Homily outline: How the Lord delights in us, even in our differences

• Fear is too often a starting point for faith
  • This is understandable when Psalm 96 has lines like this, “Worship the LORD in holy attire. Tremble before him, all the earth.”
  • We ought to shudder in awe before God.
  • But another way of understanding what makes us tremble before God is that God delights in us as Isaiah prophesizes for the Israelites.
  • And God’s delight is manifest in the differences that make each of us unique.
  • Paul lifts this up in the second reading as he tried to help the Corinthians recognize an astonishing array of gifts in their community, all for the common good.
  • To our hearing, the differences between some of these gifts might seem small,
    • g., the gift of tongues and the interpretation of tongues
  • But even little differences are just as valuable as the big ones for helping a community grow.

• Nature reveals much about the significance of small differences
  • The study of chimpanzees is a relatively new phenomenon.
  • Many know the celebrated story of Jane Goodall’s groundbreaking work with chimps in the forests of Tanzania in the 1960s.
  • Goodall helped redefine the species, and documented so many human-like traits, e.g., chimps not only use tools but make tools.
  • Their similarity to humans was confirmed when researched sequenced the chimp genome in 2005 and showed that chimps and humans share a surprising 98.8% of their DNA.
  • Yet even though there is almost 99% similarly in this essential building block, we exhibit huge and defining differences.
  • Even small differences – such as the chemical difference between water and wine at the heart of today’s gospel (wine is 86% water) – are undeniable significant.

• The desire of God to rejoice in us is a celebration of our diversity
  • Paul’s discourse on many gifts recalls a deeper truth.
  • It is not only humanity as a race that is created in the image and likeness of God
    • but each person, each child, each life refracts God’s image.
  • It is only in the diversity of human beings and cultures
    • as well as our awareness of the growing expansiveness of the universe
  • That allows finite human beings to get a glimpse of the mystery of God.

• Sadly God’s celebration of our diversity is not always shared by humans.
  • Isaiah describes the Israelites as diadem and diamonds in a crown
  • Diamonds take not only millions of years to develop, under tremendous pressure and heat
    • but then had to travel to the earth’s surface through eruptive, volcanic events.
    • The birth of a diamond is marked by stress, violence and disruption.
  • Allowing our own gifts to surface for the benefit of all can also be stressful and take unexpected amounts of time.
  • But each of us is a spark of God’s own radiance, and our shared gifts are a treasure beyond compare.

• Transformed from water to wine
  • In today’s gospel Jesus takes the most ordinary of elements (water)
    • And transforms it through generosity into an exquisite gift.
  • We might consider ourselves quite ordinary, with gifts virtually undisguisable from those of others.
  • But God’s delight in each of us reveals the blessing of what some might consider insignificant differences.
  • And those of us who have been bathed in the waters of baptism, and tasted the wine of Christ’s eucharistic presence, are thus commissioned:
    • as disciples of delight
    • discerners of difference
    • apostles of the distinctive
  • To lift up the diamonds and gifts in others as well.