Clothing and Nature

Back Can a leopard change its spots? Or do the spots make the leopard? How deep can the transformation of the Holy Spirit go? Do we really believe that our true natures can be made holy, especially when we are faced with examples of failure, promise betrayed, experiences of contradiction? Do we believe that our true natures can be transformed so that we can "put on the garments of righteousness," even "put on Christ?" (Remember all the images from the assurance of pardon). I also chose the parable of the wedding garment, which I never preached on before. It is a stunning story by Jesus about a man who is brought in to the wedding banquet of a King, probably a substitute guest, and who is thrown out because he doesn’t have the proper garment. To try to understand what this says about Jesus, who we always associate with forgiveness, but who certainly spoke the parable as a judge, is shocking to us. Matthew, more than the other Gospels, emphasizes the judging side of Jesus. The man is not only thrown out of the banquet, but thrown into the outer darkness where there is gnashing of teeth. (What is it that is lost so painfully that we would gnash our teeth? What is that something that might unite our true natures and our external selves, that we seek in the wrestling with how much we want to fit in and not fit in, how much we want to reveal and conceal ourselves in any clothing? This sermon does not touch on all of the elements of the first parable of the wedding banquet, which describes the history of salvation, the guests that refuse Jesus’ invitation, his own death as the King’s Son, nor the issues of justification and sanctification implied in maturing in Christ’s Spirit. See outtakes.)
Let me pick up on the contradiction, where we see the clothing as outer garment, and our inner self as the true nature. Why do we have this king say, "Who let this man in here without proper attire?" It could have been that the man simply didn’t have clean clothes on. In any case, the man is speechless. We know of those times when we feel totally exposed, found out, someone has seen through us, we can’t pull it off, and we feel ejected. And then we hear the menacing words, "many are called, many are invited, many are clothed, but few are chosen…to go into the inner banquet … of holiness.
God knows, scripture knows, we all live in the world of clothing and appearance. I am not going to spend a lot of time explicating clothing, because many of you know far more about it than I do. A friend has told me that I clearly dress more for convenience than for communication. But we all know too many mornings when we spend more time picking out clothing than we do in reading scripture and praying. The outer self, the mirror world, is the one we live in much of the time. We do says clothes make the person, too often.
Now think of two extremes of contradiction: the Catholic priests who find that their inner nature will not conform to the outer image of righteousness, and the pain and suffering this has caused. We know that this may be about maturity levels, and that we all do not mature evenly. There are sometimes gaps, as if our spiritual transmissions don’t fully work, and we skip gears, and sometimes terrible grinding results. The issues may not simply be maturity, but also that we can stop growing sexually or in terms of intimacy when we put all of our energy elsewhere, when you shut off the feelings at a given age, and then they come back. We certainly see an effort now in that larger church to clear the decks, empty the files, dump it all out and get through the storm—we see the pain in Croton right now.
This concern came up (for the experiences of contradiction between the way people want to present themselves, their clothing, and the way they truly are, their nature, that we seek to understand, because we all suffer from inner contradictions) in the Friday Bible Study, Kathy Davis applied this to the priest’s scandals, while I applied it to the brutal situation in Palestine. We were studying the 4th chapter of Ephesians which includes the exhortation: "Put off your old nature which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new nature, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness" (vs. 22-24). Can we simply pick up and put on a new and holy nature over our inner compulsions and habits?
Clothing brings out the sense of the exterior self being deceptive. We hear constant use of Jesus’ poetic phrase, wolves in sheep’s clothing, suggests that it is a matter of true nature coming out, but that interpretation seems to lead to the view that no repair is possible. Because so many of their attempts at repentance and therapy have failed, we may doubt— particularly in the area of sexuality—that people can mature into greater holiness and health. I am more hopeful than this, partly because I see the contradiction everywhere: what can be a bigger contradiction between the submissive, sheepish appearance of Palestinian civilians and the wolfish explosives strapped around their waists? Or think of the whole self-image of a people, distorted by the policies of the Sharon government, policies that encourage out-of-control vengeance. So how do we resolve the contradictions, imagine clothing as in the Book of Revelation, the white gowns, a place where our inner and outer selves are brought into harmony? This is part of the incarnation (a wholeness of body and soul together), but is it just a pious fantasy?
I think there is an aspect of mourning that goes with the joy of new clothes, and I get this in a story in this week’s New Yorker. The story is a by a Japanese novelist who describes a very successful illustrator, son of a distant father whose mother died when he was very young, who falls in love with a beautiful woman considerably his junior. He has no intimacy in his life. He falls in love with her not because she is so beautiful, but because she wears her clothes so well. She lives to wear clothes and buys clothes nearly every day—a habit and really a compulsion he tolerates, even admires, to the point where he makes a grand room of their house into a closet full of beautiful clothing. Finally, after counting the hundreds of dresses, he tells his wife, you must return some of these clothes, you have years of clothes to wear that are barely worn.
Think of the man we had in the parable caught without the wedding garment (is he also a compulsive…); this woman is the other side of that. So she manages to return one dress, then gets in her car to drive home. She is shaking, she sweats like an addict going "cold turkey," then sees the light flick green and shoots into the intersection, where a truck still coming through kills her.
The man is devastated, but he has to deal with this room full of clothes (and so many of his memories at first are attached to her buying that clothing). So he puts an ad in the paper for a new secretary, but with particular qualifications. She must be the same size as his wife was, size 2. You may guess what is coming. The condition of her employment is that she wear the dresses accumulated by his now dead wife. This is the description of what happens to her:
"She had never seen so many dresses gathered together in a single place except in a department store. Each dress was obviously of high quality. The taste, too, was flawless. The sight was almost blinding. The woman could hardly catch her breath. Her heart started pounding. It felt like sexual arousal, she realized.
Tony Takitani left the woman alone in the room. She pulled herself together and tried on a few of the dresses. She tried on some shoes as well. Everything fit as though it had been made for her. She looked at one dress after another. … Before long, tears swelled up in her eyes and began to pour out of her. There was no way she could hold them back. {The widowed husband has not yet shed a tear—but this is the inner self beginning to come out—or is it the effect of the clothes?} Her body swathed in a dress of the woman who had died, she stood utterly still, sobbing, struggling to keep the sound from escaping her throat. Soon Tony Takitani came to see how she was doing.
‘Why are you crying?’ he asked." He has not cried. (CI)
‘I don’t know,’ she said… "I’ve never seen so many beautiful dresses before. I think it must have upset me. I’m sorry.’ She dried her tears with a handkerchief.
‘If its all right with you, I’d like to have you start at the office tomorrow,’ Tony said in a businesslike manner. ‘Pick out a week’s worth of dresses and shoes and take them home with you.’" This she does, taking a lot of time….
Now I can’t say too much about the heavenly banquet parable that is the setting for the shorter Wedding Garment parable, but I think in the image of that glorious roomful of clothes we have a reflection of that heavenly banquet. Misdirected! but an image of a place where we will not be ashamed to be changed from glory into glory as the hymn says, or as C.S. Lewis says in one of his books, where we find ourselves dressed in clothing that paradoxically brings us back to Eden where we had perfect bodies without shame before the Fall, but now after Redemption. (All of that is in that empty room filled with heavenly clothes). But because she has cried for the woman who has worn those clothes, cried for herself, cried for all the beauty lost, the man in the story now begins to grieve. The speechless experience of clothes that did not fit anymore, the person that they fit did not exist anymore, (here we have the finality of the parable).
Now Tony goes to the closet himself: "shut the door, and let his eyes wander vacantly over her dresses. He (still) could not understand why the woman had cried when she saw them. To him, they looked like shadows that his wife had left behind. Size 2 shadows of his wife hung there in long rows, layer upon layer, as if someone had gathered and hung up samples of the infinite possiblities… implied in the existence of a human being.
These dresses had once clung to his wife’s body, which had endowed them with the warm breath of life and made them move. Now, however, what hung before him were mere scruffy shadows, cut off from the roots of life and steadily withering away, devoid of any meaning whatsoever…. He hated theses dresses now… slumping against the wall…. loneliness seeped into him once again… It’s all over now… He called the woman and told her to forget about the job…" (page 80, April 15, 2002 issue). She wanted to keep the job, having already begun to bond with the clothes, but he cuts her off.
Here we have the finality of the parable, the speechless experience of clothes that did not fit anymore, were no longer fitting (some may have felt that from the start), the person that they fit did not exist anymore… and they represented love that had not been expressed.
The king’s banquet is really intimacy, the place where love could have been expressed, the place where we could have been truly known, and shown the special things of God. In a way (as Tom Tewell says in speaking about the garden of paradise), the banquet is prayer, centering, that shows us what we are truly fit for, peace with ourselves, inner and outer, in the presence of God.
Does this solve the contradictions of our nature, specifically, replacing intimacy with sexuality? Even for the clergy mentioned earlier, I think love can solve some of the conflict, fulfilling the search for intimacy, although this may take more honesty than the situation will allow. The horror of the story is part of what Jesus wants us to feel if you misplace true intimacy, if you put it in an inappropriate place. The truth of the parable is that the sense of exclusion is real. It’s a hard word, but not the final word. The final word would be almost the opposite of the text at the end, "many are called, few are chosen." In the story, only one is ejected from the banquet. The rest are there, in God’s presence, somehow clothed in ways that truly fit them. This is the image I want us to carry as we struggle always with how to clothe our true natures. That is to remember not only our baptisms, but even the white or whatever color of our baptism garments. Amen.

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