"Oh, the times when I haved failed to recognise
How may chairs are gathered there around the feast
To break the bread and break these boundaries
That have kept us from our only common ground
The invitation to sit down..."
--Nichole Nordeman, "Please Come" (from This Mystery)

I was standing outside, on the front steps of our church, looking for some friends, when I met a couple from my Sunday School class. They're a perfectly nice couple; my wife is fairly close with the wife, although the husband and I have never really connected. They asked if I was on the way to Sunday School.

"No," I said. "They called off Sunday School so we could attend this Reconciling Ministries service.

"Reconciling Ministries?" the wife said. "What's that?"

"It's an organization within the Methodist Church that seeks full inclusion for all Christians regardless of sexual orientation," I answered, reading the description from the top of the bulletin. "They're presenting plaques to some of the Sunday School classes that have decided to become reconciling communities."

The wife's face fell. She looked nervously at her husband. "Oh," she said. "Well, I don't think you're going to want to go to that, are you?" she asked him.

"Um, no," he said, looking away.

After a few more awkward pleasantries, they returned to their car and drove off. I watched them leave feeling profoundly sad. These were people that I liked and respected. I'd shared meals with them. I'd been to parties and cookouts with them. And all of a sudden, this enormous gulf seemed to have open up between us. They (or at least he) clearly did not approve of the goals set by Reconciling Ministries. I don't just believe that what Reconciling Ministries is doing is correct, but that it is essential, and I have a very hard time with people who oppose its mission. So what does that say about our friendship?

Lately, circumstances have been conspiring to point out to me that without the common ground of love to bring us together, we are totally screwed.

One of the things I love about Christianity is the way that it relentlessly calls us to love others, to include everyone, to proclaim that God's loving grace is not for a select few, but for everyone. Critics of faith argue that this is an excuse for Christians to homogenize everyone and everything in the name of Jesus and to bludgeon nonbelievers over the head with their endless evangelism. And perhaps some people unconsciously encourage something like that. But I think on a deeper level we all understand that God loves each of us for the unique individual that each of us is. Otherwise, what would be the point? God does not want legions of automata following Him, singing endless mechanical Allelujahs.

Our uniqueness, though, is problematic. We're not all the same. We have different tastes, different attitudes, different abilities, different skin tones, different sexual orientations. Some of these we choose, some we don't. But each of us is a culmination of a billion different factors--from our genetics, to our environment, to the results of the exercise of our free wills. And so we disagree. A lot.

Usually we can celebrate our differences without too much trouble. As long as they don't directly conflict with ours, others' beliefs are generally a fine thing. It's only when people choose opposite sides of seemingly either/or questions, like abortion, the death penalty, the Iraq war, GLBT rights, etc. that the sparks begin to fly.

Here's my conflict: as a political American, I feel compelled to take a side on some of these issues. I have firm beliefs about what right and wrong are. My faith plays into almost all of these positions. So to me, some questions like the death penalty and war are complete no-brainers. I'm against anything that kills another human being. I have a very difficult time with abortion--as a card carrying liberal I feel like I should support a woman's choice, but my gut feeling is that terminating a pregnancy is not what God wants us to do. So I heartily support abortion alternatives like birth control and adoption and supporting single mothers. Again, no brainers from where I'm standing.

Another of my convictions is that Jesus calls us to be radically inclusive. That means that we as a church must open our arms and our doors to allow all people into full communion in the church, be they black, white, straight, gay, old, young, whatever. Jesus invited Pharisees, Roman collaborators and prostitutes, Jew and Gentile alike, to be in ministry for him. The Gentiles didn't follow the Mosaic law, and the New Testament makes it abundantly clear that we are not to turn away those who don't abide by the Law. I'm unimpressed by the voices of those Christians who look for ways to exclude people they find repulsive, citing proscriptions from a body of laws that they themselves would never dream of following. This, for me, is another no brainer.

But there's a catch. As a Christian--and especially as a pastor--I am and will be called to join with everyone in the body of Christ, even those whose views I find detestable. That means that my task is to work to get everyone seated at the table to share the feast, not to club them over the head with my personal beliefs, regardless of how deeply I hold them. No matter what I say, no matter how I argue, there are going to be people who will never accept the idea of gay/lesbian marriage and ordination, or the idea of God as Father and Mother (Once, in our choir, one of the basses quit because the choir director insisted on performing Bobby McFerrin's "23rd Psalm", in which the gender of God is sung as female), or a hundred other things that make perfect sense to me but which are anathema to others.

I have a feeling that someday after I'm ordained I'm going to be sent to be the pastor of a tiny church in some tiny Texas town like Alice or Marfa, as penance for every joke I've ever cracked about small-town Texans and their bigotry. Someday someone's going to come into my office and let slip that they think gay people are sinners who should burn in hell. And I'm going to want to tell them to kiss my ass. But I can't do that. This person, despite his bigotry, is just as much a child of God as the ones he detests, and needs my ministry as much as--if not in some ways more than--the ones with whom I personally agree.

How exactly I'm supposed to do that, I'm not sure. God's world is one of many seeming paradoxes, and this one is no different. We must include everyone, even those who want nothing more than to exclude others. That seems like an impossible task, but the proclamation that "with God all things are possible" is no idle boast. It's a statement of fact; the simple assertion that what we see as a paradox is due to our limited point of view.

Take, for example, Zeno's famous paradox about Achilles and the tortoise. Achilles and a tortoise are, for reasons never sufficiently explained, engaging in a footrace near Athens. Out of good sportsmanship, one supposes, Achilles allows the tortoise a significant head start. Zeno's paradox states that no matter how much of a head start he gives the tortoise, and no matter how fast he runs, Achilles will never catch the tortoise. Zeno explains that in order to catch up to his amphibious opponent, Achilles must cover half the distance between them. And once he's done that, he has to cover half of the remaining distance. And so on. And since these distances can be divided, Zeno tells us, infinitely, Achilles can't ever catch the tortoise because he'll never run out of half-distances to cross.

Now, Zeno knew that this was utter nonsense. Obviously Achilles could beat any tortoise; his point was that the notion of "motion" that we take for granted is absurd, and therefore, illusory. Zeno was a student of Parmenides, who believed that everything was all one timeless, changeless, indivisible One, and that things like time and distance and motion were merely illusions.

But anyway. This paradox puzzled philosophers for well over two millennia. Just when someone thought he'd got the best of it, someone else would come along and explain why he was wrong. For quite some time it seemed that Zeno might actually have a point, as ludicrous as it seemed. It wasn't until someone in the 19th century made the realization that any motion that takes place takes place over a series of infinitely divisible distances (thus cancelling out the infinities of the paradox), that philosophers laid the matter to rest.

The point of this overlong example is that there was never any paradox. There was only the appearance of one. We perceived a paradox because our understanding of the nature of things was occluded by our assumptions about how the world works. And this is where we return to the subject of faith: as Christians we trust that God is on top of all of our seeming paradoxes. When we see clearly, we will understand them not as paradoxes, but as simple misunderstandings that yielded two mutually exclusive apparent conclusions. So it is with Zeno, and so it shall be with me and my homophobic church friend.

There is a light that calls all of us, and when we are all fully illuminated by that light, our differences will divide in half again and again until finally they vanish and we will be left to wonder at our beautiful mutual uniqueness in the likeness of God.