“You remove my sackcloth and clothe me with joy.” (Psalm 30)
“The Lord is clothed with splendor.” (Psalm 104)
“I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” (Luke 24:49)
The fashion industry is one of the largest money makers in the world. From jeans to Cartier pearls, your fashion is your statement. Your dress is your address. Style is a statement about who you are and what you stand for, a form of visual and tangible identity that flags the viewer to a specific image you want to create, the way you want to be “viewed” and seen in the world.
Your clothing is your credo.
What you wear on the outside is an indicator of the identity you claim on the inside. As actions reveal motives, so too does your fashion reveal your feelings, your motif, your intentions, your personality, your affiliations, your deeply-seeded values and even your faith.
Wearing clothing is an art, and art is a window into the soul. Your clothing can be the cross you wear, or a tattoo you bear, the jewelry and accessories you choose, the hairstyle you coif, the glasses you don. Even the absence of clothing or accessories makes a statement about who you are and what means something …or not…to you.
Your outward appearance, the “art” of imagining through clothing, is a direct manifestation of your inner spirit. Your apparel you could say is the “image” of your spirit, the “fruit” of your roots.
[Here you can show various images on screen of types of clothing and fashions…and ask people what it tells them about the person within.]
When you make a “fashion” statement, you also make a “spirit statement.” Your spirit statement is your true “statement of faith” --in what or whom you put your faith.
Your clothing reveals how you live out your faith in the world “for real.”
In our scripture for today, Jesus tells his newly formed apostles that they should “stay in the city until they have been clothed with power from on high.”
The disciples had gone up the mountain with Jesus. They had been commissioned into apostles, and given instructions on what to do. But they could not do any of it without the right clothing. They were told to wait until they could first be prepared –clothed—for this new mission, this new part of their lives, this change of spirit. This new raiment would permeate them from outside to deep within their hearts.
They needed to be “clothed in light,” colored with the love and power of the Holy Spirit, protected by the “armor” of the Lord, suited up for the task they were about to undertake.
Just as when you go into a hospital, you can tell a doctor by his or her white coat, the apostles needed to be “uniformed” up as those who would be “teachers of the Way,” spokespeople and witnesses for God, Sherpas of the spirit, mouthpieces for Jesus. They would be a new community defined by their unique “clothing.”
Fitness for mission meant being “outfitted” for the job!
Many of you may have gone at one time to a “clothier” or a “tailor” –someone who not only chose for you appropriate clothing, created the image you needed, found clothing that suited your personality. But these tailors would also “fit” that clothing to you, so that it became uniquely you, so that it “spoke” for who you were. Clothiers were people who tailor-made clothing to match your taste, your surroundings, your stature, and your circumstances.
The apostles, before they could go out and enter into the world as a new community, needed to be properly and appropriately clothed.
Not long before his death, Jesus tells his disciples an enigmatic parable about a wedding feast in which all must be clothed in wedding attire in order to have access to the feast. It was a sign of “belonging” and of “suitability” based not on one’s money but on one’s honor and respect for the host and the occasion! This was not a reflection of political or social critique, not a body politic on dress code, as some “literalizations” of the parable have imagined. But it is a comment on what lies within a person’s heart and where their loyalty lies.
Ever heard the express, to “wear your heart on your sleeve”? God clothes us in the kind of clothing that reflects the heart beneath. When we are loyal and loving to God, everyone knows it, because it is “written all over our faces” –all over our bodies in living color. God knows what kind of garments we have clothed ourselves in! And God knows when our hearts are ready to submit to the Master Clothier, and to allow God to clothe us with His heavenly Holy Spirit garment of Light.
The clothing we choose reveals the person we are. The clothing we allow God to choose for us, reveals the faith we have and our ability to submit our hearts to “fit” God’s mission and ministry.
When we allow God to clothe us with grace and wisdom and energy and healing, salvific love, and the Word of power, we become immersed and enraptured in God’s Spirit of love and mercy, healing and goodness. We not only change internally, but when people look at us, they see the presence of God around us and within us! And that’s some powerful body politics!* Our actions, the way we behave, will spring from the way we are clothed.
Many of you will go on treks and safaris, hikes and climbs this summer. When we go on a hike, we don’t go in shorts and a bathing suit. We put on protective clothing: hiking boots, hat, warm vest. We venture forth into wilderness places prepared by the clothing we wear.
When you work on a building or construction site, you wear steel-tipped shoes, protective eye mask, hard hat, and gloves. You don’t go in as though you were going to the opera.
When you go deep sea diving, you wear the proper gear that allows you to breathe and helps you to see.
Being clothed from on high in a sense is our protective and proactive clothing. Our mission digs. Being clothed in the “power” of God assumes that we have a job to do, a mission to complete, places to go, people to see, and a calling to fulfill, as Charles Wesley might say.
We don’t refrain from going out and doing what we are called to do and be. But we also don’t go out unprepared, unprotected, in appropriately dressed in clothing unsuited for the mission.
You don’t run naked into a fire. But if there are people to be saved, you don your protective suit, you take a risk, and you run straight head-on into that fire, knowing that your clothing will protect you, so that you can save others.
We are God’s fire fighters. God’s lifeguards. God’s rescue team. We are people on a saving mission that requires us to take some risks and walk into some fire, water, wind, and waves. For that we need God’s protective presence, God’s Holy Spirit Light and energy, within us and around us, so that God’s power (not ours) prevails.
Anyone remember Star Trek? Think of the Star Ship Enterprise. Anyone remember that? Captain Kirk may be making the decisions to steer that ship into unknown territories and into dangerous places, but it is the power of the ship’s engines, tasers, lasers, and force fields that both protect and save those in the universe from the forces of evil and destruction. You can’t fight the universe without the power of the ship that sustains you.
You can’t fight forces of evil without the power of God behind you and within you.
Jesus promised as He ascended that the Holy Spirit would come and clothe the apostles with the power of God, so that they could be empowered to go out and preach and gospel even in dangerous places.
The miracle of God-powered apostleship is that all you need to do is “go.” God will do the rest! God is the power of “GO” to “DO” and “Be”!
GOD says GO to Be Jesus and Do Jesus.
We only need to give God our hands and feet, our mouths and voices, our bodies and our submitting spirits, and God will clothe us in ways that will change the way people see us and change the way we do ministry.
Next week is Pentecost Sunday! Fire up! Allow God to clothe you in that Holy Spirit clothing of power! Then go!
Do you have on your mission digs?
Then GO . . to Be Jesus and Do Jesus in the world.
*Note: Just as in Genesis, we try first to clothe ourselves, but then God intervenes and re-clothes us into the kind of relational beings God needs us to be, here too, the apostles must allow God to do the clothing, so they might be prepared to wear the Jesus pants in the world and walk in His shoes.
Based on the Story Lectionary
Major Text
Luke’s Story of Jesus’ Ascension: Stay Here in the City until You Have Been Clothed with Power from on High (24)
Minor Text
God’s Promise to Abraham (Genesis 12 and 17)
The Story of Elijah and the Cloak of Power (2 Kings)
Psalm 5: The Cloak of Protection Spread Over the Righteous
Psalm 30: You Have Removed my Sackcloth and Have Clothed Me with Joy
Psalm 91: The Lord Covers You with Protection
Psalm 109: May the Accusers Wear a Cloak of Shame and Disgrace
Psalm 104: The Lord is Clothed with Splendor
Acts of the Apostles: The Story of the Promise of the Holy Spirit and the Ascension of Jesus (Acts 1)