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Dear saints,
This week I have been enjoying Malcolm Gladwell's new book, "Revenge of the Tipping Point." Not for the first time in such books, my alma mater, Harvard, comes out rather poorly. Previously unbeknownst to me, Harvard has a rather good women's rugby team. The vignette that Galdwell begins his chapter on the team with, notes that Harvard beat Princeton sixty-one to five, which as far as I am concerned is exactly what Princeton deserved.
That outrageous slur to that small school in New Jersey aside, it turns out that there is a very good reason why Harvard's women's rugby team do so well—they tour the world looking for the best players to populate the team. Apparently there are women in Hong Kong and Australia and Scotland and Honduras who have had not known they had always wanted to go to Harvard until Harvard came to tell them that they did.
Perhaps we should all be more forgiving and celebrate, as team coach, Mel Denham, does, how "incredible it is to have such diversity." Of course, Malcolm Gladwell finds none of it incredible. He goes on in the chapter to outline how a 2014 case that went all the way to the Supreme Court revealed an expansive effort to social engineer Harvard's "incredible diversity" such that if you are from the right part of the world and play the right kind of varsity sport well enough, your chances of admission to Harvard, academically, are multiple times better than kids who are just, as they say in Boston, "wicked smart."
The consequence of Harvard's construction of diversity is that its major racial and ethnic groupings have remained stubbornly stable year after year, no matter it would seem how the population at large is changing. Gladwell's point is that social engineering fails to create authentic community and in Harvard's case it has had the impact of reserving space for students whose families have had the means to support their sporting excellence in ways that poorer families simply cannot. I should have gone to Yale.
The gift of churches like All Saints' is that they are places in our lives that at their best resist social engineering. Let's not fool ourselves, churches are subject to the same sort of forces that tend toward homogeneity. Indeed, it is somewhat easy to find places of worship in Atlanta where it can be hard to find your car in the parking lot after services because everyone drives the same car. We are not immune to those forces, but there has been a determination at All Saints' to live otherwise to a socially engineered culture.
Here, we have the opportunity to live with our differences. Here, we are unable to say who will end up sitting next to us, or what that person will say or do. As the first fruits of the Holy Spirit, the Church is in essence a free-for-all. The Spirit blows where she will, or as my mother was fond of saying as we came home from school each day, "look what the cat dragged in."
One day, seven plus years ago, the cat dragged me into this parish, and I couldn't be more grateful that she did. There was a day when the Spirit ushered you in here too. The true nature of the church is in what we choose to do next. Will we choose to start sorting our caste and creeds among one another, or will we stay with the randomness of it all and allow ourselves to be met by all these sorts of saints among us?
That is the question we are always faced with, here and every place that resists settling the seating arrangements in advance. Thanks be to God that there are places like this one where we get to mix things up. I for one need the variety and the beauty and the wonder of it all. How about you?
May God bless and keep us this All Saints' Sunday.
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