What Will We Wear?

“What will we wear?” Back when I was first ordained, that was a question that many people asked themselves on a Sunday morning. In those days, people used to dress up for church. Tie straight, pants pressed, shoes polished… People would talk about putting on their Sunday best.

By and large, that kind of formality has gradually disappeared over the last twenty years or so—and I can’t say that I regret it! So I find it interesting that in the few verses we have read from the Bible this morning the apostle Paul stops to tell us how we in the church ought to dress. Of course, he is speaking not literally but metaphorically. And he is not referring just to Sunday mornings but to a whole way of life, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

But before we get too far into this passage, I want us to look at the brief snapshot that Paul gives us of the church in Colossae in the opening verse, because it was a truly remarkable collection of individuals. In Colossians 3:11 we are given a picture of the kind of people we might be likely to meet if we joined with the congregation there on a Sunday. There were Greeks and Jews, barbarians (and here he doesn’t literally mean what we do by “barbarian”, but people from distant lands, whose native language was not Greek or Latin). And finally, there were the Scythians, who had migrated from the north shore of the Black Sea and who really were regarded by and large as a crude, cruel and uncultured people. And if that were not enough, there were both slaves and their masters.

Nevertheless, there they all were in the Colossian church, singing together, learning together, sharing in the Lord’s supper together, serving Christ and proclaiming the good news together. And here we should pause to note that what was true of the Colossian Christian community by and large was true of the dozens of little clusters of believers that had begun to crop up all over the Roman Empire. It was a truly remarkable (dare I say revolutionary?) phenomenon. Indeed, they had already been accused of turning the world upside down (Acts 17:6).

Yet while those differences were a source of strength and something to celebrate, they also brought with them some potential pitfalls. Indeed, some of them were serious enough that they could easily have splintered the church into pieces. We see it happening as early as chapter 6 in the book of Acts, where a dispute arose over the assistance being given to the Jewish versus the Gentile widows. And much of the ink in Paul’s letters (and the other letters in the New Testament for that matter) was devoted to dealing with the cracks and divisions that cropped up and threatened to tear apart the fabric of the church.

The love of Christ

Now Paul is not suggesting that ethnicity and race, slavery and freedom, culture and heritage, are unimportant or insignificant. Far from it! In fact, Paul frequently drew from his own background when the occasion demanded it. Besides, that variety is what gives the church its flavour and richness. I was impressed a few weeks ago when someone pointed out that there were (was it eleven?) different nationalities represented here that morning. I leaned over to my wife and whispered, “This is a church that has a future!”

The problem was that the Colossians had allowed their differences to become sources of misunderstanding and annoyance, of not being entirely honest with one another, and of putting others down. The situation had led to the point where people had begun to sense that they didn’t have the freedom to be who they really were. As a result, they felt forced to wear a kind of costume.

At this point it is as though Paul turns and opens up a closet full of clothes. And he says to the Colossians, “This is what you should be wearing. Take off those costumes you’ve been putting on and try these clothes instead.” What were those clothes? Paul lists them for us in verse 12: compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forbearance, forgiveness…

Every one of those qualities has a beauty all of its own and we could give a whole sermon over to each of them. Yet Paul says that they are only the undergarments. For over them all we are to put on something that outshines and incorporates them all—which is love.

But let’s be clear. When we talk about love, we’re not talking about some airy-fairy feeling. It is that very practical Christian word agape—what one person has described as “a steady direction of the will towards another’s lasting good”[1]. It is the love with which God so loved the world. It is the love that led Jesus to give up his life for you and for me on the cross. It is the love that has been poured into our hearts through the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is the love that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things”. It is the love which, when everything else will have passed away, will still abide.