But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it.  This is why it says: "When he ascended on high, he took many captives and gave gifts to his people." (What does "he ascended" mean except that he also descended to the lower, earthly regions?  He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe.)  So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers… (Ephesians 4:7-11) Gifts, gifts, gifts.  A diversity of gifts.   The last set of verses stresses our essential unity as a unity that is grounded in God himself—for there is "one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all."  And yet, the kind of unity created in Christ does not enforce us into a uniformity, for we each have different gifts.  This given diversity is a gift of Christ! There are two distinct kinds of unity.  The easier unity, which is the unity we will often tend to seek, is a unity of uniformity.  School uniforms operate on this uniformity principle.  Uniformity seeks to ensure that there will be nothing to make us look different from one another.  We try to make sure that everyone does the same things, believes the same way, acts the same way, looks the same way.  We are unified and live in peace because we have removed any context for conflict.  We flatten all diversity. There are pictures of this kind of unity-by-uniformity in the Bible—but it's never the model we're to base our lives on.  Uniformity shows up in the Bible through Pharaoh's enforced brick making.  It is a way of slavery that forces everyone—the young and the old, the writer as well as the carpenter, the shepherd as well as the priest—to submit to one, single, repetitive task that dehumanizes them.  Uniformity diminishes one's life, and utterly stunts human creativity to one, single, linear, repeatable output: a brick.   The picture of unity envisioned in Ephesians is different.  It has more in common with the Biblical pictures of "living stones" being built into a spiritual house.  Or, if you like, Paul's own picture from chapter 2 of a building made of Jews and Gentiles being built on Jesus as the chief cornerstone.  "In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit" (Eph. 2:21-22). Uncut stones are what the Israelites were to make alters out of.  Not bricks (Ex. 20:25, Dt. 27:5, Jos. 8:31).  The rationale is that the tools used would defile the perfect Creational gift God had given in the stones that lay on the ground, each in its unique form.  In the making of altars, therefore, each stone was to keep its unique colour and shape.  The stone was not to be reduced to something more amenable to human aims of efficiency or effectiveness.  Bricks, by contrast, are entirely effective and efficient.  Anyone can stack bricks.  But building an alter was to take some time and skill, figuring out how to fit each unique, diverse stone into a strong and stable unity.  This is the picture of the unity Christ builds in his church.  It is not a brick-like uniformity, but rather a unity in diversity.  It is a mosaic of living stones lovingly and carefully built together.  How?  Gifts.   It is Christ himself who measures out the dynamic colours and contours that shape the unique diversity of each living stone.  To each one of us he apportions a unique form of his grace—a gift that we are invited to use in service of building each other up toward the unity we have been given.  

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