A Sermon by Dan Calvo
Pittsburgh New Church
September 28th, 2025
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Fall is finally here, and soon we will find ourselves in the middle of winter. Now in this part of the world that we live in winter can be very, very cold, and there are few things that are more comforting during the winter than having a good winter coat that can keep us warm. This not only applies to winter of course, but during the summer we wear clothes that are lighter and allow us to stay cool. If we are working a blue collar job like in construction we need clothing that is fitting for our job, like good work boots or gloves that can help us work safely, and depending on what kind of office we work at, it’s important to wear appropriate business clothes for the way we present ourselves. Clothing is something that a lot of times we can take for granted but it is so important to our quality of life on so many levels from our personal expression to our personal safety and comfort.
Unfortunately, while we can take these things for granted, the truth is that there are millions of people in the world who do not have access to these privileges. There are millions of people who do not have access to a good winter coat or shoes so they can walk safely in the streets, or who only have a few items of clothing that are ripped and broken. Millions of people in the world, including children, women, and the elderly, are struggling because they do not have access to good quality clothes that can protect them in different kinds of weather.
The Lord told us to serve our neighbors, and for the last few weeks we have been talking about the different kinds of people that the Lord tells us to serve. We have talked about serving the hungry, the thirsty, and the stranger, and today we will be talking about serving the naked. Now of course in this part of the world that we live in we don't tend to see a lot of naked people in the streets, but if we think of the naked as people who do not have access to appropriate clothes to protect them, then we can see more easily how we can serve people in this situation. There are many organizations across the world that take clothing donations and will distribute those clothes for people in need, and we can donate from our own clothes to these organizations. It can be a very powerful thing to look at our wardrobe and see if there are clothes that we don't really need or that we don't really care about and take those clothes and bring them to a place where there will be people who are really in need of those things that we take for granted. It can be a very powerful shift in perspective to see those clothes that we don't really think about mean so much to somebody else. When we do this, we can serve the naked in the natural sense as the Lord told us to do.
Now, of course as we have covered in previous sermons in this series, we're not only told to serve our neighbor in a natural sense, but we're also told to serve our neighbors in a spiritual sense. So, who are the spiritually naked that we are meant to serve? The spiritually naked are people who are lacking truth, or people who are lacking guiding principles in their life, and who are looking for that truth to guide them and protect them from the hardship of the world. This comes from the fact that in the Word, whenever clothing is mentioned, the Word is speaking about truth. The book Apocalypse Revealed says that:
Clothes in the Word symbolize truths that clothe good, and in an opposite sense, falsities that clothe evil. For a person embodies either his goodness or his evil. Truths or falsities are therefore his clothes. (AR 45)
It's easy to see why clothing has this spiritual meaning: all truth and good comes from the Lord, none of it comes from us. So, if we don't have the truth, faith, and values that come from the Lord, then we have nothing of our own, we are spiritually naked. For example, when we feel grief over losing a loved one, if we don’t have any idea that there is an afterlife or that the person who passed is at peace in the other world, then we feel pain, like not having a coat during a snowstorm. If we are going through life trying to keep our integrity, but we don’t have any solid foundation of values and faith, then it is like walking down a rocky path with no shoes on. We need truths from the Lord to cover us, to keep us safe as we go through life.
On the one hand, it seems pretty obvious how we can serve the spiritually naked who are lacking truths in their life and are looking for it. We can share the truths that we get from the Word, we can help instruct them in these ideas from the Word, and in doing so we can in a way donate spiritual clothing from our own spiritual wardrobe to those people. We can share the spiritual clothing that we get from the Lord, and the good thing is there's a surplus, there's a never-ending amount of spiritual clothing that we can get from the Word and that we can share with other people.
But there is another aspect to this problem of being spiritually naked, that isn’t just the lack of truth when facing adversity. Clothing serves to protect us from the elements, but it also serves as a powerful form of personal expression of our identity. This is something that starts very early on in our lives when we are teenagers and young adults, when we experiment with using clothing to represent our personality, and we continue to do that throughout our lives whether we realize it or not. The clothes that we wear are often a representation of our identity, from the brands that we buy from, to the quality of the fabric and the style that we wear, our clothes can be a representation of everything from how we perceive ourselves and how we want to be perceived, to even things like our tax bracket. We can learn a lot about a person by seeing the way that they dress. All these things can be an external representation of our identity whether we are realizing it or not.
We can see how this applies to the spiritually naked, because as we go through life we are searching for our identity, we are searching for who we truly are, and there are many people in the world right now who are searching for an identity, and they look for it in all sorts of places. This happens especially with teenagers and young adults who oftentimes look for an identity in trends on social media like TikTok or YouTube, and who are struggling to find who they really are. Adults can do that too, but we tend to do it based on political parties or ideologies or even our economic status. We hold on to these things and try to build an identity around them, but ultimately those are external things, they are superficial and flawed, they're not real spiritual clothing that can provide us with a true sense of self, and if we take a good look in the mirror, we realize that we are actually spiritually naked if we look for an identity in these places. It is very similar to the story of the emperor’s new clothes, in that we can go out into the world thinking that we are wearing magnificent clothes, thinking that we have a powerful identity, but really we are walking around spiritually naked, going along with what others are telling us our identity should be.
We may look at this problem of people who are struggling with an identity crisis, who are struggling to figure out who they are in this world, and think to ourselves, “how do we serve these people?” If we believe that without the Lord we have nothing, doesn’t that mean that we ourselves in the New Church don’t have an identity at all, that we lose our personal identity when we surrender to following the Lord? Isn’t putting on the Lord's spiritual clothing like putting on a uniform and conforming to a single way of being?
The thing is that just as the Lord's truth is infinite, it also manifests itself in infinite kinds of spiritual clothing. The Lord doesn't give us uniforms, He provides us with infinite styles and infinite kinds of ways that we can cover ourselves with His truth and His kindness, but they all have the same fabric, which is His truth. In fact, the more that we decide to surrender ourselves to the Lord, the more that we accept that without Him we are spiritually naked, the more we can develop an identity of our own, and the freer we become as individuals.
The book Divine Providence explains this further in a series of passages, saying that:
The more closely we are united to the Lord, the more clearly we seem to have our own identity, and yet the more obvious it is to us that we belong to the Lord. The reason we are more clearly aware that we belong to the Lord as our sense of identity becomes clearer is that the more closely we are united to the Lord the wiser we become; and wisdom both teaches this and is conscious of it. Since the goal of the Lord's divine providence is a heaven from the human race, it follows that the goal is the union of the human race with the Lord. It also follows that the goal is for us to become wiser and happier because of this union, because we are given heaven through our wisdom and in proportion to it, and this is what gives us happiness. Lastly, it follows that the goal is for us to have a clearer sense of our identity and yet to be more clearly aware that we belong to the Lord (DP 42, 44, 45).
When we willingly surrender ourselves to the care and guidance of the Lord, and we accept that without Him we are stripped of anything good and true in our lives, we realize that there is actually tremendous freedom to develop as individuals when we accept this. Think of it like this: we all depend on electricity. We take it for granted, it powers our homes, our phones, our cars, and we have all decided to depend on it without really questioning it, and in doing so we have found tremendous freedom to develop as individuals. How much more can we develop as individuals if we accept that every good thing we have in our lives comes from the Lord and not from ourselves or other sources? How many more unique ways of expressing our identity can we find if we surrender ourselves to the care of the Lord, who provides us with all kinds of spiritual clothing?
When we willingly cover ourselves with the truth that the Lord provides by means of His Word, and we become willing to follow Him instead of trying to find an identity in other places, we will find that we are actually much freer and unique, because we are covering ourselves with clothing that is everlasting, that is not going to degrade or break, and that is custom-made for us. The Lord doesn’t want to take away our individuality, on the contrary, He wants to provide us with spiritual clothing that is perfectly suited for each one of us individually, so that we can express ourselves to the best of our capability under His guidance.
There is a good chance that we all know someone who is struggling with an identity crisis. It might be a younger person who is struggling to find their place in the world, it may be someone who is going through a divorce or separation and is trying to figure out who they are without their spouse, it may be someone who is grieving after losing someone they love and discovering what life is without them, or it may be someone recovering from substance abuse who is finding their way into a new sober life. In all these circumstances people look at themselves and ask, “who am I? What is my identity?” And we can help people in that situation by sharing truths from the Word so that they can explore what it means to grow more as an individual by following the Lord and looking to be united with Him.
Just how we can serve those who are struggling with a lack of access to clothes by donating some of our own clothes, we can serve those who are spiritually naked by sharing with them some of the truths that we carry on us, that have helped us develop our own identity. Once we share those spiritual clothes with others, they will have the opportunity to develop their identity in unity with God, an identity that is not dependent on external appearances or labels, but rather an identity that is based on a deep connection with the timeless infinity of God. Amen.