Isaiah 61:10-62:3
I had the great blessing of going home to Kentucky this week to see my family and celebrate Christmas with them. As so many of us have done over the last week, we exchanged and opened gifts together. We all received beautiful flannel shirts from our grandmother, and many of us were so excited that we immediately put them on. Unfortunately, the shirt I got did not fit quite right. It was almost, but not quite, perfect. I tried to cover over it, taking it off quietly and hoping my grandmother hadn’t noticed. But of course, there’s no hiding anything from her, and she insisted we pull up the website on my phone and order a new one right away. In the meantime, I have a beautiful shirt that is wearable, but not a perfect fit.
My sister often has this problem because she is, as some of you who have met her might remember, impossibly small. She wears a 5.5 shoe, which no one ever believes, and it is not easy to find. She sometimes has better luck shopping in the children’s aisle of shoe stores, because there are just not that many 5.5 shoes out there. She was gifted a very nice pair of slippers that she is thrilled with, but they are inevitably just a little too large for her tiny feet. She can wear them, but they’re not a perfect fit.
My cousin’s kids opened their presents with us, and one little boy was very excited to unwrap several basketball jerseys with the names and numbers of his favorite players emblazoned on the back. His grandmother had him try on every one, bringing in duplicates from her car in various sizes to ensure his jerseys would leave him room to grow. They settled on the larger sizes, even as they hung off his shoulders, so that he could wear them longer. Wearable, but for a growing boy they will only be a perfect fit for a brief moment a few months from now, and in a year or so they will be handmedowns, ready to not-quite-fit his little brother.
It is rare to find clothing that fits perfectly, especially as more and more of our clothing has become mass produced since the mid-nineteenth century. It turns out that human bodies do not fit neatly into the arbitrary sizes the textile industry assigns, and our systems of making clothing are so inconsistent that it is possible to buy two identical items labeled as the exact same size from the exact same store and have only one of them fit. Clothing purchased off the rack can be tailored to our bodies, but even then it is often only a perfect fit for a short time. Our bodies change, and that does not stop when we stop getting taller. Even something that fits perfectly at the beginning of the day may become too tight or too loose as the day wears on, some fabrics may itch and seams may irritate our skin, our shoes may cause blisters or our socks may fall down. The things we clothe ourselves with are necessities, but they are never a perfect fit.
Did you know that among so many other things, our God is a seamstress? It’s true. In Genesis, after Adam and Eve eat of the tree and realize that they are naked, they sewed together leaves from a fig tree to cover themselves. The clothing the first couple make for themselves covers them, but it isn’t a good fit, and it will fall apart quickly. It does the job in the moment, but it will not protect them from the elements. So God makes garments of animal skin for these precious humans of his, to protect their fragile skin from the sun and the rain and the thorny places of the world. I like to imagine God fretting as she sews, stitching every worry and care for these beautiful, obstinate children of hers into the seams of clothing that will fit perfectly. From the earliest stories of our faith, the people of God have understood our creator as someone who clothes us, someone who does not ignore the needs of our mortal bodies.
When the prophet Isaiah wants to bring comfort to his people, he gives thanks for the seamstress work of God. I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God, he says, for God has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. The way that God clothes us is more enduring than fig leaves, of course, but here Isaiah is saying that they are even more than a simply protective layer over our skin. The clothing God offers to God’s people is sumptuous like a robe, beautiful like a wedding garland, precious and sparkling like jewels. Salvation, righteousness, these are the things that God weaves into clothing and drapes over our shoulders.
This is what God does, the promises of God fulfilled in Jesus. As Isaiah says, as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations. As natural as it is for plants to grow from the earth, so it is the nature of God to inspire righteousness and praise in humanity. As natural as it is for us to clothe ourselves, so it is the nature of God to wrap us in what we need most. Unlike the fig leaves, unlike the flannel shirts and the slippers and the basketball jerseys, unlike the systems we build to try to control ourselves and one another, the clothing that God makes for us will always be a perfect fit. We know because God has been in our shoes. Literally, Jesus had to learn to tie his shoes just like the rest of us. Jesus felt the bands of cloth around him, swaddling him in safety and helping him drift off to sleep. Jesus probably wore handmedowns from his cousins, and had clothes that didn’t sit perfectly on his shoulders, and I’m sure his mother chuckled to herself as she mended the holes in the tunics he ripped while playing with the other children in the neighborhood. The same God who sewed together skins for Adam and Eve before sending them off into the world was himself clothed by his mother before being sent off to proclaim the Gospel. There has never been a more perfect fit.
Mother A Writes 