SUNDAY: Bible Study - 9:00 AM | Worship - 10:00 AM | PM Worship - 6:00 PM WEDNESDAY: Bible Class - 7:00 PM ~ 8110 Signal Hill Road Manassas, Virginia | Office Phone: 703.368.2622

The Supreme Court recently allowed the University of Michigan to make racial/ethnic diversity a factor in the admissions process, while disallowing quotas. This decision reflects our valuing diversity as a nation. We have gloried in America as a great melting pot. We take great pride in the fact that an American of German heritage – General Eisenhower defeated the Nazis, and that Japanese-American Kristi Yamaguchi won Olympic gold over Japan’s Yuka Sato. Last year 47 different languages were spoken in the homes of Manassas City Public School students. This kind of diversity presents great challenges, but provides great blessings as well. Children who share a classroom, a soccer team, a birthday sleep-over with friends from Pakistan, Malawi, Ireland, and Guatemala learn a level of tolerance, and an ease of communication across cultural barriers few of their parents learned as children.

Greet one another with a holy kiss. (Romans 16.16)

Greet one another with a kiss of love. (I Peter 5.14)

The Supreme Court recently allowed the University of Michigan to make racial/ethnic diversity a factor in the admissions process, while disallowing quotas. This decision reflects our valuing diversity as a nation. We have gloried in America as a great melting pot. We take great pride in the fact that an American of German heritage – General Eisenhower defeated the Nazis, and that Japanese-American Kristi Yamaguchi won Olympic gold over Japan’s Yuka Sato. Last year 47 different languages were spoken in the homes of Manassas City Public School students. This kind of diversity presents great challenges, but provides great blessings as well. Children who share a classroom, a soccer team, a birthday sleep-over with friends from Pakistan, Malawi, Ireland, and Guatemala learn a level of tolerance, and an ease of communication across cultural barriers few of their parents learned as children.

Just when we are achieving the vision expressed at the base of the Statue of Liberty in Emma Lazarus’ famous poem, we are becoming more firmly entrenched and Balkanized in other ways. The last presidential election illustrated in quite vivid fashion that the Bush’s red states and Gore’s blue states were not equally distributed. Gore won the few but densely populated coastal states and Bush won the heartland. David Brooks, in his article “People Like Us” (The Atlantic, September 2003. pp29-31) points out that actual diversity is becoming less and less a reality in American life. Citing research by the marketing firm, Claritas, Brooks reports that if you are a Republican working in Government, and living in the D.C. metro area you almost certainly live in Northern Virginia. If you are a Democrat working in government in this town you almost certainly live in Maryland. If you listen to NPR you almost certainly do not watch Fox News (I do both) and you watch either Leno or Letterman. In fact, using sixty-two demographic clusters like these Claritas finds that people living in the same zip code are becoming more, not less like each other.

This doesn’t mean we don’t value diversity, or take it seriously – it is just a natural process. A few years back I read about a computer model in which solid colored octagons were programmed to arrange themselves almost randomly – the only criteria was that they touch a same colored octagon in two of their eight sides. Time after time the octagons would group themselves in clusters of the same color. In other words, if any of us would like to live in a neighborhood with at least two families like ourselves, we will live in a neighborhood where nearly everyone is like us. Inclusion and diversity will only happen deliberately if they happen at all.

This lesson is applicable and urgent for the Church. From the beginning the Church has been the real melting pot that transcends not only ethnicity, but status and gender as well: There is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, bond nor free, but you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3.28, see also Colossians 3.11). This sameness was practiced at the most basic level, as the verses cited at the beginning of the essay attest. Kissing was not indiscriminate, but a highly stratified social ritual in the first century. In the church, though, everyone kissed everyone else. It was a frequent, visual reminder that we are a family, and that our differences don’t matter much, or for long.

We don’t have to be snobbish or exclusive to be cliquish. The most natural thing in the world is for people to group themselves with others of like interests and life-settings. It is being snug and satisfied with this state of things that is sinful. Just as Barnabas went to Tarsus to fetch Paul and include him in that diverse work at Antioch (Acts 11) we have to reach out, we have to include – and do so deliberately, or we won’t do it at all.

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