Clean Underwear

August 5, 2015

"Put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and...put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness." --Ephesians 4:22-24

When I was a little boy, I couldn't get away with anything. Back then, parenting didn't include accompanying a child everywhere he went, or defending bad behavior. On Saturdays, I could be gone from right after breakfast till dark without anyone panicking. Come to think of it, there might have been some sinister family plot behind my parents' unconcern!

There were however, some areas of maternal concern that despite my six or seven years' experience, I was never able to overcome. I always had to wear clean clothes. It didn't matter if I had planned on spending the day rooting around in a sewer, I had to start out with clean clothes. There was no getting around it. No prison guard could hold a candle to mom's diligence in making sure I didn't leave the house with yesterday's dirt on my shirt. Of course I tried, but she always caught me. She would ask, "You put on clean clothes this morning?" I would answer truthfully, but perhaps not completely, and she would nail me with her follow up question: "Clean underwear, too?" I would skulk back upstairs, strip down and dutifully, if not cheerfully, put on clean underwear. "You don't put dirty clothes on a clean body," was her motto.

I think that's what St. Paul is getting at in these words from his letter to the Ephesian Christians. We must take off the old dirty clothes of our sins before we can put on the clean clothes of Christ's righteousness. But lest we imagine it's all our own doing, a spiritual pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps, he inserts these words: "the new man which was created according to God." I have my part to play, but this new life I am commanded to put on is not my own doing; it is a creation of God. Tonight, I am grateful that I have a part to play in salvation; otherwise, I would become lazy and careless. But I am also grateful that it is God's doing, because without the righteousness of Christ, anything I put on would be just another set of my dirty old clothes.