What to Wear
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Are you intentional about what you wear? We use our clothes to communicate our values. We signal those around us that we are conservative or liberal, straight or not, happy or depressed, trendy or anti-trendy, surfers or concert pianists, just by what we wear. We wear what we think is appropriate for the situation. There’s a metaphor here for the Christian life and Paul takes it up in multiple places in his letters and our epistle lesson is one of them. He gets there by way of a command. He shows us that we need to take our clothing serious by starting out commanding us to put something to death.
He says: Put to death what is earthly in you. Put to death what is earthly in you. It would be a beneficial enough for our souls to stop the sermon here and meditate in silence on this one line. Put to death what is earthly in you. Paul will give us some examples, and we need his guidance. But we can get part of the way there through self-examination. Put to death what is earthly in you. If we’re going to listen to Paul, and we aren’t going to put our entire self to death, we have to ask a question of ourselves: What is earthly in me? What is earthly in me that needs to be put to death? If we took the next ten minutes and journaled through that question, we would be spiritually richer for doing so. What is still earthly in me? What about me still shows me and those around me that my citizenship is not in heaven, but down here in the dirt? Turn off the news at least once this week and instead of tuning in to Tucker Carlson or Anderson Cooper, spend some time and ask yourself, ask God, what is earthly in me? You’ll learn more than if you spent that time watching Tucker or Anderson. And if you don’t, then the thing that’s earthly in you is probably watching too much news.
Paul almost always likes to give us a reason to do something instead of just telling us to do it. This passage is no exception. His admonition for us to put to death what is earthly in us comes from the earlier verses of the same chapter. There Paul tells us: You have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When he appears you will also appear with him in glory. These are the spiritual basis for putting to death what is earthly in you. Paul isn’t just telling you to clean your spiritual room. His admonition to put to death what is earthly in you comes from the sweetest picture of being hidden with Christ in God and another picture of our future, that we will appear with Christ at his returning. Our souls are in God, hidden away with Christ. How can the purity of that spiritual relationship coexist with living out an earthly identity? We will appear with Christ at his return; when we do, will we want to be prepared to do so?
And we’ve died. Once you die, a lot of things stop mattering. Your to-do list is not important anymore. The collection agencies are no longer coming for your student debt. The committee you chair is going to find someone else. Donald Trump or Joe Biden will have to command someone else’s allegiance. Your sins no longer have claim on you. When you are dead, you don’t need to follow the Law and you can’t be prosecuted. Your stutter, your snoring, your facial tick all stop being a thing. When you die, you have reached the point of no return. That is, until you do return. And when you rise again, you leave those things behind you. You have a new start. Paul is trying to tell us that the person of Christ and the events of his life, death, and resurrection are so important, that if we see them rightly and clearly, we are drawn into them. We are drawn into him.
Jesus’ death becomes ours. His rising to new life becomes ours. We are new. We have a new citizenship. We can have it now. Before we died with Christ, our identity consisted of sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. Paul says we walked in them. They were our daily routine. They characterized everything we did. But that’s not who we are anymore. After what Christ accomplished for us, those old rags don’t fit us anymore. We might try them on, but they are too small. We look ridiculous in them and Paul is saying to take them off and wear something more appropriate. Paul isn’t stopping with the main wardrobe items either. He’s getting into accessories.
8 But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. 9 Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices
That hypercolor shirt from 1992, put it away. That puka shell necklace, that’s not what you should be wearing. Who wears a beehive hairdo? Stop it! (Now, I say these things by way of illustration. Please, in actual clothes, please, you do you. God loves you when you wear your Dave Matthews Band t-shirt or your rainbow unicorn socks.) But Paul is saying, hey, maybe you had a major victory. Your life is no longer characterized by sexual immorality. But are you angry all the time? Are you obscene? How’s your temper? Do you say untrue or unloving things about people behind their back? What about lying? Those things don’t fit anymore. Stop trying to wear them. They’re not good for you and you look ridiculous.
Paul then shifts from what not to wear into talking about the new self. Since we’ve put on the new self, we have all new categories. Our minds are being renewed in the knowledge of the Creator. As we walk with God, as we know him, we are changed more and more. Our identity changes. Our old, stale us/them categories stop mattering. They used to matter. They used to be the only thing we cared about. But we stop thinking about others in terms of their racial identity. We stop looking at people in terms of their politics and stop embracing them or ditching them on that basis. What we start caring about is Christ. And we begin to trust that Christ is at work and that people are in process. And we start living in to our new identity in Christ. We start to see ourselves as chosen by God in Christ. We start to see ourselves as holy, as blameless. And we start to put on clothes appropriate to someone who has been made holy and blameless. We participate in our new identity in Christ by putting on things fitting to that identity: things like compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. We start bearing with one another. We become instruments of peace. We forgive each other. Paul points out something we see in the Lord’s prayer: we forgive as the Lord has forgiven us. Have you been forgiven? You need to work to be characterized as someone who forgives. And the best thing, the Pendleton sweater of all of these, put on love. We hear that word and we delete it. It’s been misused in every way imaginable. But we know what we would look like if we were trying to wear it. Do it! Put on love. Not a hesitant, tepid, love, but actually be loving! Ask yourself what would a loving person do in this situation, and do that. Do it until you don’t even have to ask the question anymore. Paul says that love binds everything together in perfect harmony. It really ties the whole outfit together. Is perfect harmony a goal for you, or are you content in your discontentment? Paul goes on: we need to let the peace of Christ to rule in our hearts. Are you anxious? Let the peace of Christ rule in your heart. Are you spiteful? Allow the peace of Christ to rule in your heart. Are you depressed? Allow the peace of Christ to rule in your heart. Where would society be if we allowed the peace of Christ to rule in our hearts? What would effective marketing even look like? Does the peace of Christ rule in your heart? Then be thankful. Thank God! If the peace of Christ rules in your heart, you have a valuable gift.
What else does this new identity look like? What else are we putting on? Col 3:16
16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.
I don’t know who the next rector at St. Brendan’s will be, but I hope he is characterized by this description of what we are to put on. And it’s not just for clergy, it’s for all of us: Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. What is the Word of Christ? It’s the Bible. Do the words of Scripture dwell in you richly? Do you let it? Do you know how to let it? I will give you a hint: read the Bible. Start there. I promise you, you will see new things. I will go so far as to say you will see new delights if you make a habit of reading the Bible.
So you go home today. You see your Bible. What do you do? Read the Bible. As the Words of Scripture interact with your brain, their beauty and truth will work their way into your heart. Next Sunday, you’ll see Alan Shore at church and you’ll say, hey Alan, I was reading my Bible, and I had this strange insight. What do you think about this. And he will have a great answer for you and you will walk away wiser. Or you will read your Bible and you’ll see the words rejoice in the Lord always. And you’ll start singing the song to yourself while you weed your garden. But none of these things are going to happen if you don’t read your Bible. Please read your Bible. Don’t know where to start? We have a daily lectionary appropriate the church season. The readings complement both the season and the readings in our Sunday services. Or you can throw caution to the wind and just start at the beginning: Genesis 1:1. Just don’t give up when you get to Leviticus. Either way, please read your Bible. It’s part of our new self. It’s appropriate to put on. And the last picture that Paul gives us of the new self is vs 17:
17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
If you can’t do it or say it in the name of the Lord Jesus, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. Live and speak with purpose. Not your purpose, Jesus’s purpose. The new self is characterized by operating from the name of Jesus. The good things we do for others, the good things we say to others are from Jesus. Everything Paul mentions, from having a compassionate heart to patience, to sincerely forgiving someone when they’ve made a mistake or done real damage, when we do those things, when we put on the new self and operate from there, we are being Jesus’s hands and feet and smile and his love, both in the world, and to ourselves. That is what we should look like. And when we do, we need to be thankful. Putting on the new self is something we need to do, but we can’t do it until Christ opens our eyes to see him and his gospel and be changed. When he does this for us, the right response, the new-self response, is to be thankful to God, to offer our thanks to God through Jesus. The old-self approach would be to do the work, to see change, and to be proud of our accomplishments. But the new-self approach doesn’t see equality with God as something to be grasped. When we put on our new clothes, we thank the one who gave them to us. And the thanking becomes part of who we are, it becomes part of the clothes we wear and the air we breathe. So let us put off the old self and put on the new, and be thankful to God in Christ as we go.