We are such different people, joined here together in worship.

We bring myriad gifts: simple joy, deep faith, appreciation of one another and of the Earth.

We celebrate and mourn together as individuals and as a congregation.

We dance and sing together, we share our thoughts, our dreams, our fears.

We bring our special gifts to share and teach, our laughter, our knowledge, our hopes.

We bring our brokenness that we may heal in this place together.

We bring our wholeness that we may share its power.

Let us worship together feeling the strength of our differences, the wonder at our variety, the joy at our being together in this place.

A re-telling of A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.

So why do we label so much? Are we just moving so fast that we need to make immediate categorizations and keep moving? Maybe we know how much work it is to get to know someone and this helps us whittle away at the number of people we need to know and what we need to know about them. Maybe we have been labeled so much ourselves that we don’t know any other way. I’m really not sure although I think some of it may come from our fear of knowing ourselves too much, of facing not just the sunny corners of our personalities, but the shadowy ones: not just the things we are most proud of, but the things we don’t, as it were, like to talk about at parties.

So when we look beyond the labels into our own selves what do we find? What interesting parts of our selves are right there, but we glance past them to the more obvious things. What skills, what fears, what gifts do each of us have that in combination make us the unique person we are? What interests and likes and dislikes combine to make you? Is it the anger and stubbornness Meg struggled with or the love she felt for Charles? Maybe you’re good with your hands, maybe you are musical, maybe you can cook, maybe each day is a real joy to you, maybe you love to help others, maybe your favorite color is green, maybe you love the smell of warm chocolate chip cookies, maybe computers make you crazy, maybe you love to travel. They don’t all have to be big and deeply meaningful and they don’t all have to be good.

I wanted to find a way to make this a concrete, tangible experience. So I wandered around my house and my office looking for things which could in a sensing way represent aspects of a personality. I looked for things by color, by texture, by functionality, which might make a see-able, feel-able place holder for a part of a person. Something which we could focus on and explore to help us concentrate on what things in us make us special and different. What things go beyond the labels?

As I was thinking about items I could use to represent some of the aspects of my own personality I was struck by how many simple household items I could find around me which conjured up for me things about myself. A couple of them I will explain. First is a piece of Saran Wrap. I have at certain points in my life felt invisible. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to blend into the background and go unnoticed, but invisibility is not always such a gift. There is a song in the show Chicago called "Mr. Cellophane" which explains what I mean. The lyrics are: "If someone stood up in a crowd and raised his voice up way out loud and waved his arm and shook his leg, you’d notice him. If someone in a movie show yelled ‘Fire in the second row, this whole place is a powder keg,’ you’d notice him. And even without clucking like a hen, everyone gets noticed now and then. Unless, of course, that personage should be invisible, inconsequential me. Mr. Cellophane should have been my name, cause you can look right through me, walk right by me and never know I’m there." The cellophane represents invisibility to me.

The other is a piece of barbed wire (which I can’t show you, because barbed wire is harder to find than you might think given how much of it there is in the world and in spite of the suggestion of the man at Home Depot I really didn’t think that going out to some farmer’s field with wire cutters was such a good plan). This one was just such a perfect representation of prickliness, although a sea urchin has almost the same effect. It just made me think about those times when I wrap myself up in prickly so that other people can’t get in.

Some other things I found I will leave up to your imagination. They were an empty frame, a band-aid, a battery, a piece of paper, and a purple crayon.

Meditations on your choices:

What I’d like to do now is to give you a chance to think about what you chose and why it is important to you. Take the item in your hand, concentrate on it, feel the shape, the size, the texture. Think about what it was that made you choose this item. Was it the color, its function, something about its shape. Become familiar with it moving it around in your hand, looking at it. What about you is represented here? What about this item spoke to you? What aspect of your self do you find here?

When you’re ready take the second item and go through the same exercise. Why did you pick this one. What attracted you to it? What does it mean to you? Take a minute to concentrate. Get to know it. Think about what part of you it represents.

Now that you’ve gotten to know your items and to understand what they mean to you and why you picked them, I’d like to think for a minute about what your gifts mean in community. When we go out into the world most of us do not display every aspect of our personality in every facet of our lives. Part of this is simply that we need different skills or traits in the office than we do when we go skiing. We need different things at the mall or the movies with our friends than we do while we are doing our homework. But part of it is that some skills or gifts we keep for ourselves and others we give freely. There are certain things we want everyone to see and others we’d prefer were our own.

Think for a moment about yourself in a group. What is different about you with your family or with your best friends? What is different when you go out into a larger group. Which aspects of yourself are part of your relationship with your mother, your spouse, your child, that aren’t part of your relationship with a co-worker. And what do you use at work or school that isn’t an important part of your relationship with your best friend?

What about this congregation? What things do you cultivate here? What gifts do you offer this group? Are they different than the things that are part of you elsewhere? There’s a lot of overlap, but for me there are some things that come out here that I don’t really see in myself in any other setting. There are some skills I need here that I don’t need at work or at home. There are certain gifts I can use here that people at work wouldn’t understand or appreciate. There’s a certain freedom for sharing that comes from being in a community with people you trust and respect, but also a responsibility which may be different than other parts of your life.

Take a minute to look at your two items. Pick the one that represents for you a gift or a trait or a skill which you feel you already share or would like to share with the congregation. The young people will pass the baskets and collect the one item which represents to you an aspect of your personality which you share with the congregation. When the basket gets to you if you would like to share aloud with the congregation what that gift is, please do. I’ve been told that if I ask this congregation to speak they will so I’m counting on some of you to be brave. When all the gifts are collected. the baskets will be in the back so that each of you can pick one of the congregational gifts on your way out. I encourage you to take your items home and think about them. I’ve been working with the items I collected throughout the past week and the more I look at them the more I see.

And now let us go into the world carrying with us our gifts and the gifts of this community.

Let us live in the knowledge that we are bigger than labels and boxes, greater than the limitations others put on us and those we put on ourselves.

Let us remember that others, too, are greater than the labels and boxes we place upon them.

Let us celebrate all that make us singular and unique beings.

Let us seek always to understand all that is special about us and about those around us.

Go in peace.