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Heroes, generally speaking, get their due. They receive name recognition, credit, praise, and sometimes even develop a following. At times we learn some not so heroic part of their personality or life, but typically those things are not enough to knock them off their hero’s pedestal.

Jackie Robinson, for example, is someone baseball fans and people with no interest in sports recognize. Most people are aware of his legendary status as major league baseball’s first African American in the 20th Century (baseball did have African American players in part of the 19th century). Jackie earned his fame the hard way. The pressure he went through may have led to his death at only 53 years old.

Most of us, however, are not aware of many others who had to endure something similar. Imagine for a moment the very first African Americans in minor league baseball in the South where it was often illegal for races to play together on some fields. The African American players could not eat in the same restaurants or stay in the same hotels as their teammates. Sometimes they were not even allowed to ride in the same bus. The abuse often directed at them from fans, players on the other teams, and occasionally their own teammates, was horrendous. Yet who knows the name of any of these? They were heroes despite their anonymity.

The church has heroes. Usually they are called saints. Some in the Protestant fold have never acquired that churchly prefix but are honored just the same: Martin Luther, John Knox, Menno Simons, John Calvin, Martin Luther King Jr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to name just a few.

The world could not survive if all it had were heroes. The world needs day to day people who do ordinary daily tasks. The world needs people to prepare food, collect trash, wash windows, build buildings, work in retail, clean hospital rooms, and so on. During the pandemic we have called some of these “essential workers.” Indeed. Their value has risen if not in wages, certainly in our collective and individual esteem. Heroes are helpful. Day to day often anonymous people are essential.

So it is in the church. It is nice to have statues of St. Francis feeding the birds, Mother Theresa reaching out to a child, and stained glass images of Luther and others. They would merely be works of art with little value were there not lesser known and mostly little known followers of Jesus in the church around the world. We need always remember Jesus came to earth in a barn, not a palace. Jesus was born to a very ordinary couple who only later became known and understood as extraordinary.

The typical follower of Jesus may never have a church or college named after them nor a statue commissioned. For a typical follower stained glass church windows will be something to gaze upon and appreciate but never display their countenance. But a typical follower has exactly what the saints had: Jesus Christ, the one who seemed often to prefer the unheralded. The one who transforms the day-to-day person and day to day life into the extraordinary, the one who turns anonymous ones into saints.