(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.
