Proper 18A
September 4, 2011
Ezekiel 33:7-11*Psalm 119:33-40*Romans 13:8-14*Matthew 18:15-20
Rev. David M. McNair
It’s a given: no parent in her/his right mind wakes up a sleeping child unless it’s necessary! But when it was necessary for your parents to awaken you when you were a child, how did they do it?
It might have sounded something like this: “Good morning sleepyhead! Rise and shine, time to wake up — get your clothes on… Lets get this day rollin’.” St. Paul uses similar language to urge the church in Rome and us to wake up. He writes, “you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep … the night is gone, the day is near … put on the Lord Jesus Christ.”
What a curious image: “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” What could it mean? What does it look like to put on Christ? How might we go about doing this? And, why do we need to do it? What good would it be – for us, for others, for the world — for us to put on the Lord Jesus Christ?
In the early Christian church, when new converts were baptized — which they did without wearing a stitch of clothing — after they came up out of the water and were dried off, they were given a new white robe to put on which they did not take off for at least a week after baptism. This robe signified their new life in Christ. So in baptism, we are not only bathed, but we are also clothed — clothed in Christ. This robe – like new skin— is our true identity as children of God – an identity that is truer even than our skin color, or ethnicity, or gender, or social status. St. Paul tells it like it is: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, … slave or free, … male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (1) Our deepest identity – being clothed in Christ — makes us one.
Skin color, ethnicity, gender, social status has been used too often as a way to divide us. We share a long history of damage done to Jews, females, or persons of color simply because they were Jewish, female or persons of color — or homosexual, or disabled, or too young to protect themselves. Such division and abuse gathers to a scream which threatens to drown out Paul’s revolutionary words. The fact that a portion of that damage has been done by Christians, sometimes in the name of the one whom they were clothed in baptism, testifies to the ways in which baptismal garb, though invisible, can become stained beyond recognition.
And so we plead to God with the psalmist, “Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean; Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” (2) People in every age have sought to express and illuminate who they are through the clothing and adornment they place on their bodies. We humans seem to have a great desire to wear clothes and adornments that do more than just cover our nakedness. We want our clothing to express something important about us. Not only do we have clothes, we are, in a sense, defined by our clothes. Some people express their deepest commitments through the clothes and the adornments they wear.
As a way to celebrate the end of summer break Lynn and I took our children and some of their friends to Splash Country in Pigeon Forge two weeks ago. After entering the park a group of young people caught our attention. They were NOT dressed like the rest of us — in our bathing suits and flip flops. The males were wearing plain blue long sleeved shirts, long brown pants and leather boots. The females were wearing bonnets and long blue dresses with off-white blouses underneath. Their clothes had no adornments, not even buttons, and they appeared to have been made by hand. My guess is that they are members of an Amish sect. We were all somewhat relieved to spot them later in line to go down The Big Bear Plunge – and they had changed out of their long clothes into modest bathing suits.
Of course association with various religious groups is designated by particular clothing. I wear a stole on Sundays and a black shirt and white collar which designates me as an Episcopal priest. Orthodox Jewish boys and men sometime have peyots, which are uncut curls of hair over their ears as part of their religious piety. Islamic women often wear burqas. Nuns and monks wear distinctive habits. The medieval abbess Hildegard of Bingen often adorned her nuns in jewels and buttons, each invested with meaning because she believed these reflected interior spiritual gifts. We wear our clothes as extensions of our bodies and as signs of what is happening invisibly inside of us.
Clothing can also be used to prepare for and mark a change in our lives. Graduates wear robes with funny square hats; brides and grooms adorn themselves in special clothes for that moment when they will speak radical promises to one another. I know Marti Carson is busy looking for just the right wedding dress for her marriage to John in November here at CHS.
Clothing can yield up a surprising amount of information – ask any teenager. In high school, brand names, style of clothes and certain color combinations distinguish different groups — the jocks from the deadheads, and preppies from rednecks. The high school massacre in Littleton, Colorado called the nation’s attention to the way clothing marks off social groups in school. Theologian Tom Beaudoin, who writes about religion and culture says the Gothic or Vampire look of many teens and young adults is a sign of grief. For him, black clothes and dark circles penciled around the eyes mark an attempt to master suffering by dressing ironically in the colors of mourning.
Living in a part of the world that proudly proclaims “Keep Asheville Weird” we know that body adornments are incredibly popular. These marking go beyond clothing into more permanent realms of body piercing, tattooing, and scarring. Joan Brumberg calls them “body projects” and says that they are a way to turn the body into a canvas to be painted with one’s identity, a page to be inscribed with bodily experience. Certainly they are expressions of a deep desire of people to find, create, and remember experiences that are deeply marking and meaningful.
We who are clothed in the garment of Christ are called to clothe others. When you clothe those who are naked and unprotected, Jesus said, you clothe me. I read a story about church that attempted to clothe a refugee family from Cambodia. A man in the church stood before his brothers and sisters in Christ and asked them to provide clothing for the family. He told them that the children were getting ready to enter a new school year and the parents were about to look for jobs that could support their new life in the U.S.
A few weeks later, the man stood up again. He spoke in a quiet voice that was vibrating with anger. “I asked you to clothe this family,” he said. “Instead I have received castoffs from decades ago, clothes that are out of date, out of style. Clothes that are missing buttons, clothes with broken zippers, clothes that are dirty. These are not the kinds of clothes a man can find a job in. You would never send your children to school dressed in the clothes you have offered to this family. I am not asking for your castoffs. I am asking you to clothe this family.”
This man knew that clothes could offer protection for vulnerable people in need. And he believed that those clothed in the garments of Christ should know better than to offer clothes that would offer no such protection, clothes that could even increase their vulnerability. Because of his willingness to bear witness to what Christ calls us to when he calls us to clothe our neighbors, that church had an opportunity to think about the relationship between their baptismal garments and the clothes in their overstuffed closets. And they had an opportunity to try again to clothe the Christ who had asked for their help.
Wearing Christ leads us to take seriously the freedom and justice of those who make the clothes we wear. How can we be clothed in Christ and ignore the reality of sweatshop practices employed to make many of the clothes that we wear. Horror stories emerge from time to time from corporate watchdog organizations exposing horrific labor and environmental conditions and practices — of children working long hours in the garment industry in dismal conditions for almost no pay, making clothes destined for our country. These are not unknown stores or brands either. Green America has named the following companies as violating fair labor practices in recent years: Walmart, Gap, Kohls, Old Navy, J.C. Penny, Hanes, Forever 21, Nike. Our first-world enslavement to the latest fashions at the lowest prices makes this more terrible slavery possible. God intends for all to be free. Wearing Christ requires habits of clothing ourselves that make us vigilant to the effects of our choices on others.
“Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?” Jesus asks in Matthew’s Gospel. “Why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of them.”
Are your clothes and habits of adornment a burden or a pleasure? Do your clothes free you to be yourself, or do they constrain you? Did the production of your clothes denigrate the freedom and dignity of another? These are questions that might guide us in how we clothe ourselves and help us in our daily practice of getting dressed to remember that we are children of God, clothed in Christ.
The God who clothes us at baptism offers us again and again, each day, beautiful garments of mercy, justice, and kindness to wear. And each new morning God calls to us, “Good morning my beloved, you know what time it is . . . now the moment for you to wake from sleep…the night is gone, the day is near … put on the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Notes:
2. Psalm 51:7.