Last week on Speaking of Faith I heard George Ellis, a quaker from South Africa, speaking about the struggle against apartheid in his country. He says that what happened in South Africa "confounded the calculus of rationality." By this I suppose he means a miracle happened.
I was thinking about what it must have been like to be sitting in Sowetto in the mid-1980s or Selma in the late-1940s, having no idea that freedom was right at the doorstep. Then suddenly, the sound of many waters can be heard thundering its way through and the world is turned upside down.
It is the Saints who sit and wait in darkness and dare to imagine a new world where the rationality of our present calculus will no longer hold sway.
There are a few of those Saints at the United Church of Colchester - folks who sat and prayed through dark hours and just simply refused to let the doors be closed. There are a couple of those Saints beating the pavement on the east side of Lubbock High School in the name of Jesus the Incarnate - just daring enough to believe that being faithful is more important than being big. And there are a few Saints who gather every month in the youth room at First Baptist Church of Burlington to sing and pray and create a space for grace to work its way through the chinks of the panoply of a region at war.
The Saints teach me to confound the calculus of my own rationality and hope in the day to come.
