The LORD is king, robed with majesty; the
LORD is robed, girded with might. (Psalm 93:1)
I don’t know
why this line in the Psalms caught my notice today, but it seems to me that in Scripture,
when someone is clothed or robed, it’s with “majesty” or “dignity.” Jesus taught us to clothe the naked (Matthew
25:36), so how do we “clothe someone with dignity?”
For a lot of
us, after walking into a gathering our mind starts summing up everyone and
placing labels on them: “He’s awfully tall, she’s too thin, that one looks
nervous, they’re too loud, she’s not participating in the right way, he should
know better.” On and on our minds
categorize people and put them in boxes: “safe,” “scary,” “good,” “bad,”
“left,” “right,” “radical,” “conservative,” “looney,” “my candidate,” and—in my
opinion—the worst label, “Karen”. What
are we doing when this is going on? We’re
‘clothing’ them. We’re draping our
judgements around their shoulders so that we don’t need to deal with who they
really are. The problem is that we
believe those judgements to be real and let them drive the way we deal with
others when we interact. Judging each other and putting labels on them was not
the clothing Jesus commanded us to clothe each other with.
So, how
should we clothe each other? I think
that it means to hold everyone we meet, in the truest sense of the words, as a
beloved child of God, a person of sacred worth and value. If we can move beyond our mind’s chatter to be
fully present to someone as they are, a beloved child of God, we’re clothing
them with dignity. Jesus asks us to do
this with not only with our family and friends, but with those who despise us. We’re to do this for those whom we may wish to
despise. We need to do this with the
young, with the old, with the infirm, with the healthy, with the Jew, with the
Samaritan, with those who love us, with those who revile us. Sometimes we need to do this in spite of their
not believing it themselves. Some of us
have been so beaten down, suffered so many trials and disasters, that we no
longer believe themselves to be children of God. And yet that’s a cornerstone of the teachings
of Jesus. This is, for each and every
one of us, our birthright.
My prayer
for today is that we all make the effort to clothe everyone we meet in the robe
of majesty they deserve as a child of God.
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