diversity

Observation suggests that humans don’t value diversity. We like sameness. Oh, we argue for diversity, but tend to buy our homes and send our kids to school in areas that make us comfortable with their familiarity. Even minorities often suggest special dorms or schools for their race, and will form companies and promote business networks made up only of people like them.

 We buy land and work hard to eliminate bio-diversity; our goal is a mono-culture (one species of grass only) and we’re ruthless in killing everything else. Oh, we might add a few trees and bushes, but only where we decide they should be, in orderly, eye-pleasing arrangements. And not too many. 

That’s also, sometimes, the way we do church, but I don’t think it’s God’s way.

1 Corinthians 12:24-26 says: “But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”

This is a passage about spiritual gifts, addressing the propensity of the Corinthian church and Christians today to think some church members are special because of the gifts God chose to give them. We like preachers and teachers and prophets and givers; we think hosts and prayer warriors and quiet servers are more ordinary. 

But that’s not right. In God’s kingdom there are no in-important people, and in God’s church there are no ordinary gifts. Everything is needed and valued. Diversity is to be prized.

When I preach, I sometimes use the example of tulip beds and meadows, because in my originally Dutch town we love our tulip beds. We like them uniform, with flowers of the same height and in complimentary colors. These beds take a huge amount of care; left to themselves they’d be a mess and, eventually, completely overtaken by other plants.

God made meadows. Meadows have lots of different plants, and tons of bugs and dozens of animals and birds. Living together, each contributes and each takes what it needs. And meadows flourish with no outside intervention.

We may love tulip beds, but God made meadows. There’s a lesson there for the ch