Diversity
Diversity
Genesis 1:26-31
June 15, 2025
Years ago, I went with three members of our church to Rio De Janeiro to visit a woman named Barb DeSouza. Barb had been a member of the church, too. Prior to my arrival, she had gone with her husband to Rio on a business transfer for his job. When he left her and her children, she made the amazingly brave decision to stay and continue her medical work with some of the poorest people in the world. Ultimately, she built a clinic that provided medical care, physical therapy, family counseling and support, and any number of other things. The church had supported Barb’s work for years. We went not only to meet her but to smuggle medical supplies through customs for the clinic.
I will always remember one particular moment on that trip. It was in the evening. The other guy who was on the trip and I decided to take a walk. (There was a clear sense that everyone in the Favela knew that we were with Barb and we were safe.) We walked past “homes” that people had rigged out of corrugated metal and cardboard and cinder blocks and bricks. Eventually, we saw an open area with a bench. Lindsey and I sat down and watched the neighborhood soccer game. There wasn’t a blade of grass in sight, just a cloud of dust, a herd of bodies, and, somewhere in there, a ball. What I remember in that moment was thinking to myself, “I am officially as far away from home as I have ever been!” Or, alternatively, “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore…”
When you go to somewhere far away, you remember what you might have previously forgotten: that the world is a very large place; that your own expectations about how things will work and how people will behave are tied to your little corner of the world and are. not universal; that, though you may know something about that little corner, you really hardly know anything at all about the bigger world. In other words, going somewhere far away makes you humble. It also opens the possibility for experiencing the joy of new things. I loved the fact that in Rio, everyone—rich or poor, male or female—everyone, seemed to be listening in their minds eye to the same samba beat and dancing to it while they were standing in line or while they were waiting for a bus or whatever else they were doing. There was such a shared passion among those people…
This wasn’t my first time away but it was my first trip in a while. The truth is that I have a history of falling in love with very different places: the lakes of Minnesota and the deserts of Arizona; the Buddhist temples of Kyoto and the outstretched arms of the Christ the Redeemer statue, embracing all of Rio from atop Mount Corcovado. Places, like people, have a way of revealing themselves to us in such a way that we can’t help but get attached, no matter how different they may be.
As a side trip when we went to Rio, we went to Iguazu Falls, the largest water fall system in the world, with over 275 different falls. Even more impressive than the falls, themselves, though, was the biodiversity of the rainforest around them. In this corner of the world where Brazil and Argentina converge, there are over 2000 plant species, 450 bird species, and 80 different species of animals. The rainforest is brimming with life and that life is incredibly diverse—just as diverse as the Brazilian people, just as diverse—when you’re open to seeing it—as the whole world.
A writer named, Paul Avellino, has this to say about diversity: “Take a walk through any thriving forest, and you won’t find uniformity—you’ll find balance through variety. Trees of every kind, fungi laced through the soil, insects, birds, predators, pollinators, and plants that bloom at different times, all playing their part. That’s not an accident. It’s a blueprint. Diversity isn’t something nature tolerates. It’s something it requires to survive.”
Diversity is the design of the universe. Think about that…I remember watching a nature special about humming birds. They were showing us all the varieties. They showed us one particular humming bird who had this incredibly long and curved “snout,” “beak,” “nose?” It turned out that there was one flowering plant in the world that depended on this one species of humming bird which fit perfectly and pollinated the flower when it did. That’s the miracle of diversity in the world around us.
In fact, if the diversity of things is lost, things become fragile. When Ireland depended on one particular variety of potato and disease attacked that variety, people starved. When farming, in any form, becomes too narrowly focused on producing one thing, the balance of nature is disturbed. When invasive species intrude into the prairies that I love, they take over and the health of the prairie, itself, is threatened. If everyone’s goal is to have grass lawns that look the same, no matter where they live, we run out of water and the earth becomes poisoned with fertilizers. If we strip away diversity, whole ecosystems collapse.
Paul Avellino argues that the same is true of people: “So when people talk about human diversity like it’s a threat to stability, or when systems are designed to flatten, exclude, and erase—remind them that ecosystems collapse without diversity. That monocultures breed disease, and closed loops break.
We don’t thrive despite our differences—we thrive because of them. Just like the forest, just like the coral reef, just like the world we’re all lucky enough to be part of.
Diversity isn’t a threat. It has always been the plan.”
In the Hebrew Scriptures, the very first note in the Book of Genesis is about God as the one who designed the world. As I have said to you many times before, this is not a literal description of the act of creation, itself. Rather, this is a statement of faith, written when the people were in exile, about God’s role in the world. Namely, Genesis makes the case that God is always involved in the business not only of creation but of creating order out of chaos. In the beginning, the world was formless and void. The spirit of God moved across the face of the world like a mighty wind. Then, God went to work. God delights in creating an incredibly diverse world of sky and land and sea, of plants and fish and all sorts of amazing creatures. Then, God creates people—both male and female—and invites them to be the caretakers of the world. We are responsible for God’s world. Presumably, a part of our responsibility is to preserve the diversity of that creation.
In the classic translation of the first creation story of Genesis, we are told that God gives us “dominion” over everything. That word—“dominion”—has such unfortunate implications. For many people, God giving us “dominion” means that we have been given a license to “dominate” everything. We are free to use it however we see fit. We are free to treat everything as a resource to be exploited. Presumably, when the world’s population was so much smaller and there seemed to be an unlimited amount of new lands to discover, we could get away with such exploitation and not feel the impact of our abuse. Now, though, whether people want to deny it or not, in the wake of a century of rapid industrial growth and population expansion, the fact is that our refusal to move from exploiting the earth to caring for the earth has profoundly affected just about every aspect of living in this world. Weather has changed. Species have disappeared. The balance of nature has been made fragile because we have violated the design.
I think we are doing the same thing to the diversity of people around us. I remember traveling from town to town as a child. Each town was different. They had different restaurants and stores. They had different histories. Even the architectures of the homes would change as you traveled. Now, fast food and quick stop gas stations and chain stores have homogenized our cities and towns. We have the comfort of meeting our diminished expectations: “Yes…there will be a ‘not that great but predictable’ place to eat ahead.” However, there will be no big surprises: “Can you believe this cinnamon roll?”
We make that trade because we don’t like feeling uncomfortable or dealing with the unknown. If something or someone is not a known quantity then things feel risky. Of course, some of the unspeakable joys in this life are moments in which we we experience something or someone entirely new and we find out we enjoy that new experience or person. Maybe we even love that experience or person. Or, as we suggested at the outset today, maybe we are just humbled by the experience of what’s new because it reminds us that it’s actually a good thing that not everyone is us and not every experience has to happen my way.
That’s the thing about diversity. It forces me to give up my fantasy that everyone wants to be me. It makes me come to grips with the fact that it’s a really good thing that I don’t have the power to make everyone do things my way. However, in order to get to such realizations, I have to actually make peace with the fact that I have to learn how to live with the discomfort because that’s just how you feel when you do something you’ve never done before or when you meet someone whom you’ve never met before. We have to find a way to allow others to be who they are with us. We have to find a way to realize that our job is to connect and experience and learn from others. We have to accept that our job is to make the choices that are ours to make and simply be ourselves.
The lie that we’ve been sold is that our job, as people of faith, is to judge others as if they were objects and treat the world as if it is our’s to use and abuse. I want to suggest that what faithful people really ought to do is show a little reverence. The world is big enough for us to be who we are and appreciate all the wonderful ways that someone else can be different. The world is big enough that we should be able to leave enough room for all of God’s creatures to be who they are, too. When we respect the diversity of life and care for God’s creation, we are all stronger and the world is far less fragile. “Diversity is not a threat. It is the design.”