June 24, 2007
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
After living almost nine years in the Bay Area now, I generally know how to dress. It seems that for both weddings and funerals, it would be okay for me to wear a black suit. It’s fashionably accepted. I love it when we receive an invitation that says, “Casual attire.” It means no jacket and tie. And if I ever get an invitation that reads, “Black tie affair,” I would be in trouble! Joy always says to me when I don’t know what to wear—“It’s better to be over-dressed then to be underdressed!”
There’s this TV show called, “What Not to Wear” that takes a person nominated to the show by her friends, coworkers and family members for a total makeover. The show hosts, Stacey and Clinton go through the person’s closet and throw away the old, unfashionable clothes in a real trashcan. They then give the person a $5000 credit card to go shopping in some of the most fashionable clothing boutiques in New York. Stacey and Clinton show the person what looks good and teach her what to wear. I’m not a big fan of this show because I can almost see Joy wondering why I still have some old clothes in my closet.
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m not exactly a fashion connoisseur. In fact, I hate shopping for clothes. It’s entirely too stressful. For instance, you can’t walk into the Gap and just buy blue jeans. We used to call these “dungarees.” And I am always corrected that jeans are not always “blue” anymore. But my point is that you now have to decide if you want boot cut blue jeans or relaxed fit blue jeans or straight leg blue jeans. How about the colors—all shades of blue! All I want to do is to buy some pants, but the Gap won’t let me. They want me first to make a fashion statement.
Some of you have asked me where I buy my clothes and I have been too afraid to ask you why are you asking. Do I look that bad! To reduce my stress in buying clothes, I’ll tell you a secret, only when I need to I basically shop at three places: Macy’s for my dress clothes, J. Crew or the Gap for my casual work clothes, and R.E.I. for my outdoor clothes. It’s simple!
In fact, I have a confession to make. I still have some Harris Tweed sports jackets that are at least 25 years old. I guess there are a couple of conclusions you could draw from that. One would be that I’m really good at picking out clothes that never go out of style! Or I suppose that another conclusion would be that I’m cheap when it comes to buying clothes.
Clothes Make a Person
Even though I’m not a fashion connoisseur, I realize that the saying, “The clothes make the man” or “The clothes make the woman” makes sense. Just by looking at a person’s clothes, we can tell a great deal about them. In the hospital, if we see a man wearing a white jacket come into your room, we know from his clothes that he’s a doctor. Or if we see a woman wearing a purple robe, with a jeweled crown, we know from her clothes that she’s a queen. After the extreme makeover of persons in “What Not to Wear,” you can imagine that they will all be getting job promotions and marriage proposals! At FCBC, when you see a man wearing a suit and tie, most likely, that person is the pastor!
Our clothes often define what group we belong to. Our church softball teams have black jerseys and our basketball teams have white tops with the church logo on the front. Street gangs are distinguished by their colored clothing. College fraternities and sororities identify with certain emblems. Our clothes identify us as a part of certain groups.
We can use clothes not only to link ourselves together with fellow members of our group, but also sometimes use clothes as a way to segregate our communities. For example, a few years ago in Afghanistan the ruling body there issued a decree requiring the Hindus in the country to wear clothes that had a yellow patch on them. This patch was used to distinguish the members of the Hindu minority group from the majority Muslim group. Many around the world protested that law, comparing it to the way that the Nazis forced the Jews to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing back during the Second World War.
When we look at our own Biblical traditions, we can see that clothes can become a source of division between ourselves and other people. In the Old Testament, Jacob wanted to honor his favorite son, Joseph. What did Jacob do for him? He gave Joseph that Technicolor dream coat. How did Joseph’s brothers respond to that? When they saw him in that coat they hated him, because that coat was saying that Joseph was special to his father in a way that his other brothers were not. So eventually, because of the privilege that this special coat represented, the brothers tried to kill Joseph.
In the New Testament, we read that in ancient Rome, there was a law that said that it was illegal to wear purple clothes unless you were a member of the ruling class. Wearing purple was a way of identifying who was in power and who was out.
God’s Gift of Faith
In today’s lesson on Paul’s letter to the Galatians, we see that Paul was astonished and angry at those Christians who sought to convince the Galatians that they were not saved unless they followed specific biblical injunctions, e.g. eating kosher, becoming circumcised, like wearing only certain acceptable clothes. Paul sees those Christians as abandoning the gospel of grace and focusing on works. He reminded them that when God’s Law was first given, it was necessary because of human sins. The Law kept people constrained until that time that they would not need the Law.
In Galatians 3:24-25, Paul emphasizes that we were kept under the Law until faith was revealed: “Therefore the Law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.” Now that Christ has come, we no longer need the Law to direct us when we have our human faults. For in Christ Jesus, we are all sons and daughters of God through faith.
I want to take a moment to add some light and clarification to this text by looking at the meaning of the word, “faith.” For most of us, the words, “faith” and “belief” are interchangeable. We say, “How is his faith?” when we actually mean, “How strong is his belief system?” The church has reinforced this synonymous understanding of “faith” and “beliefs” by suggesting that there’s a “correct belief” to believing in Jesus Christ. Consequently, modern western culture treats “faith” and “belief” as synonyms.
Regrettably, this confusion between “faith” and “belief” obscures Paul’s meaning of “faith” in this text. The root meaning of faith is “trust.” Faith is not a human achievement, an act of believing the unbelievable or a “work.” Rather, faith is “revealed” to us as God’s work. For Paul, faith refers to the “faithfulness of Jesus Christ” to the Father as witnessed by his death on the cross and to Jesus’ mission to set humanity free from the bondage of sin. Paul says, “But now that faith has come (Jesus Christ has come), we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian (the Law).
Unmerited and undeserved by us, faith is God’s gift of Christ to us. We just gratefully accept him. The Christian life is first and foremost about a person’s relationship to the God who is revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Therefore, “faith” refers to the positive response that we have to the good news of what Christ has already accomplished for our salvation. Grounded in the dependability of Jesus, “faith” is the equivalent to “trust” and not how much we as human beings can cognitively believe in God’s actions in the world.
Paul writes this letter to the Galatians with a dual purpose. He first challenges those Jewish Christians’ beliefs that only by observing the Law in general and circumcision in particular can Gentiles become members of the people of God. Paul is basically saying that to be a Christian, there’s no particular kind of clothes you need to wear.
But the second reason for his letter is to persuade them to accept the reality that Christ’s death and resurrection have inaugurated a new age in which the old barriers that formerly distinguished Jews from Gentiles have now been replaced by a new unity in Christ symbolized by baptism.
Believe it or not, this passage that we listened to today from Paul’s letter to the Galatians gives us some fashion advice. It gives us some guidance about what we should wear as Christians, and that advice is this: put on Jesus Christ—clothe yourself with Christ.
Put on Christ
To understand exactly what Paul meant by “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ,” we need to be aware of how Christians baptized people back in Paul’s days. Back in the first century, when someone was baptized they were taken to the river or lake. Before they entered the water for the baptism they took off all their clothes. Now, some of you might be thinking to yourselves: naked baptisms—that would be scandalous! But the idea was that in baptism, persons were shedding all of their old allegiances, all their old loyalties, so that they could commit themselves entirely to Christ. So when the persons were then brought up out of the water they were given a white robe to wear that was the same as that given to everyone else who was baptized. Symbolically, what was happening was that the old clothes that separated and distinguished people from one another were set aside, so that those who were baptized might not focus on the differences between them, but that they might focus on what they now all had in common—faith in Jesus Christ.
Paul even goes so far as to say that when we become Christians, all the divisions we used to think were so important don’t matter anymore. In Christ, there is no longer Jew or Greek. In other words, putting on our nationality, citizenship, and ethnic heritage is a thing of the past. What matters is that we are all Christians. I know that we live in a time after 9/11 when there is a great emphasis on identifying potential terrorists, getting passports in time for our travel overseas, or doing something about the 12 million illegal immigrants working in the U.S. These may all be legitimate concerns and issues facing us today but when it comes to knowing Jesus Christ, there is no distinction.
Paul goes on to say, there is no longer slave or free. In other words, economic and social classes don’t matter anymore. It doesn’t matter whether you are wearing new designer clothes or clothes from a second-hand shop. When it comes to know Jesus Christ, there is no distinction.
Paul even proceeds to say that in Christ there is no longer male and female. By that he means to say that the stereotypes we carry with us of what men should be like and what things men should do, and what women should be like and what things women should do—as Christians, those stereotypes don’t fit anymore. They don’t fit because Jesus looks on all of us—men and women—as equally being God’s children. There is no distinction.
It’s like one of the points of discussions that I have with couples I meet with before their marriage. We talk about this long list of chores and tasks that the man and the woman decides whether it’s what the man should do or the woman should do or shared by both. Who should go grocery shopping, take care of the cars, clean house, or make social plans. We’re used to saying, “Oh, that’s man’s work” or “That’s women’s work.” Even though we’re used to maintaining those divisions, as Christians, those divisions no longer apply. That’s because Jesus has given us a new set of clothes to put on and we have discovered that after all of the fuss of whether they fit or not, they do! We all have a new identity and that identity is that we are all members of God’s family.
When Paul wrote to the Colossians, he counseled them to seek the things that are about Christ and not the things that are on the earth like how well dressed we are. Paul said, “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so that you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful.” (3:12-15)
The Danish theologian, Soren Kirkegaard, once put it this way. He said that life is like a huge play. We all have certain roles, and we have certain costumes that we wear. In that play, there are the rich, and there are the poor. There are the powerful and there are the weak. There are the beautiful and the not so beautiful. But one day, the play will come to an end. When the play is over, we will all have to turn in our costumes. At that point, we’ll finally realize that underneath our costumes we’re all the same. We’re all children of God.
Don’t be deceived by the clothes that you wear. Even though what we’re used to wearing might very well give us a sense of identity and belonging. God invites us to try on a new set of clothes that is freely given to us that we have not earned by our own efforts or bought with our own money. This is the gift of Jesus Christ from God himself. Don’t put this off. Put on Jesus Christ because as we do so we find our true identity. We find our identity as children of God, no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male and female, but all belonging to Christ—children whom God loves.
Let us pray.
Dear God, forgive us when we place more importance on our superficial appearance above what is deep within our hearts. Remind us that now that the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ has come, we no longer need to make distinctions but to believe and celebrate the new identity that we have as sisters and brothers of Christ. Show us how to put on Christ so that we may reveal to the world that in Christ’s love, we all know that we are Christians. Amen.