What Not to Wear

A Sermon on Mark 10:46-52

Last week, my colleague told us about one of his guilty pleasures, and this week, I’m going to tell you about one of mine… reality television. It started innocently enough, when an acquaintance of mine was chosen to compete as a geek on Beauty and the Geek, but now I watch it all, from Top Chef to America's Next Top Model. Normally I think of it as a waste of time with no relevance to anything at all, but this week, I was reading the gospel text and I found myself thinking of the show What Not to Wear. 

If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a show where people nominate their fashion-blind friends and family for makeovers. They video their friend’s fashion faux pas, and then the hosts, Stacy and Clinton get to go through the subject’s wardrobe, making fun of their clothes and throwing away whatever they want before sending the subject out on a shopping spree to buy clothes that Stacy and Clinton deem more appropriate. In one episode I particularly remember, the woman they were featuring was in her mid-twenties, but she hadn’t changed her style since her early teenage years. She wore lots of little baby-doll t-shirts with slogans on them, and low-riding jeans … but the biggest problem was her “tail.” She had a furry purple tail with a little bell on the end of it, something you might wear if you were dressing as the Cheshire Cat for Halloween, and she safety-pinned it to the back belt loop of her jeans – and she wore it all the time. She thought that without it, she would fade into the background, but once Stacy and Clinton finally persuaded her to part with her tail and teen-aged clothing and start wearing clothing that was more flattering and age-appropriate and less, um, feline, she found that she was taken more seriously. She felt prepared to interview for a real job, a job she certainly wouldn’t have gotten with a tail pinned to her jeans. The thing that had gone wrong in her closet, and the closets of so many other subjects of What Not to Wear, is that her life had changed – she had grown up – but her clothes had stayed the same, and that just wasn’t working for her. 

Now, I don’t mean to glorify What Not to Wear. It’s deeply materialistic, and totally uncritical of our habit of judging people by their appearances; it sends the message that in order to be a valuable person, you need to dress as if you had a lot of money; it buys into and glorifies some of the aspects of our culture that we as Christians are called to reject. But in some ways, that girl and her tail reminds me of blind Bartimaeus. 

Bartimaeus, the text tells us, was a blind beggar in Jericho. Blindness was a lot more common in that time and place than it is in ours – it’s a dry and dusty part of the world, and in the harsh conditions, people’s eyes would become irritated, and then infected, and in a world without antibiotics, their sight would often be permanently lost. So historians suggest that there were many more blind people at Jesus’ time than there are in ours. And in a world without the adaptive technologies that are available to visually impaired people today, there were not many ways for blind people to make a living, so they would often become beggars. 

Bartimaeus was one of these blind beggars, and in our text for today, he is sitting by the road in Jericho when Jesus, his disciples, and a large crowd pass by. He hears that it is Jesus of Nazareth and cries out “Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me!” The surrounding crowd reprimands him for making a scene, but he shouts out until Jesus notices. Jesus tells the people to send Bartimaeus over, and as soon as he is called, Bartimaeus throws off his cloak. Why in the world does he throw off his cloak? That seems like a very odd thing to do, but it turns out that the cloak had a special significance in this time: the beggars of Jesus’ time wore cloaks because they could spread them out on the ground to catch coins that people tossed their way – it was not just their outer garment and their sleeping surface, but also where they collected their money. And so in a very real way, Bartimaeus’ cloak was a marker of the kind of life that he lived, the life of a blind beggar. But when Jesus calls him, Bartimaeus throws off the cloak, stands up, and goes to Jesus. “What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asks. “Let me see again,” Bartimaeus answers. “Go,” says Jesus, “Your faith has made you well.” And Bartimaeus’s sight is restored, but he doesn’t do what Jesus says.  He doesn’t go.  Instead, he begins to follow Jesus. 

I think that that is why he leaves the cloak behind him; because this is not only a story of healing, it is also a story of discipleship, a story of transformation. When Bartimaeus throws off his cloak, he is giving up the very thing he needs most for the kind of life that he has been living, a possession which is crucial for his life as a beggar. I think that what we see in this moment is Bartimaeus committing to a new life, a life of discipleship. He is ready to follow Jesus on the way, and in the new life he is called to, he isn’t going to be sitting by the road collecting coins.  There will be no time to sit by the road with his cloak spread out in front of him. In a way, he demonstrates more vision than a lot of the other would-be disciples we’ve heard about in the Gospel lessons of the last few weeks – unlike that wealthy young man who was told that he would have to give his money away and went away dejected, Bartimaeus sees that embracing a new life following Jesus means that some things have to change. He sees that the things that have been so necessary to his daily existence are not going to be important in the life he’s being called to. And so throws his cloak off, and he walks away.  He is about to be healed, but before he even regains his vision, he prepares himself for a life of discipleship – a life on the road – a life of following Jesus. 

It’s this kind of wisdom that is so lacking among those people on What Not to Wear. Unlike Bartimaeus, they insist on carrying their “cloaks” around with them – they don’t realize that the clothes that really worked for them before, the clothes that met their old needs, no longer fit into their new lives. Something has changed – they have grown up, they have changed jobs, they are heavier or lighter than they used to be – and unlike Bartimaeus, they have not noticed that the clothes that used to serve them well are now burdens and obstacles. A furry tail might be a fun accessory for a teenager, once in a while – it might communicate that she is quirky and funny and fun. It might help her to feel, in the difficult and judgmental world of high school, that she has something special about her.  It might help her to know that the judgments of the popular kids don’t need to mean anything to her, that she is not trying to please them. Maybe that tail helped that girl to have a sense of self in a time in her life where that was really difficult. But by the time Stacy and Clinton got to her, she was not a teenager any longer, that tail was no longer a cute accessory, and she had convinced herself that without the tail, she was nobody. And as critical as I am of the show’s obsession with external appearance, the tail that that woman wore every day needed to be thrown off, thrown away, left behind, in order for her to embrace her adult life. Like Bartimaeus’s cloak, it may have served a purpose in her past, but things had changed, and now it was no longer necessary, and because she hadn’t left it behind, it was standing in the way. 

Sometimes we have a Bartimaeus moment in our lives: God calls us to something new, and we have the chance to leap up and go, leaving the garments of our old lives behind us. Something has changed, and the things that were essential before are no longer what we want or need. Maybe taking an exciting new job means that we just can’t stay in the old apartment that we loved. Maybe there’s a change in our family – we start a new relationship, or have a child, and the routines and habits that used to structure our lives become inconvenient or impossible. Maybe changing careers or going back to school means having more happiness, but less money, and that calls us to re-examine our lifestyle and live more simply. Do you have a cloak that you might be called to throw off in order to follow a new call in your own life? Does this church? 

The history of our church tells us that we have done it before. In the 1960s, we saw the expense of maintaining a deteriorating building, and we threw off the cloak of our old building, following a call to become a “church without walls.” In the 1980s, we saw that our organizational structure was a giant bureaucracy with a multitude of committees and boards. This structure had worked well when we were a bigger church but it had become a burden for our small congregation of busy New Yorkers. We threw off our old by-laws to create a more streamlined system that would let us focus more on our mission and less on meetings. What cloak might we be called to throw off next? What part of our life as we know it might start to become a burden or a hindrance as we continue to discern God’s call for us in this time? 

Our commitment as Jesus followers leads us, as individuals and a community, to places we never would have expected, and sometimes calls us to leave behind the things that once seemed essential to us. I wonder, once Bartimaeus regained his vision, whether he looked back at his cloak before leaving it behind – I know that I would have – I would have been tempted to go back for it, to insist that I might need it, like that woman who was sure that she needed to keep her furry tail. But the wisdom of Bartimaeus reminds me that sometimes the things that seemed most important are the very things we’re called away from.  Bartimaeus reminds me that sometimes following Jesus means that we can’t take the trappings of our past with us.  And sometimes for us as for Bartimaeus, the story of our healing and the story of our discipleship are one and the same.

The Christian Wardrobe

A sermon on Colossians 3:12-17

“What should I wear to your church?” That’s a question people ask me all the time when they consider coming to worship with my congregation. I usually make a joke in response: “I’d recommend that you definitely wear clothing,” I reply, “Probably not a swimsuit.” If that doesn’t set them at ease, I tell them that some people wear casual clothes like blue jeans and t-shirts, some wear dresses or suits, and that one particular child often comes in a superhero mask and cape. People are often surprised to hear of a church where you can come as you are; many churches have stricter expectations, written or unwritten. In Israel, I visited churches with posted signs, warning that men or women wearing shorts would be denied entry, and churches where security guards handed out shawls to cover exposed shoulders. In New York, you’re not likely to be asked to leave for dressing too casually in a house of worship, but stares and glares and whispers can make you feel just as unwelcome. Many of us, surely, have endured the embarrassment of showing up somewhere – whether it’s a church service or a party, only to realize that we’re wearing the wrong thing.

So where do contemporary churches get their ideas of what is appropriate clothing for a Sunday worship service? Surely not from Jesus, who spent so much time with poor people who wouldn’t have the means to purchase fine clothing. Jesus, who did not condemn the woman who washed his feet with her tears and dried them with her hair, violating social norms of apparel and proper behavior. Jesus, who told his followers to consider the lilies and not to worry about what they would wear.

There are a few biblical verses that seem to touch on what we should wear, words that encourage women not to wear gold or pearls or braided hairstyles (that is, not to wear clothing that shows off their wealth and social status). There are verses that encourage women to cover their hair in worship, in accordance with the cultural norms of the time. There are verses in the Mosaic legal codes forbidding fabrics made of mixed fibers – no cotton-poly blends! And there are verses that encourage modesty, although the kind of modesty the authors were referring to probably had to do more with humble behavior than with appropriate dress. The opposite of modest, to the writers of the epistles, would more likely be “self-aggrandizing” or “vain,” rather than “scantily clad.”

In fact, there’s not a single word in scripture that dictates what we should wear to church: no “Thou shalt not wear blue jeans to worship,” no “Thou shalt not wear white after Labor Day,” not a single word about Easter bonnets or jackets and ties or close-toed shoes. Those norms, observed by so many worshiping communities, are based in our contemporary culture, not in scripture. So what is in the Christian wardrobe? There is an answer for us today in our reading from Colossians, an epistle written either by Paul himself or by someone emulating Paul and writing in his name, which would have been a common practice in that time. Writing to the newly-formed Christian church in Colossae, he urges them – and all Christians – to “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience,” and to “above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything in perfect harmony.” In the section before today’s reading, the author reminds Christians that they have, in baptism, “stripped off” their old selves, and urges them therefore to rid themselves of all of the vices and harmful and hurtful behaviors that are not fitting for those made new in Christ.

These words come from a very different time, a time when it would have been unimaginable to have overflowing dresser drawers and bedroom closets full of clothes in different colors and styles. Most people would have had very few articles of clothing, perhaps one or two outfits in total. Indeed, Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist urged his listeners, if they had two coats, to give one away to the poor! To strip off anger wrath, malice, and slander, and to put on compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, and love, would be a powerful image for those who expected to wear the same garment every day until it gave out. To “clothe oneself” in Christian virtues would mean making a long-term commitment to put these traits on every day, to bear with the places where they might tug or itch, to live in and with them until they became as comfortable and natural as a well-worn pair of blue jeans. When we think of Christian virtues like compassion as garments to put on, we acknowledge that the life of faith may not always come naturally. Compassion, patience, and love are not like brown eyes, a trait which we either have or we don’t. Instead, they are presented as practices that we can “put on,” whether that comes easily or with great difficulty.

I love that our lectionary calendar of readings designates this passage to be read during the Christmas season – the twelve days that follow Christmas, when we reflect on Christ’s incarnation, when we hear stories of his birth and childhood. Much of the world around us celebrates Christmas for the month before Christmas Day (or two months or three months); much of the culture around us has packed up the holly and the ivy, turned off the Christmas carols, and is now getting ready to throw out the eggnog and cookies as we make our New Year’s resolutions and wait to watch the ball drop. But in church, the tree is still up, the Advent wreath is still lit, and the baby Jesus sits in the manger in front of the pulpit; we are still taking some time to reflect on the miracle and the mystery, to sit for a bit longer with this beautiful and paradoxical story of God made flesh.

We hear this passage, urging us to “put on,” like clothing, the virtues of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, and love, in the same season that we contemplate the stunning claim that God came to us in human flesh as a baby – the baby of an unwed mother, in a relatively poor family, in an occupied nation. We are urged to put on Christ-likeness because in Christ, God has put on humanity; God has put on vulnerability and mortality. God has put on human emotions and human experiences and human development. In Christmastide, we contemplate the mystery of God putting on humanity, and that through God’s incarnation, God has drawn near to us so that we might draw nearer to God. Christ has put on humanity so that we might, as Paul urges the church in other letters, "put on Christ."

The Good News invites us to be made new, to strip off everything that is not of God and to put on the garments of God’s reign. I wonder whether, perhaps, C.S. Lewis was thinking of passages like this one when he wrote The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe – that story of four children entering the land of Narnia through the back of an enchanted wardrobe and meeting there a savior who was familiar in many ways, but had taken on another kind of flesh entirely, a savior who was, as they said, “not a tame lion.” As the Pevensie children make their way to and from Narnia, they go through a wardrobe, clothing themselves in fur coats as they enter the perpetual winter of Narnia. Perhaps C.S. Lewis thought of scriptures like this one when he chose the metaphor of the wardrobe as the passage to another world. It echoes scriptures like this one which invites us to clothe ourselves for the Reign of God rather than the empires of this world.

There’s another reason, too, that I love reflecting on this reading at Christmas-time. Because in our contemporary world, we tend to think of the Christmas story with a sense of warm nostalgia. We see it in a soft-focus, casting everything in a warm golden light. You can see it in the ways we illustrate the Christmas story – my own childhood memories include many Precious Moments nativities, for instance, but I’m sure you can come up with your own images of a clean, peaceful, idyllic manger scene. But the fact is, the Christmas story as it has come to us is the story of a God who comes into a world which is difficult and dreary, sometimes dark and frightening.

Much like the Christmas story itself, this passage from Colossians is one which sounds lovely and rosy, which sounds peaceful and idyllic, but which is actually much more breath-taking and fierce, wild and wonderful. This passage challenges us to do the hard, hard work of building community that reflects the Reign of God in a world where that is not always welcome. It sounds warm and fuzzy, but it is actually asking us to do a hard and counter-cultural thing. We are invited to take off the garments of this world: self-centeredness, competition, materialism, skepticism, apathy, hierarchy, and to put on the garments of the Reign of God: compassion, kindness, humility, patience, love. These are garments that will sometimes attract scorn and judgment; these are garments which are probably not in line with the latest fashion trends. These garments mean seeking peace in a world where violence is the norm. These garments mean seeking transformation in a world more comfortable with the status quo. These garments mean seeing all people as children of God, each uniquely beloved and precious in God’s eyes, in a world that values some people far more than others. The Good News of God’s love is far more than nice people and a nice baby in a nice stable, and the life of faith is far more than nice, polite people in a nice, polite church. The Good News is this: God’s perfect love for us has taken shape in the Word made flesh. Christ has clothed himself in humanity so that we might clothe ourselves in Christ. Or, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it,

I am all at once what Christ is, ' since He was what I am and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

Thanks be to God.
Amen.

"You're Wearing That?": On Church Dresscodes

This week, the Catholic weekly Our Sunday Visitor has a piece about priests enforcing dress codes at mass, including this gem:

One group at Holy Redeemer that has been especially careless about dress is Latino women, Father Pilcher said, especially when they come for weddings and quinceaneras.
“That’s a group I have to work on,” he told Our Sunday Visitor.

Brothers and sisters in Christ: If an entire cultural group seems to have different standards of dress from the ones you were raised with, and your response to that observation is to say in a media interview that you “have to work on” people of that culture, perhaps the work set before you is internal. Perhaps that work begins with reading the Wikipedia article on cultural imperialism, continues with some exploration of your own privilege, and concludes with a bit of soul-searching. Repentance might be in order.

That said, I think we are dealing with at least two different questions. One question is, “what should people wear to church?” Another question is, “what should clergy and lay-leaders do when worshippers wear something that is Not That?”

What people should wear to church is an issue which transcends time, place, and denomination. It happens to be cropping up in the Catholic press today, but it is not a Catholic Issue. Wherever two or three are gathered in Christ’s name, someone is judging someone else’s outfit, be they Catholic, Evangelical, or UU.

Scriptural witness makes it clear that standards of modesty vary across time and culture. One culture's miniskirt is another culture's exposed ankles, which is another culture's unveiled head. These standards are culturally specific, not eternal or God-ordained, and are customarily policed by men with too much time on their hands, and lovely church ladies who wonder what happened to the good old days.

“But Feminist Pastor,” you may say, clutching your Extremely Tasteful Church Pearls, “Would you have me go to church naked, as I’m sure you do?”

“No,” I would reply, “Because I was raised in New England, and adhere to the culturally specific (see above) church dress norms thereof, Extremely Tasteful Church Pearls and all. Besides which, as a clergywoman I have the privilege of dressing in a black, sack-like robe which covers me from clavicle to mid-calf. I would encourage you to go to church wearing whatever helps you feel worshipful.”

(I also would encourage you, when you’re going to a religious setting other than your own, to try to dress in a way that’s respectful of the norms of the community you are visiting, but that’s more Miss Manners than Feminist Pastor. (Confession moment: I have arrived at more than one religious service and discovered I was dressed inappropriately for worship in that community.) )

But – and this is an entirely different question from what constitutes appropriate attire for church – what is a Christian response to “inappropriate dress”?

Judgment and shaming. Duh.
(Kidding.)

If we are going to answer our call to welcome strangers and rejects and outsiders, if we really believe that the Kingdom of God means everyone has a place at the table, we can’t expect everyone to wear, or even to own, Extremely Tasteful Church Pearls. Isn’t it great when teenagers bring their teenage rebellion, in all its sartorial glory, to church? Isn’t it great when rich folks and poor folks are welcomed at the same table? Isn’t it great when the church lives out its call to be a “house of prayer for all nations” – different cultures and all? Could we come to see challenges to our ideas about clothing as part of the blessing of diversity?

When someone arrives at church in an outfit that raises eyebrows, the church is called to welcome them with open arms, remembering that Jesus turns no one away.

When a pastor’s cultural dress norms are different from those of his or her congregation, it is the pastor’s job to come to understand the culture of the congregation under his or her care – not to condemn it.

When a congregation is in conflict over differing dress norms, whether it is because of age, class, or culture, the task before that church’s leadership is, I believe, to reframe that conflict in language that celebrates the all-too-rare gift of living together as a diverse congregation. The task is to celebrate those differences, recognizing God’s expansive love for all people, regardless of race or class, age or gender, tattoo-status or shirt-tightness. If God’s grace is big enough to welcome women in fur coats and men in Rolex watches, it is certainly big enough to welcome street people, rebellious youth, guys in ripped-up jeans, and scantily clad ladies.

As for modesty? Maybe we should get some of those ladies into clerical robes.

Daughters of Jerusalem

Last month, while traveling in Israel, I was wandering around the Old City. I didn’t have my bearings yet, but I happened to notice one of the stations of the cross: Station Eight, Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem.

A great number of the people followed him, and among them were women who were beating their breasts and wailing for him. ²⁸But Jesus turned to them and said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. ²⁹For the days are surely coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.’ ³⁰Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’; and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ ³¹For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”

I paused, and prayed.

Then I decided to try to find the next few stations of the cross. On the way, I saw an open building with Russian writing on the door – the Church of St. Alexander, overseen by the Russian Orthodox Palestine Society. My guidebook said it was worth a look, so I went in.

After paying my donation (5 or 10 shekels - $2-3), I was told that in order to go any farther, I would need to put on a wrap skirt for the sake of modesty. I was wearing jeans. They were neither tight jeans nor skinny jeans. I tied a wrap skirt over them. What else could I do?

The church preserves some incredible ruins, including a massive city gate and the tiny Eye of the Needle next to it. A Russian Orthodox nun ceaselessly muttered prayers at the altar, standing in her stocking feet with a water bottle by her side.

I took some pictures, but I couldn’t focus. I was too angry. Angry at a world where women’s bodies -- my body -- are seen as problems to be covered up and controlled. Angry that my denim-clad legs are assumed to be an affront to the God who made them. Angry on behalf of the women whose cultures demand that they dress in long sleeves and full-length skirts and head scarves in the middle of the summer. Angry at the growing realization that my pilgrimage to Jerusalem would be marked, every single day, by men (always men) examining my clothing to decide whether I would be permitted to enter the places where Jesus ate and preached and was tried and tortured and crucified.

Jesus was crucified naked.

I wept for the daughters of Jerusalem.