It is a good coat. It was a good coat in 1984 and it is still, honestly, a good coat, and it will outlast most of the ones hanging in that porch.
Wool. Proper buttons. Somebody made it to last and it has lasted, and your mother wore it for twenty-two years and you have worn it for nineteen.
It is also, and you know this perfectly well, plainly from another time. The shape of it is not the shape of anything now. The collar tells you exactly what decade it came out of and so does the length.
And you love it. That is not a small thing and it is not sentimentality: you love it the way a person loves a thing that a person they loved used to stand up inside.
Here is what has been happening for about three winters and what you have not admitted.
You go in October. You go in April. You go through the whole summer without a thought.
And on the weeks when it is properly cold, the weeks when a coat is not a coat you take off in the porch but a coat you are seen arriving in and standing about in and sitting through the notices in, you find that there is something else on.
Not every time. Perhaps one Sunday in three.
Three winters is about eleven Sundays, and you have never once told anybody, and you would not know how to say it in a way that did not sound absurd.
Come is the whole verb and there is no adverb on it
There is an invitation everybody knows, and I want you to look at what is not in it.
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.Matthew 11:28
Come unto me.
There is no adverb. There is no manner attached. He does not say come tidily, or come presentably, or come when it is warm enough that nobody will look at what you have on. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.
And look at the description of who is being called: those that labor and are heavy laden. That is not a description of people at their best. It is a description of people at the end of a week, carrying something, in whatever they happened to have on when they picked it up.
So take this now, three winters in. You are called exactly as you are dressed. The written word puts no manner on the coming, and the Holy Spirit is the one issuing that invitation, and there is not one syllable in it about what a person has on their back.
Plainness was the welcome and then it turned around
Now I want to say something carefully, because this is a place where this tradition has to be honest about itself and I will not do it unkindly.
The room this site is named for was a plain room on purpose. The whole point of it was that a person could come in from the street in working clothes and there would be nothing at the door and nobody would read anything.
Plainness was the welcome. That is what it was for.
And over the following century, in some places, plainness turned into its own kind of code. It became a standard rather than an open door, and a person could get it wrong, and the thing that had been built to stop anybody being measured became a way of measuring.
That is not anybody's fault in your building. It is what happens to a good idea over a hundred years, and it happens to every good idea eventually.
But it means that if there is a small voice in you that says a coat is a spiritual matter, that voice is a very long way from where this started.
You are welcome in that coat. His word attaches no manner to the coming, and the Holy Spirit has never once looked at a collar.
Go on a cold week.
The next properly cold Sunday, in that coat, at the ordinary time, and stand about in the porch afterwards in it rather than getting out quickly.
That last part is the actual instruction and it is the hard one. Anybody can get through a door. What you have been avoiding is the standing about, which is where a coat is seen, and the only way through it is to do it once for the full ten minutes and find out that nothing happens. Scripture says so plainly, and the Holy Spirit does not read it differently on a bad day.
And I will tell you what will actually happen, because I have seen this a hundred times in a hundred porches. Somebody will say something about the cold. Somebody will ask you about your week. And at some point in the next year, somebody will say that they have always liked that coat, and they will mean it, because a proper wool coat with real buttons is a beautiful thing and everybody in that porch knows it.
You are called with no manner attached. The written word says come and stops, and the Holy Spirit is the one who issues it, so this is not you being brave. It is you accepting an invitation that was never conditional.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud in your own hall with the coat on, before you leave. The right to speak them was not earned by anything you have on and is not lost by a coat from 1984. It is Christ's own authority, delegated, and because you are in Christ it has been given to you whole, dressed exactly like this. Speak them under not my will, but Thine: He calls and He receives in His own way and in His own timing, and one cold Sunday is never the measure of what He has settled.
- Cold weeks, you do not get to take my Sundays. The written word says come and puts no manner on it anywhere, and the Holy Spirit has never once looked at a collar or a hem.
- Small voice that made a coat a spiritual matter, get out of my porch. Jesus called the ones carrying something in whatever they had on when they picked it up, and His Spirit issues that invitation, so I go in this coat, in the name of Jesus.
- Lord, You attached no adverb to come and You never have, and Your word says it and Your Spirit does it. I go on the next cold Sunday in my mother's coat, and I stand about in it for the full ten minutes.
Matthew 11:28
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