True Colors of Faith: Yellow

I was struggling with what to say about Yellow until I spent yesterday morning at the chapel in Morning Prayer. And then it hit me that yellow has many associations that resonate, including its place in Eastern thought as the color of the third chakra, or solar plexus, making yellow an important color in the spectrum. The seat of your soul is in the solar plexus. A swift blow just below the diaphragm can kill a person.

In thinking on associations I have had with this color... I have thought about it as the ultimate Yin-Yang color. It can mean friendship, solidarity and courage... or it can be used to describe sickness and cowardice. Those dynamics definitely dwell in many faith communities... sometimes within a single individual. Those in the Episcopal, and now the Lutheran Church, know how yellow the individuals can be... either out of the extension of friendship to those who have been persecuted and marginalized by the Church... or out of fear that to be inclusive will somehow jeopardize the Church. They forget that "the Church" is the Body of Christ, and the Body of Christ has many members. MANY members.

In today's assigned Gospel, Jesus is with his disciples and gives them the new commandment to love one another, and that to do so, to lay down's one life for one's friends is one of the greatest things a friend can do for another friend. And he goes on to say...

You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

I don't know if the whole group of them turned yellow in that moment... and if they did, it was again both out of courage to be friends with Jesus... and out of cowardice of being identified as a friend of Jesus in a world that punished those who proclaimed Christ the Messiah. As my mentor is wont to say, "The both/and".

Any one of us can live into our yellow tendancies to either be a friend or a coward. Any one of us can step out of our closets to be in solidarity and friendship with Love, or continue to hide ourselves out of fear of the cost that might be incurred by living into that Love. I hope our yellow is the one of friendship.