The Wedding Dress

A friend of Sally’s and mine is living with bone cancer. She reports that she was watching a show about weddings on cable TV awhile back.
In this particular show, a woman was dumped by her fiancé just weeks before the wedding. She didn’t need the dress. She didn’t want the dress. But, she had spent $3,500 on the dress.
She returned to the store where, they informed her, they could not accept the return of the dress as it had been altered. They could accept it as a donation, however, in order to give the dress to someone.
Another bride-to-be had been shopping in the store with her mother, who was helping her communicate as she was deaf, but they had found nothing she could afford. One dress in particular had captured her attention. But, it too cost too much.
One day she received a call from the manager. She said that, if the young woman wanted to come down to the store, there was a surprise waiting for her.
When she arrived, there was a strapless dress with a Bolero top, very much like the one she had admired, clothing a mannequin. It had a bow tied around it.
“It’s for you,” the manager said. It was free. “Free?” the young woman replied. “Yes,” and the manager explained what had happened.
The bride-to-be was thrilled as, with a few minor alterations, the dress would be hers for her wedding day.
The Bible’s book of Revelation describes the Church as the Bride of Christ. “Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and said to me, ‘Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb’.” Revelation 21:9
We, too will one day be dressed with a garment we couldn’t afford, but which was given to us to make us ready. That outfit is Christ himself. (As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. Galatians 3:27)
As the baptismal robe that some use, or the robes work by those who lead worship, it reminds us that our salvation is a gift from outside of ourselves. It is what God sees when God looks at us. It’s for you, and it’s free.