By Mary Ann Swenson

Once during Advent I was in Billings, Montana for a cabinet meeting and our Christmas party. One evening we took to the (icy) streets to see the local Christmas parade, where I saw something I have never seen before or since: on the back of a hay wagon, a live nativity scene was assembled, using real sheep and children dressed-up as Mary and Joseph and the kings. What was surprising was the Boy Scouts stationed around the manger as a sort of honor guard, all of them toting genuine hunting rifles. Nobody was going to wake this baby Jesus (or steal those sheep)!

Those were the early days for me as a bishop. Since then I have traveled many places in this country and around the world. I have seen many cultures, many surprising things, and eaten a “variety” of foods. I’ve seen how cultures overlap and shape one another to create new (and sometimes confusing) expressions in storytelling, music, visual and theater arts, and worship. It is clear that God delights in diversity, and so should we.
And yet that diversity often leads to division, and becomes the source of conflict, sometimes irritating, sometimes tragic. The recent bombings in Mumbai, India have economic, political and religious roots. But fundamentally, one group sees another as different in the extreme, and therefore a target for the extreme actions of destruction. For many, diversity’s divisiveness is fatal.

This comes to mind after reviewing a new book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart, by Bill Bishop with Robert G. Cushing, published this year by Houghton-Mifflin.

We already know about the divisions of red and blue states, Fox versus MSNBC, rural versus urban, NRA versus NPR. What the authors point to is that we have always had this diversity, but at least we were bound together by the necessities of economy, physical proximity, and a common “three networks” media. Now, people move less for economic reasons than lifestyle choices; these days, market researchers can tell you all about you and your choices based on just your zip code. Mr. Bishop writes:

“We have built a country where everyone can choose the neighbors (and church and news shows) most compatible with his or her lifestyle and beliefs. And we are all living with the consequences of this segregation by way of life: pockets of like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred that we don’t know, can’t understand, and can barely conceive of ‘those people’ who live just a few miles away.”

The writers continue and illuminate their central idea, based on psychological and sociological studies: as New York Times reviewer Scott Stossel notes: “…when like minded people are grouped together, they don’t settle around the average point of view … but rather become more extreme in the direction toward which they are already inclined.” [5.18.08] Bishop says it this way: “Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.”

To my mind, this means God’s creative diversity is not a nicety, not an entertaining accessory to the human experience, but a deep necessity. When we truly encounter and embrace the other, we are drawn to the center of the human-divine experience. I think this is why Jesus came not as king or conqueror: even then, the world had enough of those. What was needed was something radically different—a child in a manger, with the power to draw both shepherds and kings to a stable filled with dung and starlight. The radical otherness of the Divine was made radically simple, so that we might recognize our commonality in otherness, in diversity.

For us as disciples of this Christ, that means forming communities of diversity, fellowships where the people do not look alike, act alike, think alike, etc. In this way, we embody the alternative to homogenous clustering and its divisiveness. Instead, hospitality and diversity become symbiotic in the church, enriching and strengthening each other and all of us.

This is what we find in the manger, what we wait for this season. Come! Lord Jesus!

Bishop Mary Ann Swenson is episcopal leader of the Los Angeles Area of The United Methodist Church. This column is adapted with permission from her weekly “e-360″ message.