Put on love– Colossians 3:1-17
Good morning! I am very sorry not to be there again this morning! Last week I was at the Benedictine Abbey and on Monday Zach tested positive for Covid. So, till midnight tomorrow, I am avoiding gatherings, prolonged periods indoors and people who might be vulnerable. And zooming also means I can avoid preaching wearing a mask!
Which brings us directly to what Paul is talking to the Colossians about in our passage this morning – what to wear?Paul outlines for them that as people given another chance a life, people who are raised with Christ (verse 1), they must strip off their old behaviours, their old self, like dirty clothes(verse 9), and put on a new self (verse 10), new clothes of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness, and love, clothes that will identify them and shape them as “God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved” (verse 12).
Some have interpreted these verses as saying Christians must the material, spurn the physical, to embrace the spiritual, the metaphysical, and Paul’s language here can tend itself to that interpretation. “Set your minds on things that are above,” says verse 2, “not on things that are on earth.” ‘’Put to death,” says verse 5 in very strong language, “whatever in you is earthly…” To understand these verses, however, we need to remember what Paul says in chapter 2 about how we were dead and have been made alive in Christ, how we were buried and are now raised with Christ. Our life in Christ then starts now! It does not begin when we leave the physical behind, but we are working out now in our in our physical forms, in our material existence, what it means to be truly human, truly part of God’s new creation (returning to the wonderful Christological hymn of chapter 1) or truly finally (verse 4) revealed with Christ in glory.
Last weekend we had the wonderful experience of being brought abruptly down to earth by a very spiritual woman. When you meet a Benedictine nun, in her full blueish, greyish habit you are not expecting her to say – after she has greeted Cecelia and Annabelle – “You know, don’t you, that breastfeeding is not an effective form of contraception!” It is possible, we discovered, to be very heavenly minded and very earthly good. In fact – this is what Paul is saying – these two go together. They are a perfect ensemble outfit! As people clothed in the new self, we are, “being renewed in knowledge according to the image of [our] creator.” We are looking more and more like Jesus. We are becoming more and more who we were intended to be.
Perhaps the second difficulty for us in this passage is that the clothing metaphor – items that can be put on and taken off – seems a mismatch with the seriousness of new life in Christ. As Tom Wright puts it, “This metaphor of ‘taking off clothes’ does not mean simply the making of good resolutions or promises to behave differently. It is the action… of leaving one family, or household, and moving lock, stock and barrel into another, where a different rule of life obtains.” New clothing signifies a new identity.
Perhaps this is something of an indictment of our western relationship with clothing – how disposable clothing has become to us! Some statistic say that the average piece of clothing is only worn seven times! This is the value of campaigns such as Baptist Word Aid’s Ethical Fashion Guide or #whomadeyourclothes.
What Paul is alluding to here, however, are traditional baptismal practices where people removed their old clothes, and as a sign of new identity, after baptism, put on new ones. For the nuns at Jamberoo Abbey, too, although there are stages in their journey, those stages are marked by changes in dress.
I have been re-reading a book by Lauren Winner this week, Wearing God, where she explores how– although we take clothing on and off – what we wear is usually chosen to shape our sense of self and present that self to others. She describes her wardrobe; the smart clothes she wears to important functions, the slightly quirky things she has bought and the clothes she normally puts on each day. And my wardrobe is similar. There are smart things that don’t get worn that often, an overabundance of tweed and what I usually wear each day – navy or black pants (or jeans), navy or black tops and a scarf. I think the scarf says is I want to look a little bit funky, but the plain navy or black pants say I don’t want to spend too much time thinking about it!
Winner quotes Alexander MacLaren, a nineteenth century Baptist minister, who wrote, “It takes a lifetime to fathom Jesus; it takes a lifetime to appropriate Jesus, it takes a lifetime to be clothed in Jesus.” Yes, we have a new identity in Christ, but daily, we are being shaped by this identity and revealing this identity to others. MacLaren goes on, “…the question comes to each of us, have we ‘put off the old man with his deeds’ (the old woman with her deeds)? Are we daily, as sure as we put on our clothes in the morning, putting on Christ the Lord?”
We have a new identity in Christ. Therefore, we must destroy the old clothes we wore – fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire and greed – all the ways human beings exploit others; we must get rid of the disgusting garments – anger, wrath, malice, slander and abusive language – all the ways fearful human beings seek to intimidate and dominate each other. We must forget the way racial, social boundaries, economic boundaries used to distinguish us from each other. “Christ is all and in all!” Therefore, we have new clothes. And we must put on these new clothes daily.
Commentator Stan Mast notes that just as Paul describes the full armour of God in Ephesians 6 (we looked at this as the full PPE of God last year!) here he describes the Christian’s workaday wardrobe!
It starts with base layers. For me – in a Canberra winter – it’s a plain merino top. For Paul the Christian base layers are compassion and humility because without those two things we cannot form and grow a new community. Putting on compassion means we can feel with others and putting on humility means that we put our own needs in proper perspective.
Secondly Paul calls us to put on the basic work wear of Christian life — kindness and gentleness. My plain paints and plain tops. Kindness, Stan Mast comments, is not very fancy or sexy, but plain human kindness does more to demonstrate the life changing work of Christ than almost anything else. And gentleness, how we deal with each other, is the matching top or bottom to our kindness – enhancing our interactions.
Patience, Mast suggests, is best represented by shoes – perhaps good walking shoes – because in all the challenges we face, getting through life, getting along with each other, we need patience to keep going, to keep working things out, to keep addressing the issues, to keep forgiving. “We need…a full wallet of forgiveness,” says Mast. “Realistically, we can’t keep from ‘grieving’ each other, as Paul says. So we’ll need to [keep reaching] into wallets daily and [pulling] out a big wad of forgiveness, sometimes 70 times 7.”
“Above all,” Paul says, “clothe yourselves with love, which binds the everything together in perfect harmony.” The term ‘bind’ describes a band or brooch or fastener, and this idea of a supreme all-binding virtue does appear in the writing of this period. Plato in Republic uses the term, but for Plato, community was held together by common respect for law. Paul is unique in saying that God’s community, our community, is bound together by love.
Stan Mast suggests an overcoat might represent love, but I have another idea that I can’t get out of my head.
Back in May Aron and I walked the Overland Track and – this shows what a novice bush walker I am – I wore gaiters for this first time. I wasn’t that keen. They looked like a fiddly and slightly superfluous piece of gear to have to fit over my boots and wrap around my leg. But our guide said she wanted us to wear them. “It’s not just that they’ll stop the water and mud from getting into your boots,” she said, “Or protect your legs from vegetation, but if you are wearing them, you’ll be prepared to go right through the muddy sections, you won’t try to avoid them by find a way around and in doing so widen the track and do more damage to the natural eco-system. You’ll be prepared to go right through.”
I think this is what Christian love does for us as a community. It enables us to get through the difficult sections in our lives, in the life of a community, in our work in the world. It enables us, not to try and find a way around the difficult things, but to go right through them.
It looks like there is a muddy bit of track ahead of us. The developments in the Anglican Church this week are evidence of the wrestling that all denominations are doing in relation to questions of human sexuality and Christian identity and the meaning of our bonds of love.
I was particularly struck by the statement made by the Anglican primate of Australia, The Most Rev Geoffrey Smith. He said, “It is always easier to gather with those we agree with. But in a tragically divided world, God’s call and therefore the church’s role includes showing how to live together with difference. Not merely showing tolerance but receiving the other as a gift from God.
My conviction is that the Anglican Church of Australia can find a way to stay together, graciously reflecting God’s great love, with our differences held sincerely.”
Wearing love as our gaiters – God’s gracious great love – enables us to continue down the path we are on, daily putting on our clothes of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, and forgiveness. Let us know God’s peace as we continue down this path! And let us remind each other frequently – teach and admonish each other – about what should come out of our wardrobes. And let us continue to sing songs like, “Put on love every day!” and hymns, like the one we are about to sing, “let your glorious light shine ever on my sight, and clothe me round, while still my path illuming…”
My apologies that I won’t be with you physically for the AGM and Quarterly Meeting today. I have nominated Steve Blackburn to chair the AGM in my place, but can I encourage you, as we meet and in whatever we do…to “do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus” – whose clothing label we wear – “giving thanks to God the Father through him!”