Title: God did not mess up Pray with me: Now, O Lord, take my lips and speak through

them; Take our minds and think through them; Take our hearts and set them on fire for your love and your work within your church, oh Lord our Creator. Amen.

Please listen to this scripture with me. From Genesis 1:26-27: Then God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

I chose these two small verses this morning because they have been something weighing on my heart for a long time. Though they are small in the amount of words they use, or the amount of space they take up in the pages of your bible, they carry a monumental message.

I need to tell you something. You are made in the image of God. Has anyone ever told you that before? Listen to me again; YOU are the image of God. That is right. You, you are the image of God. Nut you know what else? I am made in the image of God. That is right, me too! You are the image of God and I am the image of God. WE are made in the image of God. And yet none of us look alike. We are dark.

We are pale. We are man. We are woman. We are able bodied and we are disabled. We are gay. We are straight. We are queer. We are trans. We are old. We are young. We are different in every way. And we are alike in so many ways. The one likeness that binds us all together, every single one of us together, is that we are the image of God. However, I have to ask you, if we are all made in the image of God why does the church pus so many people away? How can we exclude the image of God from the house of God? That is to say, if we are all made in the image of God shouldnt we be accepting of all of the various numerous many other images of God? Shouldnt we be an inclusive church?

Have you ever felt like you were on the outside of Gods fold? Maybe not because God pushed you away, but because Gods people pushed you away? Have you experienced an exclusive church or an exclusive Christian community? One of the greatest joys in my life and one of the experiences that brought me to ministry was working with adults with mental challenges. One of the things that hurts my heart the most though is how often people with mental challenges are cast outside of Gods fold, how often they are not welcomed into the house of God because they do not look like the perfect image of God that we come to expect. Christians have often interpreted disability as a distortion of Gods purposes, a marring of the image of God. I do not know about you but I think that the image of God includes a wide range of human possibilities. To be created in the image of God means to be created for contributing to the world and to be open toward the call to love others.

I have a friend named Dale. That man is the image of God if I have ever seen it. What most people picture the image of God, I am willing to bet that what they picture is the furthest thing from my Dale. You see Dale, is flawed. He is by no means perfect. He walks with leg braces, he has visible scars, and I image more indivisible scars than anyone knows. Dale also has brain damage from a car accident he was involved in in his 20s. He has a permanent caretaker and the mentality of an adolescent at best. But that man is more loving than many other people I have met. Dale is a hug when you do not even realize you needed it. Dale is forgiving and kind and hospitable and not welcomed in many churches he has tried to go to because he cannot sit through the service and he cannot articulate his commitment to Christ and therefore cannot receive communion. I know that Dale was made in the image of God. There are some days that I am more willing to believe that Dale was made in the image of God than I am to believe that I was made in the image of God.

I think it is important to notice that the Genesis account of the creation never precisely defines what the image of God is. The language is elusive. Maybe that is intentional. We are all so different in so many ways that it would be impossible to truly give an accurate description of what the image of God looks like. We do not have bodies. We are bodies. Human beings are living souls, not souls trapped in a material body. But each and every one of these bodies is made in the image of God. Denying these bodies denied the God who lovingly sculpted each one from the earth.

As I said, we are all so very different. Not two of our bodies are exactly the same. Rather every human being has the image of God in common, even as it s expressed in variety and difference. Differentiation is part of Gods intention for humanity, so it does not indicate an inequality between some but the equality of all. God did not mess up when he made someone with a pale complexion or a dark complexion. God did not mess up when he made someone with physical limitations and someone with athletic ability. God did not mess up when he made someone male and someone female. God did not mess up when he made someone straight and someone else gay. But we mess up when we put someone outside of the community because of one of these things. We mess up when we treat someone who is different as a child of a lesser God. We mess up when we are not an inclusive church. We fail as the image of God when we do not show forth Gods hospitality. We do not fulfill our role as the image of God when we ostracize or cast out or reject or condemn a child of God because their image of God does not match our image of God. We are all children of God, made in the image of God, and therefore we are all people created vulnerably in the image of the one true God. Whether we like someones differences or not is irrelevant, we as the image of God, are not tasked with deciding who else gets to fit into our category.

We are all loved into being by God. We are all created in the image of God. We all have our differences, whether they are visible on our surface, or deep down within our DNA. Despite this, so many children of God are excluded or trivialized as social nonentities in ways that make the believe that they are not the image of God.

For so many, welcome is denied. Today I challenge you, I challenge the wider church, and I challenge myself. I challenge us all to live into our identities as the image of God. I hope that we might all learn how to show forth the love and welcome of God to all of Gods children because all of us, dark, light, male, female, gay, straight, trans, queer, able-bodied, disabled, old, young, all of us are made in the image of the one who created us.