From the Prophet Jeremiah:
Thus said the Lord to me, “Go and buy yourself a linen loincloth, and put it on your loins, but do not dip it in water.” So I bought a loincloth according to the word of the Lord, and put it on my loins. And the word of the Lord came to me a second time, saying, “Take the loincloth that you bought and are wearing, and go now to the Euphrates, and hide it there in a cleft of the rock.” So I went, and hid it by the Euphrates, as the Lord commanded me. And after many days the Lord said to me, “Go now to the Euphrates, and take from there the loincloth that I commanded you to hide there.” Then I went to the Euphrates, and dug, and I took the loincloth from the place where I had hidden it. But now the loincloth was ruined; it was good for nothing. Then the word of the Lord came to me: Thus says the Lord: Just so I will ruin the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem. This evil people, who refuse to hear my words, who stubbornly follow their own will and have gone after other gods to serve them and worship them, shall be like this loincloth, which is good for nothing. For as the loincloth clings to one’s loins, so I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah cling to me, says the Lord, in order that they might be for me a people, a name, a praise, and a glory. But they would not listen.
(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Jeremiah 13:1-11 (NRSV) – March 9, 2013.)
According to Wikipedia:
Loincloths are being and have been worn:
- in societies where no other clothing is needed or wanted
- as an undergarment or swimsuit
- by the farmers in paddy fields in Sri Lanka and India, especially when they are working with mud
The loincloth or breechcloth is a basic form of dress, often worn as an only garment. Men have worn a loincloth or breechcloth as a fundamental piece of clothing which covers their genitals – not the buttocks – in most societies throughout human history which disapproved of genital nakedness. The loincloth is in essence a piece of material, bark-bast, leather or cloth, passed between the legs covering the genitals.
As a metaphor for the relationship of God and God’s People, this has to be one of the most bizarre. We can readily understand the spousal metaphor of Hosea, the body metaphor used by Paul in First Corinthians, or Peter’s spiritual house. We’re familiar with shepherds and their sheep, gardeners and their fig trees, vine dressers and their grapevines, hens with their chicks, parents with their children, and princes and their people; they all make sense as ways to understand our relationship to God. But underwear? Seriously? Underwear???
The beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (still going strong at nearly 94 year of age) wrote a poem about underwear (entitled Underwear) published in 1961:
I didn’t get much sleep last night
thinking about underwear
Have you ever stopped to consider
underwear in the abstract
When you really dig into it
some shocking problems are raised
Underwear is something
we all have to deal with
Everyone wears
some kind of underwear
The Pope wears underwear I hope
The Governor of Louisiana
wears underwear
I saw him on TV
He must have had tight underwear
He squirmed a lot
Underwear can really get you in a bind
You have seen the underwear ads
for men and women
so alike but so different
Women’s underwear holds things up
Men’s underwear holds things down
Underwear is one thing
men and women have in common
Underwear is all we have between us
You have seen the three-color pictures
with crotches encircled
to show the areas of extra strength
and three-way stretch
promising full freedom of action
Don’t be deceived
It’s all based on the two-party system
which doesn’t allow much freedom of choice
the way things are set up
America in its Underwear
struggles thru the night
Underwear controls everything in the end
Take foundation garments for instance
They are really fascist forms
of underground government
making people believe
something but the truth
telling you what you can or can’t do
Did you ever try to get around a girdle
Perhaps Non-Violent Action
is the only answer
Did Gandhi wear a girdle?
Did Lady Macbeth wear a girdle?
Was that why Macbeth murdered sleep?
And that spot she was always rubbing—
Was it really in her underwear?
Modern anglosaxon ladies
must have huge guilt complexes
always washing and washing and washing
Out damned spot
Underwear with spots very suspicious
Underwear with bulges very shocking
Underwear on clothesline a great flag of freedom
Someone has escaped his Underwear
May be naked somewhere
Help!
But don’t worry
Everybody’s still hung up in it
There won’t be no real revolution
And poetry still the underwear of the soul
And underwear still covering
a multitude of faults
in the geological sense—
strange sedimentary stones, inscrutable cracks!
If I were you I’d keep aside
an oversize pair of winter underwear
Do not go naked into that good night
And in the meantime
keep calm and warm and dry
No use stirring ourselves up prematurely
‘over Nothing’
Move forward with dignity
hand in vest
Don’t get emotional
And death shall have no dominion
There’s plenty of time my darling
Are we not still young and easy
Don’t shout
There are observations in that poem that help me get into prophet’s metaphor:
“Underwear can really get you in a bind” — God talks about the loincloth clinging. Our relationship with God is to be intimate; we are to be closely bound to our Creator; we are to cling to God tightly.
“Underwear is one thing men and women have in common” — Boxers or briefs or bikini panties, tightie-whities or long-johns, underwear is a shared experience, although for each wearer there are unique peculiarities. Our individual relationships with God, our personal spiritualities, are like that; there is a commonality of experience, but there are also profound differences. We learn about God as we share and discuss those likenesses and unlikenesses.
“Underwear on clothesline a great flag of freedom” — Anglican prayer books include a collect for peace which, in its modern form in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church petitions, “O God, the author of peace and lover of concord, to know you is eternal life and to serve you is perfect freedom . . . .” (pg. 99) The last phrase is derived from the Latin cui servire, regnare est, “whom to serve is to reign,” attributed to St. Augustine. This metaphor as a flag of freedom reminds me that “if we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him.” (2 Tim. 2:11-12)
While I don’t expect God’s underwear to make it into the next prayer book or the next liturgical supplement the way other biblical metaphors have done, it’s one I could wish had more exposure. It’s certainly startling and thought provoking.
====================
A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!
====================
Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” There is an undeniable link between truth and autonomy, between authenticity and independence. Those who seek to take away liberty do so by use of falsehood, and most effective untruths are those which are the biggest. Adolph Hitler described the phenomenon:
Why has the health of the people not been restored? This is God’s question of the leadership of ancient Israel, but it could certainly be the question asked of modern America! Other questions could also be asked, even in the aftermath of the healthcare reform debates, the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and its vindication as constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. Why is it that, in the practice of medicine, we do not have equal treatment for everybody? Why is that every American is guaranteed a lawyer, but not a doctor? Why don’t we (even now) have guaranteed health care for everyone?
Scholars and commentators seem to agree (and a computer search of various translations confirms) that there is no single verse of the Hebrew scriptures saying what John says Jesus quoted. It seems to be an amalgam or summary of several different bits of the prophets. When I read this story of John’s, however, it isn’t a prophet that comes immediately to mind. Instead, I think of a portrayal of Lady Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs:
I’ve been thinking about this all day and there is so much to say . . . but this cuts so deeply into so many areas of life that I cannot bring myself to say any of them.
Some years ago, during the summer of 2000 to be exact, I was one of about a dozen adults who chaperoned 87 teenagers on a ten-day tour of northern Italy. One of the pieces of advice given our group by the organizing tour guide was that the young ladies would not be allowed into Italian cathedrals wearing shorts or tank-tops. She suggested that they take with them, and always have on hand a light-weight over-blouse and a large scarf that they could tie around their waist to form a sort of skirt. This caused no amount of amusement among our group 17- and 18-year-old, Twenty-First Century, American girls, but it only took one time being escorted out of a church by a stern Italian nun for them to realize how serious the advice was and to never again forget to put on their overshirts and their wrap-around skirts. 
Thirty or so years before the episode described here by John, Mary “gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn” in a town called Bethlehem. (Luke 2:7) We are told here and elsewhere that Jesus had brothers, and his brothers were named “James and Joseph and Simon and Judas.” (Matthew 13:55) He had sisters, too, but their names are not reported in Scripture.
It’s called bibliolatry and it’s been around a long, long time. The dictionary definition of bibliolatry is “excessive reverence for the Bible as literally interpreted.” What I most enjoy about modern bibliolatry is that it denies that it is bibliolatry in the most circular and bibliolatrous of ways. 
Despite the tradition that the Psalms were written by King David, any good commentary will tell you that this Psalm was written probably in the first decades of the Sixth Century BC, at around the time of the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians circa 598 BC. Some scholars would even suggest that it was written as late as the Maccabean era (circa 165 BC). Personally, I tend to go with the earlier date; the Psalm’s description of wide spread destruction of religious meeting places seems more in line with the pre-Exilic invasion.
