Rev. Kevin M. Pleas

Psalm 67:1-7

October 21, 2007

May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us, that your way may be known upon earth, your saving power among all nations. Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you. Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon earth. Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you. The earth has yielded its increase; God, our God, has blessed us. May God continue to bless us; let all the ends of the earth revere him.

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Knowing I was going to be addressing the topic of diversity this morning, I decided I would consult the world's foremost authority on the subject. This is what he had to say:

"One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. Black fish, blue fish, old fish, new fish. This one has a little star. This one has a little car. Say! What a lot of fish there are. Yes. Some are red. And some are blue. Some are old. And some are new. Some are sad. And some are glad. And some are very, very bad. Why are they sad and glad and bad? I do not know. Go ask your dad"

Dr. Suess had the right idea. There are a lot of fish in the sea. No two of them are exactly alike. And despite the fact that we all belong to a single species, what is true of fish is no less true of people. I happened across a website designed as a teaching tool on diversity for school children. The opening paragraph put it this way.

The Philadelphia Eagles' football stadium can seat almost 70,000. Could you have picked your brother out of the crowd? Yep. There are over 8 million people living in New York City. Could you recognize your mom out of all those people? Of course. And the population of the entire world is more than 6 billion. Could your family possibly mistake you for someone else? No way!

The website makes a good point. Among all human beings, every single one of us is different. We are "diverse" in relation to one another. If we only look closely enough, we discover that, at a very basic level, we have diversity built in to us. It is one of the inevitable, inescapable realities of human life. We are often "similar" to one another, but never quite the same. Most of the time though, we take that fact pretty much for granted. Most of the time, rather than thinking of ourselves from the standpoint of our individually, we are much more inclined to divide people up into categories; race, class, gender, profession and so on, and then, like birds of a feather, we flock together with those who fall in the same categories that we do.

Actually, that makes perfect sense. There's not much point in focusing so much on our differences that we end up feeling isolated and alone. We all want people around who share our interests and values. Pam reminded me last night that the word family and the word familiar are related to each other. We feel comfortable when we are around familiar people. But the more familiar we become with "our crowd," the easier it is to feel uncomfortable with those who don't belong to "us." Without even necessarily meaning to, we can begin to actively look down on, fear and avoid those who aren't a part of our crowd. Funny isn't it? In order to be accepted, we play down our own differences, and exaggerate the differences of other people in order to find reasons not to include them. What starts as a simple desire to feel included often ends up being an excuse for practicing exclusion. Ironically, despite the fact that we are all fundamentally diverse, we end up having to teach our children about the value of diversity so they won't pick on each other.

I find it interesting that Diana Bass would see diversity as one of the characteristics of a vital church. If we were asked to describe this congregation to someone who didn't know us, diversity wouldn't necessarily be part of the description. We are almost if not entirely white. We tend to be middle and upper middle class, mostly well educated, American, Christian, in the liberal protestant tradition.

But the truth is, beyond this surface identity, there is a great deal of diversity among us. We may be liberal in the protestant spectrum, but we are certainly not all liberal politically. Some have grown children, some have small children and some have none at all. We include both the financially comfortable and the financially stretched. We are men and women, with different musical tastes different hobbies and different sets of friends. Some are Mainers and some are From Away. We have beliefs that don't always agree. Without working too hard, we come up with a long list of differences. As I said at the beginning, if we only look closely enough, we find we have diversity built in to us.

What we need then, it seems to me, is the ability to hold two things in creative tension. We need to be able to respect our need for familiarity. We need to be able to understand that we all derive a sense of comfort and security by coming to a place where there are people like us. That's not a bad thing. That's not a bad thing. We all need a familiar environment. But we need to have that familiarity without trampling on the diversity we find both within and outside of our congregation. That isn't always easy to pull off.

I had an interesting experience in Augusta a few months ago. Pam and I were browsing through the Religion and Spirituality section at Barnes and Nobel in Augusta when a young man came over. He asked if we knew of a book he could use to explain to a friend of his why Christianity was better than all the other religions. (Clearly, he did not know who he was talking to.) He said he had read a bit about Islam and some of the other faiths but he was convinced that Christianity was the best of all the religions and he wanted to convince his friend as well. Then he said something interesting, "Obviously, they can't all be true. If Christianity is true than all the others must be false, right?"

Now, as you already know, I don't happen to believe that. Following Jesus - trying to follow Jesus anyway - is the way I express my own faith. I refer to Christianity as my home faith. It is where I am comfortable and familiar. But I don't take that to mean that people of other faiths are necessarily wrong. I like being a part of our crowd, but I also like to think I have some respect for those who aren't. What really struck me about this encounter though, is how common it is for us to think that way. We can't both be right. After all, we're saying different things. If I'm right (and I usually am) then you must be wrong. Those who think like me are the good guys, and those who don't… well obviously!

We do this kind of thing a lot don't we. A few years back, Pam and I attended a weekend seminar called "The Forum." Some of you know about the Forum. One of the things they talked about a lot that weekend was how often we "make other people wrong." We do that in order to reinforce our own sense that we are right. Deep down inside we may not be completely sure that we are right, but the more we can focus on how other people are wrong, the more right we're going to feel. We so often become caught up in this kind of behavior. It's so very human.

There's a story I like that's found in Anthony de Mello's book, Song of the Bird. It seems that a very religious-minded old woman was dissatisfied with all existing religions, so she founded one of her own that included only herself and her housemaid, Mary. One day a reporter, who genuinely wanted to understand her point of view, said to her, "Do you really believe, as people say you do, that no one will go to heaven except you and your housemaid?" The old woman pondered the question and then replied, "Well, I'm not so sure of Mary." Clearly, the more insistent we are about being in the right, the more tend to put other people in the wrong. We cut ourselves off from anyone who might just hold a different opinion.

And if that's true out in the world, it is no less true right here at home. Pam and I have been leading this Imago Dei class on Tuesday evenings. We've been working again with the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. Some of you know about the Myers/Briggs. It's a very simple but amazingly accurate way of looking at some of the differences among people. It's always fun to talk about some of the fundamental personality differences that people operate out of, but these things also have very practical applications as well.

Last week during our Vital Conversation for example, the topic came up of how we begin our worship services. This is a very old topic. Within our church, there are some who like to begin worship with a time of silent meditation. They want to allow themselves to sink into the upcoming worship. On the other hand, some prefer to greet their friends and chat when they arrive. At times, these two groups have been at odds with one another and we've tried a number of approaches over the years to keep both groups happy. But listening to the conversation, Pam and I just had to laugh. In terms of the Myers/Briggs, this is a classic example of the difference between introverts and extroverts. There's no right or wrong here. It's not a problem. It is simply one of our diversities. But we can easily turn it into a problem if we start to insist that the way we think the worship service ought to begin is right, and the other way is wrong.

In my time here with you, there've been a number of occasions like this. We have had mostly minor disagreements about politics, about theology, about the position our denomination has taken on certain social issues. What do we do with these disagreements when they arise? Well, it seems to me we generally do one of three things. Most often we keep quiet about it. We try to ignore the fact that we have differences of opinion. We paper them over. We pretend they don't exist. We smile nicely at one another in order to preserve the illusion of our harmony. And then sometimes, when ignoring our differences fails us and they burst out into the open in uncomfortable ways, sometimes people have been moved to leave us. I was asked just this morning why certain people who used to be actively involved in our church are no longer coming. Well, in some cases at least, that's the reason. We sometimes have differences of opinion that force us to the breaking point of our relationship.

It seems to me however, that there is a third way of dealing with our differences that is inherently healthier, inherently better, inherently more common in vital congregations. We can, and sometimes do, practice an openness toward one another that includes respect, tolerance and even a celebration of our differences. If we can let go of feeling that one side has to be right and one side wrong, we won't have to fall back on either silence or alienation. We can live openly with our basic differences. We can share a vital diversity at the heart of our fellowship. We can enjoy the richness, growth and learning that comes from appreciation of our differences. It may be unfamiliar. It may be uncomfortable at times. But it's healthy to stretch our minds and our hearts.

When we talk about diversity, it's usually an abstraction for us. We've learned to think of it in terms of racial issues, gender issues, sexual orientation issues and the like. These are some of the great overarching social conversations our country has been having for the last several decades. And make no mistake, they are very important conversations to be having. But diversity comes home for us when we realize how quick we are to make other people wrong, how quick we are to say that our way is the one and only way to be right. Our crowd is the one and only crowd to be in. You can agree, or you can be wrong. If you're not for us, you're against us. This kind of thing goes on all the time. It's very human. But it's not very Christian.

As in most things Jesus is the example we're trying to follow. He was himself about as far from being an exclusive, intolerant person as we're likely to find anywhere. Diana Bass has a wonderful paragraph in this week's chapter that makes that point exactly.

For Christians, Jesus embodies the love of God for all peoples. Jesus welcomed children, sinners, tax collectors, fishermen, women, thieves, traitors, Roman soldiers, faithful Jews, lepers, those who were deaf and blind, the poor and the outcast. Indeed, the New Testament depicts Jesus' followers as one of the most diverse groups imaginable. And, when Jesus called people, he never said, "Come with me, and you will become just like the rest of us."

These are good words. They would be good to remember. Diversity, even though it is built in to us at a fundamental level, is something we're often uncomfortable with. We much prefer to be with people like us, and we often do that by ignoring our differences. But what if we had a church where diversity was celebrated. Wouldn't that be an interesting place to be.

I'd close with a quote by the Archbishop Tutu that is also included in Bass's book. It goes like this:

In God's family, there are no outsiders. All are insiders. Black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight, Jew and Arab, Palestinian and Israeli, Roman Catholic and Protestant, Serb and Albanian, Hutu and Tutsi, Muslim and Christian, Buddhist and Hindu, Pakistani and Indian - all belong…. God's dream wants us to be brothers and sisters, wants us to be family…. In our world we can survive only together. We can be truly free, ultimately, only together.

What would our church look like, how would it be different, if our Diversity was Vital? It's certainly worth considering.

Amen.