I am honored to be able to speak to the BYU
community in today’s devotional. I hope and pray that what I say today might be accompanied by the
Spirit so that you can be edified and uplifted. By way of background, I joined The Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints when I was fifteen, in May 1978. My brother and I were raised
by our father, who was a secular Jew, in Southern California. We gathered for
the High Holy Days with our aunts and uncles and in many ways were deeply
affected by our cultural background. Although indoctrination in the Christian
religion was not a part of my upbringing, I had nevertheless read much of both the Old
and New Testaments in my own personal search for truth as a teenager and was gradually drawn
toward the persona and teachings of Jesus Christ. I thought I would focus my talk on two experiences
that have had enduring impacts on my life. These happened when I was a
recent convert to the Church. The first experience happened just a week or
so after my baptism. I was invited by a friend of my brother to attend a home worship
service of an Evangelical fellowship. After the meeting, the preacher invited
me to stay and discuss my new religion. Although we shared a common belief in the
divine mission of Jesus Christ, his ensuing attack on the character of Joseph Smith was
ruthless, and as a fifteen-year-old convert, I was unprepared to defend the Church. Along with
my very personal witness from the Spirit regarding the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon, I
discovered that night that the foundational belief upon which we disagreed was the idea that we are
not creatures but actually spirit children of God. As the apostle Paul taught the ignorant Athenians
on Areopagus, “[God] hath made of one blood all nations of men” who “are the offspring of
God." I think this doctrine resonated so deeply with me because I had been raised in a
single-parent household by my father. I had a deep-seated emotional understanding
of Dad’s love for us and gradually came to understand and appreciate intellectually how
much as a single parent he had sacrificed to raise my brother and me. Consequently, although
Dad was far from perfect, it was natural and easy for me to embrace the concept of a loving
Heavenly Father as the great universal God. The second experience occurred some weeks
or months after I had joined the Church. My father was an accomplished musician, a
cellist in the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He could also play a half dozen other musical
instruments and was a very talented painter. One day we were talking, and my agnostic father
posed a question that went something like this: “The Jews claim to be God’s chosen people,
and when I look at their tremendous historical influence in the arts, philosophy, science,
and business—disproportionately large, relative to their small numbers—I have to
acknowledge that it is not an outrageous claim. If the members of The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints are also God’s chosen people, how come I don’t see similar accomplishments
and influence from members of your church?” I responded that the Jews had been
around as a people for over 2,000 years while the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter
Day Saints was not even 150 years old. My father’s assumption—a common expectation—is
that God’s true religion should have the power to transform its believers into people who are not
only loving, compassionate, industrious, and generous—in other words, good—but also people who
are capable of extraordinary achievements in the arts, sciences, sports, business, government,
and religion. For example, the Jewish people can count more than two hundred Nobel Prize
winners—around 20 percent of the total laureates. I believe that President Spencer W. Kimball also
believed this, as he issued a bold declaration and challenge in his 1975 landmark address titled
“The Second Century of Brigham Young University”: I am both hopeful and expectant that out of this
university and the Church Educational System there will rise brilliant stars in drama,
literature, music, sculpture, painting, science, and in all the scholarly graces. This university
can be the refining host for many such individuals who will touch men and women the world
over long after they have left this campus. Putting these two experiences together, I believe
that our loving Heavenly Father has afforded us additional grace through the covenants
we have made. One potential purpose of those covenants is to empower us to become
“brilliant stars” and “refining” agents, should we elect to do so. The gospel should
also engender in us a heightened awareness of and empathy for the suffering of our neighbor.
I have noticed this in my own almost forty-three years of discipleship as I have sought to
know God through studying the scriptures, serving in Church callings, and serving mankind
in other ways. I am a father of four sons and now also a grandfather of three adorable little
boys. I naturally hope that they will emulate the kinds of life choices that have brought
me great happiness. If God is also my Father, shouldn’t He logically have the same hope
and expectations for all of His children? Elder Jeffrey R. Holland taught us one key
truth about how we can come to know God. In his October 2003 general conference
talk entitled “The Grandeur of God.” Of the many magnificent purposes served in the
life and ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ, one great aspect of that mission often
goes uncelebrated. His followers did not understand it fully at the time, and many
in modern Christianity do not grasp it now, but the Savior Himself spoke of it repeatedly
and emphatically. It is the grand truth that in all that Jesus came to say and do, including and
especially in His atoning suffering and sacrifice, He was showing us who and what God our Eternal
Father is like. . . . In word and in deed Jesus was trying to reveal and make personal to us the
true nature of His Father, our Father in Heaven. He did this at least in part because then and now all of us need to know God more fully in order to
love Him more deeply and obey Him more completely. Incidentally, I did a word count
and found that Jesus referred to God by the title of “Father” 180 times in 3
Nephi and 113 times in the Gospel of John—far more frequently than any other title for Deity. After citing the Prophet Joseph Smith in Lectures
on Faith and also the Savior’s great Intercessory Prayer in John 17, Elder Holland went on to
emphasize that having a correct knowledge of God’s character and attributes is essential in order for
us to be able to exercise the kind of faith that leads us to eternal life. Hence, the Savior taught
in the great Intercessory Prayer that “this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only
true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." Elder Holland also highlighted two
scriptural examples from Moses 7 and Zenos’s allegory of the olive trees in
Jacob 5. Both of these accounts feature a despondent Heavenly Father weeping over
His violent and corrupted children. How wonderful it is to think of God as our Father,
endowed with a glorified body and passions, among them the great emotions of love
and empathy—and we are all His children! I love how Alma taught the people of Gideon
that Jesus would purposely “take upon him[self] the pains and the sicknesses . . . [and]
infirmities” of humanity so “that he [would] know according to the flesh how to succor his people”
and become “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” for our sakes. I wonder what these
scriptures imply about the need for disciples to emulate the Savior and acquaint themselves
with the suffering of our fellow men and women. Intriguingly, the master of the vineyard
in Jacob 5:49 seemed to test the empathy of the servant when he proposed, “Let us go
to and hew down the trees of the vineyard and cast them into the fire, that they shall
not cumber the ground of my vineyard, for I have done all.” This was followed by a question
that the master had asked twice previously: “What could I have done more for my vineyard?” The servant then issued this
plea: “Spare it a little longer." The allegory of the olive trees is especially
interesting to me since I am a crop geneticist. My wonderful colleagues, students, and I study two
crops and their relationships with wild relatives: quinoa and oats. These crops are totally unrelated
to olive trees, and the three originate in different hemispheres, but quinoa, oats,
and olive trees share two characteristics: first, they were domesticated from invasive weeds; and, second, they tend to revert
back to their ancestral weedy forms. It is interesting to me that the “tame”
or domesticated olives that produce large, edible fruit are frequently produced
by grafting domesticated olive branches (the horticultural term is scions) onto wild olive
rootstocks. The wild olive rootstock’s diverse genetics provide the whole plant, cultivated
scion included, with natural resistance to pests, diseases, and environmental stress factors
like drought and extreme heat. Because the wild rootstock is so well-adapted and vigorous, if
it is not carefully tended with regular pruning, shoots that emerge from the rootstock can grow to
choke out the upper scion branches, and the latter will eventually wither away and die. Similarly,
if the upper scion is not carefully pruned, this portion of the tree can become too productive and
heavy, exerting lethal strain on the rootstock. It is not hard to see that
olive trees, oats, and quinoa can serve as wonderful metaphors that represent
people and the importance of human diversity. In plant breeding, we usually refer
to tame plants as being domesticated or “elite,” and although we do frequently refer
to “wild” plants, the preferred term is exotic when we are talking about germplasm (or plant
material) that we intend to use in crop breeding. Of course, in this metaphor the tame (or elite)
germplasm represents the true believers who, following in the footsteps of their Master,
bring forth the “good fruit” of the gospel: acting in kindness and compassion;
engaging in missionary and temple work; creating homes filled with love in
which families are taught by the Spirit; and carrying out many other good works that bless
humanity in a myriad of ways. But couldn’t the good fruit also represent artistic masterpieces
and groundbreaking scientific discoveries? In contrast, the wild (or exotic)
germplasm represents lives devoted to careless self-indulgence,
irresponsibility, violence, and disobedience to the conscience that “lighteth every man
that cometh into the world." Nonetheless, both the lord of the vineyard and the servant
see that there is value in the wild olive trees; they have the potential to
become domesticated or tamed by the refining value of experience because,
after all, they are also children of God. Early on in my career, I received an excellent
real-world lesson in the importance of genetic diversity in crop breeding. In the fall
semester of 1985, during my senior year at BYU, I was surprised one day to receive a recruiting
call from Dr. Don Rasmussen, the director of graduate studies in the plant breeding program
at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He was a Utah State graduate, a native of Ephraim,
Utah, and possibly the most successful malting barley breeder in the United States. In the end, I
decided to attend the University of Minnesota, and the next fall I found myself in Dr. Rasmussen’s
course on breeding self-pollinated crops. Dr. Rasmussen’s primary breeding objectives
were to produce malting barleys of exceptional quality that had high yields and a major
genetic resistance to the two most severe barley diseases at the time. In order to improve
the traits of complex malting and high yield, his program sacrificed genetic diversity;
all of his best varieties—which are still considered the standard for malting quality—were
closely related to each other in an effort to concentrate gene forms (or alleles) for these
two traits. Consequently, he and his colleagues paid little attention to minor diseases that would
occasionally appear and cause minor yield losses. In the spring of 1993, the year after I had
graduated with my doctorate, the upper Midwest experienced its wettest spring in centuries.
The high humidity and cool temperatures created perfect conditions for one of those otherwise
minor barley diseases: Fusarium head scab or head blight. The Fusarium fungus not only reduces grain
yield but also produces a toxin, deoxynivalenol (DON)—commonly called vomitoxin, due to its
effect on hogs that are fed infested grain. That was the first of a series of consecutive
wet years that saw Fusarium head scab rise to become the main disease of barley and
wheat in the great spring cereal production region of the Red River Valley. USDA barley
production statistics from 1987 to 2002 show a dramatic decrease in barley production in this
area that includes eastern North Dakota as well as parts of Minnesota and South Dakota and extends
up into the Canadian province of Manitoba. At the same time, many growers in the
drier western states of Montana, Idaho, and Washington switched from producing
feed to producing malting barley. Almost thirty years later, wheat and barley breeders are still
desperately searching for genetically diverse, exotic sources of resistance to this
disease, and much of the malting barley production in the United States appears to have
permanently relocated to the western states. Our research group at BYU—which is codirected by
me and Drs. Jeff Maughan and David Jarvis—is part of an international effort to breed quinoa that
is better adapted to grow throughout the world, including the lowland tropics. Farmers in Africa,
South Asia, and lowland regions of Latin America would like to be able to grow quinoa and feed it
to their children because of its excellent protein and mineral content. This has been especially true
since the quinoa boom began around the year 2005. Elite quinoa strains were bred by the
ancient civilizations of the high Andes Mountains to be productive in very
cold, high-elevation environments. (The main production area is in Andean valleys
and plateaus more than twelve thousand feet above sea level, hundreds of feet higher than the top
of Mount Timpanogos looming above BYU campus!) However, other cultivated quinoas are
present along the narrow coastal strip of south-central Chile, and weedy types (commonly
known as “goosefoot,” due to the peculiar shape of the leaf) can be found throughout lowland regions
of Chile, Argentina, and the United States. Before we started working on the problem,
the North American weedy goosefoot strains were not recognized as valuable exotic
germplasm for breeding lowland quinoa. Early in 2003, just two years into our quinoa
research project, I broke away for a day from a scientific conference in Denver to see what quinoa
production looked like in the United States, visiting the main growing region around Alamosa
in southern Colorado. I visited traditional quinoa production fields in the Bolivian
Altiplano. There, highly diverse quinoa fields were partly infested with the local weedy
goosefoot, and the two often cross-pollinated. Impoverished subsistence farmers who lacked
mechanization would walk through the fields and separately harvest the black-seeded weedy
quinoa, which they often consumed in popped form. The discouraged Colorado grower I met with
complained that every three years they had suffered near-total yield losses due to pressure
from insect pests and excessive heat. From those two experiences, my colleagues and I started
thinking that maybe the solution to failed quinoa production in the United States was to cross
it with lowland-adapted strains of goosefoot. The next year, in 2004, we started collecting
seeds from weedy populations, mostly in Utah and Arizona. Since then, our collection has
expanded to include samples from hundreds of goosefoot populations growing in environments
as diverse as the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts, the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, the Great Plains,
California, and even as far east as the coast of New England. We are now crossing elite quinoas
with these exotic goosefoot strains and producing breeding populations that we share with quinoa
breeders in a dozen countries on four continents. Two years ago, while revisiting the
Colorado quinoa region, this time during the growing season, we noticed that the
production fields had native goosefoot plants growing around their margins. In addition, the
quinoa fields contained many plants showing intermediate characteristics between quinoa and
the weedy form—just like we were accustomed to seeing in Andean quinoa fields in Bolivia and
Peru. The next year we sampled fifteen plants showing varying degrees of goosefoot
characteristics, and after DNA sequence analysis by one of my students, Jake Taylor, and
Drs. Maughan and Jarvis, we confirmed the extensive introgression of goosefoot
genes into this population. Interestingly, many years after the quinoa disaster of 2003,
the problem was no longer failure to set seed; it was now a problem of heterogeneity due to
the natural outcrossing process, which was converting quinoa into an adapted crop through
genetic mixing with its weedy but native cousin. In other words, weedy goosefoot genes had
literally saved the Colorado quinoa industry. Although Andean quinoa has been bred
for a very specific type of environment, within the DNA of quinoa cells is additional
genetic diversity because it is a polyploid—a plant that anciently combined the chromosomes
of two distinct eighteen-chromosome species into a single thirty-six-chromosome plant.
Because of this enhanced diversity, that thirty-six-chromosome ancestor was more vigorous
than its diploid, eighteen-chromosome relatives and was thus able to invade and colonize a much
wider range of habitats—hence its dispersion throughout lowland and highland environments
of North and South America as weedy goosefoot. As humans migrated into the Western Hemisphere,
weedy goosefoot was already adapted to the disturbances that humans made as they cleared
land for hunting camps and, eventually, gardens and villages. Humans started consuming
goosefoot leaves, whose flavor is reminiscent of its cousin spinach, and eventually began
consuming the small but nutritious black seeds. In time, early indigenous farmers
picked out plants having larger, nonblack seeds and began to sow these—and
so the domestication of quinoa began in the Andes and in at least two
other places in ancient North America. If genetic diversity is so
important for crop survival, what about in human beings? While the genetic
answer to this question is a resounding yes, I believe that the cultural answer to this
question is also yes. With Dr. Len Novilla, a BYU professor of public health, I cochair our
college’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee. We have reviewed carefully executed organizational
and leadership literature from around the country. The data—including from such reputable sources
as the Harvard Business Review—indicate that businesses and other organizations having
ethnic- and gender-diverse leadership structures consistently outperform more homogeneous ones. It
was amazing to witness the parade of cultural and ethnic diversity purposely displayed in the Sunday
morning session of April 2021 general conference! Clearly our Church leadership recognizes
the value of our varied ethnic and cultural backgrounds and experiences.
We will become even more successful as our leadership reflects the ever-diversifying
landscape of international Church membership. In returning to Dad’s question about the
accomplishments of the Jews relative to members of our church, is it possible that the difference
in output among our two groups of believers can be traced to diversity? In looking at
the history of the Jews, we see a religiously and ethnically cohesive group of people who
initially migrated from or were driven out of their Near Eastern homeland into tumultuous
and often perilous multicultural environments in places like central and eastern Europe,
Iberia and Morocco, the eastern Mediterranean, southern Arabia, and Ethiopia. We call
this the Jewish Diaspora; appropriately, this word comes from a botanical term, diaspore,
referring to the seed and all associated plant tissue that is necessary for successful separation
from the mother plant. Within these diverse environments arose distinct Ashkenazi, Sephardi,
Mizrachi, Temani, and Falasha Jewish cultures. Contrast that historical experience with the
early Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. By revelation we basically did the exact opposite; we fled persecution in the eastern United
States for the relative seclusion of the western wilderness. Although the Church sent
missionaries out to many parts of the world, for the first century we brought the converts
back for assimilation here in Zion. Consequently, although the Church gathered tens of thousands
of Scandinavian converts here to Utah—comprising 16 percent of Utah’s population in
the 1900 census—the descendants of Swedes and Norwegians who I lived with for
six years in Minnesota seemed to have a stronger affinity for their multicultural
roots than their cousins here in Utah. This is in spite of our very strong dedication
to temple and family history work in the Church. I wonder if one result of the physical gathering
to Zion is that we sometimes conflate the prevalent Intermountain West culture in which
we live here in Utah and southeastern Idaho with an official “Church culture,” expecting that
our converts from multicultural and international backgrounds will adopt the cultural patterns
here as evidence of their complete conversion. In last October’s general conference, Elder William K. Jackson of the Seventy spoke
of a universal “culture of Christ.” He noted: [The culture of Christ] comes from the
gospel of Jesus Christ, which is eternal and explains the why, what, and where of our
existence. (It is inclusive, not exclusive.) . . . The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is
hardly a Western society or an American cultural phenomenon. It is an international church, as it
was always meant to be. . . . New members from around the world bring richness, diversity,
and excitement into our ever-growing family. For BYU to fulfill the prophetic hope,
expectation, and challenge—the gauntlet thrown down forty-five years ago by President Kimball—and
fully become a “refining host” of “brilliant stars,” I believe we need to welcome and nurture
the expanding diversity of our multicultural American and international brothers and sisters
in all of their ethnicities, cultures, languages, and life experiences. The very same Savior who
beckoned us to “know . . . the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom [He] hast sent,” in almost
the same breath prayed to our Father “that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and
I in thee, that they also may be one in us." Moreover, I believe that our Father in Heaven
expects us to develop this unity and cultivate our diverse talents and abilities so that
we can be counted among the “few” servants in the allegory of the olive trees charged
with pruning and edifying His vineyard He has spared the vineyard, as well
as all of us, for this sacred purpose. I am deeply grateful for the two young
missionaries, Elders Leavitt and Jenkins, who knocked on my door so many years ago. I
testify that the gospel of Jesus Christ they taught me is true. I believe that Jesus Christ is
our atoning Savior who perfectly exemplified the qualities of His, and our, loving Heavenly
Father. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
