A WING AND A PRAYER "Everybody in the Pool"

The good news is that God loves us no matter what we do or don't do. We can't earn God's love by keeping all the rules. And we can't lose God's love by not keeping them. That sounds like bad news to some people--especially folks who think they do a pretty good job of keeping the rules. - p. 89

And that's my gospel of inclusion! I don't mind those who are able to keep all the rules of the Torah. All the more power to you, if that's how you're going to keep holy. But there is a problem when the rules of one culture are somehow transferred to another culture. Why are we insistent on trying to recreate the holiness of first century Palestine, when we are so very different from then and there? For some of our Christian sisters and brothers around the globe, their culture may have much more in common with that culture.

But this is democracy, a relatively recent experiment in society, that no longer has homogenization as its main effort. Now, we celebrate the infinite diversity in our American culture. Our rules are less an effort to make us all uniform as they are an effort to allow us to express a unified love of diversity, celebrating that which makes each of us different.

Rules that force us to wear the same clothes, watch the same movies and television shows, or even worship in the same way, are rules that oppose God's wonderful creativity. Creation is diverse, human beings are diverse--why should we try to defy that creativity by enforcing rules that squelch God's wonderful love of individuality in human expression?