The Costumes Were Already Hemmed

Dress rehearsal is at ten, and by ten past ten the fellowship hall sounds like a bus station.

Dana is on a folding chair against the radiator with her coat still on, watching her son. Owen is eight. Owen is the innkeeper. Owen has one line, and the line is there is no room, and in three rehearsals he has said it once correctly, once to the ceiling, and once in a voice he apparently invented for the occasion.

He has also dropped the lantern twice. It is a plastic lantern. It still makes a noise.

Dana is doing the thing she does, which is running Sunday morning in her head in advance, checking it for the exact moment where it goes wrong so she can be ready for it and not be surprised in front of everybody. She is not a pessimist. She would say she is realistic. She would say somebody in this family has to be.

Then Ruthie, who is somewhere past seventy and runs this every year, wheels the costume rack out from the storage closet and parks it under the window.

Thirty costumes. Every one on its own hanger with masking tape on the crossbar and a name in ballpoint. Shepherds, angels, three kings, a donkey with an actual saddle blanket, two innkeepers because last year one got the flu.

And they fit. That is the thing Dana cannot stop looking at. They come off the rack and go over heads and they fit, because Ruthie measured every child in October, wrote it in a notebook, and spent the fall taking hems up and letting hems down at her kitchen table with the radio on.

She did that before a single rehearsal. Before anybody knew who could say a line and who was going to drop a lantern.

Owen's is fourth from the end. Brown, with a rope belt. Somebody shortened the sleeves for him in November.

That is your ache too.

You have a list. Everybody who has ever stood at the edge of a church has one, and yours has a top item on it: the thing about you that you have decided has to be dealt with before you could really be part of this. You do not talk about it much. You have been working on it, on and off, for a long time, and the working on it has quietly become the reason you have not walked in.

You are inside a company that is being made ready by somebody else's hands, and the work on it started before you knew there was a rack. Scripture says God is the One able to keep and to present, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that work in ordinary people rather than the people doing it to themselves.

Look at whose hands the verbs are in

Jude ends his short letter with one sentence that has been read over congregations at the door for centuries, and almost nobody stops to notice who is doing the work in it.

Now to Him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you blameless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy.Jude 24

Able to keep. Able to present. Both verbs belong to God. Not one of them is assigned to the reader.

And the you is plural. Jude is not writing to one anxious person about their private progress. He is writing to a whole company of believers under real pressure, and the keeping and the presenting are things done to that company, together.

You are being kept by hands that are not yours, and the keeping is already in progress. That is written plainly in Jude, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that keeping from the inside rather than standing over anybody with a notebook.

Now say the corporate part out loud with me, because this is where the whole thing gets shrunk. When Scripture calls the church the bride of Christ, it is describing a whole people at once. A body, a household, a nation of ordinary people. It is not a private romance between Christ and a reader, and it was never offered as one. The readiness in that picture is granted to the company, and you are inside the company, which is why the preparing was never yours to project manage.

There is no checklist, and I am not going to write you one

I want to be careful here, because this is the exact place where a person gets handed a new list and calls it good news.

Jude does not say God is able to help you get yourself ready. He says God is able to present you. The presenting is His. If I gave you five steps to readiness right now, I would be taking a verb out of God's hands and putting it in yours, and you would be back at the radiator running Sunday morning in your head.

You are not the one responsible for getting the church ready, and that has never once been your job. Scripture puts the keeping and the presenting on Him, both times, and the Holy Spirit is the one working it out in a whole people, which means your progress is not the hinge anything swings on.

And notice the last three words of the verse. With exceeding joy. The presenting is not a grim inspection. Whatever else you have imagined about how God looks at the church, Scripture puts gladness in the room at that moment, and the gladness is His.

Look back at the hall. Ruthie did not measure the children by how well they had done last year. She measured them by how tall they were in October. That is the only information the notebook contained.

What the sleeves prove

Owen's sleeves were shortened in November.

Sit with that a second, because it is the whole thing. In November, nobody knew he would drop the lantern. Nobody knew he would do the voice. The hem was taken up on the basis of a boy's arm, not a boy's performance, and it would have been taken up either way.

That is what the word grace is doing in your Bible. Not a nicer verdict. An earlier one.

You were being prepared while you were still busy failing, and that is finished work and not an offer. His word says He who began a good work in you is the one who completes it, and it is the Holy Spirit who is doing that completing right now in a company of very ordinary people.