You In Your You-ness--July 22, 2024

You In Your You-ness--July 22, 2024

"As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise." [Gal. 3:27-29]

Okay, let me say this as plainly as I know how to: God delights in "other-ness."

God loves variety. God intends difference. God's creative genius is best seen in the way God's universe makes room for infinite variation, difference, and diversity.

It's why there's not just one kind of fruit in the world, but apples and pears and berries and cherries and grapes and plums and on and on, each kind with their own multiplicity of variations.

It's why there are not simply generic types of animals, just one Mammal, just one kind of Bird, one Reptile, etc. There could have been. Scientists will tell you they can hypothesize other worlds that only have generic one-celled protozoa in them, floating in the water in homogenous blandness. The world could have been a uniformly "blah" shade of taupe, for that matter--there is no reason there has to be the variety there is in the created order around us... except that the Maker of the universe delights in other-ness.

In fact, you could say, what makes the whole of creation hang together is its ability to hold together despite its mind-boggling diversity. The planet doesn't "work" right if there are only flowers and no bees to pollinate them. The whole doesn't hang together if there aren't penguins and fish, peaches and cranberries, foxes and rabbits, wolves and lambs. Even in tiny variations--say, different varieties of wheat or corn--there is value when one kind is resistant to a blight that another kind is susceptible to.

So, in other words, God's joy--and cleverness--are on full display in the created world's "otherness." And notice there--pears are not "acceptable" as fruit because the apples pity them and think, "Well, they're trying hard to assimilate into being apple-ish like us... let's throw them a bone and let them in the fruit club." God doesn't love rabbits because they are trying hard to be like hamsters but just haven't gotten the ears short enough yet. Each is beloved, each is good, each is a precious thing of beauty being fully what it is.

And that is true as well in the community of Jesus' followers. God's intention is not to puree us all up into a homogenous slurry of generic "people" who have lost their individual flavors. The church ain't mashed potatoes. Rather, God's intention is to hold together the whole cross-section of all the ways there are to be human: every shade of skin color, every hue on the rainbow, every kind of variation. And God's design is not to blend us all into a uniform shade of taupe or a single flavor of vanilla. Our belonging is not dependent on losing our distinctives, or all adopting same-ness, in appearance, in attitudes, in likes, in loves, even in outlook. And there is no insistence on assimilation for the community of Jesus--my goodness, the whole story of the "birthday of the church" (what we call Pentecost) was a sermon given and heard in every language they could think of, rather than Peter telling everybody gathered in Jerusalem, "Hey, I've got a great message for you--once you learn Aramaic, you're gonna want to listen..." The picture we get from the New Testament itself is of a community where each is valued for what each of us is, not for how well we do at assimilating into something else, or being blended into a vanilla shake. The audacious claim of the Gospel is that God holds all kinds of people together in a unity that accepts us exactly as we are, with all of our other-ness. In fact God appear to have an easier time accepting (and loving and delighting in) otherness than most Christians do.

Just to be clear--we don't lose our gender or skin color or language or national background when we become a part of the community of Christ, the church. Christians don't lose their individual particularities because they are Christians--I'm still a white male of English and German background married to a white female of German and Norwegian ancestry. But God's intention was never to make everybody like us. In fact, in the history and breadth of Christianity, we are surely the minority, even though we American churchgoers often unwittingly assume that the default for "Christian" is "people like me." God forbid! God's way isn't--and never has been--to take new faces and just put them in the blender with the rest of the church puree so it all tastes and looks the same unappetizing shade of tan.

My welcome in the disciple community doesn't come because I have sufficiently made myself like others, or because I fit the categories that others bring, any more than someone else has to make themselves fit my demographic categories. That's why Paul says here in Galatians, "There is no longer Greek or Jew, free or slave, male and female." Those old lines and distinctions no longer divide us or carry any force for us within the Christian community. These are all the categories Paul can think of--gender, race, class--and he insists that among us they carry no weight. Our baptism into Christ defines us, he says, and makes a stronger claim on us than any other label that gets put on us or that we put on ourselves. Before I am anything else--before I am white or male or English or middle class or married or whatever other categorization we might describe ourselves with--I am made a child of God through Christ. I don't stop being any of those other things, but Paul would tell us that none of those other things are the basis of my belonging or my identity any longer. The old labels used to define me just don’t stick.

The problem we face with all of these words, though, is that we have let it go as just a utopian vision and we perpetually fall short of it. Martin Luther King, Jr. used to point out that the most segregated hour in America was the Sunday morning worship hour--a sad reality that flies in the face of all that Paul says about what it means to live in the Christian community. For that matter, for generations, Christians have either ignored or spiritualized this passage from Galatians so that women could not have positions of leadership in the church--often with the claim that they were abiding by other scriptures that speak against women's leadership, but clearly then ignoring this passage. We'll have to have the fuller Biblical conversation about women's leadership in church on another day, but the point here for today is that Paul gives us this radically open, profoundly beautiful picture of community in this passage, and we invent all sorts of new ways to settle for less than this genuine kind of community. 

For that matter, Paul doesn't describe this picture as a future possibility or a commandment of what we should be or could be if only we would strive harder at it. This is not a utopian hypothetical community--Paul says that this is how things are for us. In other words, God regards us already as a community where the old lines between Jew and Greek, free and slave, male and female no longer divide us. God no longer sees those distinctions when he looks at us--he sees Christ. He sees children of God. And yet we somehow still settle for the divisions and distinctions and labels. Paul seems to think that there's nothing more we need to do to create this kind of community, except to believe that it is already the case.

That's not the same as saying, "I just don't see color." That's not how God intends it, any more than you look in the produce aisle and say, "I only see fruit." No, part of the beauty of a pear is its pear-ness, and part of the beauty of a kiwi is what makes it different from pears, apples, and bananas. The idea is not to lie and say, "We don't see differences," but to say that our belonging comes through God's embrace of our otherness, and not because God secretly wishes all the rabbits would try a little harder to be like the hamsters. Our belonging is not predicated on assimilation as a past accomplishment or a promissory note--it is grounded in the joy that God takes in other-ness of every kind.

We are constantly reminded how deep the wounds and sensitivities about differences like race, culture, and language are in this country. And making it worse perhaps are our clumsy attempts to speak about those topics. It feels sometimes like we don't really know how to relate to one another, and that even our best intentions ("I don't even see color!") are misguided because they still imagine that the right strategy is matter of pretending difference isn't there. It can feel like a lost cause to try and genuinely love people who don't already look like, think like, or talk like me.

And yet... here is Paul announcing that the Christian community exists as an alternative kind of community where the old boundary lines really can be taken down--because they have been taken down, once and for all by Christ Jesus. Maybe the challenge for us, seeing how racially fractured our world is--not to mention all the other categories that divide us--is whether we can dare to actually trust the claim of the gospel--that the old lines need not hem us in any longer, that the old labels will not stick, and that our identity is a gift of Christ, a common gift meant to be shared with all.

If you are a pear, be a pear and know you are beloved by God as a pear. If you are a maple tree, don't worry about trying to be like a pine--you are loved as a maple. If you are a rabbit, don't you spend one minute trying to shorten your ears to make yourself more like a hamster--you bring joy to God exactly as God made you.

You, in all of your you-ness, bring joy to the Maker of the universe.

God of new vision, teach us to see as you see. Train our eyes to look on your beloved and to see your beloved. Teach us to own our particularities but not to judge by our particularities. Teach us to rejoice that you have created a community in which the outsiders are brought in and the lowly are raised high, and we are all given the likeness of Jesus--simply as a gift. Teach us these things, and we will praise you for them.