When "Colourblind" Is Still Blind

(And why Jesus came to make the "colourblind" see the full spectrum of His image)

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You've heard it. I've heard it. You've even said it. Some of you have said it to me.

"I don't see colour."

It's supposed to be an encouragement - a declaration of equality. "You're just like me, just with different skin." 

And at one level it is. At another, it's just blindness.

I grew up in a church of people like me - East Asians, mostly, out of South China in the waves of immigration that preceded and succeeded the Communist Takeover.

Some were born here, bred here, like my father and myself. Some came to Australia and converted to the faith from their ancestral spiritual leanings, like my mother and two of her brothers. And some came from Christian families out of Asia - a great panoply of believers by way of James Hudson Taylor and CMS and all other missions throughout the Asian archipelago. A wondrous history and culture of believers.

In my childhood, we all worshipped together before the Lord - we were one, we were many, and from all the lands of Asia we came.

But we also understood that our different pathways to come here meant that we thought differently about things. That the Chinese-Malaysian family out of Kuala Lumpur had a different perspective on nation-states than did the brother-in-Christ out of Singapore. That the Indonesian sister had a different experience of bigotry to the Chinese sister. And yet, we were all one family of God worshipping together on a Sunday, sharing meals together at social events on weekends, calling each other during the week.

This is what it means to "see colour".

My experience of being an Australian Christian differs to a white-passing Australian Christian's experience. My understanding comes from my incarnation as a non-white body, female and Asian, and the presumptions enfolded into a culture which prizes and prioritises whiteness and maleness, even in the church and often from the pulpit. And so, you might not see me as "different" to you, but my experience of humanity, of society, of culture is entirely different to yours.

I've experienced racism. Both the nasty kind and the nice kind.

The nasty kind is easy to deal with. But the nice kind? That really cuts. And it's difficult to explain, because the nice racists can also be nice people, who don't realise that they're part of the problem.

Maybe you think this doesn't make a difference - after all, the gospel is the gospel, right? And yet Paul's teaching is both very specific to the cultures he was writing to - some of them culturally Jewish, some of them Greek, or Macedonian, or some of them a mish-mash of whoever had been baptised in the household when Paul came - their hang-ups, their idealisations, the way they looked at the world. "The Jews want to see fantastic signs and wonders, and the Greeks think Knowledge Is Everything, but we preach a Christos Yesous ('saviour' in both language groups) - who the Romans consider a criminal!" 

Paul lived in a cultural melting pot as much as we do, and closer to it, I think. So reading him with the lens of a 'melting pot culture' is surely a better way to think of his teachings than the monochrome culture of eras past?

I've attended Anglican churches since I was 18. Moved away from home, joined a local church that was Anglican, ended up sticking with the Anglican denominational churches since. Solid teaching, good people, a certain type of worship and service and expectation... Those things suit me, brought up in Sydney Evangelicalism as I was (my childhood church was in the Sydney Evangelical union of churches) but they may not suit someone from another background. It's not for everyone, and sometimes more important than the particularity of the teaching and the preaching is the ability of the congregant to connect with the pastor who is their church's spiritual guide week after week. 

For someone of a non-white background who needs this, they're not going to find it in the Anglican church. A high priest who is able to sympathise with our sorrows and struggles... Not so much at the (very excellent) church I attend. That *is* okay, you know. The reason there are so many churches done so many ways is so that the broad and multitudinous People Of God can find somewhere that they can be comfortable in...before they go out and work on their discomfort.

When I was young, I imagined that there was something like a 'waiting room' for heaven. You know, after you die, while you're waiting for the judgement day, we all get around to talking to the people who are also waiting for Jesus to come again and get to know each other. (Look, I could only think in linear time in those days, and I'm an ambivert. Getting to know and chat with people sounds like a lot of fun to me, while to others it probably sounds like a version of eternal torment.) 

These days, I think heaven is going to be an eternity of not only meeting other believers from all times and spaces, but learning their languages and praise songs, sitting in their cultures and hanging out, worshipping God the way they worship God, loving each other the way they were taught to love their neighbours. Only, you know, perfectly. 

I do not want an eternity of Anglicanism. Apologies to any and all ministers I have known and listened to and served under and been ministered to by! But, yeah, nah.

A whole world history of new culture and new practices, of people who have new depths to give the gospel and the preachings and teachings of the ages? A whole new understanding of who God is, of the Father, of the Christ, of the Holy Spirit? Of who my brothers and sisters are? Of who we were made to be in His image? All of us, varied and different, through the aeons, from Rahab running her inn and wondering at the God who welcomed a non-traditional woman into his people, to Selina who lives in a world where she can be non-traditional in so many ways Rahab couldn't have imagined and still not stand out?

WOOHOO. Sign me up, for lo, I am there!

And that's why "colourblind" is such a problem to me. Because to not see the variety, the wondrous expanse of God's creativity in making people different, in guiding our cultures, in enabling all of us to come before him dressed in robes of the finest grace? Is, to me, to be truly "blind" to the Kingdom of God - an empire not defined by borders of geography, but by those who open the borders of their heart to a God who requests entry, and who accept Him and his multitudinous family with Him.

All the 'little children' of God's world.

belonging

So, I was made to feel like I don't belong, among people with whom I'm going to have to spend eternity.

And it's likely to happen again.

I've known for some time that at least one woman at church doesn't like me. There was another who's since left the church. And in the last couple of months, I've added a third one who doesn't speak to me. Now we have at least a fourth and her husband.

Which is rough, because I did think they were friends.

I've never been at a church where anyone followed up after I left. I don't expect my current church would either. One vanishes and is never seen again. It's happened with other people I know, it is likely to happen to me.

Online, I mused that at least I'd go to another church. Start over, sure. But also: I'm never going to fit in - I'm the wrong sort of person for fitting in with women-from-church. Either I'm competition for the more individual ones, and the ones who aren't competitive with me aren't interested in my life.

A stranger offered me grace, though. Friends - ex-Christians, some of them - said it really sucked. A number of them want to meet up during the holiday season.

It did suck. It does. I don't know. Should I bother hanging around with people who can dismiss me so easily? In a great and terrible irony, I've never faced this issue among non-Christians. Only in the church. Is that because I have unreasonable expectations of Christians?

I did point out my exclusion. Not one person apologised. Not one of them has actively checked in with me. Some are generally inclusive. But from the others? Dead silence.

I did like the affirming church I visited a few times the other year. Spotted a friend who was in the Pride Parade with her church, went along to see what it was like. Oddballs, quirky, queer. I've never found it strange that alphabet gender-and-sexuality folks dislike the suburban middle-class church - the suburban middle-class church sure doesn't like them. Heck, it doesn't even like me! And I pass as cishet, with a solid knowledge of the bible and a firm faith.

Plus I've always known I'm on the fringes of social acceptability. Not-a-wife, not-a-mother, men don't talk to single women - and when they do, they're not actually interested in holding a conversation, they'll just answer your questions about them and never ask them back. It took eight years for me to be invited to regular things. And I know perfectly well I'm still on the outside, a johnny-come-lately who isn't known or trusted, and is a cat that walks alone. I'm not comfortable, and for some people, that's not something they want to include at their table.

Bit rough having it shoved in my face, mind.

I don't expect redeemed behaviour from the unredeemed.

Strangely, though, too often in the matter of community, the redeemed are less welcoming or inclusive than the unredeemed.

The Deaths of unChristian Christians

Do we defend Christian deaths over non-Christian deaths?

As in the people who profess Christianity (never mind their actions, so long as their "anti-" politics align with ours) are sacrosanct and not to be touched? We should value their lives (to be rescued, given refuge, grieved, held precious) over non-Christians?

There's an attitude of "well, when they target a Christian, they target all of us" in our thinking. Anyone who publically claims to be a Christian must and should be defended. Even if they don't show love. Even if they don't preach peace. Even if they're individually a rather repellent person who we wouldn't really want to have a beer with, or let babysit our kids. They're a Christian and therefore we have to be sad/angry/outraged that they're dead.

Are we angry because a "good Christian man" has died? Or are we scared because we think we're becoming targets?

Because there were Christians in Gaza too. Which has been bombed down to the bones. Many of the people in the US who've died through police or public violence in the last decade were Christians, or, at least, church-going. The fact that they didn't publically speak about their faith in ways that we can track on social media...well...are you going to apply that to your fellow churchgoers? Or only to the ones who you resonate with?

Was Kirk a "good Christian man" because he was a good Christian man, or was he a "good Christian man" because you see yourself in his life? Because you idolise the aggressive and argumentative style of "gospel" that embodies the Reformed Evanglicalism so prevalent in the modern western faith? Because you wish you were the kind of guy who argues with people a decade younger than you in such a way so that they lose their temper and you come out looking cool and authoritative? Because saying "the world needs Jesus" is easier than saying "maybe we need to treat people like they're essentially decent people"?

(This is where Calvinism becomes a stumbling block; because sin may make us untenable to God, but people need to be far less demanding when it comes to us simply being human among each other.)

Is it truly godly anger that drives us? Or just self-interested fear? I generally learn towards self-interested fear when it comes to humanity. 99.999999999% of us are not very godly. And the remaining miniscule percentage is not anyone on social media, because if you were more godly, you'd be somewhere else where there is no social media, giving your life to something other than outrage posting (or, indeed, social media posting at all, which is inherently performative and self-interested).

Ever noticed how it's mostly Christian men on social media, making posts? That's because their far more godly wives are out there doing the work and don't have the time for doing more than reading through their feed and liking pictures of places they haven't been (yet). And that is also probably why God kept me from being married.

And here's a thought. What about "bad Christian men" dying?

In the last few years, a number of Christians have died whose lives turned out to be rather less godly than Christians like to consider. Or their fruit was often rotten and worm-filled. Ravi Zacharias. James Dobson. Charlie Kirk. Just to name a few.

There's a lot of "well, they were a Christian, so the evil they did didn't matter", and a lot of "well, they did evil, so they can't have been a Christian". And in the midst of it, I've found a new strain of thought burgeoning: that we hope they found a God in His heaven who was beyond their limited comprehension of Him on Earth, and that they understand the bindings they put on others in being able to meet God, and that they understand what they have done.

heaven and hell and all that's in-between

The Sydney Evangelical church appears to be doubling down on the 'turn or burn' style of evangelism. It's not that it isn't a truth that we are called to the kingdom, but I feel like the risk of approaching it as such is alienating in a way that too many Sydney Evangelicals don't quite get, as alien as they are to modern culture and modern mindsets.

To the SydEvang, it's all about "they want to live a sinful lifestyle" and "they're rejecting God's plan for them".

In one of my political groups today, there was a discussion about how young people seem to have no idea about how the political system worked, and that the Governor General Sam Mosteyn wanted kids to learn about civics again. Someone mentioned the failing faith in institutions that our country and other western democracies are experiencing, and I noted in that discussion that it doesn't really matter how much you teach people about civics, if they feel that civic institutions are not benefiting them.

Like, sure, if you have a solid income, or good savings, or generous and willing parents with property, then sure the civic institutions may - on balance - benefit you. But if you're up-and-coming, or struggling to find work, or have accessibility issues, then the political institutions of our country have cut and trimmed and snipped and shaved and belittled and demeaned the people who rely on any kind of civic services - or even just the people who weren't born under a fortunate star.

Why bother engaging with a government who only seems to be working for people who aren't you? If the system appears rigged, the options are to rip the whole thing down, or to opt out, not to play a game where it's obvious you will never win.

I feel like this is also a problem with 'the church' broadly speaking.

Because so far as the average Australian is concerned, 'the church' doesn't care about them. 'The church' advocates for no electoral responsibility. It does not say that Centrelink is insufficient to live on. It does not note that then NDIS is designed to be bureaucratic so that it shoves people off. To the average Australian, 'the church' doesn't give a shit about you if you're gay or poor, if you can't put money in the plate, if you don't already act like a Christian. 'The church' as a body is a useless bit of happy clappy that doesn't improve the collective life of our society in any way.

Every Christian reading this will promptly protest that this is a vile slander, and the church runs charities (they don't, the charities are organisations outside of 'the church'), that it contributes to community life (it might, but it's unlikely to be doing so in any way that meaningfully impacts the community), that Christians do good works in the community...

Ah, and here we come to the crux.

"Christians" do good works in the community, but it is rarely with the full weight of a church behind it.

Christmas carols, yes. Perhaps an Easter service?

When was the last time 'the church' encouraged a protest...oh, the NSW bill about abortion services being available to more women across NSW? Apparently the only thing worth 'the church' getting behind. Somewhat like the donation that the Anglican diocese made to the 'No to Marriage Equality' campaign?

If the church is only self-interested - and yes, anti-abortion and no-marriage-equality are seen as 'self-interested' by outsiders - then how is it different to any other secular or other-religion community out there? If we are only advocating for the (largely theoretical) issues of the church, then what value does 'the church' have to outsiders? And these days, everyone is an outsider to the church, except for the small numbers of people who are regulars within it.

When was the last time 'the church' encouraged a protest about something that was 'moral' biblically, but 'controversial' within the Sky-After-Dark, anti-woke, largely capitalistically-minded congregation? eg. immigrants, poor people, disability, political integrity? (yes, political integrity is controversial within churches where the underlying belief is that "if you are a Christian, you will vote [x]" even if such sentiments are never explicitly voiced)

Biblically moral but congregationally controversial? Oh, that's a "conscience matter". But somehow the question of early abortion (before reasonable viability) or late-term abortion (for life-threatening medical reasons) is not a conscience matter? I have known families who made the choice to keep the child until it died of natural causes, and of families who had to make the choice to terminate the pregnancy early in the hope that a later pregnancy might be viable as the first was not. But everywhere along the timeline of pregnancy, there are Christians who have made choices - good ones, bad ones, morally approvable ones, and morally unconscionable ones. Were they good choices? Maybe not. But nowhere else do we so ferociously refuse to allow people to make bad choices, even when there are lives at stake.

IDK. I think we're stuck in a 19th Century methodology of preaching the gospel, with no idea of how to break out of it. And no, making it only 'the social gospel' isn't the way, but there's got to be a midway point between "you should be afraid of hell" and "it's all about being nice".

thoughts about somebody that I (used to) know

That moment of realisation when you understand that people who are nice to you at church or in Christian contexts actually dislike you.

Oh, they're nice because it's socially required of them, but they have zero interest in pursuing the relationship.

They might not kick you out into the darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth, but they'd be just as happy if you vanished and never darkened their doorway again.

love through relationships

I spent Saturday night in the midst of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, at a church that opened its gates and doors to the people going along, providing refreshments and space, in the name of Jesus and for the love of Him.

I was so glad to be out there as part of the body of Christ, offering assistance and space. And yeah, there were conversations had about faith and belief, but mostly just smiles and inquiries, offers of water, chai, pancakes, and sausage sangers.

There are people who will disdain this as "affirmation" and others who will sneer that it's "propaganda".

Is it affirmation to succour the humanity - hunger, thirst, exhaustion, sensory overload - of those we disagree with?

Is it propaganda to put our best foot forward when we have the resources and desire to?

I've wanted conservative churches in Sydney to put their actions where their teachings are for a while, particularly in a space that challenges us more than it comforts us. Not typical "evangelism" stuff but hospitality and kindness, "living lives of such generosity and love that even the pagans will see you are different and rejoice" as Paul once said.

I don't want the word of God to be used as a bludgeon. I want it to be living water, satisfying a thirst most people don't even realise they have. But you can't force it down their throats and expect them to be grateful. That's not how this works.

"How do you show Christian love if you aren't also judging them according to God's standards?"

It's a question that most Christians wrestle with in one form or another. Most of the people in my circles tend to fall on the side of "if you do anything with them without emphasising their sinfulness and their need for God, then you are failing them and failing God, and failing your Christian calling". In the extreme version, it means you don't have gay friends or trans friends. You don't eat with sinners. You don't break bread with the fallen and not-getting-up.

I mean, it's okay if they're socially "civilised": you know, they would fit into the church so long as they never opened their mouth or had to make a statement of faith.

On Saturday night at the 'open grounds' in the midst of the Mardi Gras, a young earnest Evangelical said she didn't want to ask people how they were enjoying the night because if they said 'yes' then she was enabling their sin and making it seem like it was okay for them to be sinning.

Which mostly leads me to the reminder that our version of 'sin' is entirely too small.

Fucking someone outside of wedlock? Sin!

Kissing someone of the same sex because of attraction? Sin!

Enjoying a celebration that's set up around a sinful lifestyle? Sin!

But...

Bitching at a family member before you left the house this morning? Not!Sin!

Ignoring the homeless person with their hand out when you walked past them on the way to work? Not!Sin!

Making snide comments about someone who doesn't have the ability to hit back? Not!Sin!

Our version of 'sin' is limited to the things we do, rather than the way we interact with people, rather than the way we interact with our fellow image-bearers, rather than our attitude to existence. It's a very small version of sin, which makes it easy to decry those things that other people do while ignoring the things that we do. And even those of us who know that sin is an attitude and not merely actions often forget and try to ensmallen sin so it excludes our own sinful acts and thoughts and omissions.

I've talked about this a lot on here before: the very distinct insistence that we have to tell people the gospel... And yes, we do. But picking the time and the moment, backing it up with a relationship, being about more than just the words? I think we have too many words and not enough of the other stuff. We live in a time of words and wordiness, of speeches and comments, of shortform videos and long bursts of information. People don't want our words anymore.

They want our love - our actions, our kindness.

Can we tell the truth kindly? Yes. But also, it requires first a relationship. God does all His best work through relationships.

Marty and the Matildas: a Christian perspective

Hey my brothers, Have you ever laughed with another men about how useless women are? About how silly their pursuits and interests are? How pointless it is to encourage them to stretch their wings, to be whatever they can be, to enjoy life and living?

Congratulations. You've just joined The Lot In Sodom Club!

For those of us not up with the passage, let us take a moment: Genesis 13. Lot lives in the city of Sodom, in an honour-shame culture. Sodom's not a nice town; it's the region where you don't want to live because, well, the people ain't neighbourly. And that's putting it nicely. (God has a whole bargaining sequence with Abraham where he's planning to destroy the city for it's inhospitality, and Abraham bargains God down to 5 good men in the city only to find there isn't even that many.)

A couple of messengers from God turn up at Lot's house, and he invites them in as guests. Then the men of the city gather around outside and want to shame these guests by raping them. (Reminder: rape is about power over, not about desire for. People do not commit rape because they so desperately desire the person, they commit rape because it's one of the most effective and devastating ways to show your power over someone.) Anyway, letting your guests be raped by your neighbours goes against the law of guesthood in this culture and Lot is against that. So instead…he offers his daughters for the locals to rape instead of the guests.

People often mistake the bible for a book of heroes; examples of what to do. Instead, it tends to be examples of people keeping from doing awful things and instead doing EVEN MORE AWFUL things - and the whole point is . And we see this here where Lot does something that is perfectly acceptable by his culture to prevent something that is unacceptable by his culture.

A side note that people may not realise: female rape may have been normative throughout the history of human society; that does not make it right in the eyes of God. There are plenty of things that have been normative through the history of human society - slavery, torture, slaughter of your enemies - that does not make it right in the eyes of God.

At this point in the narrative of Lot and his well-intentioned-but-spiritually-bereft-binary-decision-making-process, the messengers from God aren't having with this. They grab Lot and drag him inside and say, "right, what's your exit plan?" They get Lot and his family out of the city

What Sheargold said used to be perfectly acceptable in our culture. Make fun of the women, of their pursuits, of their attempts and failures, of their presence in areas that have often excluded them - through money, through laws, through social exclusion. It is normative throughout the history of human society; that does not make it right in the eyes of God.

So you've laughed at the "silly women" or dismissed something as "the ladies, lord help us". Gotten a laugh out of the guys, felt good in the moment. It's the Marty Sheargold moment of glory. Good laughs, good times, people who get it.

Apparently Mister Sheargold has a fifteen year old daughter. Now, maybe she doesn't have an interest in soccer, in the Matildas, in moving outside of whatever her perception of 'proper and appropriate for a woman' is. But in that moment when Marty likened grown women playing professional sport to the games of little girls, and dissed the watching of both? He did a "Lot of Sodom", metaphorically speaking. He shoved his daughter out the door of his house, into the street, at the mercy of anyone who wanted to take a passing swipe at a cunt - a slag at women, their skills, their discipline, their interests.

"Oh, hey, don't you think that comparison's a bit extreme?"

Well, so is tearing out your eyes to keep from lust, and Jesus Christ (of Nazareth, son of God, son of Man, Messiah, holy one, Prince of Peace, Lamb of God, Emmanuel - all those big and fancy names) said that bit. So maybe a bit extreme might be a helpful way to shock us out of what's socially acceptable so we think about what's spiritually acceptable.

When you're selling respect of your daughters/wife out, in order to feel good with the laughs of your fellow penis-haverers (yes, biological determinism in phrasing), isn't that also selling out…God's vision and version of humanity?

God who made all human beings in Their image ("let us make humanity in our image") and then makes a woman out of man (so…the man/humanity had 'woman' inside him from the start of creation before God creates male and female? Bonus question: if we take the literal reading of Genesis, the woman was already within man when 'man' was first created, does that make the initial Adam an androgyne?) whose people are instructed to give a day of rest to EVERYONE (including those whose work is not acknowledged, or is presumed - "you, your wives, your children, your male and female slaves") who provide examples of women being granted land on their own bloodline cognisation, whose first evangelists were female - a portion of society whose words weren't valid in court, that God's vision and version of humanity?

There's a lot of fuss over who's 'higher ranked' in the social order of gender before God. And not a lot of acknowledgement that this is just Sons oF Thunder And The Disciples Scrapping levels of insignificant before the majestic God - who is a they/them by trinitarian definition, just to tie a few knickers over.