Sermons

“Lord, When Did We See You—Naked?”

Matthew 25:31-46; Matthew 6:25-34 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – March 1, 2015

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that we bare our souls before you in utter confidence and follow your Christ with deep faithfulness. We pray in the name of Jesus, Amen.

So, we’ve got five more weeks of Lent to cover all the states of human need that Jesus discussed with the sheep and goats. Hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, imprisoned. So of course, we’re starting with nakedness, right? Because who wouldn’t? No, really, this isn’t my fault. We’re having guest preachers the next couple of weeks, you see, and I figured it would only be polite to let them choose their topics first. And wouldn’t you know it, Tim and Sadie took the first three, which left me at naked. But don’t worry – and I know you’ve been concerned about this – there will be no visuals today. At least none of the variety you’re thinking of!

Titillation aside, we know that Jesus was getting at something far more painful than common nudity when he rewarded those sheep for giving him something to wear. The word “naked” in this context brings up all sorts of other unpleasant states: cold, embarrassed, unprotected, unbalanced. Nakedness, in this context, is a symbolic stand-in for pretty much any state of vulnerability. At our Bible Study on Wednesday evening, we noticed how, in the story of the Gerasene demoniac from Luke 8, clothing and the previous lack of it were used to illustrate the miraculous transformation of the man, now in his right mind, after having been possessed. In Matthew 25, Jesus is clearly talking about people wearing no clothes without any choice in the matter, showing us that their nakedness is an indicator of some other deep vulnerability, whether extreme poverty, mental illness, violence or some other disaster.

It seemed important to me to pair this exploration with the passage I just read from the Sermon on the Mount, lest we take a single metaphor too far. On the one hand, Jesus knows that we need clothes, as evidenced in Matthew 25, and even mentioned in verse 32 of chapter 6. On the other hand, Jesus also knows that we are prone to letting our clothes become a preoccupation, pretending they can save us from all sorts of other vulnerabilities that have nothing to do with nakedness. When we stand in front of a stuffed closet, declaring, “I have nothing to wear!” it is something other than our body that we’re worried about covering up.

We all have such tender spots within us, places we try not to let any light shine into, portions of our hearts we never share. And because of the cultural significance that clothing has taken on, in its capacity to communicate status and identity, we use it as a shield, to help protect those tender places within our souls. We make take something we can control, like what we wear, and try to pretend we can use that to fix something that’s been broken by something we can’t control. Sometimes we may even use the accumulation of more and more clothing as a way of trying to fill an empty place within our hearts. Things may be falling apart on the inside, but at least we’ll look like we’ve got it together. As it turns out, a Christian ethic of nakedness and clothing is more complicated than we might at first assume.

My guess is that there are very few people in this room who don’t have too many clothes. Think for a moment – how many shirts do you own? Can you even be sure without going through them and counting? How many of those shirts do you wear on a regular basis? How many don’t fit any more? Why do you have that many shirts? Do you know why? And does the reason why have anything to do with serving Jesus by clothing the naked?

I wonder if maybe it has more to do with not clothing the naked. Why did those goats not help the vulnerable poor in their midst? We will never know, except inasmuch as we know why we don’t. And most of the time, I think it’s because we’re afraid that if we give things away, there won’t be enough left for us. Whether it’s clothes, or money, or time, or just compassion, sometimes we find ourselves caught in the scarcity trap and we just can’t bring ourselves to share, lest we run too low. This deep-seated fear of not having enough, not being enough, it is not a holy thing. The reasons we don’t give are the same reasons we hoard and accumulate. We are lacking in trust in the faithful providence of God.

Beyond that, beyond whether we are willing to share or not, there are larger ethical implications when we forget that the body is more than clothing. After all, we’ve already identified that nakedness is really just a symbolic stand-in for a wide variety of vulnerabilities. It turns out that some of those other vulnerabilities are also related to clothing. If we’re going to start applying the gospel to our over-stuffed closets, we’re going to have to ask even more difficult questions. Where do our clothes come from? And where do they go when we’re done with them?

It was not that many generations ago when clothes were a precious luxury. Only the very wealthy had multiple outfits, because clothes were expensive. But these days, with $12 pairs of shoes and dresses for $14.95, almost everyone can indulge the latest fashions. So where did the high price go? Much as we might like to believe it, the high cost of clothing did not just cease to exist. Instead, it has been transferred to workers in countries we’ll never see. Remember the clothing factory that collapsed in Bangladesh a few years ago? Over 700 people died when the roof, shared by five different sweatshops, fell in on top of them, in May 2013. Most of the workers in Bangladesh’s sweatshops are women, and they are some of the lowest paid garment-workers in the world. Anybody want to look at the country listed on your clothes tag right now?

‘Alright, Rebecca, we know that sweatshops are bad, and we try to buy American, even though it’s practically impossible! But surely the other end of the line isn’t as problematic; we’re careful to donate our clothes when we’re done with them.’

Yes. Yes, we do. Boy, do we ever donate clothing! Americans donate 4.7 billion pounds of clothing every year.[1] And sadly, it’s not all doing the kind of good we intend for it to. Only about 10% of donated clothing is deemed good enough to be sold in our local thrift shops. Of the remaining 90%, some ends up in landfills, some is recycled into rags and insulation, and a vast portion of it is baled up and sold to second-hand clothing dealers in third-world countries. According to Shannon Whitehead, in a blog for WhyDev, an organization devoted to promoting sustainable, just economic development, one of those hundred-pound bales “costs around the same amount as feeding a family of five for a month in a country such as Cameroon.” They aren’t allowed to know what’s in the bale before purchase, and there’s basically no accountability to ensure the sorters sent them anything of quality. Since they need the profit from the sale of one bale to finance the next one, one low quality bale could result in bankruptcy. So this is a high-risk business for those working in it. But it’s also had a devastating impact on local textile economies. With such cheap goods coming in, local producers simply can’t compete. In the last 10 years, Whitehead reports, these industries have collapsed, putting hundreds of thousands of people out of work. Clothing the naked is far more complicated than we might imagine.

Have you ever wondered why the goats have to be the bad guys in this story from Matthew 25? After contemplating our consumption habits and exploring the damaging effects they have, both at the point of origin and the eventual destination, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s because goats will eat anything. At least by reputation, a goat is mammalian garbage disposal, a bottomless pit, if you will, constantly ready to consume whatever is in front of it, whether it tastes good or not. And we’re like that sometimes, aren’t we? Because there are times when we feel so empty we don’t care what we’re filling ourselves with, as long as there’s a lot of it. This is the scarcity trap that causes the kind of worry Jesus was talking about in Matthew 6. When we’re obsessively worrying about what we’re going to wear, we’re much less likely to share clothing with someone who actually needs it. So how do we get out of this trap? What if it’s by looking for Jesus? Not necessarily in the sweatshop worker in Bangladesh or the displaced textile producer in Ghana. But by recognizing our own nakedness, the shame and vulnerability we carry in our hearts, the dark places we hide from other people, the pain and brokenness we try to hide with our well-coordinated ensembles. If we can see Jesus with us in our weakness, the love of God can begin to fill those empty places. The things that we thought we had to hide become not so mortifying.   If we can grasp hold of Jesus’ humanity, we can start to feel less ashamed of our own.

And what’s miraculous about this search for Jesus is that it does end up helping the young women in sweatshops in Bangladesh and the children of Cameroon. Because as we are filled with confidence by the presence of Christ, our need to fill our empty places with more and more stuff diminishes. We buy less to begin with, so we have less to get rid of in the end. “My local economy was struggling and you didn’t dump a glut of cheap goods into it making it worse” isn’t quite as poetic as what Matthew actually has Jesus saying, but it could be a good modern adaptation.

Consumerism is the dominant spiritual sickness in our society. Shopping is considered a hobby in our culture. And a lot of it is carried out with as much discernment as a goat on a feeding rampage. But we don’t have to live that way. We can reject the false gospel of stuff and more stuff. We will not end up naked, as we may fear, but rather more beautifully clothed, in the love of God, the compassion of Christ and the generosity of the Holy Spirit. May it be so. Amen.

[1] www.whydev.org/what-really-happens-to-your-donated-clothing/