Does our faith enable us to face forward in life - or do our doubts and fears keep us looking backwards over our shoulders, expecting the worst to befall us? This week we consider what message we send to the world when our faith is so fragile that we cannot even trust God to be with us.
Like the disciples, sadly we, too, lack a daily trust in God's continued presence in our lives. Despite the fact that we are supposedly a Pentecost people, living with the knowledge of the resurrected and risen Christ's reconciling power, we still twitch and tremble at the sign of even the slightest ripples. Frightened of what might befall us if we would undertake any large ventures or attempt any distant crossings, we content ourselves with playing at activism in tiny mud puddle issues.
In the summer of 1990 Binney & Smith, the makers of Crayola crayons, retired eight colors from their 64 crayon box and replaced them with eight brighter, bolder colors. The colors inducted in the Crayola Hall of Fame include raw umber, maize, lemon yellow, blue gray, violet blue, green blue, orange red and orange yellow. The new shades introduced include such postmodern colors as Cerulean, Vivid Tangerine, Royal Purple, Teal Blue, Fuchsia, Jungle Green, Dandelion, and Wild Strawberry.
The reaction on the part of adults to the change has been swift, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, always objecting. The "Save Raw Umber Society" gathered signatures. A Virginia woman started the National Campaign to Save Lemon Yellow. The Raw Umber and Maize Preservation Society boasts the acronym RUMPS. Pastors have delivered sermons calling for letter writing campaigns against the change.
The most intelligent responses came from kids. One young boy wondered why the company simply didn't make a box of 72 crayons instead of 64. And Ebony Faison wrote to Crayola makers and asked for help. "Raw umber is the color of me. When ever I draw me, I use raw umber. What color should I color now?"
But adults seem to be much more concerned than the children. It is as if the validity of treasured childhood memories depends upon these rainbow hues never changing. Our fears of adult life, of the decisions we must make, the roads we must follow or avoid, do not depend on the world remaining the same as we have always known it.
Don't wake Jesus up! This is not the way for the church to recover its identity as a "peculiar people." The Spirit of God reaches every generation differently, and God's spirit can use the more postmodern colors of Vivid Tangerine as easily as the more modern look of Raw Umber. We must trust that God is with us in the colors of all the seasons of our lives.
Whether we are moving under the banner of "schismogenesis" (the term cultural anthropologist Gregory Bateson uses to describe the tendency of societies to move toward breakdown and collapse) or "ecclesiogenesis" (Leonardo Boff's word for the movement of structures towards greater Christlikeness), there will be storms arising to upset the boat. But the meaning of "salvation" is precisely this ability to face the future in confidence and trust. "What is salvation? To be delivered from everything mean, low, despicable, selfish, cringing, fearing in my whole nature, that I may stand humble yet bold and free before the Universe of God, because God knows me and I know God. That is salvation!" (These are the words of the English eighteenth-century poet and novelist George MacDonald, Getting to Know Jesus [New Canaan, Conn.: Keats Publishing, 1980], 145).
Circulating throughout the church today is a package of seeds called "Peace Seeds." Six different colored pods are found in the package, along with the following instructions: "To grow a peaceful soul and a peaceful world, sow these seeds ...
White - Forgiveness for someone who has wronged you.
Red - Prayers for someone you dislike.
Green - Hospitality to a stranger.
Yellow - Acceptance of someone who sees things differently.
Blue - Kindness in the face of rude
Pink - Generosity toward someone less fortunate.
The new Crayola crayons can suggest to us the presence of still other color-coded qualities we need to cultivate. Historical theologian David F. Wells illustrates how different cultures order and formulate information by citing how "English-speaking people divide the rainbow into six colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet (some add indigo). People from Telugu, on the other hand, divide it into two: hot colors (red, orange, and part of yellow) and cold colors (the rest of yellow, green, blue, violet). They use adjectives to make finer distinctions" (Turning to God: Biblical Conversion in the Modern World [Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1989], 73)
Travel through the postmodern world in which we live today requires both these "hot" and "cold" colors. Interestingly, in the emerging postmodern culture with its desire to be "cool," to "chill out," we are seeing more "cold" colors catching on than "hot." The following virtues seem to be in particular need during these latter days of the twentieth century.
Hot Colors:
Fuchsia - Compassion. Everywhere one looks from the inner city homeless to the tribal Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, which according to a recent edition of the Boston Globe, has living conditions as bad as in any third World country, there is an increasing need for compassion.
Vivid Tangerine - Joy. Count how many times Jesus uses this word at the Last Supper in John's Gospel.
Cold Colors:
Cerulean - Reconciliation. As Christ has reconciled the world to God, we must practice reconciling ourselves to one another.
Royal Purple - Honor. "Where there is no shame, there is no honor" (African proverb). Jeremiah 6:15 reads "They acted shamefully, they committed abomination; yet they were not ashamed, they did not know how to blush" (NRSV). Honor presupposes being able to blush. We have all but forgotten how to blush anymore.
Teal Blue - Faithfulness. Mark's Gospel is right. Faith, fidelity and trust are intimately related. If we genuinely have faith in God and the reconciling activity in Jesus, then our lives should reflect a confident, trusting calmness in that presence. A woman writing for the daily New York Times described her marital bond as "the most basic commitment of all, that one of us, in Emily Dickinson's words, will 'shut the other's gaze down."'
Jungle Green - Oneness with Creation. Perhaps the reason Jesus slept so serenely during the raging storm was his sense of oneness with all of the natural world.
Dandelion - Humility. Paul's words in 2 Corinthians 5: 18-6:2 stress that while his ministry is one of reconciliation he is still reliant upon those who hear his message freely choosing to accept its truth. The freedom to accept or reject Christ's reconciling power is still in the hands of each and every individual.
Wild Strawberry - Passion. Jesus decried tepidness. The disciples' timidity in the storm evoked sharp words from Jesus. In this week's epistle Paul calls himself an "ambassador," and as such puts the burden for getting God's message across to humanity squarely on his own shoulders. Such a mission takes passionate commitment.