Maybe Mark Twain was right. The full quotation concludes with these words: “Naked people have little or no influence on society.” A generalization, to be sure, but perhaps an apt one? This quote was discovered when throwing out the wide inter-net for some research on clothing and the Bible. In the process, I found a couple of very interesting sites, including one for Christian nudists. Who knew??

The reason for this sudden interest in all things sartorial? I am this week’s preacher and our text for Sunday is Isaiah 61, where in verse 3 and then again in verse 10, the prophet waxes rhapsodic about the new clothes God provides his beloved children.

“to bestow on them a crown of beauty
instead of ashes,
the oil of joy
instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
instead of a spirit of despair.”
“For he has clothed me with garments of salvation
and arrayed me in a robe of his righteousness,
as a bridegroom adorns his head like a priest,
and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.“

What is it about new clothes? Most especially really beautiful, very dressy or highly symbolic new clothes? I asked our staff for their memories of clothing items that had struck a particularly strong emotional chord in them. Answers ranged from logo-laden t-shirts given for successfully managing a difficult training session, to a liturgical stole, beautifully imprinted by a loving partner, to a wedding dress or an academic hood which each signalled a change in identity and purpose for the wearer. It seems that clothing carries some pretty heavy emotional and psychological freight.

And perhaps it has always been so. Adam and Eve instinctively covered themselves with hastily stitched together greenery once they had availed themselves of the forbidden fruit. God helped them do a better job of it by providing animal skins for warmth and protection in the world outside the garden which was now theirs to inhabit. Jacob gave his favored child a special coat, which coupled with his own rather innocent air of braggadocio, got him in a heckuva lot of trouble; that same son grew up to be the Grand Vizier of the Egyptian empire and was so well hidden behind that office’s clothing and paraphernalia that his own family did not know him. The levitical code outlined in great detail the attire to be worn by the priests when on duty in the tabernacle. The giving of his cloak by the prophet Elijah was part of ‘passing the torch’ to his successor, Elisha. King David danced before the ark wearing only his loincloth which horrified and shamed his wife. King Solomon “in all of his glory” was richly robed and adorned. Angelic messengers are consistently described as being garbed in white, often a dazzling white. Our Lord had an outer garment which was seamless and triggered the interest of the Roman guards at his deathsite. The apostle Paul uses the imagery of being clothed with Christ, or with the new person in Christ, in at least 3 of his epistles. The company of the redeemed as described in John’s vision of heaven are all dressed in white robes. All of which leads to the inevitable conclusion that clothing (or the lack of it) does signify important truths in the pages of scripture.

So, as I pull my clothes on today, am I also aware of the garment of righteousness, of salvation, of praise that is mine to wear every day? Is it visible – to me and to others? Which set of clothes makes the woman? Does the symbolic set influence the physical set in any way?

This is my sixth attempt to post the last three pictures from last night’s pageant. Something is definitely wacky this a.m. Hopefully, these will be viewable without bleeding over into the previous posting. Any advice on how to avoid this would be sincerely appreciated.

I have learned some hard lessons about this blogging stuff in the last 24 hours. An individual blog can only handle so many pictures before it bleeds into the previous one once posted. And…it’s much easier to tell a photo story if you start at the end of the story with your pictures. Geez Louise, what a lot of time spent on not much. At any rate, here are the next seven pictures from our lovely Children’s Pageant last night. The last three will be posted in the next blog. :>)

A birthday party for Jesus, that’s what we enjoyed tonight. The children of Montecito Covenant Church put on a smashing party, including some of the most heartfelt drama we’ve ever enjoyed. The pageant preceded a supper and the entire evening was capped off by sharing a big birthday cake for baby Jesus. It was fun, it was festive, it was creative and it told us the story from the children’s point of view. What could be better than that??

The pictures above are of our current ‘kitchen,’ ‘pantry,’ dining room,’ sitting/T.V. room and office space for my husband, only the latter two purposes the ones for which the space is designed. As you’ll note, it’s pretty much all in one room, with the actual cooking taking place in the adjacent bathroom. To tell you the truth, it’s a little bit grim, especially as we move further into the holiday season.

Seen below are photos of the spaces that used to be our living room, kitchen and family room, now shorn of furniture and carpeting, awaiting the sledge hammers of the demolition crew which will begin their thunderous and dusty work on Monday morning.

The corner by the fireplace in the living room is where our Christmas tree would be located, in a normal year. The piano, which is now safely out of harm’s way in the entry hall, of all places, would be down the steps, used frequently for carol-playing and chord-banging by our grandkids. The wooden chandelier in the kitchen would be festooned with greenery and velvet, the family room would look cheery with red and green distributed widely.

This year, that Christmas spirit is tough to find! Two poinsettias on the front porch and a tree in a pot, ordered from Jackson & Perkins, but not yet here – that about covers it for 2006.

Which is why I was glad to be a worker bee for a little while this morning while some decorating was happening at our church. (Not that I did any actual decorating, of course, but I’m handy with a broom. )

Did you know that blue (or purple) is the color for this season of the year? The liturgical color, that is. Our wreath at church has four fat blue candles with a larger white Christ candle in the center. The beautiful sanctuary Bible, a gift from a parish family, is open to an illustration with rich shades of blue and red. The courtyard, the pergola/coffee area and the sanctuary (pictured below, courtesy of Don Johnson’s MCC blog) all look stunning. The sanctuary, with fresh greens of all kinds hanging from every sconce and decorating every flat surface, looks particularly festive. There are white lights on the 3 trees (just like the three bears, we have one large, one medium, one small) and lovely clear glass icicles hang from every branch. The tallest tree has a softly colored gold star atop and here and there, sheer gold ribbons shimmer. It looks truly lovely, and as we move into the last two weeks of Advent, a few more decorative items will be added to the space, helping us to picture what it means to wait. For waiting is our theme for this Advent season. Waiting for God to visit our world, to visit us, to help us, to save us from ourselves.

Although the new film, The Nativity, has a bit more Francis of Assisi and Hallmark going for it than actual gospel narrative, it does get some things really right. Like the tyranny of the Roman government, the paranoid lunacy of Herod and his son and the relative squalor into which the Savior was born. The clothes (and the feet) of these people got dirty and stayed dirty. The implements for daily living and comfort were basic and minimal. Travel was arduous and exhausting. Living spaces were crowded for most people, with privacy an unheard of luxury. Makes our back room look positively opulent, even with its piles of stuff.

Stuff we’ve got a lot of, just not much space to spread it out in these days. We’re giving away lots of furniture and we’ve weeded out many unused items, with more of that weeding still to come, I’m sure. And yet, we have so much. Jesus and his parents had so little. How remarkable that God would choose to come to us in such a way. Born to a captive people in a forgotten hill town, sent a-wandering to preserve his young life, given parents who were faithful but genuinely puzzled about all that happened to them. It still amazes me, even when I’m feeling those ‘Advent blues,’ I still give thanks for the season and for our remarkable Savior, whose coming remains a mystery and a wonder.

Waiting for the phone to ring,
the note to come,
the tears to start.

Waiting for the sun to rise,
the day to begin,
the smile to flash.

Waiting for the rain to come,
for clouds’ release,
for seeds to burst.

Waiting for the baby’s kick,
the toddler’s step
the ‘tweener’s lope.

Waiting for the first dance,
the sweet surprise,
the magic touch.

Waiting for the teacher’s nod,
the boss’s applause,
the bonus check.

Waiting for travel days,
for new horizons,
for old favorites.

Waiting for cars to budge,
for traffic to flow,
for life to break through.

Waiting for doctors’ news,
for treatment woes
for future hopes.

Waiting for death to come,
for pain’s release,
tired eyes to close.

We wait, we wait, we wait.
And all the while, we truly wait for…
hope…
peace…
joy…
love…
Jesus.

Even when we don’t know it,
Even when we don’t want to know it,
Even when we refuse to know it.

We wait for Jesus.

Yesterday I had lunch near the pier in Goleta. It was one of those incandescent days – bright blue skies, strong fall sunlight. After my lunch partner returned to work, I stayed by the beach for a while. I read from an Advent devotional, sent a few brief prayers/sighs heavenward and just sat there, drinking in the view. For the birds had come out to play, you see, and that view was pretty remarkable.
There were several groups of pelicans, divebombing for a late lunch, and I was dumbfounded with admiration. Pelicans are large, rather ungainly looking birds when sitting on the pier – huge beaks, large webbed feet and a wingspan wider than many human beings are tall. If those wings are even partially open while they try to walk, they begin to list like a sinking ship. They make no sounds at all – I guess that huge fishing beak leaves no room for a voice box – but boy, whenever they’re in the air – the show is on!
They can soar without moving a muscle for what seems like miles at a time. Or they can skim, just inches above the water, looking for their next meal. They can land on or take off from the water in the blink of an eye, making the swirling waves look like solid ground.

When the day is beautiful – as yesterday surely was – they can climb about 30 feet above the waves and scout out a tasty morsel in the clear waters below, then make a stomach-dropping plummet, quickly bouncing buoyantly to the surface with a beakful. It is wonderful to watch.

I have long been fascinated with these strange, shoreline creatures, probably because there is something ancient, almost primeval about them. Our California brown pelicans look like a strange mixture of leftover parts from God’s design lab – part dinosaur, part sea bird. Surely such a creature could not be eloquent, graceful, even beautiful. And yet they are.

Proving once again that noise is not required for beauty to shine. In fact, pelicans are a reminder to me that silence has a unique beauty all its own. Pelicans can soar and skim and dive. They can do exactly what they’re designed to do and they can do it really, really well.

How lovely it would be if God’s human creatures could do what they are designed to do – to worship God with whole and holy hearts, to live in soulful companionship with one another, to work for the joy of it, and to cease from work regularly so that quiet can provide the ballast that is needed to keep the ship afloat.
Help us, O Lord, as we move into the Sabbath tomorrow and as we gather at your table, to become – just for a minute or two – who we really are. And to be who we really are… really, really well.

I had an interesting conversation with my boss yesterday. Please bear in mind that this is a man whom I like immensely, whose talents I admire, whose company I appreciate and whose presence here is a gift to us all. We were in the car (where lots of good conversations with all kinds of people tend to take place), driving back from a pastoral care afternoon. We’re currently in hot-and-heavy-search mode for a full-time Pastor for Student Ministries position and he is in the thick of it, searching for someone with experience who can jump into one of the most important roles on our staff. Somewhere in there, he talked about what’s required for ministry, most especially full-time ministry. “I tell everyone who applies that they’ve got to think in terms of 50 hours a week -minimum. There’s just no way you can come into a ministry position thinking you’re going to work 40 hours a week, unless you’re a slacker.” And that got me to thinking about this whole part-time ministry gig I’ve been engaged in the last 13 years. Is there space for that kind of work, is it legitimate, does it make sense?

This is an issue that I have always struggled with, especially as a woman in ministry, especially as a mid-life woman in ministry, who began her ‘career’ after already occupying a pretty full-time position for 25 years – wife/mom/community worker. I have always wondered why it is that ministry requires more hours of labor per week than any other job out there (well, at least most jobs out there). The one for which I was not paid required about 168 hours a week, in other words, 24/7. I never imagined, when I answered God’s call to enter ministry at the age of 49, that I would have to ADD another 50 to that. In fact, it was pretty clear to me that I simply could not do that and live. I know others who have successfully managed that transition, who pour themselves into a 50, 60, 70 hour ministry week, carefully parcel out small amounts of time and energy for family and friends and do so without looking back, but that is not who I am, nor even, to be perfectly honest, who I desire to be.

Trying to take a Chrismas photo this year, with all seven of our grandkids. This shot sort of captures the core of my life – where my primary commitments lie. It is out of this particular core that I do ministry, which makes my life and my call somewhat unique, I think. God called me to family first and pastoring second, and that is the ‘order’ in which I have tried, often unsuccessfully!, to keep things. Unfortunately, there is no model, no template for this kind of life and I have had to make it up as I go along. And it is a mysterious idea to most men, I think, whose ability to segment their lives is truly remarkable to me. I am eternally grateful to my family for their patience with me through this long process.

So when I went into this profession, it was with the self-awareness that full-time commitment was not in the cards. But how do I explain that to others when I’m not sure I can fully explain it to myself?

Here’s a stab at it, I guess. It has to do with the way I’m wired and with the way I was raised, and with the way my basic understandings about life and how it works were hard-wired into my brain during the era in which I grew up. It also has a lot to do with my understanding of God’s call to me – as a woman, as a wife/mom/grandmom/daughter/daughter-in-law/sister – and as a pastor. And that particular call looks, in many ways, quite different from God’s call to almost anyone else I know.

This is my ‘other’ life, one which has brought deep joy to me and which has required the building of a new identity, that of pastor and professional. For whatever reason, God has given me gifts of preaching/ teaching/caring and God has asked me to use those gifts in service of the church. Figuring out how to do that well has been challenging. It took some convincing to find a job that would be limited to 30 hours a week (called 3/5 time in our profession – and, of course, it seldom was only 30 hours a week.) But I found two – one unpaid at Pasadena Covenant for 3 years, and one here at Montecito, paid – with a pension, no less – for the last 10 years). At the age of 61, after 2 fairly strenuous years of full-time leadership (which proved my initial thesis absolutely right – that I am not cut out for full-time, full-bore leadership responsibilities), I asked for and received a reduction in my hours to 20 per week, a number which has been particularly conducive to sanity for me, accessibility for my family and presence enough for my congregation, especially as our new senior pastor has come to take his rightful place as the person of primary authority and spiritual leadership.

I was born in 1945 and grew up in the 40’s and 50’s. My parents were solid, middle American church-going, Jesus-following Christians – my dad a college prof, my mom a homemaker. My mom instilled in me the ‘ideal’ of meeting a Christian man, getting married, producing children and repeating her life, with her devotion to her husband and children, parents and siblings. My mom was (and is) beautiful, fun, smart and talented, though she seldom believed any of that to be true. She and my dad deeply desired that I get a college education – but that was truly secondary in their minds to my getting married. Which I promptly did, midway through my senior year at UCLA – a decision I have never seriously regretted and for which I am truly grateful as I look at the long arc of our life together.

For a long time, I lived a life very similar to my mom’s and my husband’s mom’s lives. Although, I have to say, I never felt particularly good at it. I learned a lot in those early years and because I have an innate love of learning, it was fun to figure out how to prepare meals, how to be pregnant, how to care for infants and toddlers. But at the same time, I found much of my life to be exhausting and quite lonely. My children were born in 1968, 1969 and 1972 (when I was 23, 24 and 27) and those were the years when every single woman’s magazine had articles about ‘wasting your education’ as a full-time homemaker. My work was valued very little in the culture I lived in and that caused a certain amount of cognitive dissonance in my spirit and in my life. I could do no other – my family of origin had deeply imprinted on me the proper ordering of life, at least as they understood it at that time – and I knew myself well enough to know that I couldn’t leave my babies for someone else to raise. The idea of my husband fully sharing in child-raising responsibilities simply never entered either one of our heads. It was a very different time.

So, I planned birthday parties, became room mother, did the Brownie thing with my daughters and the Little League thing with my son. I went to Bible studies and even began a program for younger moms once my own kids were in school, which I planned and led for five years. Maybe that should have been a clue…

During those years, I got into deep discussions with trusted friends and relatives about the role of women in the church. Coming from a background where I made sure the word ‘obey’ was in my wedding vows, where women taught children only, where the idea of a woman in the pulpit or even serving communion was unheard of, it is still somewhat surprising to me that I began to entertain the idea that perhaps God’s design was not as I had been taught.

I remember going to a woman’s Bible study, led by a very competent woman teacher, where that teacher sat down from her teaching when a male custodian briefly entered the room. I found that absurd and terribly sad. So I went to a women-in-ministry conference sponsored by Fuller Seminary in the mid-1970’s and began to do some reading and thinking and praying about the whole issue. I landed somewhere in the middle, which is a space I should be very familiar with as it seems to describe so much of my life! I couldn’t fully endorse the full-on feminist agenda at that time, but I also could no longer live comfortably within the confines my early training had placed around me.

It took me five years to work up the courage to apply for seminary. Five years after the first persons came to me, gently suggesting that God might have something new and different in store for my life. I heard this from students in a Bible study I was teaching at the time and I heard this from both of my pastors. But I worried about the impact of that amount of change on my marriage. I worried about what my parents and my parents-in-law would think. I wondered how it might impact my children. And I was terrified that I might fail.

With the encouragement of some women friends who had been balancing work and family for a long time, I did apply, when my youngest child was a senior in high school. I was accepted and I began a 4 year adventure that took me to all sorts of interesting places, ultimately leading me into pastoral ministry in the local church. I did a lot of work to get there – not only academic work, but deeply searching personal work as well. Moving out into the professional world, most especially into the professional pastoral world, went against everything I had lived and believed for a very long time. It took time for God to work through my resistances and my fears, it took time for me to jump through the hoops required to become officially ordained, it took time for my husband and me to arrive at a relationship that was comfortably egalitarian, with space for me to pursue some personal dreams.

So…now it’s 13 years later, I’m nearing 62 and my husband is about to retire. And I am struggling once again. Do I take off this hard-won pastoral hat and put it aside forever? That’s what the choice feels like about now. While to me, working at a 20 hour per week pace feels comfortable, doable, satisfying and obedient, to others I think it may look like dabbling. Is there any room at the table for someone with my particular skill set and my unique sense of call? I’m not sure. We’re tossing around ideas about how to do this – once again, the territory is uncharted – and there are no clear answers yet. Any creative suggestions are most welcome!

I am blessed to live on the south central coast of California, an area of spectacular beauty, with almost immediate access to the wilder, untamed parts of God’s creation. The ocean is south of us (which is almost always confusing to everyone!), the mountains are north (sort of), and a five minute drive in either direction can have you rhapsodizing about the power of the sea or the quiet beauty of a hillside path.

One thing we do not have, however, is a readily seen delineation between the seasons of the year. No snow (well, occasionally a bit of powdered sugar on the tops of the mountains), fewer and less dramatically colored leaves than many places in the more northern or eastern parts of our country, no extended period of dormancy from which spring elicits a sudden and startling awakening.

But if you live here long enough, you do begin to see the subtle differences that exist in our climate as the earth makes its way around the sun throughout the year. There are indeed colored leaves. They are beautiful and various. My yard is graced by a gingko tree, one of the longest-lived plant species on the planet, which gives us a spectacular show every year as its fan-shaped leaves morph from bright, lime green to a brilliant yellow-gold. Then our yard is literally showered with these beauties as they almost all drop off about two weeks before Christmas each year. There are some maple varieties that change color, lovely small eastern redbud trees whose dark red leaves do a reverse turn in the fall, fading to a soft rust, and the ubiquitous liquid amber, with its spiky pods and multi-colored leaves. True, there are no large piles of fallen leaves in most yards, but there are lovely varieties in color to be seen. Trouble is, there are so many evergreen varieties that it is sometimes hard to spot those colors amidst all that green.
Perhaps the most significant change to be noted as the calendar changes from summer to fall is in the angle of the light as it falls on the earth. The misty, sometimes dreary days of summer foggishness give way to a clarity of air and sky that almost hurts the eye. The blues are deep, the clouds are large and lovely, the air begins to have just a little nip to it, especially as the afternoon shadows lengthen.
The view from the top of Highway 154 in October was enough to suck the breath right out of your chest. And the vineyards in the adjacent valley were gloriously green and purple, loaded with large clusters of dark, ripe grapes. That’s a sure sign of fall in these parts, as the grape harvest gets into full swing.
And of course, there are all those fall-blooming flowers in every garden and grocery store across the town. Chrysanthemums galore, hydrangeas, late-blooming roses, amaryllis, camellias. Beauty nestling in every crevice, it sometimes seems.

Yes, the changes are subtle. But they are nonetheless real and quite beautiful to the discerning eye. I, for one, wouldn’t trade it for unending days of snow, sleet, and sludge. Although I do think the whole idea of ‘snow days’ is a grand one, and something we don’t have here in California. Sometimes that works against us, I think, creating a sort of drivenness to always be doing, doing something…because the weather is just so great. Sort of works against developing a true appreciation of Sabbath sometimes. Still, I’ll take the climate any day and try to be creative about re-thinking that Sabbath idea!

H ere’s to the bounty of the earth,
A nd to the eating that is nigh.
P ray, let us merrily increase our girth,
P iling our plates with mountains high of
Y ams, potatoes, turkey and pie.

T ake yourself a second slice,
H ave another piece of cake.
A nything goes, there is no price, for
N one of it will widen your waist.
K eeping tradition is surely nice,
S ince everyone knows this is the day that’s
G iven completely to the notion,
(I nvented by a cook, so they say) when
V acation mindset gets in motion,
I nviting all to come and play.
N ow pile those plates up, everyone,
G rab the kids and have some fun!

‘Twould be nice if it were so, but, alas, we all surely know…it ain’t! Nice to dream, though.

Hope your holiday is filled with family, friends, fun and food. And that somewhere in there, you find your heart filled with gratitude for the blessings that are yours.