music: Modest Mouse – Float On
Today on “A View from the Pew”, we examine the curious case of:
Dressing Your Best For Christ!
I grew up at a church called First Church of the Open Bible, on the corner of Beaver and Hickman streets in Des Moines. Sunday mornings were always a flurry of activity. This was not just a day – this was Sunday! The Lord’s Day, the day we pulled out clothes specially reserved for the weekend. And shoes…shoes that were so stiff and shiny you could use them as a mirror to tie your tie in. The girls would spend absurd amounts of time in the bathroom Sunday mornings. Sometimes Hope would get her hair curled the night before.
What was weird about the whole “getting dressed up” thing only applied at certain times. For instance, the dress code times looked something like this:
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Sunday morning: All out. Dress shoes, belt, sometimes a tie, all neatly pressed and ironed before you were allowed to wear them. No shorts.1
Sunday night2: Slight wrinkling of the clothing allowed. Usually we wore the same outfit, sometimes the slightly more casual button-down shirt was allowed.
Wednesday night: Only slightly dressed up. Shorts allowed in warm weather.
Ask any church-goer in a traditional church why this is and 99% of the time, you’ll get the same answer: “You should dress your best for God.” Really? I can’t help imagining a scenario when Jesus would have a problem with the way someone was dressed. As a kid I’d imagine Jesus’s reaction to meeting people who weren’t in their Sunday Best.
“Hey, ya’ll, it’s me, the Lamb of Hosts. I’m just checkin’ up on…oh. Oh dear. Oh my. Jerry, what were you thinking with that pair of shoes? All scuffed and dirty. Tim, how could you wear jeans into My House this morning? Don’t you know this is a holy place? Morgan, is that…is that a clip on tie? Oh Father, forgive them…they know not what they do!”
Isaiah 64:5 says that all of our righteous acts are filthy rags. And that’s the result of humans trying really really hard to be good people. Do we somehow believe that the wearing of nice clothes somehow makes it look like we’re trying even harder to be righteous?
So today’s question is: how was your church clothing changed over the years, or has it not changed? Have you gotten more or less formal?
Exit, stage left.
Sparks
1: So that “men would not being showing off their hairy legs” the pastor told me once when I was around eight years old.
2: Yes, folks. We went both Sunday mornings and Sunday nights, almost every week, for thirteen years. I HATED it.