The Color Purple
By Charles Rush
March 9, 2003
John 19: 1-5 and Revelations 18: 12-18
is morning, we lift up the color purple, the color of Lent. The color purple has a more interesting history than you might imagine. Lore holds that purple was invented in the ancient city of Tyre, which still exists in Lebanon.
Tyre
is one of the oldest cities in human history having been in occupation
constantly for over 5000 years. It is a city on two islands right off the coast
of Lebanon. The islands had a fresh water supply and so had both access to land
and a natural defense that was ideal in the ancient world.
There
are oyster beds right around the islands. The Mollusc Murex Trunculus lives in
those beds and this Mollusc produces a purple ink that can be extracted,
reduced and then used as dye. By 2500 b.c. the city of Tyre was already famous
for the purple clothe that they produced and sold around the entire
Mediteranean basin.
In
the early days, dyed cloth was quite a treat as it was very difficult to
extract dyes organically. People then, as now, were willing to pay top dollar
for ‘sumpin funky' in the way of clothes. Purple dye was held to be most
precious, it being really impossible to produce in any quality except in Tyre.
In the Roman empire, we it is said that one gram of purple dye sold for 20 grams
of gold[i]
Very quickly Purple became the standard color of royalty and a status symbol of
wealth. Our text this morning in Revelation is a not so subtle jab at the Roman
Empire, depicted as an overly rich woman that boasts of sumptuous purple
This
morning, we lift up the color purple in the richness of symbolism that it has
for Lent. Our first lesson this morning uses the color of purple in bitter
irony. The soldiers mock Jesus, the would be Jewish Messiah, by putting a
purple robe on him and offering him the purple drink of wine turned to vinegar.
The gospel writers all use this mockery and invert it to give the actual
meaning of spiritual royalty a new definition. Looking back at the actual trial
and crucifixion of Jesus, they understood Jesus to be absorbing all the
humiliation and injustice perpetrated upon him. He endured degredation
according to all those witnessing those events unfold. But really, the gospel
writers suggest, this humiliating degredation was his spiritual exaltaion unto
a coronation that happened upon the Cross when he died. Far from extinguishing
a rabble rousing revolutionary, God used this event as reconciling moment
with humanity, surrounding us with love in a moment of hate, enveloping us in
acceptance in the act of our rejection.
Purple
then starts to take on a different meaning. In Lent we remember the trials that
Jesus went through at the end of his life, not in any kind of morbid way that
seeks to emulate the sufferings of Jesus, like the long history of Catholic
ascetical tradition has done. But in a way that reminds us that we are not
exempt from suffering in this life. Part of our spiritual health is preparing
for the inevitable destiny of having to deal with difficult suffering, to being
open to growing through it, difficult as it is, unjust though it can be,
frustrating to the point of rage that it can become. So we use purple paraments
during Lent to remind us that we will have to face our own spiritual tests,
ultimately our own deaths, and to remember that we can get through them, that
we can actually become more authentic, more dignified, more mature for having
grown through hardship and difficulty.
But
we also lift up purple as a symbol of bruised healing, which is probably
the center pole that holds up the tent of Christian faith. I was moved
by the line in Julie's prayer this morning that remembers purple for ‘wine
spilled across spoiled pages of life'. I think of those times in people's
lives when they are over-stressed and under-resourced, when expectations for ourselves
or our spouses or good friends are woefully disappointed, when there is too
much work and not enough creative space, when people are tired and cross, when
hurtful words are exchanged with the express intention just to wound, possibly
fueled by the abandon that comes from too much alcohol, the hurt that strikes
out offensively, the psychic distance that is created, the barrier of
alienation that follows, the regret, the remorse, the figuring out how to put
this relationship back together.
The
bible calls that process of change- metanoia. It is literally, a
turning around. It is the process of realizing that we don't want to live in a
broken, spilled manner any more and we need to change and do some things to put
our broken relationship back together. Christians are very realistic about the
fact that we are fallen. We screw things up. We break stuff. We are a
problem unto ourselves, as St. Augustine said.
That
is a basic tenet of Christianity. I had an acquaintance, a fairly rough and
tough guy that explained to me that the reason that he didn't go to Church was
because of several people he knew at church were such hypocrites. They
professed one thing on Sunday and they lived quite another way.
I
said to him, ‘that is so quaint. It is so cute the way you are almost
innocently optimistic about human nature, so child-like in your hope for Sunday
morning worship. Pray tell, since you are in the cut throat side of the
advertising business, tell me where this well- spring of bubbling expectation
comes from?'
‘Well',
he responded, ‘the Church ought to practice what it preaches.' Let me be clear
about that. The quest for authenticity and integrity, is just that, a quest.
The Church does not now, nor has it ever believed that it was a collection of
the sanctified righteous. As Deitrich Bonhoeffer regularly reminded us, the
Church is a collection of forgiven sinners. On it's best days, it is
more like a hospital nursing people back to spiritual health, like a greenhouse
nourishing anemic, withered plants back to strength.
People
who don't know me well sometimes worry that they might share something with me
that a Minister would find shocking, that my sensitive moral conscience might
be offended. All this year, I've been around construction guys that curse like
construction guys, and when I walk up from behind them unleashing a long
paragraph of uninterrupted expletives suddenly they become like school boys, “Sorry
Father, I didn't see you.”
I
understand this mentality and the Church bears substantial responsibility for
creating and sustaining an ethos where people do not feel free to bring their
total selves to worship, to speak freely about what is really bothering them
about themselves and work on it. But there is nothing in our faith that
warrants this. Our faith assumes that we sin and that our sin is often a big
issue for us personally and that our particular ways of sinning are
routinely the issues that we have to work through spiritually to mature and
grow.
We Christians ought not to be easily shocked.
Of all religious people, we ought to know more than most the depths of
destruction and alienation to which we are capable of going. More to the point,
of all religious people, we ought to know that these depths are precisely where
God can meet us and help us to heal. We can make moral distinctions on grades
of evil, but we ought to know that when it comes to reconciliation and healing,
for God there appears to be no place for stigma. We just begin where we are. It
may be ugly. It may be complex. It may require spiritual triage. And Ministers,
of all people, ought to have a pretty tough stomach. After twenty years, trust
me, there is very little that I have not heard or heard about.
I
recognize that the Church will probably always have the patina that wants to
give the appearance of our Sunday morning selves. I'm just grateful that there
is an hour in the week when people are willing to nurture their highest selves.
But let's be clear, the real church meets when we gather with others in all
honesty about who we are, both our virtues and our vices. It meets when
we have the trust and the support of those around us to be self-reflective and
transparent. That is what it is all about. This is the Spirit moving in our
midst.
We
worship the God of the second chance. And if the lives of the heroes of the
faith are any guide- David, Abraham, Moses, et. al- God is the God of many
chances. And that is not because God doesn't care about morality, it is because
our spiritual lives are often dramatically defined around the fault lines in
our character that need to be healed. And that process we usually work on all
of our days. So we celebrate the purple of bruises that are healing. That is
the nature of our work.
Finally,
we celebrate purple as passionate living. I'm thinking of that wonderful poem
by Jenny Joseph that speaks to a new found funkiness to color outside the lines
in the third stage of life.
When I am an old woman, I shall
wear purple
with a red hat that doesn't go,
and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on
brandy and summer gloves
and satin candles, and say we've
no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement
when I am tired
and gobble up samples in shops
and press alarm bells
and run my stick along the public
railings
and make up for the sobriety of
my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in
the rain
and pick the flowers in other
people's gardens
and learn to spit.
You can wear terrible shirts and
grow more fat
and eat three pounds of sausages
at a go
or only bread and pickles for a
week
and hoard pens and pencils and
beer nuts and things in boxes.
But now we must have clothes that
keep us dry
and pay our rent and not swear in
the street
and set a good example for the
children.
We must have friends to dinner
and read the papers.
But maybe I ought to practice a
little now?
So people who know me are not too
shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start
to wear purple.[ii]
You
may wonder what the connection is between acknowledging our honest need for
change in our lives and being free enough to wear purple when we are old. It is
indirect but it is there. It is the hope that we just might be lucky enough
to work through our issues and come to grips with ourselves that we start to
have an acceptance of ourselves, a maturity about ourselves and others, and
that might just change our perspective of the world and open that freedom and
passion in the third stage of life.
I
think of a drama that I cannot recall at the moment that moved between a
daughter, a mother, and her grandmother. The grandmother was so wonderfully
sensual, accepting, and able to think outside the box.
The
mother and daughter were in the midst of a struggle concerning the daughters
behavior, her poor choices, the mother's expectations for the child, the mother
projecting some unfulfilled dreams upon the child, the mother trying to control
and mold the girl, the daughter struggling to define herself independently from
her mother. Into this mix, the Grandmother appears from time to time. Her
granddaughter seeks her out.
No
matter how embarrassing the problem that the girl brings to her grandmother,
the grandmother is able to listen with an open mind because, while she
understands social expectations and attaining goals, the Grandmother is beyond
being limited by that vision alone. She is able to describe the dynamics of the
situation for her granddaughter and help her to see what the actual options are
and what is at stake. She doesn't have to tell her what to do. She just wants
to help her granddaughter to think for herself because she knows that is the
real point of it all anyhow. She no longer has to over-steer to get her
granddaughter to move in a certain direction. That is not her job. She has a
new role, a growth role because she is not only trustworthy with people's
secrets and their sensitivities, she also has an authority, a gravitas for her
granddaughter that no one else has. She combines the wisdom that comes from
having lived, failed, and grown through it. She has that ability to let others
be real about the struggles that really concern them without fear of rejection
or condescension.
It
is a very beguiling image. I walked out of the theater and said to my wife,
“she was a vision that made you want to grow old”. My wife said, “Yes, she was
a good witch.” A good witch indeed. And isn't something like that what we all
hope to become on an intimate spiritual level, the person who helps others get
on through what they are actually working on?
It
is a good reminder to the vast majority of us here who are wrapped up in the
second stage of our lives. We are overly aware of the rules of the game, of
succeeding within the confines of those rules, of teaching the rising
generation what the rules are and how to achieve reputation, status, and perq's
by interiorizing the rules and a certain understanding of success.
But,
we also know that with those that are closest to us, that this is not the whole
spiritual story. With those few people that we can feel free with to share our
whole history, often times the actual spiritual issues that are our challenge
are subternanean, but they are really what we are about.
In
her moving novel, The Color Purple, Alice Walker's protagonist, Celia,
works through becoming a good daughter, a good neighbor, a good mother on one
level. But underneath the surface, she is dealing with the spiritual trauma of
being sexually abused by her step-father as a child and being told by him that
this was her plight in life, what she should expect.
Few
of us have such a deep trauma that becomes the central spiritual issue of our
lives, but all of us have spiritual/emotional issues beneath the surface that
actually bring our total life, the public persona and the private persona, into
focus.
We
lift up the color purple to remember that. And to remember that the people we
most cherish, the people that we really want to be with us, are the people that
make us feel comfortable enough, safe enough, strong enough to occasionally
process these subterranean spiritual issues and get understand the congruence
and the disconnect between our private persona and our public persona. That is
real friendship… And that is when the real Church meets. May you be blessed to
be surrounded by such people and to be such a person. May you be privileged and
lucky to color with purple.
Amen.
[i]
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/5709/tyre.html
[ii]
http://www.holistichealthtools.com/purple.html
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