The apostle Paul comes off in today's text as a sort of wardrobe/costume guy with some makeup work thrown in.
"Clothe yourselves" -- that's how Paul begins his exhortation to change today. Think of a director on the set of a Hollywood movie who stops shooting and yells "Wardrobe!!!"
So Paul says, "Clothe yourselves." That may not seem very revolutionary to us, people of the overflowing walk-in clothes closet. Merely to change one's clothes is not a big deal. Today any person who buys a new house must have walk-in closets. If you buy a pre-1940s house, you're lucky to find a closet in your room at all. People just didn't have that many changes of clothes, and then, too, a lot of kids wore "hand-me-downs."
But, in the ancient world of the early Christians, putting on a fresh set of clothing was a big deal. Clothing was costly. There were no factories to manufacture it. Every article of clothing had to be painstakingly stitched together by hand. Few people outside of the aristocracy owned more than one or two changes of clothes.
To receive a new outfit, therefore, seemed like making a whole new beginning. And for Paul's readers to hear him saying, "Hey, you need a new wardrobe!" -- well, they would sit up and listen, because changing clothes was just not something you did without thinking.
