The Color Purple
© The
Reverend Dr. Byron E. Shafer
(Rutgers, November 28, 1999; 1st
Sunday of Advent, Year B; World AIDS Sunday)
Isaiah 64:1–9 (OT, pp. 770–771); Mark
13:24–27, 32-37 (NT, pp. 51–52)
Alice
Walker's Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Color Purple opens
around the year 1911 in a small town in the rural South.
The
central character is Celie, who at 6 years of age
had lost her father to a white lynch mob and in the years thereafter
had seen her mother grow more and more mentally unbalanced.
Then, at puberty, Celie had begun to be raped by her stepfather,
who sternly warned her, "You better not never tell nobody
but God. It'd kill your
mammy."
So as the book begins, we find Celie, now 14 years old,
dutifully pouring out her troubles to God
in a series of letters.
A
few years later, Celie is married off to a mean-spirited, often brutal
man whose primary desire is to have her take care of his children.
During this time, Celie's only consolation is that she is, at least,
able to help her younger sister Nettie escape a similar set of
sordid circumstances by sending her off to Africa with
some acquaintances who're going there as missionaries.
Celie's
experiences of drudgery and abuse continue,
but then Shug Avery comes into her life.
Shug is a beautiful, vivacious singer of the blues,
and Celie's spirits begin to rise upon meeting her.
The two fall in love, + Shug starts planning to take Celie off
with her to Memphis, there to begin life anew as partners.
It's
at this point that Celie writes the letter to Nettie,
her beloved missionary sister in Africa,
that I now share with you in a much shortened form:
"Dear
Nettie,
I don't write to God no more, I write to you.
What happen to God? ast Shug.
What God do for me? I ast.
She say, Celie! Like she shock. He
gave you life, good health,
and a good woman who love you to death.
Yeah, I say, and he give me a lynched daddy, a crazy mama,
a lowdown dog of a step pa
and a sister I probably won't ever see again.
Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying + writing to is a man.
And act just like all the other mens I know.
Trifling, forgitful and lowdown.
She say, Miss Celie, You better hush. God might hear you.
Let 'im hear me, I say. If he ever
listened to poor colored women
the world would be a different place, I can tell you.
All my life I never care what people thought bout nothing I did
But deep in my heart I care about God.What he going to think.
And come to find out, he don't think.
Just sit up there glorying in being deef, I reckon.
But it ain't easy, trying to do without God.
Even if you know he ain't there,
trying to do without him is a strain.
Then [Shug] say: Tell me what your God look like, Celie.
Okay, I say. He big and old and
tall and graybearded and white.
He wear white robes and go barefooted.
Blue eyes? she ast.
Sort of bluish-gray. Cool.
Big though. White lashes, I
say.
[Shug] laugh. Then she sigh.
[She say,] When I found out I thought God was white, and a man,
I lost interest. Here's the
thingThe thing I believe.
God is inside you and inside everybody else.
You come into the world with God.
But only them that search for it inside find it.
And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not
looking, or don't know what you looking for.
It? I ast.
Yeah, It. God ain't a he or a she,
but a It.
But what do it
look like? I ast.
She say, My first step from the old white man was trees.
Then air. Then birds.
Then other people.
But one day when I was sitting quiet
and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me:
that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all.
I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed.
And I laughed + I cried + I run all around the house.
knew just what
it was.
Listen, God love everything you love—
and a mess of stuff you don't.
But more than anything else
God love admiration.
You saying God vain? I ast.
Naw, she say. Not vain, just
wanting to share a good thing.
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple
in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
What it do when it
pissed off? I ast.
Oh, it
make something else.
People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool
living in the world can see it
always trying to please us back.
It always making little surprises
and springing them on us
when us least expect.
You mean it want to be loved, just like the bible say.
Yes, Celie, she say.
Well, us talk and talk bout God, but I'm still adrift.
Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy
thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make.
Not a blade of corn (how it
do that?)
not the color purple (where it come from?).
Nothing.
Celie's
letter to Nettie is not signed;
it just ends "Amen."
The
color purple—a color we sometimes associate with
humanity's deepest "blues," our deepest bruises,
our deepest troubles, like Celie's;
a color we sometimes associate with God's apparent absence in
our lives, or with God's apparent deafness to our sorrows.
But
purple is also a color that God's made to surprise and please us,
a color that's a surprising part of beauty in the fields, a color
that's been a source of hope for Shug and for countless others.
The
color purple—
it's the color of this morning's flowers, + pulpit hangings, + stoles—
it's the color of the season of Advent,
of the days from now until Christmas.
The color purple—associated both with sorrow, like Celie's,
and hope, like Shug's!
As
a color associated with sorrow, and bruising, and the deep "blues,"
Advent's purple serves to remind us
of people's experiences of injury and pain, of hatred and injustice,
experiences like those that filled Celie's life,
like those that suffuse too many lives in our time and place.
Advent's purple serves to remind us of the injury, bruising, + pain:
of persons who can't support themselves and need to go on welfare,
of persons who have to sleep on the streets, persons branded
uniformly by our Mayor as criminals needing to be arrested,
of children who live in poverty,
who attend poor, overcrowded schools,
who have no health insurance—
including children with cerebral palsy, autism, epilepsy,
tuberculosis, and mental retardation.
Advent's purple serves to remind us of the injury, bruising, + pain:
of employees "downsized" in corporate mergers,
of seniors who've lost their life savings
to unscrupulous stock brokers or scam artists,
of families declared by officials, wrongly, to be ineligible
for public housing or shelter.
Advent's purple serves to remind us of the injury, bruising, + pain:
of workers exploited in sweat shops to make products
for Wal-Mart, Disney, and other US corporations,
of refugees expelled from their homes in Rwanda, Kosovo,
East Timor, Palestine, and many other places,
of people suffering and dying from infections and diseases
related to AIDS.
Advent's purple serves to remind us
of the hatred and injustice experienced:
by all who are poor,
by all whose homes have been painted with swastikas,
by all who are victims of racial, ethnic, or religious profiling,
by all who have been identified as HIV+,
by all gays and lesbians who dare to seek
their civil and religious rights.
Advent's purple serves to remind us
of the hatred and injustice experienced:
by the Palestinian people,
by many of the Serbs in present-day Kosovo,
by many of the Catholics in Northern Ireland.
So
let us color Advent purple for its somber, blues-like mood,
born from the injury, bruising, + pain, from the hatred + injustice
suffered by so many Celie's in our world.
But,
as recognized by Shug, purple is also a color of beauty + of hope,
a color of delightful surprises sprung on us by God
when we least expect them.
So let us also color Advent purple for its hope-filled mood, a
mood rooted in our faith that, in the fullness of God's time,
all injury, pain, hatred, + injustice will be vanquished.
For during Advent we affirm in faith that just as
Christ was born on earth one night long ago,
so too, a full measure of the peace and justice
and love that Christ came to bring
will also be born on earth someday.
Therefore,
during Advent let us undertake to repent in sorrow.
For, under our stewardship, life on earth is filled with wrong,
and injury and injustice flourish.
But
during Advent let us also undertake to be renewed by hope.
For just as amidst the sorrow and injustice of a past time
God took flesh and came to humankind in a surprising
and wonderfully purple kind of way—in the birth of Jesus—
so, too, amidst the sorrow and injustice of our present time
the Crucified yet Risen Christ will come again
to rule in our hearts and to set in motion through us
the coming to earth of a full and perfect peace.
Thus,
Advent looks backward to a former time
when, amidst the tragedy of Israel's history,
it was able to express hope for a God-sent Deliverer, a Messiah.
And
Advent looks forward to a future time
in which the promise of peace and the potential for justice that were
inherent in the life of Christ will at last be fulfilled on earth.
Expectant
waiting for Christ to come anew into our hearts
is the thing that's central to the Advent Season—
as the lectionary makes clear when it assigns the 13th Chapter
of Mark as the Gospel Lesson for this First Sunday of Advent.
The
Gospel of Mark describes Jesus' ministry in 1st‑century Palestine
as just a sample of what God's reign will be like on a larger scale,
in the fullness of time, when the Risen Christ comes again.
Mark
understands Jesus' ministry in first‑century Palestine to have
embodied in microcosm the qualities of peace and justice and love
that are to be realized in macrocosm—that is, throughout the
world—in the fullness of time.
For
Mark, the resurrection of Jesus prefigures this longed-for age
and anchors our hope for its coming.
And for Mark, the resurrection of Jesus is the sure and certain
sign that God has the power and the will to overcome even
the worst injury and injustice humankind is able to inflict,
the sure + certain sign that God's reign of peace + justice and love will
indeed
come on earth as it is in heaven.
Through
the ministry of Jesus we know
that the groundwork for the reign of God has been laid.
Through the resurrection of Jesus we know
that the requisite power for the reign of God exists.
Now only the consummation remains.
Humankind
has been given no clue
as to the time of that consummation.
Yet amidst the sorrows of our age,
we await its coming with hope.
So
color Advent purple,
the color of sorrow!
And
color Advent purple,
the color of hope!
Let us pray:
O
God, as Shug said, You are always making delightful surprises
and springing them on us when we least expect.
During
these days of Advent, surprise us again
with fresh bursts of purple in our fields,
new signs of hope in our world.
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