Before You Are Presentable

He had been at it about forty minutes before he noticed what he was doing.

The photographs were from the harvest thing in October, still up on the church's page, and he had gone through all sixty two of them. Not looking at faces. Looking at feet. Then at collars. Then at whether anybody in the second row was in a coat that had been through anything.

Forty minutes of a Tuesday night, working out what people wear there.

He had been away nine months. Nothing dramatic had happened, which is the part that is hard to explain to anyone. He had missed one Sunday because of a shift, and then two, and then the gap grew a skin over it, and after that the question stopped being shall I go and became what would I even walk in as.

Because it was not really about the coat. It was about the nine months, and the reason for the nine months, and the fact that he was not the man who had left. He had the vague conviction that you have to arrive somewhere as a finished thing, or at least a tidied one, and he had not been able to get himself tidied since about February.

So he zoomed in on strangers' shoes at eleven at night, and told himself he was being practical.

At the top of the page there was a phone number and the word welcome, and he did not believe it, and he closed the laptop.

He was working out the price of a door that has never once had a price on it.

The father did not wait for the speech

There is a story Jesus told about a son coming home, and everybody knows how it ends, which is a problem, because the famous ending has covered up the actual detail.

The son had a speech. He had written it out in his head, in a field, among the animals, and it was a good speech: I have sinned, I am not worthy, make me a hired worker. It is the speech of a man getting himself into presentable condition before arriving. He was going to arrive with his account settled and his position understood.

He did not get to give it.

And he rose up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was moved with deep feeling, and he ran and fell on his neck and kissed him.Luke 15:20

While he was still a long way off. Before the speech. Before the wash. Before one single thing about him had been improved, including the smell, which the story does not mention and which everyone at that farm would have.

The father ran. Not to the gate, to meet him at a reasonable distance once the boy had done the walking. Down the road, out past the property line, to a filthy young man in the clothes he had slept in, halfway through a sentence he never got to finish.

That is the picture. And it is worth knowing that when a preacher named Bresee started a work in a plain hall near the middle of Los Angeles, the thing he was determined about was that nobody would be charged for a seat and nobody would be sorted by what they arrived in. No rented pews. No good end of the room. The plainness was not a rule about clothes. It was the door being made as wide as the road the father ran down.

Which is worth saying carefully, because a thing like that can turn over in a generation or two and quietly become a dress code of its own, which is the exact reverse of what it was for. Plain as a welcome is one thing. Plain as a standard to clear is the same door with a price back on it.

And this cuts the other way too, so hear it plainly: nobody here is telling you that effort is wrong. Dressing well for God is a real love and a real gladness, and if that is you, keep it, and enjoy it. This is only for the person who has made presentable the price of admission, and has therefore not been able to afford to go home.