"There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ's gift.... The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ." [Ephesians 4:4-7, 11-13]
The church ain't McDonald's. At least it isn't supposed to be.
That's the good news on a day like today. The Spirit of God gives us a unity that includes all the ways we are different from one another, rather than making us all part of a monolithic, homogenous bloc. For the people gathered in by the Spirit--the people we usually call "church"--we are held together by a unity that is inclusive of our differences, rather than by uniformity.
And that's the way we're different from McDonald's. Or Burger King. Or take your pick with any fast food chain. The goal of any of those drive-through franchises is uniformity--you will get the same thing every time. A Big Mac on Monday should be identical to a Big Mac on Thursday, and a double cheeseburger in Maine should be the same as one in Idaho. The logo is identical across all those restaurants, so that the Golden Arches will be recognizable in any place. Same red and gold theme colors. Same menu. Even the uniforms are... uniform. The idea is to sell us a uniform product that will be identical across time and space. They have even taught us a liturgy to sing the praises of the consistency: "Two all-beef patties, pickles, onions, lettuce, cheese, special sauce, on a sesame seed bun." Remember that jingle? That famous ad for the Big Mac wasn't just meant to tell us the ingredients (or else they would have told us what was in the "special sauce"); they were selling us on the idea of uniform products and uniformity across their restaurants. They wanted us to like, to want, to need it to be the same everywhere. And that, dear ones, is uniformity, not unity.
After all, there are lots of basically identical McDonald's restaurants, but they often see one another as competition, where they are always trying to get an edge on the franchise on the other side of town, or to do better than the competing chain across the street. They are all just trying to sell us the same basic variations on the same fried meat and potatoes, after all.
But the church ain't McDonald's. Our unity, as Ephesians notes, is different. It comes not from a uniformity of our appearance, or all having identical gifts, or each of us all thinking identically either. (Did you notice there that this passage assumes we aren't all there at the "unity of faith" and we haven't all arrived at "maturity" yet? That takes for granted that we don't all think the same way presently.) Our unity as Spirit-gathered people is the God who is "above all and through all and in all." Our unity is not that we all think or act or look or dress the same, but the Christ who gives us each intentionally different gifts.
And notice there--the difference in our various gifts and roles and abilities is not a design flaw that God has to accommodate, but rather a choice on God's part so that each of us will be able to bless and enrich each other. We sometimes imagine that God's grace is something like, "God really only likes red circles, but I guess if you're a blue square or a pink triangle or a yellow trapezoid, we'll let you sit in the back, so long as it's still mostly red circles around here." But that's not how Ephesians says it: our differences are intentional gifts of God, and the difference, as it is used for building up all, is good. The differences as they are used in and for love are ways of manifesting our unity, even though we are not uniform. In other words, the Spirit's kind of unity is inclusive of our ways of being different from one another; the Spirit doesn't need to sweep them under the rug or just never ask about them.
That reminds me of an observation I read not long ago. The author was thinking back to the days of desegregation in schools and of busing kids from one neighborhood to another so the schools would have a more racially diverse mix. And the author pointed out that our usual way of talking about that era was that White neighborhoods had to accept busing so that Black kids could get the benefit of being around the nicer facilities, smaller class sizes, and better education of the schools that had been majority White. In other words, the author said our usual conventional wisdom is that the outlier, the "other," (in this case black students) were grudgingly to be regarded as acceptable, but they didn't have anything to offer white students--only to receive from them. But the author suggested maybe we've had it all wrong. But the point of desegregation wasn't just a one-directional (and still racist) rationale like, "Let's help out the poor helpless Black students" but rather in each direction, "Maybe these majority-White populations have something to learn from the experience of their Black neighbors that they would miss out on, too, if they had only ever gone to school with other White kids." In other words, the differences aren't meant to be ignored or treated as tokens who are acceptable only as long as they are kept in small numbers at the back of the room, bur rather the differences used in the service of love become gifts for all. Red circles have something to learn from the yellow trapezoids--especially if they have never known a trapezoid before. When those differences are put in the service of love, we no longer need to rely on external uniformity--we have the gift of unity trough difference.
McDonald's enforces uniformity on everything it can get its hands on, insisting it all be color-coded with the red-and-yellow brand and stamped with the trademarked logo. But the followers of Jesus are meant to be a whole spectrum full of color--the whole rainbow, and every shape in geometry. When we get that our differences are a gift that can be used in service to one another, something truly powerful begins to happen. We can see the gift of unity, not being a matter of enforcement and regulation, but another way of talking about love. And that is exactly the Spirit's business.
Today then, here's good news for each of us, red circles and blue squares and everybody else: we are not burdened with imposing uniformity on each other. We are gifted with difference that can be an expression of love and unity. You just as you are bring gifts. You just as you are can be blessed by the gifts of others. You just as you are will learn from others, and you just as you are will teach others, too. But it was never about making us all into Big Macs. The Spirit delights in our different callings, gifts, and perspectives, because they are gifts of God. Thank God.
O Holy Spirit, let us own and love the different gifts you have given to each of us, so that we can use them for the sake of one another.
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