Chris Taylor’s Sermon – 1/27/08
Clothed In Christ
Psalm 27:1-6
Colossians 3:5-17
In a few minutes we are going to be ordaining and installing our new officers. They will constitute one third of the leadership of this congregation over the next few years. In our Presbyterian polity it is not the pastors who control the church – their role is to lift up their best understanding of what God is saying and where God is leading us. It is these officers, and specifically the elders who make the decisions. All of which is to say that these new officers are going to have a significant impact on what happens around here over the next three years.
What kind of church is God calling us to be? We catch a glimpse in a congregation that Anne Lamott describes in her book, Traveling Mercies. It was in Marin City, a community on the outskirts of Sausalito; very poor, mostly black, and full of drugs and guns and government housing that people called the Projects. The church was right across the street from an enormous flea market that Lamott used to visit.
It was called St. Andrew Presbyterian, and it looked homely and impoverished, a ramshackle building with a cross on top, sitting on a small parcel of land with a few skinny pine trees. But the music wafting out was so pretty that I would stop and listen… Finally, I began stopping in at St. Andrew from time to time, standing in the doorway to listen to the songs. I couldn’t believe how run-down it was, with terrible linoleum that was brown and overshined, and plastic stained-glass windows. But it had a choir of five black women and one rather Amish-looking white man making all that glorious noise, and a congregation of thirty people or so, radiating kindness and warmth…
I went back to St. Andrew about once a month. No one tried to con me into sitting down or staying… The church smelled wonderful, like the air had nourishment in it, or like it was composed of these people’s exhalations, of warmth and faith and peace. There were always children running around or being embraced, and a gorgeous stick-thin deaf black girl signing to her mother, hearing the songs and the Scripture through her mother’s flashing fingers… And every other week they brought huge tubs of great food for the homeless families living at the shelter near the canal to the north. I loved this. But it was the singing that pulled me in and split me wide open.
Eventually, of course, Lamott found her way in; found her way to the folding chairs; found something healing and powerful in joining her voice with those of the people around her. Eventually, she even found her way to Jesus. Or, more accurately, Jesus found her.
The reason I share all this is to give you the background, the setting, for what happened sometime later. It is hard to tell if it was a few years later or ten years later, but something happened there one day that was like a moment of grace breaking in.
Lamott introduces us to a man named Ken Nelson. He was dying of AIDS; gradually deteriorating right before their eyes. He had started attending right before his partner died of the same disease, and later on Ken would tell people that Jesus had slipped into that great gap his partner had left behind, and that Jesus had been there ever since. In Lamott’s words, “Ken has a totally lopsided face, ravaged and emaciated, but when he smiles, he is radiant… He says that he would gladly pay any price for what he has now, which is Jesus, and us. ”
Then Lamott tells us about a woman named Ranola; large, beautiful, jovial, black and very devout. She had been raised in the South by Baptists, and she had been taught certain things about people like Ken. She didn’t know quite what to make of him. She was a bit standoffish; always looking at him with some confusion, or out of the side of her eyes. She was, as Lamott puts it, having a hard time breaking through everything she had been taught.
But then one Sunday something amazing happened, something beautiful and powerful. They had gone through the first hymn, “Jacob’s Ladder,” Ken unable to stand with the rest of the congregation but singing anyway. And then came the second hymn, the fellowship hymn, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”
The pianist was playing and the whole congregation had risen – only Ken remained seated, holding the hymnal in his lap – and we began to sing, “Why should I feel discouraged? Why do the shadows fall?” And Ranola watched Ken rather skeptically for a moment, and then her face began to melt and contort like his, and she went to his side and bent down to lift him up – lifted up this white rag doll, this scarecrow. She held him next to her, draped over and against her like a child while they sang… Then both Ken and Ranola began to cry. Tears were pouring down their faces, and their noses were running like rivers, but as she held him up, she suddenly lay her black weeping face against his feverish white one, put her face right up against his…
So what is the connection? Here in our text Paul talks about this new life that we have in Jesus. He makes it clear that he believes that there should be this enormous shift in our lives when we first turn to him. In fact, in another epistle (I Corinthians 5:17) he even goes so far as to say that we are new creations; that the old is gone and the new has come. But here in our text he makes it very clear that a lot of this change is up to us. He calls us, he challenges us, to “clothe ourselves” with the qualities of Jesus. Not just once, but three different times in this translation.
“Clothe” here isn’t a passive verb. This isn’t something that happens to us. It is a choice we make. A choice we made when we first turned to Jesus, and a choice we need to keep on making every day of our lives. He even describes what this choice involves: 3:8, getting rid of anger, wrath, malice, slander and abusive language; 3:12-14, taking on compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. “Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love…”
What do every one of these qualities have in common? Virtually every one is about relationships; about the way we choose to relate to each other.
Clothe yourselves with Christ. That’s what I loved about that tiny, run-down church of Anne Lamott’s. They got it. If you don’t remember anything else about this sermon, just remember this one image: Ken Nelson dying of AIDS, draped in Ranola’s loving arms. If your love isn’t big enough to include a man dying of AIDS, then you don’t know the love of Jesus. If your love isn’t big enough to embrace someone with whom you disagree, then you don’t know the love of Jesus.
That’s my hope, my one great hope for these new officers and for this congregation in the years to come: that we, too, might choose to so clothe ourselves with Christ that virtually ever person who enters these doors would feel welcome; that every person who enters would find a people here who radiate a warmth and kindness that speaks to them of Christ’s presence in our midst.
Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies, (Anchor Books, New York, 1999), pp. 46, 47