Tony
Celelli, our president here at the South Texas School of Christian Studies,
recently received his doctoral regalia. It is stunning: a sort of steel-blue
gown with cobalt blue chevrons picked out in gold piping, off the shoulder with
a slit up one side. (All right, I made that last part up, but it would add some
dash.) He has declared that henceforth we will wear gowns and hoods to our
weekly faculty meetings.
I
don’t blame him! I myself have
never managed to develop the professional disdain one is supposed to display
for the full regimentals of religious scholarship. I have owned my academic
trappings for six years now and still look for opportunities to tog up, even to
wear the hat – an oversized octagonal tam that looks like some sort of
monstrous velvet sombrero. I worked hard for the right to wear this get-up and
I feel smarter just hearing it swish around me as I walk. And I still get a
charge every time someone refers to me as “Dr. Jackson.”
All
of that is harmless enough, I suppose, but Jesus took a dim view of such
sartorial distinctions, and he wasn’t much for titles. The problem is that
flowing robes have plenty of room for deep pockets and can cover up a lot in
the way of ill-gotten gains. The position of seminary professor implies a
certain holiness that I may not in fact possess, and can lead me to forget that
an unnoticed widow may outdo me in her love for God.
At
the final moment of his conversion, St. Francis of Assisi shucked the silken
finery he had always worn as a rich man’s son. No one is quite clear on how he then
came by the battered brown tunic that the turned into a friar’s habit – some
say he traded for it with a beggar; G. K. Chesterton speculates that he may
have stolen it from a scarecrow. However he obtained his outfit, Francis was
the man who made the clothes. “Ten years later,” records Chesterton, “that
make-shift costume was the uniform of five thousand men, and a hundred years
later in that, for a pontifical panoply, they laid great Dante in his grave.”
Jesus
warns against the deeply fallen assumption that what we wear tells the world
who we are. Instead, Our Lord insists, who we are should transform what we
wear. All the world’s wealth and all the world’s honors will not buy one thread
of the white robe of Jesus’ exchanged righteousness, but two mites’ worth of
self-sacrifice can purchase the Christ-given distinction of being great in the
Kingdom of Heaven.
Suit Up!
Doug
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