Coloring Outside the Lines

Coloring Outside the Lines
Romans 8:1-11; Genesis 25:19-34; Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Did you learn to color inside the lines? My mother probably taught me that. I’m sure I had to know that before I went to school. It was hard with those big fat crayons I had at first. Then I graduated to the regular-sized crayons, which made it easier, but they got blunted so quickly. Finally I got the big Crayola box of 64 which also had a sharpener in the box. That was great. Later on I had colored pencils – not as many colors but easier to keep the points sharp. And with the pencils I really worked hard to have the strokes all going the same direction.

Coloring inside the lines is probably one of the most important things we learn as children. It is far more than just crayons. Life is filled with lines and we have got to learn to stay within them. That’s the gist of so much of what parents teach us: Keep your nose clean, don’t wet your pants, clean your plate, don’t make waves.

You can speak for yourselves, but I know that I learned to be very adept at following the lines. The engineer in me knows that close doesn’t cut it if you are building a house or a bridge. The bookkeeper in me says, find that penny; it’s in there somewhere. And the stated clerk part of me says that this is what the book says.

When it comes to lines, one of my best friends is the trim brush. I love painting trim. It is an exact and exacting skill to cut a crisp, straight line. Anyone can paint a wall. Doing trim is an art form. A member of the first church I served was a car dealer and in the days before factory appliques he used to paint by hand the pin-striping that was popular on cars. That takes a steady hand as well as a good brush.

I wonder if Mary taught Jesus about coloring inside the lines. Joseph the carpenter may have taught him about precision. He had to deal with close measurements.

I have a feeling that much of what Jesus learned he learned from his other Father. Apparently he didn’t learn much about lines, for he was always blurring them or ignoring them. He talked with an unchaperoned Gentile woman sinner. By way of story he blessed the landowner who paid the 5:00 pm workers as much as the 7:00 am workers. He ate meals with Pharisees and tax collectors. He associated with fishermen and herders. He fed his disciples and healed people on the Sabbath. He saluted the faith of the Roman centurion who sought long-distance healing for his servant. He told the young ruler to go against the economics of the time and sell his riches if he wanted to get right with God. He suggested that the scheming, book-cooking manager had skills and nerve that should be emulated. He commended the Samaritan cured of a leprous disease for taking time to thank him and the man who had been blind from birth for seeing that Jesus’ giving him sight was an act of God. He told a story about a father who welcomed back a repentant profligate younger son and was snubbed by an ungrateful proper older son. And Jesus backed the keepers of the Law into corners by discussing the Baptizer’s authority and the right of sinful people to stone the woman caught in adultery.

Someone there is who doesn’t love a line. And that someone is Jesus.

He comes by it naturally. Or should I say unnaturally, since I mean his heavenly Father. God has a way of ignoring lines, coloring outside the prescribed area. If we strung together most of the Old Testament stories we have heard or will hear this summer, we would have much of the story of Abraham and his clan. God used an elderly woman – wife Sarah – to produce an offspring for the childless couple. Abraham flirts with killing his son on Moriah. Isaac’s wife Rebekah also is childless until she prepares to bear twins, one apparently a fool and the other definitely a trickster. And the prophecy was that the younger will rule the older, which is not the usual way of things. The trickster, Jacob, will be temporarily out-tricked by his father-in-law, but will eventually come out far ahead. His brood of sons from two wives and two mistresses are filled with their own conceits and deceits, yet out of them will come a nation of bickerers, believers, and bearers of the Law, the lineage of Jesus and our ancestors in faith.

The Law was both blessing and bane. And if you listen deeply to Paul, it was mostly bane. For the good at which it aimed, increasingly made it impossible to achieve the desired good. The Law was the line within which life was to be colored and it was impossible to keep control of the coloring. The life coloring erratically leapt outside the line or never got close on the inside. In a sense, the line became more important than the paper on which it was found, or the picture which the line described.

The line is all about itself. Or as Paul said, the Law was weak because of selfishness, often described as flesh – meaning human sinful reality – in truth, selfishness. “The attitude that comes from selfishness leads to death,” says Paul (Romans 8:6). That selfishness is obsession with the line. Eugene Peterson [The Message] expresses Paul’s thought this way: “Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life” (v. 5).

This is the heritage of the church as we know it. Beginning in the fourth century, about the time when Christianity received the emperor’s blessing, the experience of believers shifted from trying to emulate Christ’s lived-out love to trying to codify doctrine. The theological question moved from “Who is the focus of your belief? (faith in Jesus Christ)” to “What is content of your belief? What is your religion?” (belief about Christ). Religion creates lines defining correct belief from incorrect belief, while faith is trusting, setting my heart upon, giving my loyalty to, throwing my lot in with. Faith is not in a system of belief but in the person of Jesus Christ.

Theologian and sociologist Harvey Cox writes:

“What I see, and what lot of others see too, is that people frequently want to refer to themselves now as not really “religious,” but “spiritual.”...What I think it really means is that people want to have access to the sacred without going through institutional and doctrinal scaffolding. They want a more direct experience of God and Spirit. And I don’t think it’s really going to go away.”(1)

According to Diana Butler Bass, “Christianity is moving away from being a religion about God to being an experience of God.”(2) The world of belief about God is being eroded. People who cling to the lines, who insist on a system of intellectual faith argue that what is old is better and they defend narrow understandings of belief and piety. Butler Bass says, “If one believes that Christianity is about belief, taking refuge in fundamentalism is logical.”(3)

This suggests that the obsessive discipline of the lines of religion have separated people from God. People are hankering to get rid of the lists of beliefs about God and get to know God on a personal level, on an experiential rather than intellectual plane. Back to our coloring metaphor: forget the lines, let’s get involved with the paper. God is the paper and is as much outside the lines as inside. Maybe more.

Religion of lines asks the what question. What is inside the lines and what is outside the lines? What is a data question. People today are experiencing these what questions very negatively. Faith seeks to ask the how question. How is the interrogator of direction, of doing, of curiosity, of process, of learning, of living, Butler Bass says. “When we ask how, we are not asking for a fact, conclusion, or opinion. Rather we are seeking a hands-on deeper knowledge of the thing....How weaves our lives with the information as we receive review, reflect, and act upon what we sought....How is a question of meaning and purpose.(4)

Paul says it in his own way:

“The attitude that comes from the Spirit leads to life and peace....If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your human bodies also, through his Spirit that lives in you” (v. 11).

The Spirit wants Christ to be resident in you. The Spirit wants you to experience Christ. Human selfishness wants you to be able to name 100 things Christ did for others. The Spirit wants you to know and enjoy what Christ has done for you. Human selfishness wants to you give a “just the facts” police description of Christ. The Spirit wants you to feel Christ’s touch and the warmth of his breath in your life. Human selfishness wants to make the lines big and bold and to stay inside of them. The Spirit wants to find Christ on either side of the lines, because Christ has refused to make lines.

Lines separate people from Christ. Christ’s people color outside the lines, for Christ Jesus has set us free from the lines of sin and death.

(1) Harvey Cox, cited by Diana Butler Bass, Christianity after Religion (New York: Harper One, 2012), p. 110.
(2) Diana Butler Bass, ibid.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Ibid., p. 113.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com 
Copyright 2014 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.