Claiming Common Ground - Galatians3:28

I am such a newby!  Still (and always I hope) learning about this new ministry, traveling around, listening and sharing.   It is a new landscape on which I am walking, and it is beautiful.    In these early days I am enjoying first hand the beauty of the diversity of our District and our Annual Conference.   It is amazing.  Breath-taking.   We are diverse in location, in culture, in race, and in ethnicity.   We are even diverse in our theology, in the way we experience God's love in Christ.  

Everywhere I look, everyone has their own "thing,"  their own experience, their own perspective and agenda.   Everyone holds a piece of God's good work in their hands.

So, someone asked me the other day, with all this diversity and difference, what is it that pulls us together?  What is it that "connects" us in this great United Methodist Connection?    Across our geography and our experience there is much that can, and sometimes does separate us.     So, what then, draws us into the folds of community together?

Paul asserts that "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."

Well, I don't want to disrespect the Apostle or anything, but I'm pretty clear that in Christ I am still a male and a pretty white Euro-American one at that!    Furthermore, I am fairly certain that anyone reading this would also claim their race, ethnicity, culture, gender and sexuality as core to their identity, even as they seek faithfully to follow the Master.

Here's what comes to me as I ponder and pray about all this.

Our cultures and our ethnicity, our gender and our sexuality are all gifts from God.   They are precious gifts that we are called to unwrap together in the context of Christian community.   Because we are "in Christ," do we surrender those pieces of our lives?  No.

In Christ, however, we have claimed a new common ground.    In Christ, enriched by our diversity, we have claimed the powerful truth of Christianity.   And that is, that when we pour ourselves out for others.   Redemption happens.

When God gave God's self for us on the Cross, we were redeemed, yes?   That's our story.   But it doesn't end there.   We are called to go and do likewise, pouring ourselves out for others in love as we spread redemption across the land.    God in Christ has given us the Resurrection story to live out using the powerful gifts of culture, ethnicity, race and gender.

Our call is to claim this common ground of self-giving love in Christ while we celebrate and learn from one another.   Our call is to go out into the world and share this redemptive, self-givng love until the whole world is transformed.

So let us treasure these precious and holy gifts of culture, ethnicity, race, gender and sexuality.
Let us claim this common ground of self-giving love and pour our whole selves out for the healing of the world!

Let's step into a new day of a unity, not based on making everyone the same in some bland template of religion.   Let's step instead  into the powerful giftedness of who we are together in the self-giving love of Jesus Christ!

I look forward to the joys and challenges, the laughter and the wonder of being with you as we travel this path together!   SR