Sermon text - What To Wear

Romans 13:8-14

What To Wear

James Sledge                                                         September 4, 2011

There is a catchy little ad campaign that you may have seen on television for something called freecreditreport.com. All the ads feature a young man and his band mates singing about how someone stole his identity and now his bad credit score has unexpectedly kept him from buying a house or getting a new car, a good cell phone, and so on. He sings that if he had only used freecreditreport.com this would never have happened. The songs are snappy and the characters in the commercials are funny, and I would not be surprised if it had won some sort of advertising award.

There is one part of these commercials that is easy to miss. It may appear in tiny print at the bottom or is spoken so quickly by an announcer that you can scarcely understand it.  So I’ll slow it down for you. “Offer applies with enrollment in Triple Advantage.”

It turns out that your free credit report is not quite free. You can get a free report which does not include your actual credit score if you sign up for their plan. Then, you will get this useless, free report, free as long as you realize that you’ve just signed up for a $19.95 a month plan that kicks in if you don’t cancel your membership within seven days. If you actually want your credit scores, you have to pay a dollar up front for them, as well as sign up for the program that starts billing you $19.95 a month if you don’t cancel it in a week.

The crazy thing about all this is that you can get your credit scores at absolutely no cost directly from the credit agencies. By law they must give you one free report every twelve months, and the companies that compile credit reports have even created a website called AnnualCreditReport.com where you can request reports from all three companies at once.

Now to my mind, the folks sponsoring those catchy commercials are engaged in a kind of fraud.

They use a misleading name and commercials where the band sing “free” over and over, even spelling it out, in the hopes of getting you to sign up for a pay service you don’t need. And indeed this company has occasionally been sued by attorneys general from various states. These suits have sometimes required them to alter their commercials or put clearer disclaimers on their website, but as long as they tell you somewhere that score isn’t really free, their misleading advertising isn’t actually against the law.

And herein lies a serious problem with laws. Most everyone agrees that people shouldn’t be allowed to steal, but creative folks are forever figuring out new ways to separate someone from property or money without technically violating any laws. There are so many laws that no one can keep up with them all because someone is always figuring out yet another way to lie, steal, or cheat not covered by existing law. This is the reason people sometimes say, “You can’t legislate morality.” People always find a new way.

But according to the Apostle Paul, love fixes this. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and that solves the problem of never being able to create laws that cover everything. Love does no wrong to the neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.

Paul doesn’t simply mean that by loving your neighbor you insure that you stay within the law. He also means that love is the end toward which the law means to direct us. Truly to love your neighbor as yourself, to put the other person’s needs on a par with your own, brings us to the full intent of God’s commandments, the creation of true community where everyone has enough and where everyone finds his or her place and all live in the kind of mutual harmony that the biblical book of Acts uses to describe the early church in Jerusalem.

For Paul, the possibility of living in a true community of love is not some “pie in the sky” hope for another day. Paul knows full well that much of the world does not share in his hope. He knows that the current ways of our world, or of the flesh, are not in keeping with the new day that Christ’s death and resurrection have begun to bring. But Paul is certain that those who are in Christ can fully experience a life governed by love, a life that does not belong to the ways of the current world but to the world that is drawing near. That is why Paul speaks so frequently in his letters about being “in Christ” and why he calls us this morning to put on the Lord Jesus Christ.

When you got ready to come to worship this morning, you put on clothes. In all likelihood, you picked some clothes over some others. Worship dress codes have certainly changed in recent years, but most of us have some things we wouldn’t wear to worship.

And what to wear isn’t just about coming to worship. There are “appropriate” clothes for many different occupations. A lawyer had better not go into the courtroom in shorts and flip flops. And many schools have dress codes or even uniforms, and you can’t come into the school building without wearing the proper attire.

Speaking of uniforms, if I were standing here this morning wearing shoulder pads, jersey,  and a helmet, I would look quite ridiculous. But everyone would know just what I was dressed for. What I had put on would reveal that to everyone.

Paul seems to think that putting on Jesus is a bit like this. It not only equips us for what we are going to do, but it also identifies us as those who are engaged in the peculiar activity of revealing the ways of God’s coming kingdom to the world.

If you are anything like me, the state of the world sometimes bothers you. In fact, I sometimes find it downright depressing. Whether it is an obsession with sex that treats people as objects, encourages meaningless “hookups,” and even creates sexy outfits for toddlers, an economy that seems to be creating less and less jobs but a greater and greater gap between rich and poor, a political system that seems to be both toxic and broken with an “us versus them” mentality where anyone who disagrees is my enemy, or our inability to live in community and do things for the common good, there is much in the world to lament. Sometimes I even think that the terrorism that so plagues our world is but a slightly less restrained version of the same hatreds and divisions we see in our own country.

But Paul says there is another possibility. We can become part of the light that shows a new way. We can clothe ourselves in Christ so that we are no longer caught up in hatreds and darkness. We can begin to live now in that new day of hope and love. When we put on Christ we will have what we need to live lives of love that fulfill God’s law. And it will be obvious for all to see because we will no longer be caught up in the destructive behaviors of this world because clothed in love, we will no longer desire to do any wrong to a neighbor, to anyone.

What a wonderful possibility. No hatred. No treating others as sexual objects. No arguing and fighting. But to join in this possibility, you have to dress right. You have to put on the right clothes. So what are we going to wear?