Put On Your Sunday Best
As I was pondering this
well-known, often abused and rarely understood passage, for some reason my mind
wondered to Saturday evenings when I was a little boy. Saturday evening was
“shoe polishing time.” Right after the Mary Tyler Moore Show, my Dad would
polish his shoes. He had one of those wooden boxes with the little shoe-sized
ramp on it and all the rags and brushes and polishes inside. There was
something magically grown-up about that box, and my Dad had elaborate rituals
that added to the atmosphere, already thick with the smells of waxes and
polishes. I recall being eager to have my own shoes polished, and eventually
Dad would help me polish them so we would be ready for church the next day when
we’d all get decked out in our Sunday morning best.
Looking back, I realize that he
was conning me into doing something that I otherwise would not want to, but
there was still something of the “right of passage” in this Saturday evening
polishing.
Years later, one of my best
friends told me that she always thought of me as 25 years old until one day
soon after my 30th birthday she caught me polishing my shoes. That,
she said, meant that I was a grown up. I don’t think I’ve polished my shoes
since! But once you’re grown up, you can never go back.
The author of Ephesians –
traditionally taken to be Paul but more likely to have been one of his
followers writing late in the 1st century[1] –
has caught the early church polishing its shoes and is telling them, “you’re
grown-ups now; you better dress the part.”
The word of the Lord to the
early church bears repeating to the church in our day, and to the church here
at Clarendon: “we’re grown-ups now; we better dress the part.”
Our passage this morning
describes the outfit: the whole armor of God – the belt of truth; the
breastplate of righteousness; the shield of faith; the helmet of salvation and
the steel-toed, butt-kicking boots of justice … er,
well, the gospel of peace for your feet.
This is a serious fashion
statement! But more than that, this is a serious faith statement.
How do we put it on here? Now?
In this place, in this moment?
I’d like to be able to tell you
this morning that I’ve spent a great deal of time this first week at Clarendon
searching for answers to these types of questions.
But the truth is, I’ve spent a
good deal of time this week searching for the answers to more mundane
questions: which key opens the pastor’s study? Where can I find a pad of paper?
How do I get my e-mail? Would it be wrong to throw the computer through the
office window? How do I get HAL to open the pod bay door?!?
Still, in the midst of my
searching and questioning of the banalities of first days in an office, I’ve
run across a few things that, surprisingly enough, begin to answer some of the
deeper questions about a grown-up faith for our time and place.
Rummaging through the desk in my
study I found the book of baptism records. Each certificate bears these
foundational words: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
We cannot put on a grown-up
faith, we cannot put on our Sunday best, until we figure out how to take this
fundamental charge seriously. This is not about “church growth” or “filling the
pews” or even “winning souls for the Lord.”
No, this is much more important
than any of those: this is ultimately about salvation.
Now I know that salvation is one
of those church words, one of those theological catch phrases that causes
squirming in progressive pews and among progressive pastors. I squirmed when I
wrote this paragraph.
But I could not escape it, so I
will “declare it boldly, as I must speak”: salvation is what’s at stake when we
put on our Sunday best. Now I do not pretend to understand much at all about
“eternal salvation,” but I do recognize everywhere around me a world that needs
to hear the goods news of the gospel: the good news that at the center of all
creation is a heart that beats for love of us all; that such love seeks us out
and will not let us go; that when we live in the midst of that love and allow
it to embrace us, we find a remarkable wholeness and healing of our wounded and
broken lives and relationships. If such healing and wholeness are not
salvation, then salvation has no real meaning.
This is crucial: there is a
broken and desperate world out there. I’ve spent some time this week looking
out my study window and watching the scads of young adults who live within an
easy walk of our door, and I’ve wondered, how many of them know themselves to
be beloved. They are occupying a lot of my prayer time.
There is a broken and desperate
world out there – just as we are often broken and desperate ourselves. So the
good news is for us, too. And it empowers us to carry it beyond ourselves into
the world.
Listen for your calling for the
particular ways that you are led to live out the good news. Given that
baptismal certificates sparked this reflection, I can’t help recalling that
when we baptize a child, we promise to nurture and love that child. The
In-House Committee will be meeting this morning to discuss, in essence, how we
live out that promise here. So let me remind you all that we need church school
teachers. Teaching is certainly one way that we share the good news.
So let’s hear the good news
again for ourselves, and then share it with all the energy and gratitude we
can.
When we do that, we’ll be
baptizing lots of folks – perhaps some of the tattooed and pierced Gen-Xers and Millennials that walk
past our doors daily – and then I can clear one more item out of that desk.
My rummaging through the desk also
turned up this sign: “Please Use Other Door.” I have no clue what it was
intended for. It didn’t help me a bit: there’s only one door in my study and
I’m not looking for an escape route just yet.
But as I considered the strange
dress code of the whole armor of God, it occurred to me that perhaps we’re
being encouraged to take another path, use another door, put on some unusual,
unexpected outfits here.
We are living through some difficult
days: on the global level last week’s bombings are a violent reminder that
terror strikes too often and too close; on a national level we are a deeply
divided nation facing an array of challenges so staggering that many are
calling on the Terminator to solve them; faith communities remain bitterly
divided over issues of sexuality as this summer’s meetings of national church
bodies have underscored yet again; and here at home you are living through
unsettling changes even at church. Listing these difficulties side-by-side does
not, of course, make them equivalent, but it does underscore the fact that no
place feels safe, secure and settled these days. Salvation seems very far off.
The early church certainly
understood this. They stood against enemies not of flesh and blood but “against
the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present
darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil.”
And how did they respond?
Against such overwhelming forces, what weapons did they reach for? What
strategies did they devise? What armor did they use? What did they do?
Well, they put on their Sunday
best: truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, deep spirituality and the
gospel of reconciliation.
Perhaps this is where the signs
are pointing for us: despite the difficulties of the day, let’s not respond in
the typical fashion – huddling in fear, lashing out in anger, crying in despair,
suffering in separation, divided and ultimately defeated by the powers. No,
let’s use another door, follow another way.
Surely the difficulties we face
today, as serious and staggering as they seem, are no more overwhelming than
the challenges faced by a tiny band of faithful who faced a hostile empire. Their
struggle no doubt seemed hopeless to many. The cosmic forces would certainly
crush them. Indeed, as the Russian writer Vasily
Grossman put it:
Human history is not the battle of good struggling to
overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a
small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not
been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.[2]
Against the powers and
principalities fear and anger, violence and hatred may often feel like the
natural and human response. But fear and anger, violence and hatred will never
defeat the powers. Those, indeed, are the very tools mastered by the powers.
When we turn to them we become, ourselves, mastered by the powers. But there is
a force more powerful. As Chris Hedges, the New
York Times war correspondent puts it in the final paragraph of his powerful
book, War Is a Force That Gives Us
Meaning,
[L]ove, in its mystery, has
its own power. It alone gives us meaning that endures. It alone allows us to
embrace and cherish life. Love has power both to resist in our nature what we
know we must resist, and to affirm what we know we must affirm. And love, as
the poets remind us, is eternal![3]
In other words, in theological
words, nothing can separate us from the love of God which is ours in Christ
Jesus. Nothing! Not the cosmic powers of this present darkness; not our own
faults and failings; not sickness; not depression; not addictions; not mental
illnesses; not economic struggles; not failures in our personal relationships;
not changes at our church; not division in our politics; not terrorism striking
innocent children; not hatred; not intolerance; not ignorance; not apathy; not
unbelief nor wrong belief – nothing can separate us from the love of God.
That’s the good news of the
gospel!
And, against the powers of the present
darkness, I will proclaim over and again the good news of the gospel. We are
the children of the living God. We are beloved.
And so, beloved, put on this
good news and proclaim it! Live as if you believe it to be true! For in this
good news lies healing and wholeness; in this good news lies salvation. And
there is a hungry and hurting world out there that needs to know its own belovedness. Now. In this time. In this place. This is the
best we have to offer. This is our Sunday best. Amen.