Light Clothing

Romans 13:8-14

Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. For this--Do not commit adultery, do not kill, do not steal, do not covet, and any other commandment is summed up in this word--You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does not bring about evil for a neighbor, so love is the fulfilling of the law.

Besides this you know the time, how now is the time for you to wake from sleep, for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed. The night is far gone and daylight is growing near. Therefore let us take off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.

As in daylight let us walk about properly outfitted, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual excess and debauchery, not in strife and envy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ and do not give your concern to the flesh and its unrestrained desires.

This morning I want to talk about what it means to love your neighbor as yourself. I want to talk about what it means when Paul says that we should take off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. I want to talk about what it means to believe what we say. And I want to start by talking about my pants.

I have been having a problem with my pants. It’s a good problem, but it is a problem. Back in March I left Camp Occohannock with a group of college students who had been with me on a spring break mission trip. For one whole week I had been eating the cooking of Emily Bundick, the camp cook, and I knew I wasn’t going to like looking at the scales when I got back. Sure enough, during that week, when I had been out working every day and should have been losing weight, instead, because of Ms. Emily’s cinnamon buns and clam fritters, I had put on three pounds.

So something had to give. I started swimming. I started working out in the gym. I started eating better. And it worked. I started to lose weight. That’s when my pants issue started to develop.
I couldn’t keep them up. I’d be walking around the house and they’d fall right off me. I’ve been through three belts since April. I couldn’t put my keys in my pocket for fear they’d pull my pants down. This was a crisis, I’m telling you.

Fixing the problem was an expensive proposition. New pants don’t come cheap. But there was a theological issue at stake, too, and this is where my pants problem rises to something more than a personal concern. Theologically what was going on was that my pants no longer reflected the person I was becoming. I needed clothes that were more appropriate to my new self. To really be thinner I needed to have thinner clothes.

Now that may not sound theological but the point I want to make today is that there a lot of us Christians running around in inappropriate clothes. What we are supposed to be "putting on" is what Paul calls the armor of light. What we are supposed to putting on, (and that’s exactly the language Paul uses for it, like clothing), is Christ. And there a lot of us walking around with our pants falling off--metaphorically speaking. (Although from the fashions I’ve seen in some places having your pants falling off you is the in-thing.)

You know the old saying, "Clothes make the man…or the woman." We’ve made a whole industry out of fashion because of that very basic belief. New clothes make us feel differently, don’t they? They can be statements about who we want to be.

That’s why clothing is such a contentious issue in schools and between parents and children. One of the first ways that we express our desire to be different from what we have been is through the clothes that we wear. It changes through time - what we choose. But whether it was Nehru jackets or bellbottoms or skinny ties or bling -- every generation has its statement.

Clothes can carry symbolic weight. As we watched the news this week and saw the national guard arriving on the scene in New Orleans, the sight of the uniforms made us feel that maybe some order was going to be restored. When a football player puts on the pads and the jersey with the school colors for the first time, he feels differently -- stronger, more confident, part of something bigger. When nurses finish their training they receive a hat -- a symbol of their profession that gives them a sense of confidence that they can care for others despite any lingering insecurities.

When I lived in Texas I started wearing cowboy boots because it was appropriate church wear. And, you know, when I first put them on I felt like I could ride horses and kick rattlesnakes and yodel. It was great feeling.

But to put on the armor of light? To put on Christ? Now that’s another story. Which of us feels like that’s our natural clothing? Like John the Baptist we don’t even feel worthy to touch Jesus’ sandal, much less take on Christ’s wardrobe. It’s not just the pants that won’t fit!

Paul says that this is exactly the clothing we should wear. It’s pretty obvious from the way we have lived when we’ve tried it on our own that our "fashion choices" look pretty ridiculous -- like showing up in cutoffs for the senior prom -- like getting married in platform shoes and a rainbow afro wig -- we all too often show up inappropriately dressed for the kingdom feast. We make our own rules. We live our lives with disregard for others’ well-being and even with disregard for our own. We can be so self-centered that we have a hard time seeing where our center should be.

So what do we do? We put on new clothes. We put on the armor of light that Paul talks about. We live as people of day even though the world around us is living in the dark. We put on Christ because it’s the only way to become Christ-like. It’s such an unnatural thing for us who have grown accustomed to the dark.

And it’s awkward and uncomfortable at first -- like new jeans before you break them in. When we grow in holiness and try to walk in Jesus’ footsteps it feels like someone else is doing it, or someone else should be doing it, and we’re just along for the ride. Have you ever noticed this? You go to pray after a long period or maybe your whole life not praying. You go to pray and the words come haltingly and you stumble and you don’t know what to say.

Or you take on a discipline--reading the Bible or fasting or tithing and for a long time there is the voice inside you saying, "This is not you. This you acting like a Christian. This is you putting on a front. It’s not really you."

But the voice is wrong. What’s really happening is that you are becoming the ‘you’ you were meant to be all along. You are taking on a persona but it’s the persona you were meant to have all along. Because what you are putting on is Christ and the scriptures tell us that our lives are hidden in God with Christ [Col. 5:3]. Who we are is Christ’s. Who we were meant to be is Christ’s. We’ve been looking pretty ridiculous for way too long because we’ve been trying to keep up appearances…we’ve been trying to pretend that we’ve got it all together…trying to put up a brave and ‘with-it’ front. But I’ll bet you’re exhausted from the effort. I’ll bet you’d like to shed the coat and tie (or the pantyhose) of other people’s expectations and trade them in for the sweatshirt that is as comfortable as your own skin.

Well, you’ve got clothes like that. If you’re baptized you got them at your baptism when you went under the waters to die to your old self and to be reborn with Christ. We’ve got appropriate clothes; they are the clothes of Christ.

"O.K.," you say. "O.K., Alex, I’ll accept that I’ve got new clothes. But they don’t seem like they fit. They don’t seem like me. I don’t know if I can accept being Christian if it means being really different. Won’t I look funny to my friends and funny to my co-workers?"

And to that I say, "Yes, you’re going to look funny." You are going to look different and that is exactly how you ought to look. The world, enslaved to darkness, needs some people who look different. The world needs some people with light as their armor. The world needs some funny-looking people because the world needs Christians who love the world enough to tell it that it needs to be transformed.

This week I read that the Evangelical Lutheran Church has agreed to enter into a covenant with the United Methodist Church to share in the communion table. This is a good thing. It means that Lutherans and Methodists can meet at this table and share in this meal with no barriers. But one of the Lutheran delegates had a quote that caught my eye. He said he could think of no church that was less offensive than the United Methodist Church.

I’m taking this out of context, I know, but that is sad. It’s sad because having open hearts, open minds and open doors should not mean that we Methodists never give offense. There are a great many things out there to which we should be offensive. We ought to be offended when our media culture tells us that our highest aspiration ought to be as a consumer of that our greatest pleasures can only be found in sex or alcohol. We ought to be offended when lying is an acceptable form of discourse in public or private. We ought to be outraged when the poorest members of our society are left behind, left out, and treated as leftovers.

Which brings me to the flood. Hurricane Katrina may be the greatest tragedy our nation has endured in our lifetimes. We have watch in horror this week as the levee broke in New Orleans, as dead bodies floated in the streets, as survivors endured heat, hunger and homelessness, as all of the wonderful resources we have at our disposal didn’t seem to be sufficient to stop the suffering.

We wondered what our nation had become, didn’t we? We wondered how it could happen here, in the United States, in our country. We wondered what would happen on the Eastern Shore if we got the storm. Would our community stick together or would we see the same fighting, the same divisions, the same violence?

We asked, perhaps, how God could allow such disasters. And maybe we asked what we as a nation had done to deserve it.

Well, there are no end of possible failure for us to point at but I don’t think God singled out the poor folks of New Orleans to teach us a lesson. We may learn some lessons from this, and I hope we do, but the loving God we serve does not wish evil for any of God’s children. The ‘whys’ of this tragedy will take many days to discover.

But there is a challenge for us who believe. Steve Long, a professor at our United Methodist seminary in Chicago, Garret Evangelical, says that what marks Christians is that they put themselves in places where they would not be if the gospel they proclaimed were not true. Christians put themselves where they would not be if the gospel they proclaimed were not true.

Do you really think that human community can never rise above the murky depths we have seen displayed this week in New Orleans? Do you really think that God is against us and that death and destruction are the last and ultimate words to be spoken over each and any of us? Do you really believe that hurricanes have the power to express the will of God? If you believe that then there is not much to say today.

But I don’t believe there is a hurricane that has that power, even if it’s a category six. I don’t believe New Orleans is gone. I don’t believe God says ‘yes’ to death and ‘no’ to life.

I do believe that God can move across the face of the waters and create life. I do believe that God can take a homeless people and move them through the sea to a new land and a new home. I do believe that Jesus walked on water and calmed the sea. I do believe we are made new in Christ by water and the Spirit. I do believe that there is a new city of God and that a river runs through it. And I do believe that Christians can be witnesses to what they say they believe by what they do in this moment.

When the people of Israel were about to go into exile many centuries ago, the prophet Jeremiah did a very strange thing. Jerusalem was about to be destroyed--the people led away into captivity. And Jeremiah bought a piece of land in the city. Foolish in light of the circumstances, but a witness to what God would ultimately do. God would bring the people back.

It’s time to buy land in New Orleans. It’s time to put ourselves in places we would not be if we did not believe that the gospel was true. It’s time for us to say that God is still with us. The world of darkness needs light and hope and we’re the ones who are most excellently well-appointed. How’s your uniform looking, my sister…my brother?

Thanks be to God.