I saw Shrek the Musical this week. In it there is a chorus of fairy tale characters who invade Shrek’s swamp. They have been banished by Lord Farquhar from his perfect city because they are different from the the plastic uniformity he has established there.

Pinnochio keeps insisting that he is a real boy. Every time he does this, his nose grows.

In one song in the second act, the fair tale characters sing proudly about being the freak parade. At the end, Pinnochio steps forward and says “I’m wood, I’m good, get used to it!”

 When I was in seminary in Chicago while I was a Jesuit, my field placement was in an African American parish on the south side of Chicago, “in the ghetto” as Elvis Presley would put it. It was an amazing experience for me. I came to the point where I would look down at my hands and be surprised that they were the wrong color—I was supposed to be like the people I loved and lived and worked with. One black nun was especially fascinated with me. She couldn’t figure out how I had fit in so quickly and so comfortably in the neighborhood. She pressed me in conversation once and I came out to her, told her I was gay. “Aha!” she said, “That’s why.” She thought I felt at home in the black community because I knew what it was like not to feel at home in the straight white world we all live in. She thought that I knew in my bones what it was like to be different, to not fit in with the “norm.”

I have come to believe that there is something that every human being knows in their soul that troubles them and makes them fear rejection. There is something, some secret fault that torments us and makes us afraid that if fully known, we would not be accepted. We all know in our bones what it is like to be different.

Biologically, we are essentially herd beasts and difference makes us uneasy at a very primal level. Think of a troop of chimpanzees encountering a stranger—there is all this whooping, grimacing and aggressive posturing that either drives the stranger into abject submission or to run away or to become the subject of murderous violence.

In the Epistle today, St. Paul doesn’t do much to relieve our anxiety about differentness: “Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions. Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables. Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat; for God has welcomed them. Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another?”

The context of this passage is this: in the Greco-Roman world, no one just butchered an animal for food. Every animal was offered in sacrifice to one god or another. Their carcasses made their way into the public market and the meat was sold. Some Christians at the time held that since the gods were not real and they had taken no part in the ritual of sacrifice, it was all right to eat the meat. Other Christians were so used to participating in the sacrifices that they couldn’t separate themselves emotionally or morally from the sacrifice, so they did not buy the meat and ate a vegetarian diet. Paul is telling the community in Rome that whichever side of the question is right in itself (Paul seems to think that the liberal side is right), they need to just cope: they need to accept their diversity and not judge each other for their conflicting positions. “ Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another?” he asks them.

This passage from Romans is very important for us in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion to hear in our day. People often think that the Church of England was founded by King Henry VIII. But we in the Anglican Communion count Queen Elizabeth I as being the person who established our identity. In the midst of the controversies between Protestant and Catholic in her time, she announced, “We will no longer argue about these things.” We call this the Elizabethan Settlement.

Instead of being founded on a common statement of belief like most of the other Christian communities in the world, we are founded on a common pattern of public prayer—the Book of Common Prayer. In the Episcopal Church, lay people are free to believe or think anything they like and they are still fully members of the church—you can even be an atheist; if you want to come, you will be welcomed.

The current struggle that is magnified in the media has to do with the extent to which we are willing to live with differences of opinion: The conservative wing of the Church, especially in the Global South, hold that gay people cannot be welcomed into the church because of the passages in scripture that apparently condemn homosexual sex. They are also strongly influenced by modern Islam with its intolerance of gay people, because they live in constant contact and conflict with Muslims. The progressive wing of the church has discovered over the last thirty years that gay people participating in the church clearly show the presence of God in their lives and deserve full inclusion in the church by publicly blessing their relationships and ordaining them to all of the orders of ministry: deacon, priest and bishop.

At St. Paul’s we come down solidly on the progressive side of the debate. For more than thirty years, St. Paul’s has welcomed Gay men and Lesbians into the heart of our community. We have sponsored Gay men for ordination (myself least among them); we have called Gay men to be our rectors, and we have celebrated weddings for Gay and Lesbian couples. In the diocese we are known for our Anglo-Catholic liturgy and our exultation in diversity. So it should be no surprise that most of us (but not all) hope for a resolution of this debate in favor of full inclusion.

This feels to me like airing our dirty laundry in public. But if you are new to St. Paul’s and new to the Episcopal Church, you deserve to understand what’s going on in our family—no elephants in the living room here, if we can help it.

But the fact that we are progressive and think that we are right, does not exonerate us from our responsibility in Christ to accept and love and affirm the people who disagree with us. Paul goes on to say in his letter: “Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike. Let all be fully convinced in their own minds. Those who observe the day, observe it in honor of the Lord. Also those who eat, eat in honor of the Lord, since they give thanks to God; while those who abstain, abstain in honor of the Lord and give thanks to God. We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.”

“For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.”

The Lord Jesus did this for us and calls us to imitate the welcome he gave to tax collectors, prostitutes and sinners. The Law of the Gospel is universal welcome even to people who disagree with, revile or condemn us.

It’s interesting that the words “diversity” and “universal” have common etymologies: Universal, universe, university and similar words come from Latin roots meaning turning toward the one or the whole. Diverse, diversity and similar words mean turning away from conformity and uniformity. The great irony of Christianity, seldom appreciated by Christians, is that we are called to turn to the whole or the one precisely by turning away from uniformity and conformity. We are most truly ourselves, we most accurately represent Christ in the world when we accept, tolerate, exult, rejoice in, celebrate and cherish that we are all different from one another.

Like the fairy tale characters in Shrek, we are the freak parade. Each of us, gay or straight, black or white, male or female, carries a secret identity that causes us pain, that makes us fear rejection. We can all stand up here, in this assembly, in this fellowship, like Pinnochio, and say, “I’m wood, I’m good, get used to it!”

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