Dress for Success

Sermon

One Sunday morning as I made my way to church, I sort of reveled in how relaxed I felt—unlike most Sundays as I headed out to beautiful rural Estacada to preach. As I sank into that unaccustomed sense of calm, I noticed I was still wearing my slippers. Who knew that what one wears has such an effect on one’s mood! Looking at this Colossians text about “putting on” particular characteristics, as if they are clothing worthy of Jesus followers, I have to wonder if that ever happened to the epistle writer. How this writer uses the metaphor, though, isn’t so much to reflect what one has accomplished; it’s all about that old job-seeker advice: dress for the job you want, not the one you’ve got.

This used to be helpful advice, back in the days when people got up in the morning and dressed to go to a place of employment where they were seen by other people. Nowadays, we only need to look professional from the waist up, as evidenced by the development of a new clothing category known as “the Zoom shirt.” Zoom shirts are that professional-looking shirt you keep next to your computer in case you need to quickly hop onto a Zoom meeting. The Pauline writer doesn’t sound fooled by that trick. He seems to want his readers to be fully clothed in virtues all the time—compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.

I know various lists of virtues were a convention of the ancient world, but I don’t think they were supposed to be read as to-do lists. These were teaching lists, aspirational of the characteristics students were admonished to embrace. I’m a sucker for lists. If I see a list of things like this, I assume it’s a to-do list. But that’s not the purpose here. This writer prefaces his virtue list with the assurance that his readers are already “God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved.” Aspirational virtues, yes, but more a consequence of who they are (chosen). This is not “how to be worthy of chosen-ness.” This is all about “Dress for the job you’ve already got.” That is, dress this way because you are chosen, holy, and beloved.

I think many of us are uneasy—especially in these times—about the notion of chosen-ness, as if the Chooser, by designating some The Chosen, has excluded others. God is bigger than that and does not include some at the expense of excluding others. More than once, I have met to plan a funeral with the children of a beloved parishioner and found myself taken aside by those children, one by one, and told confidentially, “I was the favorite.” Invariably when this happens, it is all the children taking me aside. That’s a parent doing a good job. So I wondered about chosen-ness these days, wondering whether that isn’t what every human wants—to believe that they are the favorite. And then, times being what they are, I began to wonder if that’s what’s behind Black Lives Matter: the desire to be the favorite, the chosen one.

I figured the best way to check this theory would be to call my friend, Emmett, a Black preacher in Portland. Racial matters these days are sensitive, and I was nervous. Could I ask this respectfully? Would Emmett be offended? But I had to know. So I called, because Emmett has made no bones about the fact that we are friends and he loves me. Emmett listened to me so respectfully, with such love, that

I could hear the hard truths as he said them. I didn’t always agree with his theology, but I could hear him, because we love each other.

You’re wondering what he said, aren’t you? He reminded me that Black Lives Matter is more than yard signs, it’s an actual organization with goals and objectives. Their primary goal is educating the electorate in underrepresented Black communities, focusing on racial and economic injustice, LGBTQ+ human rights, police brutality, gun laws, government corruption, and criminal justice reform. Look it up! To me, it’s putting concrete action to the virtues listed in the text from Colossians. These goals take the abstractions of those virtues and assign concrete behaviors to them, behaviors that reflect the world we want to live in. But back to Emmett, who further set his context for answering my question by talking about chosen-ness in scripture. He’s a preacher, after all. Once his contexts were set, Emmett talked about what it’s like when a parent has a favorite. He thinks that a parent sees a reflection of themselves in the favored child. What if that’s the point of being chosen? That we reflect our parent, our Creator? What do our lives say about who it is we’re reflecting? And do we believe that other people (people not like us!) are also reflecting that same Creator?

That feels like quite a stretch these days—reflecting the One who created us—when the world seems to be falling apart. It would be tons easier (and dare I say, more effective) if we only had one crisis at a time so we could focus on addressing a particular crisis, get that out of the way before moving on to the next. But it seems we’ve got them all—all at once. Pandemic with inequitable access to healthcare. Growing understanding of the effects of 500 years of racism and colonialism. Climate change impacting most the people least able to “weather” it. Crumbling infrastructure, energy resource depletion, environmental degradation, an inability to educate our children, polarization in our civic and political structures, and it’s an election year. Yep, you name it, we’ve got it. With the added bonus: we’re all supposed to be in quarantine.

One would think, given the stay-at-home-ness of quarantine, that I would not have gotten so far behind on reading the magazines that continue to come relentlessly in the mail. But yes, it’s true that I was over two months behind on reading The New Yorker. So it was that I finally got around to one of the May issues this week and ran across an article about mutual aid groups. At the time of the writing (and perhaps still) mutual aid groups were springing up around the country. They’re not a new phenomenon, and the author is at pains to differentiate them from charitable organizations. They both work to alleviate suffering, addressing the effects of inequality of any kind. But charitable work stops there—at addressing the effects, whereas mutual aid groups also work to address the root causes. The premise for many such aid groups is that neighbors are best situated to help neighbors. It’s as if they have taken the advice to “dress” for the world they want to live in, not for the one they’ve got.

While the article notes some significant work being done by these aid groups, it also hastens to add that citizen involvement will not solve the larger problems we’re currently facing. The larger problems will still need to be resolved technocratically and politically from the top down. We will still need experts to address larger problems, but citizen involvement from the bottom up (mutual aid groups) will also be necessary. “Dress” for the world we wish to live in. Mutual aid groups may not result in lasting social or political-civic changes—the institutional shifts we need to see. But people engaged in mutual aid work, the author notes, discover “a sense of self and a sense of connection to the people and place around them that [does] not go away.” In other words, our perspective on the world around us changes because of what we aspire to and how we work to make those aspirations happen.

The maddening and disheartening thing about the times we’re living in right now is that it no longer makes sense to think in terms of “dress for success.” Put Zoom shirts aside, since they only reflect a reality from the waist up. These times are important enough, exciting enough for our culture, in flux enough, that it’s not about “success” as much as it is about aspiration. The questions we face are bigger than wondering about when a vaccine will get developed. Like Queen Esther in the Bible, we might need to hear that we were born “for such a time as this.”

We aren’t really expected to “dress for success” in these times, because we aren’t being called to succeed. There is no such thing as “succeeding” in the work of transformation, which is what we are about these days. In the 1990s, I was part of seven annual mission/work-camp trips to a barrio in Juarez, Mexico. The trips were the sort of thing guaranteed to make North American Presbyterians crazy. A week was never long enough to get our projects accomplished. But from year to year, because other groups came between our trips, we began to see a few projects creep toward completion. We discovered that it wasn’t about us. We weren’t there to “get stuff done.” We were there because —well, because it was about us. It was about us learning to show up, to be faithful, to do what was set before us—even when we didn’t succeed or see the completion. It was about us in community, living into a concrete expression of those Colossians virtues.

There’s a lot of talk about freedom in this country, especially in an election year. I affirm that freedom, but with this caveat: the deepest freedom we enjoy is the freedom to become who God created us to be. I think this list of virtues we read in Colossians today is part of that—compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience. What makes all the difference in this world is how we make those virtues concrete, how we embrace them, not as “good ideas,” abstractions, but as real behavior in the here-and-now. Make these virtues not just “stuff I gotta do” but an expression of the world you want this to be