Colours of Love – Yellow… delighting
(Sunday Lent 4)
Trevor Burt
Marian and I had just moved into the mountain area of north eastern
Victoria, to a place called Shelley. In the Forestry house we could look
out our front window at Mt Kosciusko and the Snowy Mountains, a stunning
view. Our first night there and we didn’t have time to put the curtains
up. Early in the morning our room was filled with a strange red glow. We
raised our faces over the window sill to see a most spectacular red
sunrise over Mt Kosciusko. It was breathtaking. It was the first of many,
many delightful experiences we had in that special place.
Our colour of love this week is yellow, symbolising delighting. Warm sun,
bright light, sandy beach, large vibrant sunflowers… yellow in our world
incites joy, positive feelings, activity, energy, reckless abandon.
People who send out questionnaires and response forms take advantage of
the positive feelings generated by this bright colour – surveys have found
that more yellow forms are returned than forms of any other colour. Have
you noticed that councils have yellow rubbish bins in their main streets -
people are more likely to use bins if they are yellow. Maybe we should
paint St Columba’s yellow. At least we’ll be noticed, that’s for sure. As
from next week our collection plates will be yellow. Now this is out of
the bag, all the young boys who want to draw attention to themselves will
want yellow cars instead of red ones.
Yellow (or gold) is the colour of the celebrating seasons of the church
year – Christmastide and Eastertide. In the weeks before these seasons the
colour is violet, as it is now in Lent, a season of deep, pensive
reflection. The complement of violet is yellow, the colour of celebration
and joy. The two seasons fit together well.
“Rejoice in the Lord, you righteous, and be glad”, says the psalmist
(32:12); “and shout for joy, all you that are true of heart.”
When something good happens in our lives we can’t help but rejoice, and
that joy is magnified when we share it with others.
In that remarkable parable in Luke’s Gospel, the parable of the lost son,
Jesus gives us an insight into the joy in heaven when we return to God.
Sometimes called the parable of the excessive father, we begin to
understand the nature of God in this profoundly challenging story. This
story is usually paraded as a story of rewarded repentance, but as we will
see, I think it is more about the unconditional, excessive love of the
father.
Imagine one of your children demands their half of the inheritance and
takes off. So you can see that both the father and the brother would be
rightly grief stricken and perhaps justifiably angry, although we are not
told how they respond in the parable. The son is effectively disinherited.
To seal that view the son works with pigs which, if he were still a Jew,
would make him ritually unclean. In Jewish culture he is as good as dead.
In utter poverty he comes to his senses. He doesn’t have remorse for the
pain and suffering he may have caused. Rather he hatches a plan to get his
father to receive him as a servant. You may be familiar with the kind of
plea: “Oh, woe is me, I’ve been so bad, so terribly, awfully naughty, so
abominably, horrendously atrocious, how about giving some sympathy to this
miserable, pathetic sinner.”
Now this is where the story has a twist that would have enraged its
original hearers. The father comes out to greet the son. This is unknown
in Jewish culture, where the son comes to the father, not the other way
around. That is a sign of how loving the father is. What happens next is a
big challenge for a commonly held view of God in the Christian church –
and that is that we need to be sorry in order to be forgiven. Contrary to
this view, we discover that before the son gets to complete his woeful
speech the father not only embraces his son, but throws a great party in
celebration. “We had to celebrate and rejoice” says the father, “for this
son was lost and now he is found!”
As I reflect on the story I find myself entering into the exuberant joy of
the father, and I find myself rejoicing and delighting that we have such a
God whose love is so excessive and unconditional. We cannot help but
delight in the Lord, and I can’t help sharing my delight with you.
If you look up the word delight in a concordance you will see that it
appears most often in the psalms. Nothing surprising about that. The
psalms are a great repository of songs of delight in God – nearly every
psalm celebrates and rejoices in God one way or another. But what may be
surprising is that most of the references are to delighting in the Law.
Now our parliaments and councils and synods are creating laws all the time
but I don’t see many street parties celebrating this fact. So what is
going on here?
The kind of law the psalmist is delighting in is Torah. Torah is not a set
of statutes or rules, but rather a way of life based on teachings that
guide us through life. So the psalmist delights in the way of life
enhanced by the teachings. We have just unfolded a way of life with an
understanding of God as unconditional and excessive love-giver, and that
wonderful insight wells up in feelings of delight.
Celebration is central to our lives as human beings. We love parties. We
love presents and food. We love telling and talking. Here in St Columba’s
we love celebrating our birthdays and anniversaries and achievements. It
is affirming and it helps to bond us together as a community. When Marian
and I were in Bali earlier this year there seemed to be continuous
celebrations going on – colourful clothes and luscious food and ornate
decorations and happy people, joyful gracious people. Such a peaceful
people. Perhaps we should all go to parliament house with placards like
“delighting not fighting”. Or, “bombing is wrong, delighting is right.”
Or, “change the mood with party food!” Or, “Let’s celebrate, not
castigate.”
In the first Canberra election some 15 years ago one member was elected
from the “Party, party, party” Party, but I don’t think he lived up to
expectation.
We were made to delight in God. So how can we delight in God more?
The simple answer is to do more of the things that already bring delight
to us. Now I’m going to have to qualify this a bit. I love cream biscuits;
I delight in God for the invention of cream biscuits. But that doesn’t
mean I should eat more biscuits. That would not have a delightful effect
in the longer term. I also notice that eating cream biscuits has a very
short term positive effect. The good feeling doesn’t last long at all. If
such individualistic and self-focussed activities don’t give a lasting
delight, then what does?
It turns out that delighting others is a sure-fire way of experiencing
delight yourself, a delight that lasts. Now there is no point me cooking
meals for others because I don’t seem to achieve a look of delight on
other people’s faces when they eat my cuisine. Quite the opposite. It
wasn’t delight in people’s eyes I saw when I brought the burning popcorn
into the church some months ago, it was alarm.
But I do get delight when I help people in some way. I experience delight
when I help someone in need and see peace come over their face, when I
help a person get through a tough patch and see a smile emerge at the end,
when I preach something meaningful and I see people’s eyes light up. I
light up with delight when I tell others of my positive experiences and
the delight grows as I see them sharing in my joy.
Our journey through Lent, the Colours of Love, has brought us through a
time of reflection and growing to a point we can look back and delight in
God in how we have begun to transform into the likeness of Jesus. We still
have some important things to reflect on before our Lenten journey is
complete, but this week we delight. What do you delight in? What can you
give praise to God for? How about taking some time out each day this week
to delight in those thankful events that are happening in your life. Begin
each day by praising God and see what difference it makes.
A delightful story to finish. Two poor people were sitting on the kerb of
a street when an obviously wealthy young man pulled up in a bright, yellow
sports Mercedes complete with all the gadgets and accessories you could
ever want. One of the poor people remarked, in the rich man’s hearing,
“Wow! I wish I had a car like that.” Without hesitation the rich man said,
“Your wish is granted, here are the keys. The car is yours.”
Utterly amazed the other poor person remarked, “Wow! I wish I had a
brother like that.”
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Wednesday, 16 June 2004