Third Sunday in Pentecost Zechariah 12.8-10, 13.1

20 June 2004 Psalm 63.1-8

St. George’s Episcopal Church Galatians 3.23-29

Le Mars, Iowa Luke 9.18-24

The Rev. Karen Wacome, Presiding

Dr. Donald Wacome, Lay Preacher

You…have clothed yourselves with Christ. Galatians 3.27

Are You Putting Me On?

In the Lithuanian shetl of Eisysky, the Jewish population of four thousand was liquidated on September 25, 1941. In groups of 250 the people were taken to the old Jewish cemetery in front of open ditches. They were ordered to undress and stand at the edge of the open graves. They were shot in the back of the head by Lithuanian guards with the encouragement and help of the local people. Among the Jews that day was one of the shetl’s teachers Reb Micahlowsky, and his youngest son, Zvi, age sixteen. Father and son stood at the edge of the open pit, trying to comfort each other in their last moments. Young Zvi was counting the bullets and the intervals between one volley of fire and the next. As the executioners were aiming their guns, Zvi fell into the grave a split second before the volley of fire would have hit him. He felt the bodies piling up on top of him and covering him. He felt the streams of blood around him and the trembling pile of dying bodies moving beneath him. Above him, the shooting died down. Time passed. It became cold and dark. Zvi crawled out from under the bodies of the mass grave up into the cold, dead night. He could hear the murderers signing and drinking, celebrating their accomplishment: after 800 years, the town was Judenfrei, cleansed of Jews. At the far end of the cemetery, in the direction of the church, were a few Christian homes. Zvi knew them all. Naked, covered with blood, he knocked on the first door. The door opened. A peasant was holding a lamp he had looted earlier that day from a Jewish home. “Please let me in!” Zvi pleaded. The peasant lifted the lamp and examined the boy closely. “Jew, go back to the grave where you belong!” he shouted and slammed the door. Zvi knocked on other doors but the response was the same. Near the forest lived a widow whom Zvi knew too. He decided to knock on her door. The superstitious old woman opened her door. “Let me in,” Zvi begged. “Jew, go back to the grave at the old cemetery!” “I am your Lord, Jesus Christ. I came down from the cross. Look at me ― the blood, the pain, the suffering of the innocent. Let me in,” said Zvi Michlowsky. Crying “My God, My God” the widow crossed herself and fell at his bloodstained feet. She took him in, cleaned him, dressed him, and cared for him. After three days he left, commanding her to keep his visit to Earth a secret, and made his way to the resistance. (From Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, Yaffa Eliach, as related by Joel Marcus in Jesus and the Holocaust.)

This is the story that came to mind when I read the lesson for today from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatian Christians, with its amazing assertion that we wear Christ like a suit of clothes. The Greek word enedusasqe literally means simply “to put on,” but as in modern English, it’s regularly used to express the idea of putting on an article of clothing.

Desperate Zvi Michalowsky at the door of the superstitious old woman: clothed in Christ. Beyond all hope, despised and hunted, as good as dead, already having been in the grave, preposterously out of place ― how enraged those ‘good Christians’ who wanted him dead would be if they knew his imposture ― yet saved because he is absurdly mistaken for Christ. The story is deeply ironic, turning St. Paul on his head, for it’s we gentiles who are saved by passing ourselves off as the suffering Jew, the Christ of Israel, the crucified God. It’s us, disguised as Jesus, unnaturally grafted on to God’s people, made heirs of Abraham according to the promise.

We are clothed with Christ. When God looks at us he sees not what’s wrong with us but what’s right with Jesus. He doesn’t see someone contemptible, lost, hopeless, dead. When God sees us he sees not our faithlessness but the perfect faithfulness of his son. We’re taught to think about God as all seeing, all knowing. When I was a boy, this was a way to keep me in line: even when no one else saw what I was up to, God had me in his sights. He doesn’t miss thing, and I’d get what I deserved. But Paul’s talking about what God doesn’t see: when God looks at you and me he doesn’t see the difference between Jesus and us; looking our way he can’t help but see the face of Jesus. Rather than seeing what’s wrong and wayward in us God our Father sees us as his well-loved children; he loves us as he loves God the Son. Wearing Jesus we are loved by God as God loves himself, lifted up into the joy-filled life of the everlasting Trinity.

Putting on Christ, we can begin to see ourselves as God sees us. In Luke’s gospel we find the disciples, no doubt priding themselves that, unlike the crowds, who have no clue who Jesus is, but imagine he’s the latest in a long line of prophets, they know he is the Christ, the Messiah, the unique embodiment of God’s so long-awaited deliverance of his people. Yet they don’t understand. They have big ideas about being on the winning side in the coming showdown with God’s enemies. But Jesus cuts them off with his grim prediction of rejection, suffering, and death: their conception of what it means to be the Messiah is radically at odds with God’s. He says his way is the way of the cross: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.”

What does it mean to deny yourself? I think part of it is that we’re called to forsake our confidence in those things about us that we can’t help feeling rate God’s approval, those things out of which we naturally construct our identities as worthwhile human beings. Those things might be all well and good, but the crucial thing is that they don’t even show up on the radar of God’s loving acceptance of us. Nothing counts here but putting on Christ. We’re always tempted to find something else to wear, some more plausible means of making an identity for ourselves, something more fashionable, or more flattering to our best features, but that’s to reject God’s saving grace in favor of a fantasy, an illusion. In the theological language of the Reformation we’d say Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us, his ‘alien’ goodness reckoned as ours by grace, through faith. Pushing on St. Paul’s metaphor, we might say God’s throwing the mother of all parties; it’s a costume party, and there’s just one costume that gets you in the door.

Paul in Galatians goes on to say there’s something else God doesn’t see: the difference between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. The differences that were once all-important, sorting people into those included in and those excluded from God’s loving gaze, recede into insignificance. No matter what we are God regards us as his own, in Christ, inseparably bound to him. We are one in Christ.

To deny yourself, to be ready to lose your life is, I think, to be willing to push anything, no matter how important, into second place, to treat what’s dear to you ―because you know it really does matter a lot― as though it doesn’t count, rather than let it divide people for whom God in Christ gave himself. God wants us to see the way he sees. He sees Christ in us and us in Christ and that’s how he asks us to see one another. Gerard Manly Hopkins’ great poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” concludes:

For Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

These concerns are perhaps especially pressing these days, when our church has become a battleground in the ‘culture wars.’ Great things seem to be at stake, matters that threaten to dissolve the unity of our common confession of Jesus Christ. We give lip service to God’s insistence on unity in Christ, but we really see the issues of the day as essential, as exceptional…as more important than the fact that God looks with absolute love upon them no less than us.

Archbishop Rowan Williams, speaking at York Minster last summer, said:

The irreducible facts about the brother or sister are that Christ died for them and that the Spirit wants to give something through them. To cling to unity is to cling to those convictions, especially when everything in us cries out for separation …our life with Christ is somehow bound up with our willingness to abide with those we think are sinful and those we think are stupid.

God for Jesus’ sake forgives and accepts us with no strings attached, refusing to let the zillion ways we are inadequate, incompetent, disloyal, wildly wrong, plain foolish and a menace to all that’s sacred get in his way. That this is the way God deals with us might seem pretty crazy, as crazy as the story of an old Lithuanian woman believing that the Jewish teenager at her door was Jesus Christ. And it might seem almost as crazy to believe that this is the way he expects us to deal with one another. But it’s the gospel truth.

Amen.

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