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Don't Forget About 'Others'

Three ways to remember 'others' in our sermons.

Matthew D. Kim

I grew up in the Sesame Street generation watching the well-known children's program in the seventies and eighties. On that show, a recurring segment was "One of these things is not like the other," even with its own catchy song to boot. You probably remember the tune. They would show four items such as hats, socks, toys, animals, etc. Three of the items on the screen would be identical. The fourth would be conspicuously different from the others. The point of the exercise was for young children to be able to group together like items and identify the one that was different. Throughout life, this exercise of pointing out dissimilarities in many ways never leaves us. It's a life skill where we immediately spot the "odd one out." We tend to separate things or even people who don't look or sound like the majority or dominant group. Our minds reflexively spot them and something in our brain triggers that someone different is in our midst.

As a corollary, in so ...