion or to move on with my life. Amazing. Who would have thought?
If you want to blame someone for all these broken people calling themselves Christians or Christian leaders, you better blame Jesus. He made them. I have to say though, I've tried that (although I didn't realize for years that I was actually blaming him when I'd whine about "those people"). From my experience, I'd have to say this is a singularly unsatisfactory approach to the problem.
Jesus' tent is humongous. It's also not at all subject to the rules and theology we think it should be. I'm pretty convinced there's an inside and an outside but apart from a few who are very close to me, I wouldn't hazard any guesses as to who's standing where. It's hard to come up with language that describes the size of Christ's grace and love and his ability to include absolutely everyone in it who wants to be included. I think the best I can do is this: It's so big, it hurts.
