She wears a grey woolly cap, and it doesn’t really fit her head properly, because her hair hasn’t been cut for a very long time, it sort of rests on top of it. She wears a long dark green coat. It has shiny patches, for it is well worn. Her sleeves are torn; the lapels are dirty and grey. It is the same coat she has worn for many, many years. Her boots are a little newer, scuffed and often stained with salt and water. But, at least the boots seem warm, for they are the same boots every day.
I see this lady frequently on Yonge Street. Word on the street has it that she lives somewhere in the Rosedale Valley ravine at night, and then comes out during the day. She walks up and down the streets in my neighborhood. In wet weather she often has a garbage bag over her, and the water runs off her shoulders to keep her green coat dry for a while. It is very obvious that she has but one outfit and you see the same outfit whether it is the middle of the summer or a day like today: the same woolly cap, the same green coat, and the same worn boots.
She often appears not to know where she is, and it is obvious that she is not aware of the fact that she is like she is, or seen as she is seen. But when she gets up in the morning, she has no choices to make. She does not awaken and say, “Well what outfit am I going to put on today?” She wears the same thing. Her life is simple, and she walks and walks and walks, and then retires in the evening.
When we get up in the morning, you and I have choices to make. Most of us, I pray all of us, have the option to choose what it is that we are going to wear on any given morning. The choice that we make about what we are going to wear often determines precisely how the day is going to be. If it is a day of work, we might wear a suit or something smart, something presentable to look like we know what we are doing. On a day of rest, we might wear something soft and cushy and comfortable, but we wouldn’t want to be seen in public. Or, we might wear something for hard labour and work, with our jeans and our boots and rough shirts and tough gloves.
It depends on the day what we wear when we get up in the morning, for unlike the woman who lives in Rosedale Valley, we have a choice. That choice reflects what our day will look like and what our day will be. In many ways, it determines the impression that we give to everyone else around us. The seriousness with which we take what we wear and how we look is important. It is significant. What we wear says something about us.
There was an incredible article written in The New York Times a few years ago by Linda Grant. Grant is a Pulitzer Prize winning author and someone who writes on fashion – a brilliant woman! In this article, she said that fashion and what we wear is actually quite important. This is what she wrote:
Fashion is necessarily about transience. But then, so are our lives. Looking back at old photographs, we can often date them by the clothes we wore – not merely the decade a certain style was in vogue, but remembering that a particular dress or coat or pair of shoes was what we wore when we were in college or when we had just got married. Or, that we had purchased something special that we had saved for. Naked we are not timeless. We age, and the clothes we wear tell many stories about our identity and how it progresses. Our clothes become our identity. Clothes are not everything, but you cannot have depths without surfaces. They communicate that which is within, and between the two there is always a great dialogue.
This is a brilliant philosophy of fashion!
What Grant is suggesting is that the clothes that we put on and the fashion that we have is like a living dialogue with ourselves. The fashion and how we appear reflects what we inside ourselves want to project. What we are able to wear reflects often what our heart’s desire is or the values that we have. There is a correlation at times between what we wear and who we are. She is not suggesting that clothes make the person – that is not what she is getting at. That is too facile, too superficial. Rather, she is saying it is a living dialogue that speaks about what and who we are.
It is because we have a choice that what we wear says something about what and who we are. The Apostle Paul writing in the passage read this morning from the Book of Romans is saying something very similar. He is using the metaphor of the Christian life as being about putting on clothes. He says, “Awaken from your sleep and clothe yourselves with Jesus Christ.”
For those to whom he was writing, this was a very important message because the Romans and the days in which the Christians lived were dangerous and dark days. They were days of debauchery. They were days of excess. There were the festive processions to Dionysius when people would in fact display public acts of sex and debauchery and drunkenness and carousing and even violence. These festive moments for Dionysus would be turned into the streets as public manifestations of Roman frivolity.
Even though the structure of Roman society was strong, and the governance was well organized, and the military was well organized, culturally at the heart of what was in the Romans was debauchery and pleasure. Paul looks at this, and he looks at his fledgling Christian community, and he responds, “I want you to awake from this darkness that is the culture that surrounds you. I want you to be different.”
Earlier on in the Book of Romans, he says quite clearly that Judaism, which of course has its law, and Christianity, the emerging new faith which has Christ the Saviour, are marginalized by Roman society, and even as Paul anticipated, persecuted by Roman society, because Roman society could not stand these communities of righteousness, of law, of restraint. Judaism and Christianity were so close in the first century that to the Romans they were almost inseparable. They were seen as being one. Christ the Lord who had come was understood to be Christ the Jew, the Messiah, and therefore the two were put down synonymously by the Romans and despised by the Romans.
Paul then says, “Wake up!” Every day that you get up, every day that you rise, you have to make a decision: either you are going to buy into the culture of the Romans. Those of you who have been Gentiles, who have been saved from that darkness, you have got to decide for yourselves: are you going to go in the way of the culture from which you come, or are you going (to use that incredible phrase) “clothe yourself in Christ?“
For Paul, this was more than just a moral thing. He understands that people live in the society, but he is also concerned for their wellbeing and protection. That is why he uses the word “armour” to describe the putting on of Christ – like the Roman soldiers put their armour on. He says, “I want you to put the armour of Christ on you for your protection from the darkness of the culture that surrounds you and its influences. I want you to wake up every day and put on the armour, the clothing of Christ.”
He was saying this because he wanted them to get ready, to get dressed for something great, for some great occasion. He wanted them to prepare themselves by what they wore for a new day that was dawning. Paul believed that when Christ came, to quote the great Karl Barth, “Eternity broke into the flux of time.” When Christ arrived, he brought with him the magnificence of God and eternity, and that a new day was born and a new era had begun.
In the passage that we read from Isaiah, Paul believed that the coming of Christ was the fulfillment of what Isaiah had hoped for: a time of peace, a time when the nations would unite, a time when people would turn their hearts to God, a time when people would awaken from their sleep. Paul sees this happening in Jesus. He sees Jesus as the turning point in history. It is because Jesus has arrived, everything is different and everything changes. He wants those early Christians to embrace that and to take it on themselves, for a new day had dawned, and Paul wanted the people to clothe themselves with Christ, and not with the darkness of the old world.
Reading recently a work, an essay on the great painter Rembrandt, I see the same theme in his life and work. Rembrandt, as many of you will know, was a prolific painter in the early days of his painting. In fact, he was asked to do many of the portraits of some of the important people of his era. He was the one who went around to many of the greats in Europe, particularly in Holland, and did the most incredible painting, and he was happy and wealthy and rich. He had made a lot of money and he had a happy marriage: he loved his wife, and he and his wife had a tremendously happy time together.
Then, quite suddenly, his wife who he loved so much died, and his painting died with her. He simply could not manage the same quality of painting: his attention to detail, his care had gone. He felt part of the purpose of his life had disappeared. Rembrandt went into a great darkness, a depression almost. But something changed in Rembrandt. We can never know, and scholars never know precisely when, but from a painting point of view they do know: it was when he painted his famous Night Watch. In that magnificent painting that today is in Amsterdam, but copied all over the world, there is light again. Where there had been darkness and turbid paintings of dark colours, all of a sudden light is bursting! You can see it in Night Watch; things have changed.
Over the next few years, he did something remarkable: thirteen times he painted the same biblical scene where Jesus meets the disciples on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection. Thirteen times Rembrandt does the same painting, but differently. As all the scholars agree, clearly something must have happened to Rembrandt. He must have had an Emmaus experience. He must have run into Jesus Christ. He must have understood that this was for him existentially, spiritually, a turning point. It was not only the turning point of history when Christ came; it was the turning point for Rembrandt. Then his paintings become light again. They become magnificent again.
When I went to an art gallery a couple of years ago, as I shared with you not long after I was there, I sat in front of his Self Portrait and I just stared at it for ages and ages, because I could see in this wizened old man that he had painted in his eyes this sense of hope and this sense of light. It was as if he had put on new clothing, as if Rembrandt in his life had “put on Christ.” For him, it was the turning point in his life.
The question that I think faces every Christian in every era is: “Is he really the turning point in our lives?” It is not just in history, not just in time, but in our lives. But we also realize in Paul that there is more to come. It is not just about Christ having come into the world; it is the expectation and the hope that Christ returns. The great Dag Hammarskjold, who was the Secretary General of the United Nations and a devout Christian man, and one of the most quotable men of the twentieth century said, “For that which has been thank you; for that which is yet to be ‘Yes!’”
He believed that there was the future. He believed that there was something more. He got up every day in that belief, because it was what kept him going through the North Korean and the South Korean conflict, it was what kept him going with the Palestinian and the Israeli problem, it was what kept him going in so many things: what is yet to be “Yes!” In other words, God has still more to do. This is what Paul was saying! Therefore, “put on Christ” and get ready for the big occasion. “Put on Christ” and get ready for your tomorrow. “Put on Christ” also means that it is a daily thing.
This past summer, I had a conversation with a pastor in the native communities of northern Ontario. He was here at a meeting, and he and I spent a couple of hours together. What a wonderful man! He ministered in really difficult situations. I asked him what was one of the greatest challenges to his ministry? I said, “Tell me about what you do. Tell me what it is like to care for your people. Is it similar to what I encounter? Is it different from what I encounter?” We compared notes. I didn’t give away any of your secrets; we just compared notes!
It was an incredible time. He said, “The most difficult time for me is actually at New Year’s. You see, at New Year’s I always look forward to something new: a new day, a transformation, the beginning of a new year. I hold a Watch Night service in my church and the community comes to it, not all of them, but I pray they are going to come to it. There is a sense of expectation and hope and then so many who have so many addictions to alcohol and other things go home from the Watch Night service and they drink themselves into a stupor.”
He continued, “What absolutely breaks my heart, Andrew, is that New Year’s Day should be a day of new beginnings, but for so many of them it is just a continuation of the old. What should be a day that looks forward to something transformative, a new day of justice and peace and hope and equity, becomes a day of hangovers and sickness. My heart just breaks because I realize that the only thing that is going to help, the only thing that I can keep doing (and then he used the phrase) is to ‘put on Christ.’”
When I heard that I thought, “That is right. it applies to all of us! It is a daily thing “putting on Christ.” It is a daily thing. We have to decide what we are going to wear on any given day. Part of that decision is whether it is going to be a day with Christ. The problem with our society and our life is we like to compartmentalize everything. We like to divide it up, for example, into “the sacred” and “the secular.” The world and the culture say to us that “sacred” and “secular” are separate. They should have nothing to do with one another: here’s your sacred life; here’s your secular life; and have them nice and neatly carved out!
When you “put on Christ” you take him everywhere! There is no “sacred” or “secular”. There is no distinction, no compartments. You don’t cease to be a Christian. You don’t cease to follow Christ. Christ not only becomes the turning point in your life, he becomes the clothing, to quote Grant, which defines who we are. That is why when we hear of this distinction, we ourselves cannot buy into it. Oh, others can, societies can, governments can – let them do it if they want – but not us! We cannot compartmentalize our life.
We cannot on the one hand say we are going to put on this attire today, but we are also going to wear this other attire, and the two will be on at the same time. How foolish is that? We can’t do that. It doesn’t work. It is not what we are to be. We either wholly live “with Christ” or we make a decision not to.
We were having a discussion upstairs before the first service began with staff about what we put on in the morning, what we put on first? Well, I said, “My glasses”. If I don’t put on my glasses, I haven’t the foggiest idea what I am going to put on anyway! So, glasses first. Oh, others had different views – and I won’t tell you exactly how intimate that got – but everyone puts on something first for the day, and that outfit can often determine, as I said before, the rest of your day. Can you imagine what it is like to say to yourself and to say to the Lord, “Today Lord, I am putting on you!”
There is also a sense in which we put on one last thing: we ultimately put on a community. The early Christian church understood that it was different. It was different in the same way that the Jews were different. Paul knew that and he didn’t want them to be different from that at all. Not only did he not want them to compartmentalize their life, he wanted the Christians themselves to reflect the love and the mercy and the forgiveness and the peace and the righteousness and the holiness to which Christ had called them. He was excited for every new day for them.
Oftentimes, there are those I am afraid who put on what I call “temporary shows of religiosity.” They put on the garment of respectability and think that when they have worn that garment of respectability they have impressed everyone. Oh my, how many of those have existed over time. Not really believing the substance, not really wearing Christ fully, not really committing to anything – just putting on the veil in a sense, the robe of religious respectability. It is phoney! It is not a sign of change in a person’s life.
I don’t know about you, but right now I am excited. I am excited not about the coming of Christmas, well I am, but I am excited about the beginning of the new series of Downton Abbey in January, and I am ticking off the days when I can see Downton Abbey again. I am addicted! Lord, forgive me, I am addicted! Don’t call me when Downton Abbey is on. I will not respond. Call me later!
Downton Abbey is great, but you know what I like as much? The Ralph Lauren adverts just before it! They are so cool! Have you noticed that? They get you wanting to buy something that you would never wear in a million years – just because it looks cool. And those old cars and that sewn leather, it is just fantastic, right? It is brilliantly done, but there is a moment in all the Ralph Lauren ads – you go back and you listen – when it says “Fashion can be timeless.” In other words, what you put on can be timeless.
I would say Paul would say Lauren is talking about Christ, is he not? Not in the ad, but in Paul’s mind. When we put on Christ, we put on something timeless. No matter what the day may bring, no matter what we may face, no matter what we encounter, no matter the problems of the world, no matter if we are like that dear lady on Yonge Street who is homeless, or if we are like that pastor in the native community in the north and his dear people, it doesn’t matter if we are wealthy and we have the most glamorous clothes that we can put on a day-to day basis, it doesn’t matter!
What matters is that we put on Christ, and when we put on Christ, we put on the most important thing that we can ever wear. So tomorrow morning ask yourself when you get up, “What am I going to wear?” And your answer will be “Lord, I will wear you!” Amen.