Advertisers know that in marketing any product the right packaging is crucial. No matter what you are trying to sell soap or semi-conductors the image projected by the packaging is the first experience of the product for the potential consumer. So it had better be a great experience.

One of the trendiest marketing ploys is intentionally dressing down the product. Lining my shower is a whole row of shampoos and bath gels that are encased in what look like the glassware from a nineteenth-century chemist's shop (Molton Brown, Penhaligon, etc.). Primitive labels, ground glass stoppers, square-shouldered bottles, all house a twenty-first century selection of soaps and shampoos, colognes and conditioners. By looking so old, these products have made themselves look brand new.

One of the most successful less is more advertising blitzes has been the supersonic rise to celebrity status of the Naked Chef. How many of you have seen him on TV (The Food Channel)? For the past five years, first in Great Britain and now on every cooking channel around the world, the hottest, trendiest, wunderkind has been Naked Chef Jamie Oliver.

Oliver specializes in simple, fast, unfussy, unsauced foods and flavors. Hence The Naked Chef. Oliver himself is always fully clothed, only his cuisine is dressed down. Barely 22 when he was discovered, Oliver's television career is a combination of The Monkees and Paris Hilton.

He was a chef albeit struggling and unknown when his good looks and jolly working-class, boy-next-door-charm got him on TV. But now that he was suddenly famous, Jamie Oliver needed something to be famous for. Since fixing his do-able-in-thirty-minutes standard wasn't enough to fill up all the air-waves, The Naked Chef show became known for detailing young Jamie's jazzy, ride-my-scooter-about-London, hang-out-in-my-loft-with-beer-and-buddies lifestyle as much as for its recipes.

Backlash soon started. Today, now that The Naked Chef is a marketing mantra for everything from music CDs to women's clothing (as well as more traditional marketing spin-offs like cookware and olive oils), Jamie Oliver is almost equally well-loved and well-hated. Yet, despite al the fru-fru and fame that accompanies his cooking show, Oliver still adheres to his 3 naked food principles: 1. Only the best, freshest foods; 2. Enlivened with the barest suggestions of spice and sauce; 3. Prepared with simplicity and speed.

The Naked Chef has made fashionable, not to mention tasty, chicken breasts cooked in folded-foil bags, or an all-in-one-pan stir-fry breakfast of sausage, eggs, bacon, and tomatoes.

Sometimes simple and straight-forward is the best. Especially when we're just starting out. The Naked Chef's audience is made up overwhelmingly of twenty-somethings, young adults enjoying their first apartment, their first hand at being host or hostess. Simple is best!

Remember back how you first learned to read. For most of us it was not by picking up the Wall Street Journal, but it was by getting to know and recognize the ABC's. [Hold up some beginning to read books . . . "Run Scott Run"]. Simple is best!

In today's gospel lesson Jesus offers his brand new disciples their first lesson in the Jesus message and mission the new reality of the kingdom of God. Here too, Jesus starts out his disciples with simple and straightforward teachings, even as they are utterly radical and revealing.

The crowd Jesus addresses is declared by Luke to be impressively diverse: "people from all Judea, Jerusalem and the coast of Tyre and Sidon" (verse 17). What these people do have in common, however, is their Jewishness ("the people" is Lukan shorthand for "the people of the covenant"). [Note: the NRSV unfortunately omits Luke's distinctive "the" and reads simply "people".]

This common Jewish ancestry, however, still leaves room for great diversity. There are those from the coast lands and those from the desert interior. There are those from the powerful religious epicenter and those from the forgotten boondocks. There are, assuming Jesus was directing his speech to those personally gathered around him, those who are poor and those who are rich. There are those who enjoy every benefit of a successful, powerful lifestyle, and those who are mired in the misery of ostracism and powerlessness. Jesus keeps it simple. The naked truth, he declares, is that some of you are poor, are hungry, are weeping. But Jesus refuses to deck out these troubles with reasons or causation. He declares the fact of poverty and misery. But he fixes no blame upon those who are suffering. Instead, he promises blessings, a radical realignment of the experience of those whose lives are a struggle for the mere basics of life:

The hungry will be filled. Those who weep will laugh. The poor, those with nothing, will have no less than the kingdom of God.

Jesus keeps it simple, too, for those in the crowd who currently live at the top. The rich, have received their consolation and have no promise of any more recompense in the future. In plain terms Jesus spells out how those who are now full will be hungry, and those who now laugh will mourn and weep.

Again, it's a complete reversal of fortune that Jesus describes. Jesus' woes strip the socially accomplished, those with prestige and power, of all their worldly accessories. Without these worldly goodies, without the benefit of ease and easygoingness, the powerful are suddenly reduced to a state of great woefulness:

Those who were up are cast down. Those who are downcast will be raised up.

Jesus doesn't dress up this inverted worldview. His directness was doubtless heard as audacity, even treachery, against those in positions of authority. In Jesus' new world order he called the kingdom of God being in blessedness isn't being dressed up in fine clothes, or affirmed by first-class status, or found at a fancy address.

Jesus declares that blessedness is determined by divine prerogative. Jesus declares that blessedness is available to all those who suffer "on account of the Son of Man" (verse 22). Jesus declares to his new disciples that their commitment and loyalty to him is what will bring a state of blessedness.

But this blessing will come to his disciples (and to us) dressed in the ugly clothes of exclusion, rejection, and defamation. Good disguise. Such a good disguise that Jesus knew he had to make absolutely clear the connection between this ugly reality and the God's-eye-view blessing that it hid from the world's-eye-view.

Jesus describes a world simply turned upside-down. Those at the top tumble to the bottom. Those trapped on the bottom suddenly find themselves on the top-of-the-heap. We like reading it. But face it . . . wouldn't you hate to live it?

We who call ourselves Americans like to think of ourselves as up-by-our-bootstraps kind of people. We're proud of working our way up ladders and building new and more elegant perches on each and every rung. So how many of us would call it blessedness to find ourselves shoved down to the bottom, the ladder rungs chopped out from between our grasping hands, falling to the bottom in a beaten heap?

Since our endings and beginnings are the same, Jesus starts us on the journey of faith by introducing us to The Naked Christian. You aren't the package. You are what's inside. Outward appearances are deceiving and deceitful. The real part of you, the best part of you in is what's on the inside, not outside.

Silk-stocking churches need Naked Christianity. So beware of that Prada piety, that Armani attitude, that St. John sanctimoniousness, that Hermes holiness, that Versace virtuousness, that Kate Spade superiority, that Donna Karan dominance, that Anne Klein/Ann Taylor ascendance, that Nicole Miller niceness, that Bulgari botoxed smoothness, that Christian Dior Christianity.

The naked faith Jesus introduced in the Beatitudes is this:

• keep faith fresh
• enliven faith with the barest of spices and sauces (e.g. Baptist spices, Methodist sauces, Presbyterian gravy, etc.). The condiments aren't the contents of faith.
• live missionally with simplicity and speed
• always identify with the lowliest and neediest

That's a Naked Christian.