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Last weekend I visited my niece, Grace. She’s 14 months old now. She’s getting to be quite a little person! She’s not quite talking yet, but she has a big vocabulary of sounds. My personal favorite is when she quacks like a duck. I prompt her, “Grace, what does the duck say? Quack, quack, quack!” and she comes right back with “Quack, quack, quack!” I’ve never met a baby who did that before. She’s her own person—she’s unique. She’s special. Just like everybody else.

I remember how Mr. Rogers used to tell kids on his television show that they were special—there was no one exactly like them in the whole world! One time he met a little boy named Alex. The little boy gasped when he got face to face with Mr. Rogers and said, “Are you Mr. Rogers?!” Mr. Rogers smiled at him and said, “I am! And are you Alex?! It’s such a special treat to meet you!”

Look around you. Each one of us here is special. There’s no one in the world just like us. There’s a lot we have in common, but not one single one of us is exactly like anyone else. We look a little different, we feel a little different, our experiences and talents and challenges are all just a little different. It’s the same with the flowers we’ve brought here today. All different kinds, all different colors. But even with the same kind of flower, no two are ever exactly the same. If we look closely, we can see beautiful, subtle differences.

It’s the same with trees. Each one of these gorgeous, stately trees is unique. Even trees from the same species grow just a little differently. Every single living thing in the world is absolutely, uniquely itself, no matter how similar it is to other things of its own kind.

In my dream-world, the world we try to realize here in our church community, everyone is special. We notice our differences and say, “How wonderful! How terrific that we’re all so beautiful in our different ways!”

But all too often, we human folks have noticed our differences and said, “How weird. How disturbing. How wrong it is that you’re not like me. There must be something wrong with me, or maybe there’s something wrong with you.” The other night I found myself oddly fascinated by one of those makeover shows on TV. I think people like them because we love to watch those makeover victims get exposed in those awful “before” photos. “Eeuw,” we say, “how could they have put that on when they got up in the morning?”

We know that same urge to say “Eeuw” can lead to pretty sinister and serious consequences. That’s how racism and heterosexism and all the other “isms” hang on in our hearts. And religious liberals aren’t immune. All too often, we’ve used our differences as an excuse for mocking and persecuting each other.

But we don’t have to let those differences divide us. Science tells us that we’re all part of the same family tree, going back to the very beginnings of our species, way before history can remember. We’re all part of the same planet, the same stardust, the same universe, swirling and transforming and re-forming on a timescale so vast, we can’t even comprehend it. That’s the paradox: each of us is unique, but each of us is part of the same family, the same vast essence of stuff that makes up our whole world. 

I remember drawing a family tree when I was a young child in school. I started with the base of the tree, the center of the universe—otherwise known as ME! Two branches held my parents’ names. Each of my parents’ names branched off into their parents’, and so on, as far back as my parents could remember, toward great-grandparents and even a couple of great-greats. That felt like a long way back when I was a child.

I also remember a couple of kids in my old neighborhood, Katy and Kelly, did family trees and discovered that they actually were related. They shared a set of great-great-grandparents, I think it was, who came over from Norway in the 19th century. I remember feeling jealous that Katy and Kelly had that special connection to each other. In my world, close relatives had a special claim on our love just by virtue of that family connection. Relatives might drive you nuts—they might do horrible things—but they were always family. They were always part of who you are. Back then, I never realized if my buddies and I could trace our ancestors back far enough, we’d have discovered that we were all related to each other—fifth cousins, maybe, or fifty-fifth, or a thousand-and-fifth. But all of us are cousins, all the kids I played with, and every child the whole world round, if we could just see back far enough.

Take another look at these flowers. Biologists use a different kind of family tree to show the evolutionary relationships between different species, a tree of speciation. Animals (such as people) are on one branch, and plants (such as flowers) are on another. But if we look back far enough, we share a common ancestor with the flowers! The bottom line is that we’re related not only to our fellow human beings, but to every single living thing that has existed or will exist on this earth.

It’s no accident. All of us living things have evolved on the same earth, in the same universe. We’re all unique, we’re all special individuals. But our very uniqueness exists within this vast whole that is our world. We’ve been shaped by everything else that is.

The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh has a word to talk about this paradox. It’s called “interbeing.” Interbeing says everything that exists is really part of everything else, if we look deeply enough. Look at a flower, he says. We might think a flower is different from other things. But a flower can’t exist without other things like sun and clouds and dirt and rain. If you look deeply enough, everything in the universe is part of that flower.[1]

Look at a person—look at us! We are who we are because a million other things exist—the sun, the earth, gravity, water, trees, flowers, other human beings…refrigerators, cars, houses…books, songs, stories. If you look deeply enough, all those things are part of us too. We are because everything else is. Human beings are important, but we aren’t more important than anything else.

That means something for how we live our lives. Everything that is, is connected to everything else. Knowing that moves us toward more love—love for the world in its unity, and love for the uniqueness of every living thing.

I ponder the family tree that branches back from me and you to the ancient ancestors of us all, and forward toward all the future generations without number. We’re all part of one world. And it’s heartbreaking that we humans aren’t very good at loving each other. How much more could we love, if we could only see that we are all relatives?

I ponder the biologists’ tree of life that shows us so clearly that lizards and flowers and bees and ducks are all our relatives. How much more could we do to protect them, if we could only see that we’re all branches on the same tree of life?

Even now we can make a beginning, each one of us. Maybe it starts by noticing the tree in our yard and really seeing how beautiful it is. Maybe it starts by noticing a stranger on the street and saying to yourself, “He’s my cousin.” Most of us have people in our lives, family or friends, whom we love deeply. Our love for those people is stronger than anything they do or don’t do to deserve that love. When my niece Grace was born, love for her welled up in my heart before I’d even met her. The love I feel for her is much stronger than liking or disliking, praising or blaming. This weekend she was teething. At one point she got fussy and bit her mom on the arm, so hard that it left a bruise. She wasn’t very likable right at that moment, but our love for her doesn’t waver because of things like that.

What if we could feel that kind of love for everyone and everything we met? It’s in our nature to love people when we feel a connection to them, when we feel they’re part of us in some way. Our world is in such need of more love. So let’s practice. Let’s challenge ourselves to see those connections with everyone we meet. It’s not about liking people; it’s about claiming them as members of our human family. The goth teenagers with their jet-black hair and spiky neck collars are members of our family. Cousins. The scandal-ridden politicians—they’re members of our family too. Cousins. The wild-looking guy wandering up and down the street, hair every which way, denim jacket dirty and full of holes—he’s our cousin. It’s not about liking people—it’s about loving them. And who knows where that might lead?

Amen and blessed be.