New Year's Fashion Statement

“What Not To Wear”
© 2006 Rev. Dr. Christopher W. Keating
December 31, 2006
Colossians 3:12-17
Luke 2:41-52


Watching Jesus grow up always confuses kids. When our girls were little, they struggled to understand how Jesus moved from being a baby at Christmas to being an adult at Easter. It gets even more confusing today, as Luke wastes no time in showing how Jesus is growing up. In just a week’s time, Jesus has moved from infancy to puberty. Despite Luke’s assurances that Jesus was filled with wisdom and the favor of God, this morning he is very much a teenager. Here is the adolescent Messiah: wandering off from his parents, lost in his own world, impatient and not listening, even daring to tell Joseph and Mary that their not the boss of him.

If in fact Jesus is filled with wisdom, he hardly shows it when he is talking back to his parents!

Presbyterian writer Ann Lamott chronicles her attempts to raise a teenager in her book Plan B – Further Thoughts On Faith. She tells parents that as a 48-year old single mother raising a 13-year old son, the usual things helped: “some distance, prayer, chocolate.” She tried reading books on adolescence like the classic Get Out of My Life but First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall? Next she taped little pink cards to the wall with reminders that said “Breathe, Pray, Be kind, stop grabbing.’ Next she talked to her spiritual adviser, a friend of hers who is a Catholic priest. What would Jesus do with thirteen year olds? She asked. Fr. Tom was blunt. “In biblical times,” he said, “they used to stone a few 13-year olds with some regularity, which helped keep the others quiet and at home. The mothers were usually in the first row of stone throwers and had to be restrained.” Ann Lamott says she wrote that down and put it below the pink cards.

Once, when things were getting particularly bad around her house, Ann Lamott began to imagine what it would have been like to begin gathering a few stones to lob at her son, but instead she went for a walk. “I thought of Sam’s most infuriating habits; how snotty he can act, how entitled, his clothes and towels always dropped on the floor; the way he answer the phone, sounding like Henry Kissinger and only pretending to take down the messages…What a mess we are, I thought. But this is usually where any hope of improvement begins, acknowledging the mess…I try to let silence and time work their magic. You don’t get far through grinding your teeth and heaving breathing. You noodle around, to warm you, and you meander…”[1]

And that, I think, is what it means to increase in wisdom, in stature, and in divine and human favor.


That is the call for us as we face this New Year. Luke’s picture of Jesus doesn’t end when was an awkward adolescent, but instead reminds us that his journey of growth in faith is much like ours. He grew steadily in faith, increasing in wisdom. He participated in the rituals of faith that provided not only a foundation to his life but a platform for transformation. He stood in the midst of the temple, absorbing its traditions and opening himself to God’s way. He increased in wisdom, in stature, and the favor of God was upon him.

It is the only place where there can ever be any hope of improvement.

A few weeks ago, a charity called and asked if we could put out a few bags of old clothes for their store. I asked them if they took teenagers. The lady was a bit startled at first. Then she laughed and said, “Oh no, Mr. Keating, I’ve already raised mine!”

Tonight we’ll blow out the candle on 2006, a year filled with the normal ups and downs and we may make a few resolutions for 2007. We’ll tell ourselves that by the end of 2007 we’ll be a little lighter, less addicted to caffeine or nicotine, more organized, less in debt, or better read. I don’t know about you, but in the Keating house, the promise is to have more space in the closets. We went shopping the other evening, and I bought a new suit. I came home, proud as I could be of that new suit, until I looked inside my closet. It’s a mess in there. There are shoes which are older than my children. There are shirts which would look painful if I wore them, sport coats which are thread bare and missing buttons, and pants which looked pretty good in 1989.

That’s a long time ago.

It’s been too long, in fact. I live in fear of the cast from the “What Not to Wear” TV show appearing in my bedroom someday. You may know this reality show. Designers show up at the home of an unsuspecting person, often a woman. They proceed to rummage their through her clothes, making rude comments about the person’s taste and styling. Then, sending the person out to shop, the designers retreat to a studio where they continue to skewer the person for making poor choices. It’s painful. Yet, the victim is almost always thrilled by the closet of new, expensive, and trendy clothes.

It’s a drastic measure, wrapped in trendy commercialism and dripping with sarcasm, but in its own way the show has a point to make. Go to your closets and see what is hanging in there. Look at your spiritual wardrobes, says Paul, and see if the time has come to strip yourselves of those practices and behaviors which run contrary to the faith. Go into those messy closets, and look at what you’ve been wearing. Perhaps the time is ripe for transformation.

It’s a drastic measure, but it is the only place where any hope of improvement can occur.

Paul looks at the spiritual closets of the Colossians today, and wags a admonishing finger at them. He reminds them that in baptism they have put on Christ. They are called to live differently, to allow the presence of Christ to show in all that they do. In baptism, they have put on the garment of Christ. Our baptismal identity, says Martin Luther, is that garment which we put on daily to remind us of what it means to be alive in Christ.

“If you have been raised with Christ,” Paul writes, “seek the thinks that are above.” Toss out old and outdated clothing, he tells them. Set aside malice and anger, and rage. Live as God’s people by wrapping yourselves in the distinctive virtues and practices of faith—compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience. Bear with one another, and learn to practice forgiveness.

Of course, in practice that is much harder than it sounds. In practice, it is no easy task to set aside malice and anger. It is one thing to tell someone to be forgiving, but to practice forgiveness is painfully demanding. Paul, however, is not asking us to be doormats. As one theologian observes, he does not ask us to overlook hurts or to absorb hurt deep into our selves.[2]The community he envisions is a community of profound mutuality. “Forgive each other,” he admonishes, for you are a holy people.”

If we do that, how different we might look to our culture.

The various reflections on the life of President Gerald Ford have focused on his controversial act of pardoning Richard Nixon. Was it a quid pro quo deal? Were there secret negotiations? Was there a payoff for someone? Instead, it seems, it was what it was – a chance for a deeply wounded nation to discover healing and renewal, to be set free from the tyranny of anger and retribution.

Looking at her angry son, Ann Lamott left him in the car alone to sit and smolder a while. Breathing clean fresh air, she sat on a log for while. “After a while, I heard the car door open…I heard his footsteps approach and I sat up.” She looked at him and he sighed. He began to speak. “I’m sorry I was such a BLEEP!”

Lamott quips, “I’d sort of been hoping he’d say something I could report back to my pastor, but I saw how bad he felt, how lonely.”

“He sat down in the dirt, and we talked in a stilted, unhappy way. I practiced being right for a while, and he was sullen; then I practiced being kind.”

Perhaps the time has come for us to make resolutions that have the possibility to make real impact this New Year’s Eve. Perhaps the time has come to pursue a path of faithful transformation. What if God were inviting you and I to follow in the paths of Jesus this morning, so that we, too might increase in wisdom and stature? That is our invitation. Perhaps the time has come for us to practice being kind. Amen.

[1] Ann Lamott Plan B, p. 100.
[2] Cf. Andrew T. Lincoln, “Colossians,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. XI, p. 649.