As many of you know, I spent much of this week in Minneapolis. It was beautiful and slightly odd. They have this slogan, “Minnesota Nice.†And they are, but in a slightly creepy The Borg sort of way. I mean, maybe I’ve lived in New York too long, but these people were in orderly lines for buses that hadn’t even arrived. The counter staff took the time to inquire about my wrist and my general state of being in the middle of lunch rush. And the accents… well let’s just say Garrison Keillor and the actors on “A Prairie Home Companion†get it right. Diversity in Minnesota is generally of the Swedish or Norwegian variety. At least that’s the official story.
But there is another story. Other immigrants have made their way north to Minnesota. There are people of color, and Latinos and Asians, though given the conditions in winter, we may want to question their sanity. Minneapolis is even the home of my favorite hip-hop label, with a vibrant Alt Hip-Hop scene, and I was delighted to stop by their retail store, where they were, predictably, really nice.
There is a version of the biblical narrative that goes like this: God calls Abraham and Sarah out of Ur, in what is modern day Iraq, and declares that their descendents will be God’s people. They settle in Canaan, but it has always been a risky place for agriculture, and through a variety of plot developments, Abraham’s great-grandson relocates the extended family to Egypt, where they eventually are enslaved. Many years later, they escape, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, crossing the Red Sea, wandering in the desert. They eventually come to the land God promised to Abraham, and God commands that they begin a campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing. They rid the land of the annoying strangers and establish a pure land of Hebrews. That pure unbroken line flows through David to Jesus, and it is only after Jesus is rejected by his own people that diversity is introduced into the body of those who worship Yahweh.
There is one problem with this story. It is a lie.
Even if we write off Ishmael, Abraham’s other son, as we so often do, we cannot ignore the fact that Moses marries outside of the tribe. That the foreign prostitute of Jericho gets incorporated into the people and shows up in one genealogy of Jesus, clearly before the rule was invented that Jewishness could only be passed on the mother’s side. A close read of the Hebrew scriptures will show them incorporating entire alien tribes into their body. They were even evangelistic for a time, converting the other and welcoming them into the people. The Hebrews co-mingled with countless cultures. There was a fit of pique when some of the elite returned from Exile, when accusations of intermarriage were used to justify stripping the poor of what little land and dignity they had scraped together while the best and brightest were in Babylon, but this was about economic competition, not bloodlines. And the Samaritans, though carefully constructed as foreigners, as the other, were mostly descended from the Twelve tribes. They were on the outside because of religious competition with the priests in the Temple, not because they were actually aliens.
There is a version of the Bible’s theological story that goes like this: God calls Abraham and Sarah, making a covenant with them and so establishing the Jewish people. It proves to be a bad marriage. Israel is a tramp, flirting with, and sometimes even getting in bed with, other gods. Eventually Yahweh gets fed up, and sends Jesus to wipe the slate clean. But the Jews still won’t listen, so God writes the Jews out of the will and gives everything to the Gentiles who are willing to follow Jesus.
Except. Except. Except there were many forms of Hebrew religious practice, and they did absorb and reconfigure bits from other traditions, from the story of the Great Flood to the very names they call their God. Except that they never all agreed with the power of the Jerusalem priests, just as Christians never all agreed with the primacy of Rome. Except that there were at least four very different major movements in the Hebrew religion at the time of Jesus, with wildly different understandings of life, death, and the Law. Except that there is no evidence that Jesus meant to start anything but a Jewish renewal movement.
There is a story that there was one church founded by Jesus and under the rule of the disciple Peter and his successors, and that bad Christians broke away from that single pure faith, and that this strand of troublemakers has further divided into countless splinter groups we call denominations but that many in the Roman church call “sects.â€
Except. Except that story has to ignore the African and Orthodox churches that never accepted the rule of Rome. Except that there has never been unanimity among those who would follow Jesus. They couldn’t agree what he meant and how he saves in the years immediately after he died, an innocent victim of capital punishment, much less four centuries later.
There is this story that when white European settlers landed in the Americas, they found an abundant land sparsely populated by native peoples, a story that suggests that each wave of immigrants is assimilated into a unified culture that is American. We refer to it as a melting pot, because we all get melted down into a boring unity.
Except it was never true. Many immigrant communities retain a distinctiveness to this day, and if anything we are a hearty stew of diverse cultures. Except that the version of America wrapped up in the flag, the doctrine of discovery and Manifest Destiny, chooses to ignore the real horror done to the First Peoples of this land, ignores the fact that many were brought here in chains, and that they were not granted their civil rights until my lifetime. It ignores the fact that fear in the form of McCarthyism was used to bully and harass many, mostly members of marginalized populations like Jews, and that scared churches reacted by moving national flags into their sanctuaries so as to affirm their patriotism and align their worship with the conduct and militarism of the nation, just as ancient Christians were asked to align their faith with the purposes of Rome.
We put a lot of effort into constructing stories that speak of unanimity and uniformity. This relentless homogenization has been going on for as long as we have recorded history, and we can presume it is even older than that. I imagine that ancient man conveniently forgot that one of his grandfathers was actually a Neanderthal, as DNA evidence has suggested. Our brains seem to rebel against things that don’t fit neatly into containers. We can weave a binary, an “us vs. them,†a “good vs. bad,†out of thin air, modern day Rumplestiltskins.
But if we are brave enough, we can admit that the world our Creator made is not so simple, not so easily divided. Goats and sheep in the gospel, yes, but most of us know that even the good have their bad moments. Even Jesus curses the foreign woman, caught with his compassion down. Nature is diverse, orderly, but diverse, and things don’t break out as we’d like. Imagine the shock when scientists discovered that the same gene that, when doubly expressed, causes Sickle Cell Anemia, when singly expressed protects against malaria. The same gene is both good and bad, adaptive most of the time, but not always.
It is the same with our churches. Someone can be incredibly annoying in one area, and terribly gifted in another. The new arrivals needed to keep the faith alive bring a freshness and energy, and strange ideas that just aren’t the way we’ve always done it, because after all, they don’t really understand. The Spirit sends us the blessing of new Christians, new ideas, and as a general rule, our churches beat them back, or beat them into submission, for we are still trying for sameness…
We might be better off thinking of our faith, of our communities, of our nation, as living embodiments of bricolage. A French term that, like many, doesn’t have an exact translation, it comes from the noun bricoleur. This is the term for a person who is handy, the sort of person that puts things back together with what is at hand, with bailing wire and a bit of chewing gum, sort of a French Claudia. The French philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss used the term to describe the way we weave new things into our cultural narratives, just as the Hebrew-Christian religious trajectory took in bits of Babylonian myth, bits of Neo-Platonic thought, bits of the language used for Caesar, bits of the dualism of Eastern religions. And since there was no good English translation for bricolage, for this idea of assemblies of things woven together from bits and pieces, well, we brought that word along too, and wove it into postmodern thinking.
Lévi-Strauss wants us to see the bricolage that is already before us. I’m not going to stand up here and urge us toward diversity. Diversity is the natural order. Homogeneity is the absurd state, the weird, the freakish. I am not going to tell you that Paul’s text eliminates the categories of male and female. That’s absurd. Diversity existed in Paul’s vision of the church. it is not that differences disappear. It is just that they don’t matter. For Paul, the human desire to categorize and separate, to manufacture sameness, is swallowed up in the great movement of the Kingdom, and there is room in the in-breaking kingdom for what is strange and different. There is room in God’s house for Jesus, and for the thug that died on the cross next to him. There is room in this house for Bach, and for the tatted-up 25 year-old who longs to know Christ and is listening to Tupac.
Diversity isn’t a goal. It is a fact, the natural order, the way God built the world, and it is messy and amazing and the source of every great idea, for what we assemble as humans, our ideas, our creations, our art, it is all bricolage, all evidence that we are called as co-creators with our Creator, that Divine Mystery and Holy Imagination we call God.
We should celebrate it, as did the 19th century Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. In “Pied Beauty,†he writes
GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Praise God indeed. Amen.