Least common denominator

I was helping Noah with his fractions homework tonight. It won't be long before his math requires me to do some refreshing myself, but for now we spent some time working on fractional equivalents and least common denominators for adding. Needing to multiply by variations of one is understandably a somewhat confusing concept for a fifth grader, but Noah's catching on.

The idea that you can multiply a given by variations of one to make it possible to add fractions got me to thinking about our life of faith, and life in the church. So often we have trouble with the idea that sometimes we need to multiply in order to get things to add up. We always want to reduce things to the common, but neglect to take into account that reductionism doesn't necessarily lead to commonality.

Especially in our diverse world we need to continually be looking for the multiples that will get us on the same page. Jesus did this by finding commonality with a huge range of scoundrels, pharisees, and ordinary folk, and yet so often we in the church have such limited capacity for creatively helping things add up.

I'd like to learn from fractions, increasing our options for finding common ground rather than insisting that our prime denominator dictate the equation.