THE REASON FOR PULPIT ROBES [Sun, 1-11-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—THE REASON FOR PULPIT ROBES [Sun, 1-11-26]

 

It’s Sunday, and I’m not wearing either of my pulpit robes. Not the black one with the doctoral stripes. Not the white one, either. So, why do I still have them?

Recently I gave my clergy cap to a colleague, Pastor Teresa. It’s a black baseball cap with a white clerical collar tab just above the brim. Now everyone in the softball game at the church picnic will know who the preacher is. I enjoyed that cap but got to wear it only a few times, because I got it just as I retired. I’m glad Teresa has it. She’ll get a lot more good out of it than I ever could.

One of the problems of old people is that nobody wants our stuff. And there aren’t many people we can force it onto, especially if it’s niche stuff. You can require your children to take a few things, because they are family heirlooms. These days, though, adult children don’t want good china and silverware. They eat from take-out boxes. Not even The Salvation Army wants your classy stuff.

But what can you do with your pulpit robes if your kids aren’t clergy and the up-and-coming younger preachers are five-foot women instead of six-foot men? Giving away the black robe is even trickier, because it has doctoral stripes. Yes, a non-doctored clergy person could remove the stripes, but there would be blacker doctoral-stripe chevrons left on the sleeves.

When I started seminary, I was appointed to a church that was used to seeing its pastor on Sunday morning in a pulpit robe, but I didn’t have one.

I had been preaching in little churches for three years. People wore “good clothes” to church in those days in little churches—dresses and hats for women, suits and white shirts and ties for men. Yes, it was okay if a woman wore a “house” dress, or a man came in overalls, but those were rare. I had only one suit, that I had worn every Sunday for a long time, but that was okay; that was all I needed to look good enough for a little country church. But Cedar Lake expected a robe.

We could not afford to buy one, of course, so Helen made one. Plain black. Nothing fancy. I wore it for fifteen years, until I got that doctoral robe. Then Helen began to use my old robe for the preachers at the mock weddings in her high school “adult living” classes. One of their assignments was to plan a wedding so that they would learn how expensive those things can be.

That was the robe I was wearing when high-school friend Phyllis Graham grabbed my robe lapels after worship one morning, when I was a new campus minister and she was a new math professor, and said, “You don’t know it yet, but when you’re in that pulpit, you’re something special. People will believe what you say just because of the way you say it. So you make damn sure that what you say is true.”

I’ve always felt that those robes were reminders to me. When I was wearing one, I had to make damn sure that what I was saying was true. Nobody wants my robes. There are not many folks these days who want that reminder.

John Robert McFarland