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The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. – Psalm 51:17
This is one of my favorite psalms, as the psalmist teaches us to pray for mercy, for pardon, and especially to be clean in the sight of the Lord. It makes us reflect on what it is that the Lord wants or requires of us, as we seek to please God, and live according to the law of love. This call to accept God’s love and live into it, is to understand our worth as well as the worth of every others person God has called by the Holy Spirit.
I’m reminded of this story: There was a young girl named Sasha who asked that one wish. She wasn’t very popular, was quite shy, and didn’t have a personality that was able to make friends. Often she was laughed at or made fun of, simply because she didn’t interact with people. She was an only child to a single parent, and thus spent most of her time alone. Sasha was asked her one wish, and this is what it was.
“I wish to be worthy of love,” she said.
When her wish was spoken aloud was instantly given her, but nothing about her changed. Sasha looked in the mirror, she tried to have new thoughts, she searched deep in her heart, and repeated again and again, nothing has changed.
And that was the point. Nothing had to change for Sasha to be worthy of love, because everybody is worthy of love.
We need to be reminded as the church that as we are made clean we are called, then, to be one, as there is one God and Father of all, whose saving activity fills the cosmos, who is over all and through all and in all. The very act of being united in such a way is Trinitarian. The unity of the church is rooted in the eternal uniting of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirt. We cannot, do not, and did not create this unity, this unity simply existed, but we are called to nurture and care for it in the way that nurture and care for one another, with humility, gentleness, patience and love for one another.
We live out of the divine gift of love, the gift of God’s worthiness as we share it and bear it with one another. It is so wonderful a gift of God; we are all created differently and distinctly, even identical twins have their own unique fingerprint, and as some could tell you, their own individual personalities. We are all created differently, yet we are all called to be together to be in unity with one another as with Christ. God gave us the fundamental unity of the church, but God also gave the church a rich diversity in each of its members. Every person in the church is worthy of the grace of God, just as every person who has life is worthy of the grace of God. And to each the Holy Spirit calls, equips, and gives people to the church.
The goal behind the unity of the church is not a uniformity, where everyone is exactly the same. Instead, a unity which reflects, and serves God’s reconciling grace for the entirety of creation in Christ. If we never encountered people whose opinions, whose lifestyles, whose stories of how God has impacted their life, that are different from our own, then how would we ever be able to reach people who are different from ourselves?
We need to have such encounters and learn to love people who differ from us both within and within the greater community. God’s kingdom is diverse, and it’s rich diversity needs representation in our lives as we seek to build God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
Grace & Peace,
Sam