A Sermon about Inclusivity. I used some material from Roots. The Bible Readings were Galatians 3, verses 23-29 and St Luke 8, veres 26 - 37.
A few weeks ago a blog post appeared on my
Facebook wall about the CEO of US clothing Company Abercrombie and Fitch. It’s
not a brand I wear, not I suspect does it grace too many of your wardrobes.
Nevertheless I watched it and was appalled to see this CEO, Mike Jeffries
saying, “We
go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a
great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our
clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely”.
Basically, he was saying in public what a
lot of companies and institutions keep in the boardroom – that they have a
specific target audience. What was so appalling though was that he went on to
effectively say in public that ugly, poor or overweight people were not welcome
in his shops or indeed welcome to wear Abercrombie and Fitch clothes. As you
can imagine this video had two outcomes. First, the company’s stock lost a lot
of value, and second, a campaign was launched to present a counter argument, in
which a young man was filmed giving homeless people Abercrombie and Fitch
clothes to wear.
All of that seems rather a long way from
us, but it provides a modern twist on the common theme of our two readings,
which both mention clothing, or being clothed. In today’s society, rightly or
wrongly, what people wear is perceived as part of their identity, which is why
when the Archbishop of York or the Prime Minister wears a hoodie, we are
challenged – which was their intention.
In Galatians Chapter 3, the conversation is about baptism and it provides a vivid illustration of God’s newly-arrived freedom. Paul’s writings generally give the impression that candidates for baptism removed their outer clothes
before going under the water and, once they emerged, put on new clothes to
symbolise their sharing in the risen life of Christ . Whatever their place in
the wider social world (indicated then as now by the clothes they wore), the
newly-baptised would all be dressed alike to demonstrate their oneness in
Christ. Imagine the baptism of a household, headed by a Jewish man who has come
to faith. His wife and children, who in those days were lower in the family hierarchy, join him
together with his Gentile slaves. They emerge from the water of baptism as one,
re-clothed with Christ. Paul’s vision of baptism is truly sacramental. It
offers a foretaste of God’s intention for all humankind, as in Christ (not
Moses), we enter into the inheritance promised to Abraham and his seed: the
blessing of God’s Spirit that knows no boundaries, and makes us truly
alive.
In the Gospel reading, Jesus crosses the sea of Galilee into
Gentile territory. The Gerasene man he meets represents the chaos of a world
devastated by imperial rule. Too disturbed to live in the town among his own
people, his superhuman strength makes him a danger to himself and others. He is
unclothed. His nakedness symbolises his vulnerability,, personally and socially.
His name suggests that he is possessed by the spirits of the foreign army that
has taken over his land (today we might say that he has been
driven mad by the stresses of the Roman occupation). The only place for him is
out in the wilds among the tombs: a living death. In this hopeless, godless
place we find Jesus, crossing every imaginable boundary – geographical, racial,
cultural, spiritual – to enter the world of Legion and liberate him.
The story suggests quite a
struggle to set him free. Did he shout so loudly as he was released that he
frightened the pigs over the cliff edge? Like the baptised in the Galatian
church, he is re-clothed (v.35), a symbol of the liberating, peace-making power
of the Son of God over a dangerously chaotic world. Why does Jesus send him
back to his own people? Not surprisingly, they want nothing to do with Jesus.
He may have delivered their man from evil but he has deprived them of their
livelihood. If these Gentile pig farmers are to have faith in the liberating
power of Israel’s God, perhaps they will listen to the man formerly known as
Legion, as he tells his story of how Jesus re-clothed his whole being.
Clothes provide more than a
protective outer covering. If you think
of designer labels, hoodies, burkas, school uniform, military uniform, it is hard to avoid the
conclusion that clothing is a significant expression of body language revealing
as much or as little as it conceals. What we wear says a lot about how we see
ourselves in relation to others. Clothing is a symbol of identity. In the same
way, to be clothed with Christ gives us an identity as a Christian. You may
have particular clothes you wear for Church – obviously I do, but it is not
these that matter – that would be falling into the same trap the Galatians did,
of making the regulations more important than the relationship.
For to be clothed with Christ is
not about what clothes we wear in a literal sense. To be clothed with Christ is
to be in Christ, to be part of God’s inclusive family, the community of the baptised. To be part of a
worldwide spiritual community where all are of the same status, just as those
baptised today in the Jordan all look the same in the white gowns they are given as they emerge from the water.
Abercrombie
and Fitch are like the BNP or the EDL, they are exclusive and they are
obnoxious about those they seek to exclude. While in its chequered past the
church has sometimes been like that, today all over the world we rejoice in our
unity and diversity, as the community of the baptized.
I close then with a quotation from Pope Paul VI,
which I read in a letter from Bishop Stephen Cottrell. It's from "Evangelisation in the Modern World".
"The Christian community is never closed upon itself. The intimate life of this community - the life of listening to the Word and the Apostles' teaching, charity lived in a fraternal way, the sharing of bread - only adquires its full meaning when it becomes witness, when it evokes admiration and conversion and when it becomes the preaching and proclamation of the Good News. Thus it is the whole church that receives the mission to evangelise."
