We hear a lot about the importance of diversity these days, and we're tempted to think that it is a new idea, that we just realized that for a group to function as well as possible it is often helpful to have a variety of viewpoints and experiences represented. Today's Gospel (Mt 10: 1-8) reminds us that the idea of diversity is nothing new-- the group of men that Jesus picked as Apostles, who are named in this passage, was quite diverse in its own way. OK, Jesus didn't include any women in the group of 12. Personally I think we make too much of that fact. In that time and place, with the gender roles that existed, for Jesus to pick female Apostles would have been unthinkable. Women simply didn't play that kind of role. How many women ran the Roman Empire back in those days? I say we make too much of the fact that women didn't do various things 2,000 years ago because sometimes we want to extrapolate from the way things were 2,000 years ago to establish how things should be now, in a very different time and place, with a different set of cultural expectations and structures. Just because things were a certain way in Jesus' day doesn't ipso facto mean that's how things should be today. Deeper reflection is required. Setting aside gender, though, Jesus' selection of Apostles was pretty diverse. There were 4 fishermen, so presumably 8 who were not. There was one person who would have been strongly opposed to Rome (Simon the Cananean, who was a zealot with revolutionary tendancies) and one who was, or at least had been, a Roman sympathizer (Matthew, the tax collector, who would have worked for Rome). There were two with Greek names (Philip and Andrew), showing that they came from families with an openenss to cultures beyond the Jewish one. Matthew seems like he was probably quite wealthy. The others probably weren't. And of course there was Judas, whom Jesus knew would betray Him but who Jesus picked anyway. Yet despite the differences within the group, Jesus gives them all the same message: The kingdom of heaven is at hand. There's a point there, and it reflects an understanding of diversity that is quite different from the way diversity sometimes gets used these days. Jesus doesn't use the differences in his group to come up with different "spins" for the different sub-groups. He doesn't tell Matthew to present Jesus one way to his tax-collector friends, while telling the fishermen to present Jesus a different way to their fellow fishermen. There isn't one message for the Greeks and another for the Jews. There isn't one for the rich, and another for the poor. There is just one message-- the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Sometimes we seem to forget that. We want to use our diversity to enable us to present a different image of Jesus to different groups, presumably because we think that doing so will make it easier to present Jesus in an attractive way. Look at some of the visual portrayals of Jesus-- sometimes He almost looks Nordic. Think about how we discuss Jesus teachings on wealth or welcoming the foreigner or other "hot button" topics. Often the message isn't Jesus' message, but a version of Jesus' message that won't offend the folks in the pews. Jesus told the Apostles to preach one and the same message, regardless of who they were or where they were. Do we do the same?