Psalm 145:8-10

The Lord is gracious and merciful;
Slow to anger and great in lovingkindness.
The Lord is good to all,
And His mercies are over all His works.
All Your works shall give thanks to You, O Lord,
And Your godly ones shall bless You.

The familiar words of this Psalm are a favorite starting point for Christian songwriting, meditation, and teaching. It captures the gracious nature of God and His covenant keeping love to all Creation from people to parsley. In response, both the righteous saints and the natural realms give praise to God.

Embedded in this simple reality lies an important implication for how the church is to live out the unity we have been studying in 1 Corinthians 11. We should take a cue from Creation when it comes to how we worship God.

Looking at nature, an obvious reality emerges – everything glorifies God, but almost nothing does it in exactly the same way. It is overwhelmingly apparent that God loves diversity. He reveals Himself in the arching fragility of the inchworm, and in the even slower march of ancient glaciers. God really loves green, but He also seems to love blue. And orange. And red. Don’t forget violet. There are also some amazing yellows going on. God loves smooth things and rough things. He loves the sweet and the spicy. He loves the microscopic and the cosmic. He loves the cute and apparently also finds pleasure in the seemingly grotesque. One thing He seems not to love, however, is sameness. That’s why even ants come in over 12,000 unique flavors.

Would we expect any less than a dizzying amount of variety to be represented among the “godly ones” who praise the Lord alongside the rest of His diverse works?

Of course not, but here is the point: the diversity emphasizes unity when it is all focused on the creator. The variety underscores the fullness of God’s glory when it acts as millions of facets on the same gem. It is a betrayal of the creativity of the Author to see diversity erased and a thousand different colors try to become a uniform shade of gray.

This, then, is the challenge for the Church of God: diversity without division. When we gather, there should be no lines of separation between anyone – Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free. That doesn’t mean, however, that we stop being any of those diverse identities. It doesn’t erase peculiarities of habit and custom that accompany those identities. As long as we are gathered to sing the same song of praise, having more unique harmonies added to the choir is a blessing, not a bother.

That doesn’t mean it is going to be easy to blend all those voices together. It will require grace, patience, love, and kindness, for VBC to continue becoming the variegated representation of God’s redeeming work. In the end, however, will emerge a wonder for the world to see. Our nation thinks it is celebrating individualism and autonomy, but notice how over time the lines of distinction are blurring. In the name of diversity, everyone is slowly being reduced to a monochromatic citizen, an undefinable and amorphous individual. When our levels of intersectionality have become a hopeless Gordian knot, and the ethnic flavors have been boiled into a single, non-offensive mono-culture, and when the last cheers for tolerance have been drowned out by conflict and vainglory – then a stunning discovery will be made. For there, as it had been all along, will sit the Church of God in its full spectrum of diversity and its relentless pursuit of unity. And when people ask how such wildly different people can partake of the Lord’s Supper as one family week after week, we’ll respond – the same way the gators and the galaxies do it. We receive God’s grace and declare His goodness. Care to join in?