Robed

I am thankful for albs. I'm even more thankful for cinctures (the rope that goes around) because it is just a fun word to say.

White robes are helpful in so many ways. I had trouble sleeping the night before my first Sunday back. Our identities have so many layers and nobody has called me pastor for three months. I almost forgot what that means. I'm certainly not the most well-behaved person or the most confident in my faith, but somehow God and the church have called me to live out the good news in word and deed. This happens in worship through proclamation and presiding at communion, but that also sets the rhythm for all of life.

So I'm thinking about what it means to live out the good news and hold that as the core of my identity. That's not easy for me. The lists have already started. Organizing and being at the center of community activities are already on those lists. It feels good to be needed and that's what I have to keep in check.

I don't want to stop doing things that I love, but I do need to avoid finding my worth in completing long lists. I lived in abundant love, laughter, and beauty during sabbatical. Those all seem essential to the good news. We also stumbled through some moments of forgiveness, honesty, and pain, which also seem essential to living in good news. Great tables were laid with an abundance of food and variety of people.

There was one moment at the DimSum restaurant with our Chinese friends who owned our apartment and some of their Australian friends where they asked me lots of questions about what it meant to be a pastor. It was a pretty foreign concept to them all, but I talked about how I accompany folks and look for grace and love in the midst of their lives. At the end of our meal, they asked me to do a blessing. In the midst of chicken feet and donuts, I gave thanks for a feast with friends and God's presence among us. It felt kind of lame, but how profound can you get when the Chinese ladies are getting a little anxious to clean your table?

I don't know what that has to do with anything, except it was one of those many awkward pastor moments where I felt inadequate and slightly pathetic.

I fail at living in good news or always being a good pastor (whatever that means), but I rock at putting on my new and truly white robe. I get to put that on every Sunday symbolically for all of us. Robed in white, washed, made new. Like the freshly fallen snow makes everything look so clean and new, I get to act out the good news of what God has done not what I'm doing.