Calgary First Mennonite Church

Wearing Christ

Written by Alissa Bender

Associate Pastor Alissa Bender
Calgary First Mennonite Church
February 7, 2010

Wearing Christ
Colossians 3:12-17, 2 Kings 2:1-14

 I begin this sermon with confession.  I’ll explain first that as we enter Prayer Week this year, we will be considering themes that connect directly to the themes of this year’s assembly of Mennonite Church Canada (which will happen here in Calgary in July).  The over-arching theme of Prayer Week, as with Assembly, is Reclaiming JesusTM.  My confession is that when I first saw this theme, I wasn’t sure I liked it.  It made me feel strangely uncomfortable, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go where the image was taking me.
 You see, I am part of a generation that has been inundated with the message that my identity is wrapped up in the brands to which I am loyal.  Our teens today actually have an even harder job separating their identity from brand loyalty, as advertising has become much more potent and definitely ever-present in their constantly plugged-in world.
 

Wendell Loewen (Beyond Me: Grounding youth ministry in God’s story) gives some clear examples of how corporations use branding to create identity.  In the early ad campaign of Apple’s iPod, their homepage had the now familiar silhouette of a trendy young person dancing to the music from their white iPod attached to their ears.  The caption read “Which iPod are you?”  Not which iPod do you like, or which one fits your lifestyle, but which one are you?  This was an obvious attempt by Apple to blend product and identity, and the hopes that consumers would also fuse these two together.
 

Loewen writes about how young people in any generation are seeking and forming three important things – Identity, Belonging, and Autonomy.  This search doesn’t really change, but we have to understand that our culture changes.  The myth of consumerism is ready to answer these three questions.  Identity?  You are what you buy.  Are you a Mac, or a PC?  Belonging?  You belong to the brand and to everyone else who is loyal to that brand.  Autonomy?  You are valued by what you buy and what you have.  You are worth the value of your spending power.  You are as cool as the product with which you identify.
 

And before anyone jumps to judging anyone for believing these messages, remember that not only is this the water we swim in, it is the water our young people were born in.  And if the church is not offering alternative messages, then it is we who have shirked our responsibilities.  Loewen lays out an intricate web of counter-narrative to these types of societal messages and I can’t describe it all in this sermon (but you can borrow the book).  But I say all of this to remind us that it is up to us to say to each other, and especially to our youngest people who are just forming their sense of identity, belonging, and autonomy – You matter because you are a child of God.  Your worth is found in the fact that God loves you.  And by the way, we love you too, and value all the gifts you bring, no matter how unpracticed or less than perfect they may sometimes be.
 

But this is all a tangent to try to explain my moment of confession to you.  I wasn’t sure I liked this Reclaiming JesusTM theme because I have been raised to be critical of the myth of consumerism, in which corporations attempt to blend my identity with their brands.  As I reflected on what made me uncomfortable about this theme, I realized that I have seen in various places that the Church is capable of falling into the same manipulative trap, rather than subverting it.  I was resisting making Jesus into a commodity that we can put in a box, write a catchy slogan for, and sell in various colours and sizes depending on the kind of Jesus that suits your home.  I wasn’t sure that any part of the Christian family could trademark Jesus, not even the denomination of which I choose to be a member.
 

Thankfully, the great part about confession is that it opens a space for us to move on and to see something new.  So, now that I have put my issues out into the open, I hope that I can also help us to move past them.  Because I started to sift through my negative feelings around the trademark metaphor and found that maybe, just maybe, there is something in it that I can claim.  Maybe by drawing attention to this aspect of our culture, the Church can critique it, and in fact, subvert it. 

Perhaps there are ways of asking questions along this line that bring us to the heart of the gospel.  What does it mean for my identity, and the identity of my church community, to be truly wrapped up in our loyalty to Jesus?  What does it look like to clothe ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, in a way that identifies us as a certain kind of people?  When the questions are asked that way, then I’m interested in what we’re talking about.  Then I’m interested in how it is that we wear Christ.
 

We’ll have 5 sessions this week in which we’ll reflect on the 6 verses in Colossians 3:12-17.  Today verse 12 is our focal point: “Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.”
 

If I were wearing this (show Nike swoosh), who can name my slogan?  So, what do we wear that proclaims the slogan – “I follow Jesus”?  And I don’t just mean wearing something physically, around our neck or our wrist.  But the clothing image helps us think about what people first notice about us that sends a message about who we are, what we value, and where our loyalties lie.
 

The five qualities that are named in Colossians are all about how we relate with other people.  How we’re in community with each other will be evidence of who we follow.  Compassion translates two Greek words.  The first refers to the place that was thought to be the seat of emotions – not our heart, but our guts.  In New Testament times, deep feelings were seen to come out of the depths of our bowels (try that on a Valentine).  The second word is mercy or pity that is acted out.  So Paul calls us to compassion that isn’t just a surface level “wow, that must be rough”, but instead is mercy that comes way up from our gut and is put into practice.
 

Kindness might be given this list of synonyms: graciousness, courtesy, responsive listening, goodness, empathy, respect for the other’s feelings, and generosity.  In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, this Greek word is used to describe God’s gentle, caring ways.
 

Humility was not highly regarded in the ancient Greek world.  But Jesus claimed this quality, and calls his followers to it.  Humility isn’t putting ourselves down falsely so that others can puff up our egos.  It is perhaps best described in Philippians as the call to look to the interests of others, and not only to cling to our own self-interest.
 

Gentleness, or meekness (not weakness), describes the Jesus who rode through victorious crowds into Jerusalem on a gentle donkey instead of a great war horse.  Gentleness or meekness has to do with submitting ourselves to God’s ways above our own ways of selfish ambition or conceit.
 

Patience is another quality that is grounded in the character of God.  God’s patience is described in the Old Testament by saying that God is slow to anger.  In Colossians 1:11, patience is paired with endurance.  Both of these synonyms describe characteristics that are often necessary when we are in community.
 

All five of these qualities are important for us to be able to be Church together.  And Paul is telling us that these qualities will characterize the Christian community.  But you know what?  They’re not always easy.  We can tell ourselves over and over again to clothe ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience… but we can still get angry with each other.  We still want our own way without considering the needs of others.  We still keep walls between ourselves rather than reaching into our gut for compassion.
 

We want to clothe ourselves in all of these good qualities, but sometimes we find that there are things in the way that need to be taken off, that need to be shed in order to wear something new.  And try as we might in our own good intentions to clothe ourselves in this way, what is really needed is for us to let go and to let Christ clothe us.
 

I can think of no better illustration of this than a story that happens in The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, in the book called The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  If you know about Narnia, you know that the lion, Aslan, acts as the Christ figure in these allegories of the Christian story.  In Dawn Treader, we have the character Eustace, who starts as a rather miserable boy.  At one point in the story, Eustace lets his arrogance and general ill-humour lead him away from the group, and then, because of his greed and selfishness, finds himself turned into a dragon.  Eustace was very frightened and upset by this, and the part I will read you now is his description of how he became a boy again, when in the middle of the night, a lion appeared and led him through the forest to a well.
 (Page 114 “I knew it was a well… to Page 117… I think you’ve seen Aslan.”)
 

We are God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, who can we trust more to clothe us, than the one who loves us dearly?  We need to allow God to clothe us in the character of Christ.  This is especially vital as a Christian community.  We are all individuals with different experiences and needs and preferences.  We all have our ideas about what we should be wearing, so to speak, as a church, and what we need to take off.  But how delicious, as Eustace said, that we aren’t figuring that out on our own.  We can, and in fact we need to, ask God to clothe us in Christ.
 

The story from 2 Kings that I told earlier was given as an extra Scripture for today’s theme, and it rolled around in my head a lot this week as I considered what it might be teaching us.  You see, sometimes it’s easier for me to focus on my responsibility to clothe myself in compassion and patience, than to allow God to give me the new clothes that I need.  But when I suddenly understood that we are asking God to clothe us, I looked at Elisha and realized – he couldn’t do it on his own either. 

Elijah, his spiritual mentor, was about to be taken away from him, but Elisha couldn’t let go of him on his own strength.  He followed him from town to town, not wanting to face the inevitable.  Finally, when Elijah turned and asked Elisha what he wanted, I believe Elisha had a choice.  Elisha could have asked to go with Elijah, or asked Elijah not to go at all.  But instead, Elisha asks to be clothed in God’s power, as he has witnessed of Elijah.  And in the symbol of taking up the mantle that Elijah had worn, we see that, in fact, God does clothe Elisha with power.  And off he goes to do his own work to which God is calling him.
 

You would think it should be easy to ask someone else to do something for us.  But we like to manage things on our own, don’t we?  We like to pick our own clothes out of the closet, even if this self-criticism that we wear every day doesn’t look good with anything else we put on.  Even if this bitterness that we wear has a dark colour that runs into the rest of our wardrobe.  It’s still what we know, and we might not even notice it anymore as we put it on every day.
 

The story of Eustace Scrubb shows a vivid picture of our need to allow God to do the sometimes painful but freeing work of removing the rough and ugly exterior of our own creating, and to allow God to re-clothe us in the compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience of Christ.  This is a work of grace.  We cannot work to earn it, but we do need to let God do it.  Because I want my identity to be fused with my loyalty to Jesus.  And I want visitors and neighbours and strangers to be able to look at the wardrobe that we exhibit as a church and to say – Ah, we see what kind of people those are.  We see that they practice compassion, value justice, and invest in hospitality.  Whoever they belong to, is the one to whom we want to belong as well. 

Maybe this Jesus trademark isn’t so bad after all.  It may be, after all, that I just needed to allow someone else to show me how well it fits.  Holy, dearly loved, chosen people of God.  Let us allow God to take care of the wardrobe that gets in our way of following Jesus together.  And let us be clothed in the character of Christ, in compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.

 We are going to pray together about this for the next few minutes.  We are going to come to God in prayer, asking for help to shed the things that keep us from drawing closer to God, the things that get in our way as members of this community.  And we will pray also that God will clothe us as Elisha was clothed, as Eustace was clothed, as the Colossians were clothed, with the character of Jesus Christ. 
We will do this with a form of prayer that has been part of the Christian tradition since the 4th century.  You will have found the small, paper prayer labyrinth in your bulletins, and maybe you’ve already read the words of explanation. 
There are many different ways to pray.  Sometimes we encounter God in silence.  Sometimes in admiring God’s creation.  Other times in words or music.  And sometimes our prayers rise to God through what our bodies are doing – service for others, fasting, resting, or walking. Normally a labyrinth is big enough that we walk through it, as a symbol of our faith journey, but we’ll stay in our seats today.
Some music will play for the next 5 minutes.  In that time, trace your finger through the labyrinth, slowly and prayerfully.  As you trace your way from the entrance to the centre, ask God to reveal to you the things that God wants to remove from your wardrobe, whatever keeps you from drawing closer to God.  When you reach the centre, pause there and rest in God’s love for you.  Then, trace your way back out, asking God to clothe you for your life in this community, and for whatever your ministry is.