Every time I turn around, I’m reminded once more to go green. The enthusiasm of the green movement is impressive. Images of windmills, young men and women biking, solar panels on houses, animals in untainted forests; the marketing of the green movement is exemplary.
And yet, I can’t help but wonder what we in the church, the church universal and eternal, the body of Christ, the bride of Christ, could do if we just learned to spread the Gospel as well, as passionately, with such immediacy as those who speak for the environmental movement!
What would we call it, if we used similar terms? Going white, for the purity of God? Going red, for the blood of Jesus? Going purple for the kingdom? Going black for sorrow over the state of the world? Going blue for heaven’s glory?
The thing is, even as we wring our hands over the environment, sweat over carbon emissions, lose sleep over deforestation and extinction, human beings are suffering terribly, across the ocean and across the street.
What will the future hold for a world in which children have been taught to give greater weight to forests and jungles, beasts, fish and fowl than to their fellow human beings? Worse, ask yourself what the future will hold for all of us, or rather for each of us, when a few generations not only focus on nature above man, but have been educated to believe that man is not the pinnacle of creation, but a parasite on a randomly, accidentally, beautiful world?
So let’s go red, and offer salvation to the broken as their sins are covered. Let’s go purple, and recognize that nature, while part of God’s creation, is not the end all of God’s creation; and that the kingdom yet to come will realign nature in the way it was meant to be; perfect and pure, untainted. As the scriptures say, ‘the entire universe waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed.’ We belong here; we are to be stewards and masters of this earth, but it is not our final destination, at least not as we see it now.
Perhaps we should go black first. We should look around at the world of men, beyond the issues of nature, and realize that sin is everywhere. Evil is rampant. We should repent in black, and we should gently help the world to see that evil and sin weren’t the church’s idea; they are innate in humanity. We may deny it; until we turn on the news. So let’s go black, in repentance and in calling the world to the same.
Let’s go white and fight the battle for holiness; to be holy is to be whole! To be holy is nothing more than to finally be true to our intended design. It doesn’t mean to be judgmental and dour, miserable and hateful. It means to be transformed, bit by bit, into the image of God, maker of all things and all persons.
And while we’re at it, we’ll go blue. We’ll offer the world hope of life in a place that makes the most amazing wonders of this life seem dim by comparison, even as we must believe that the delights and treasures of earth probably hold distant reflections of heaven’s wonders, and of the world to come.
Like it or not, we’re going green. But in the mean-time, a world of humans suffers and dies broken, sick, hurting, hateful, lonely, full of self-loathing, addicted, and hopeless. The world may need some green adjustments, but the race of men need to go white, red, purple, blue and black.
I’ll just bet that if we did, we’d fix the green thing in no time flat. But first things first, you know?
Edwin
Agreed. If the gosple was marketed with the same intensity and talent as the green movement, we might even have a revival.
We are having to rebuild our Church building in the next few years and as we are doing it, I’m hoping to persuade our elders that going green is a good thing, not necessarily to make us look cool or popular, but if we are spending less on the church’s electric bill maybe we can increase our outreach as we pay someone elses.
mamadoc
15 years ago
In my church tradition, we go purple for Lent and Advent, red for Pentecost (in memory of those tongues of fire, I guess), white for Easter and Christmas and green for the rest of the time (ordinary time). All this was invented well before the environmental movement, but it does add a measure to the year.
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Agreed. If the gosple was marketed with the same intensity and talent as the green movement, we might even have a revival.
We are having to rebuild our Church building in the next few years and as we are doing it, I’m hoping to persuade our elders that going green is a good thing, not necessarily to make us look cool or popular, but if we are spending less on the church’s electric bill maybe we can increase our outreach as we pay someone elses.
In my church tradition, we go purple for Lent and Advent, red for Pentecost (in memory of those tongues of fire, I guess), white for Easter and Christmas and green for the rest of the time (ordinary time). All this was invented well before the environmental movement, but it does add a measure to the year.