A New Outfit

December 9, 2018

Baruch 5:1-7; Luke 3:1-6

“Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction.”

Tis the season, I suppose. Lots of us do give and receive new items of clothing around Christmas. I can certainly recall the days when most of my friends’ fathers wore ties every day, so the new tie for dad was a go-to Christmas present. Hats and scarves are always nice, too. Holiday sweaters are a thing.

The robe of righteousness, on the other hand, is really hard to find in most stores.

I actually went to Amazon and searched. Try it. You’ll find some books and songs by that title, but you will not find an actual “robe of righteousness.” I was disappointed. Maybe when they move to town I can have a talk with them about this sad lack of righteousness robes.

They say “dress for success,” so I wonder how the prophets would define “success” when they offered up their riffs on clothing. Baruch, of course, is not the only place where we find such sartorial advice. In the New Testament letter to the Ephesians, Paul advises putting on the “whole armor of God” with its “helmet of salvation” and “belt of truth.”

Paul seemed to be urging members of the young church to prepare for battle, and, if he was thinking in terms of “success,” he probably had in mind triumph in spiritual warfare with the powers and principalities and rulers of the present darkness, as he put it elsewhere.

This morning we dipped into a part of scripture that we don’t often touch on. The book of Baruch is part of the Roman Catholic canon, sometimes referred to as the Apocrypha or the Deuterocanonical Books. Scholars tend to place the writing of Baruch roughly a couple of hundred years before the time of Jesus, but it is written as a letter from a friend of the prophet Jeremiah from exile in Babylon to the people in Jerusalem in the early sixth century before the common era.

Taking the text on its own terms, then, Baruch is telling the people to dress for the job they want, not the job they have, or, better, dress for the life you want not the life you have.

That’s decent advice, as far as it goes, but it raises all kinds of questions. If you want to follow this advice, for example, you first must understand the life you have. That’s a question of reflection and self-examination, first, but also, to understand the life I have I must also interrogate the structures that define that life, the context, if you will.

Luke’s gospel underscored this necessity. That is to say, Luke frequently – especially in the opening chapters – takes the time to give us specific markers so we will understand the context. “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius,” our text this morning begins. Luke is telling us something about the structures that define the life he is about to tell us all about.

That work is essential to deep self understanding. What family dynamics define the contours of the life I have? What economic structures frame it? Am I rich? Am I poor? What differences do such realities make for me? What political realities form the social context for my life? What about age, health, ability, gender, race?

It turns out that understanding the life I have takes a lot of work. Heck, it might take me a whole lifetime to figure out this one life!

What about imagining a future otherwise? That is to say, if I want to follow Baruch’s advice and dress for the life I want, then I am further into the work of discernment. What does this other life look like? How am I shaped and formed for it by not only all of those things I’ve examined about the life I have, but also, how am I shaped and formed for this other life by the longings of my heart – that is to say, way too quickly, what is God calling me into?

Luke quotes Isaiah and echoes Baruch, as well, in proclaiming, “prepare the way of Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill made low. The crooked places will be made straight, the rough ones made smooth; and all flesh will see the salvation of our God.”

Luke’s call back underscores a crucial truth: these ancient texts cohere around a vision of wholeness for all people that rests on justice and leads to shalom. That’s the life that God is calling me into. That’s the future I need to dress for.

Advent promises us that such a future is coming, and this passage from Baruch reminds us that it’s time to get dressed: the prince of peace will be here soon. Amen.