Exploring Mission: Celebrating Uniqueness

Readings: Psalm 104:24-31, I Corinthians 12:12-14, Secrets of Heaven 7236:2 (see below) 
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Photo by Karolina Grabowska: https://www.pexels.com/photo/assortment-of-flowers-on-vases-7291750/

Welcome to our continuing series: Exploring Mission. Each week we will be exploring an aspect of our church’s mission statement. We are doing this so we can connect ourselves to the WHY of our community, to ground ourselves in the spiritual principles that can give our work together its meaning. Today we will consider the part of our mission statement that says that we are:

• Creating a community where people are seen and valued as unique children of God, each on a spiritual journey of transformation. 

Despite the famousness of our I Corinthians text for today, which speaks clearly about the necessity and beauty of differentiated oneness, we human beings have not historically been very good at navigating difference. In fact, we have often feared it, used it as ways to create division and conflict, and likewise mistaken homogeneity for peace and safety. Or if variety is begrudgingly admitted, it is at best tolerated, while we all secretly think our way of being is better.
But as we will soon hear from our Swedenborg readings in the meditation we will do in a moment, as well as from the ecstatic praises of the Psalms, of which the 104th which we just heard is only one, we learn that variety is not simply to be tolerated but it is essential. Essential. God designed the universe to run on the principle of diversity, not on the principle of similitude. We will hear: Every perfect whole arises from a variety of elements and it is the way that these disparate elements find a way to work together that creates wholeness and creates perfection.
But even further, we will hear that variations in love and faith are what determine the nature of heaven and its joy. Variety is not only essential in a mechanistic way, variety is what creates joy. And I think this might be because when we truly appreciate and love variety, what we are loving is the pure creative energy of God, the pure generative potential of Divine Love. There really aren’t any words to explain it except to say that we are primed by our very nature to feel joy when we perceive the creative acts of God, when we perceive what Divine Love through Divine Wisdom can create…and perhaps we recognize this in our experience of the vastness of nature, the transcendence of music, the preciousness of a baby, the wonder of science.
Now of course, these are all lovely but somewhat abstract ideas…what does this mean for us in our daily lives, as we go about creating community here and elsewhere? Well, first it means that God values our uniqueness, and that our spiritual journeys are not for the purpose of making us all the same by somehow following all the right rules, but rather for the purpose of making us more wholly ourselves. Our uniqueness is not an earthly burden to be shed, but rather something we come into more and more fully the more we let God lead us to our true selves.
And second, when we can rest in the joy of our own uniqueness, as well as the fact of our winding journey to accepting it, we can with fuller freedom enjoy the uniqueness of others, knowing that we all have a vital part to play in God’s cosmic tapestry. Our evolutionary impulses, our cultural training, nudges us toward “othering” difference, and our work, in ourselves and for others, must be to lean into the heavenly joy we were created for and to use God’s eyes to see and value the diversity that is always before us.
Now, it might not be apparent but I have really struggled to put words to these ideas today, and I think it might be because they need to be felt with the heart as much as understood with the mind. So I want to now lead us in a short meditation to balance out our experience today. We’ll be using a couple of short phrases from the bible, in between some readings from the writings of Swedenborg.

Meditative Scripture Reading:

Psalm 104:24 How many are your works, LORD! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.

Genesis 1:31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.

Heaven & Hell 56 
Every perfect whole arises from a variety of elements, for a whole that is not composed of a variety of elements is not really anything. It has no form, and therefore no quality. However, when a whole does arise from a variety of elements, and the elements are in a perfected form in which each associates with the next in the series like a sympathetic friend, then it has a perfect quality. Heaven is, then, a single whole composed of a variety of elements arranged in the most perfect form; for of all forms, the form of heaven is the most perfect.

Psalm 104:24 How many are your works, LORD! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.
Genesis 1:31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.

Secrets of Heaven 6706
For all without exception in heaven and all without exception on earth differ from one another in good. Good is never exactly one and the same with any two people; variation is essential, in order that each kind of good may continue to exist by itself.

Psalm 104:24 How many are your works, LORD! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.

Genesis 1:31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.

Secrets of Heaven 690
In addition it should be realized that one community is never utterly and completely like another, nor one member within a community like any other member. Instead unanimous and harmonious variety of all exists, and these variations have been so ordered by the Lord that they strive towards one single end, which is attained through love and faith in Him. From this arises their unity. For the same reason one heaven and form of heavenly joy is never utterly and completely like another. Indeed variations in love and faith are what determine the nature of heaven and its joy.

Psalm 104:24 How many are your works, LORD! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.

Genesis 1:31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.

Divine Providence 202 
The Lord's divine providence is universal by virtue of its attention to the smallest details, specifically through his having created the universe in such a way that an infinite and eternal process of creation by him could occur in it.

Psalm 104:24 How many are your works, LORD! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.

Genesis 1:31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. Amen


Readings:
Psalm 104:24-31

24 How many are your works, LORD! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. 25 There is the sea, vast and spacious, teeming with creatures beyond number— living things both large and small. 26 There the ships go to and fro, and Leviathan, which you formed to frolic there. 27 All creatures look to you to give them their food at the proper time. 28 When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things. 29 When you hide your face, they are terrified; when you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust. 30 When you send your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground. 31 May the glory of the LORD endure forever; may the LORD rejoice in his works

I Corinthians 12:12-14
12 Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. 14 Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.

Secrets of Heaven 7236:2

The fact that all in heaven are divided up in accordance with their different kinds of good shows how manifold and how varied good is; it is so varied that good is never the same with one person as it is with another. Indeed if millions of people went on being multiplied forever, one person's good would still not be like another's, just as one person's face is not like another’s…The reason for the unending variety is that every form has distinct and varied constituent parts; for if two were exactly alike they could not be two but a single unit. This also explains why in the natural order no one thing ever exists which is like another in every respect.