Therefore, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him (Colossians 3:12-17).

Once upon a time, on the isle of Lewis at the northern end of the chain of the Outer Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland, there was a dressmaker. Her name was Fiona, and everyone knew that she was the best dressmaker on the island.

Sometimes the girls came to her for fine dresses for fancy occasions, dresses in the style of a Paris ballroom. Mostly not: the people of the Outer Hebrides tend to be more practical than that. The wind blows cold and damp across the northern Atlantic and over the rocky coasts of Lewis, so you want clothing that will be warm and reliable: good solid wool, rather than frilly silk.

The people of Lewis raised sturdy sheep, and each spring they sheared those sheep and spun the wool into fine yarn, which they dyed in precise colors; and then they wove those different-colored strands into good cloth, in precise patterns, forming the different tartans that indicate which Scottish clan you are part of. Many of those tartans are similar in appearance: just a small detail of the pattern makes the difference. So Scottish weavers take great pride in the exactness with which they weave their cloth.

As I said, patterns like these are called tartans. Every Scottish clan has its own: Stuart and Gordon and MacLeod and all the rest of them. Regiments have their own: the Black Watch is perhaps the most famous. Here in America we often call all such patterns plaid, and we pronounce it to rhyme with glad, but in Scotland the word is plaid, pronounced to rhyme with glade, and it means the rectangular cloth worn as a sash that runs from your right hip across your chest and over your left shoulder, then across your back to your right hip once more. In Scotland plaid isn’t an adjective describing a pattern of cloth; it’s a noun identifying this particular article of clothing.

As your mother probably told you, you should never run with scissors, because if you stumble you might lose your balance and fall and end up stabbing yourself with the scissors. The usual line is that you could put an eye out. But your mother probably didn’t warn you that you absolutely should not run with bagpipes, because you might get kilt.

In truth, though, in order to get kilt you need quite a few yards of tartan cloth, and you need to run your scissors quite precisely in order to get the best fit. It has always been the case that some of us are hard to fit: when we go with a friend to the store to buy a new kilt, and we’re trying one on and we ask our friend “Does this kilt make me look fat,” and if they will tell us the truth we will find out that it does. But Fiona the dressmaker had the eye and she had the knack, and she could run her scissors across a tartan cloth and make you a kilt that fit you well, and made you look your best, slender and young and strong.

People would ask Fiona to put what they needed into the kilts and plaids that she made. Someone would come to her and say, “I see what I need, Fiona. I need patience. God has been patient with me, and I need to be patient with my brother. So if you could sew some extra patience into this kilt, that would be a great help.”

And Fiona would say, “Och, aye, lad, that I can do.” And maybe it was magic and maybe it was psychology, or maybe it was a spiritual gift or the dressmaker’s art: but Fiona would stitch patience, or compassion, or kindness, or gentleness, into the cloak or kilt or plaid that she would make for you, and when you put on that article of clothing, when you wore that kilt or when you wrapped that plaid across your shoulder, you could feel it: you could sense that you had put on a garment of compassion, that you had fastened a plaid of gentleness and kindness across your shoulder, and therefore that characteristic was now wrapped around you, it was there, you were now enfolded in that compassion or that patience, and you could act on the basis of that characteristic.

Paul wrote to the church in Colosse, and he told them this: you are God’s chosen people. Because God has particularly chosen you, that makes you holy. And here is what you particularly need to know: you are dearly beloved. All of you, together, are dearly beloved children of God; and each of you, individually, is a dearly beloved child of God.

Remember when we were out on the playground in fifth or sixth grade, and we were choosing up sides for kickball? Two of the best athletes were the captains, and they took turns calling out the names of students to be on their teams. Maybe you were a good athlete, and you got picked early in the process. Maybe you weren’t that good at kickball, and everyone knew it, so you were one of the last ones picked. Or maybe what everyone knew was that you were really bad at kickball, and nobody wanted you on their team, so that eventually the two captains had called out all the names except yours, and you were the last one left, and they both looked at you, and then looked at each other, and they both shrugged because neither of them wanted you on their team, they saw that you would be more of a liability than an asset.

Some people look on all of life that way. It’s all a competition, we want to prove that our team can defeat your team, we think our clan is better than your clan, and our tartan is obviously bolder and prettier than your tartan. If you march in here with your bagpipe band in all its regalia playing Scotland the Brave, you will get kilt. The best you can do is plaid for mercy.

But God has something else in mind for this world. Rather than some of us being victors and some of us being losers, our Lord has in mind that we would all know that we are dearly beloved children of God. Rather than some of us feeling proud and superior because we won, while others feel despondent and broken in defeat, our Lord has in mind that we would all find purpose and joy and delight in knowing that we are dearly beloved. Instead of figuring out how to defeat each other, we should figure out how to help each other. Rather than figuring out how to take advantage of one another, or hold a grudge against one another, we would figure out how to bless and encourage one another. Rather than figuring out that if I want to get more, I need to somehow get it away from you, and thereby you will now have less; rather than figuring that in order for me to win you have to lose, in order for me to advance you have to decline – instead of that, we want to figure out how we can all advance together, because we are the dearly beloved children of God.

Maybe you want to say, “Wait. What you’re proposing is socialism, and that has never worked.” Well. It’s not really me proposing it; it comes from the Bible. So if you want to oppose it, it won’t be me you have to argue with. More than that, I don’t think what God wants for us is this thing we call socialism, because if it were socialism then the government would be running the program. And what God has in mind isn’t a program that the government is going to run.

Well then, who is going to run the program? Why: you are.

The Rule of Saint Benedict is a small book, written by Benedict of Nursia, which is a town in the hill country in central Italy. He wrote it about the year 530, nearly 15 centuries ago. The book instructs monastic communities how they are to run their lives. There are chapters about how the prayers and psalms should be recited in the day and in the night. There are chapters about monks or brothers, and about nuns or sisters. Part of it gives instructions on how a person becomes a monk or a nun. The motto of the Benedictines is Ora et Labora, and if you remember your Latin you know that means “Pray and Work.” And perhaps a young woman says to herself, “Pray and Work. I think that’s what I need in my life. I want to learn how to know God, and love God: I want to learn to pray. And I want to do what God intends for me to do in this world: I want to find the work that God created me to do. And if that’s what the Benedictines do, pray and work, I guess that means I want to become one of the sisters at the abbey.”

So she goes to the abbey and presents herself there. They invite her in, and she becomes a postulant, an apprentice nun, and they take away all her ordinary clothes that she came in with and give her a nun’s robe.

What do they do with her secular clothes? Maybe she was wearing a good winter coat when you came in. Perhaps they could sell that. Perhaps she had a new white blouse. Those are good. Or wait: what if she had a sweater vest? Those are great! Lots of people would want to buy something like that. They could make a little money to help cover the abbey’s expenses if they sold that stuff. But no. They don’t sell her secular clothes. Well then, do they give her clothes away to the poor? No. They wash her clothes, and dry them, and then they hang them up in her closet. So every morning when she gets up and gets dressed, she opens her closet door and there is her nun’s robe, and there are her secular clothes, and she has to decide how she will get dressed. She says to herself, “Am I a nun?” And if she answers, “Yes, I am a nun,” then she puts on her nun’s robe and goes about her daily tasks as a nun. Or perhaps she says, “No, I no longer want to be a nun. I am done with this monastic life.” And she puts on her secular clothes, and she walks out.

Suppose you answer today that you are indeed a nun. As you are starting out your day, then, you begin with this act of getting dressed, the act of putting on your nun’s robe. Getting dressed is not a particularly challenging thing to do: it does not demand great intellect or courage or spiritual depth. As I look around this morning I can see that everyone who has come here to church today got dressed beforehand. I can also see that some of you were not fully awake when you put together your outfit. Nevertheless, attentive or not, you did get dressed.

Monks and nuns who follow the Rule of Saint Benedict will sometimes spring out of bed full of eagerness and energy, with their hearts singing that “This is the day that the Lord has made, and I am ready to pray and work!” But it doesn’t happen like that every day, for nuns or monks or anyone else. On some days any one of us might wake up feeling ragged and grumpy. We don’t want to pray and we don’t want to work. We don’t even want to eat. We just want to hibernate like a bear, we just want to roll over and go back to sleep, and please don’t bother us till winter is over.

The truth is, some of us are morning people, and we generally wake up raring to go. And some of us are night people, and we never really wanted to know that there are two 8 o’clocks in the day, let alone that there are two 5 o’clocks in the day. The identification of some of us as ‘morning persons’ and some of us as ‘night persons’ is fairly recent, but the recognition of how people are different actually shows up all the way back in the Bible, where Proverbs 27:14 says, “He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him.” Which is to say, you want to remember that Bible verse before you call to your neighbor at sunrise with a cheery greeting, “Good morning, neighbor! Have a blessed day!”

And when you are a monastic, even if you think of yourself as a cheery and energetic morning person, some days you are just not in the mood to pray and work. Suppose one of your brother monks walks down the hallway of the monastery, and he taps on your door and calls out with a cheery voice, “Good morning, brother! Have a blessed day!” Sure enough, it feels like a curse to you and you want to curse right back at him. You are grumpy, and irritable, and everything feels blah. And you are standing in your closet doorway, looking at your robe and your secular clothes, and you think, “Is this who I am? Is this what I want? Maybe not. Maybe I should just put on my old secular clothes and walk out.”

But you have asked that question every morning for some little while now, ever since you first came to the monastery. For all this time you’ve been getting in the habit of getting in the habit. And so you get in the habit this morning, too, and you pull your robe off its hook and get dressed in the robe of a nun. Because “I am a nun,” you say to yourself.

It is not a big deal, to get dressed. We all do it, most every day, though sometimes when we are ill and sometimes when we are lazy we might still be in our jammies at 4 in the afternoon. Yet apart from that, most every day we climb out of bed more or less on time and get ourselves dressed. Sometimes thoughtfully and thoroughly. Sometimes hurriedly and haphazardly. Yet in this mundane activity of putting your arms through the sleeves and buttoning up your buttons, even while your mind and voice are grumbling about how early it is and how sleepy you are, your hands are proceeding with the work of establishing your identity once more.

In our reading this morning Paul uses the metaphor of getting dressed as an illustration of the way we become virtuous. “Clothe yourselves,” he says, “with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.” He lists five virtues there: compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. That doesn’t mean that Paul thought there are only five virtues: we could easily add to the list things like integrity and prudence and helpfulness. The metaphor is this: when you put on your coat, you are now wearing something that you did not have on a minute ago. If you put on patience, for example, you are now displaying more patience than you were before you did that.

If day by day you put on the uniform of a soldier or a police officer, the act of putting on that uniform helps to establish your identity once more. If you dress as a farmer, or a teacher, or a nurse, or an office worker, you are acknowledging your identity, your calling to do what these vocations do. If you put on the robe of a nun, that helps you remember that you are a nun.

And if you lived long ago on the Isle of Lewis, and you went to Fiona the dressmaker and explained to her what you needed – maybe, recognizing how impatient you often are, you ask for a plaid of patience – and she would nod and agree to make that for you. The cloth she would use would be the tartan of your particular clan, of course, but she would stitch into it some extra patience.

Patience is a tricky thing. When my children were young, we had a plaque on the wall with a prayer inscribed on it: “God, grant me patience: and I need it Right Now!” And that sounds a little ironic, but it actually is quite straightforward: if you pray for patience, God will answer that prayer, and give you that patience right now. But there’s a catch – you knew there was going to be a catch, didn’t you? – when God grants you that patience, so that you now have it, that won’t be sufficient: you not only need to have patience, you must go ahead and do patience.

To do patience: that’s a phrase that doesn’t quite exist. We can say “Do your homework” or “Do the dishes” or “Do the math.” In church we can do the prayers and do the offering, and the preacher can do the sermon and the choir can do the anthem. And at the high school prom the DJ might put on Chubby Checker singing, “Come On, Baby: Let’s Do the Twist.” But we don’t say, “Do your patience.” Yes, I know we can use different words in each of those other cases: we can say wash the dishes, pray the prayers, sing the anthem, dance the Twist. Still, it doesn’t sound strange to say do in any of those phrases. Yet it does sound strange to say, “Do your patience.”

Why don’t we have the phrase to do patience? It’s like the language assumes that if everyone just has patience, we’ll be fine. But that is not true. You must not only have patience: you must do it.

And so when you pray for patience, God grants you that gift: patience is yours, and so now you have it. And then, because God loves you so much, and because you now have this wondrous gift of patience, some time within that very day God will give you an opportunity to use that gift: God will give you a chance to do patience. And perhaps you will forget that God answered your prayer and gave you this gift, or perhaps you will feel surly and will not care that you have this gift: and you will express anger or bitterness or impatience, instead.

Perhaps at that very moment you will remember that God gave you this wonderful gift of patience, and now you have it: and you realize you had the chance to express that patience, but you didn’t quite do that. Perhaps you go to God in prayer once more, saying, “Thank you for giving me the gift of patience, Lord. I didn’t use it too well just now. Would you please grant me a little more?”

And I think I should report to you that you do not actually need more patience. You need instead to use the patience that God has already granted to you. You don’t need to have more patience: you need to do more patience. As Paul taught us when he gave us this metaphor of clothing ourselves with patience: we need to do the deliberate act where we are wrapped up in a garment we weren’t wearing just a moment before.

John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople in the year 400, insisted that everything we have in our lives is a gift from God. All of the good things in life we enjoy from day to day, and the individual giftedness we have with which we can bless the people around us, and the forgiveness of our sins which Jesus established in his death on the cross, and our eternal life in heaven which Jesus established in his resurrection: all of these come to us from the grace of God. We can take no credit, as if somehow we brought these things into existence. All that we are, and all that we have, is a trust set in our keeping by our Lord.

Now if Chrysostom was so insistent on that, it might make you think that we can just shrug and bask in the fullness of God’s goodness – since God has already done everything that needs doing. But that turns out not to be the case. Chrysostom also insisted that the only way anyone can live the Christian life is: by living the Christian life. No one else can do it for you. Everything comes to us by God’s grace: we didn’t invent any of it. But only you can live your Christian life.

Just to summarize this, then: the Christian life has two parts. First, we recognize that God’s grace is primary, giving us all that we need; and then with grateful hearts we act on that basis. The classic Presbyterian way of describing this is with a three-word phrase: grace and gratitude.

So. You were praying for patience, and God has supplied you with all the patience you need: thanks be to God for the gift of patience. And now, from a grateful heart, you do patience. Except that we don’t say do patience. All right, you exercise patience, or you practice patience, or you express patience. You clothe yourself with patience: you do the deliberate act of getting dressed, displaying patience in a way that was not there until you took the action of doing the patience.

And so Fiona, the dressmaker of Lewis, would tell you when you came to pick up the article of clothing you ordered, “Here is your plaid of patience. I have stitched extra patience into it, just as you asked. And so you will know that when you put it on, you have your full share of patience, all that you need, and a wee bit more, just in case. Yet you must know this: When the test of your patience comes, it will be for you to do it. For just as with all the gifts of God: you have it because of God’s grace, but it is up to you to use that patience from a grateful heart.”