Do you remember as a child how you dressed to take trips?

(You can either begin your sermon with an interactive time at this point, inviting the congregation to remember how they were dressed for trips, or you can make it personal and tell your own recollections of what kind of clothes your parents made you wear when it was time to travel.)

As a child I remember having to get dressed up whenever we'd go on a family trip. If we were going in our own car, we could be more casual, but still had to look good enough to go into a restaurant for a meal, or to appear to check in at some overnight establishment (even though these were always cheap, family-friendly motels).

If a bus trip was involved we had to look even nicer, since we'd be traveling with all sorts of other people. Besides, since it cost money to ride the bus we were supposed to see the long, hot trip as some sort of special occasion. The first time I rode in an airplane, it was definitely a formal affair. For my parents, the pricier the trip, the more formal the attire.

Last month, the ranks of the newly-trained and assigned sky marshals filed a complaint with their commanding offers about their dress code requirements. U.S. sky marshals claimed that the type of clothing they were required to wear made it difficult to do their jobs on two levels.

First, the required slacks, jacket, shirt, tie, and dress shoes were accused of restricting their abilities to move around quickly and freely. How, for instance, was a sky-marshal supposed to leap forward and tackle some troublemaker if his slipper-soled wing-tips slid on the carpeting, or if his jacket caught on the head-rest of some passenger's seat?

Secondly, and just as much a security issue, the sky marshals pointed out that they could hardly be thought of as undercover when they consistently found themselves the only ones on their flights not wearing jeans and sneakers. With their dress shirts, suits and ties, and especially those dead-give-away hard-soled shoes, the sky marshals felt like they were wearing a neon sign: "Marshal Here."

Although casual Fridays are less popular than they were a few years ago, there's no doubt that we now live in a dressed-down world. The days of dressing up to travel are long gone. Comfort and adaptability (and maybe stain resistance and wrinkle resistance) are the only requirements for travel clothing.

Who cares what you look like? Wear long pants with big zippers around the knees that you can zip-off into shorts if the weather heats up; Wear bright, puffy sneakers with everything to keep your feet well supported and slip-free; Wear T-shirts with expensive logos on them to every occasion; Wear multiple layers of the baggiest clothing possible; Spray all your clothing with sticky, water repellent finishes and bug-proofing aerosols; Above all, males never wear a tie; females never wear a dress. Besides just being comfy, this new causal attitude while traveling actually reveals how much we want to be prepared for any possible circumstance. Fashion (or lack thereof) nonchalance belies a constant fretting over how ready we are for anything unexpected on our journeys. With our cell-phones, water-bottles, sun-screen, personal GPS units, iPods, laptops, and microwaveable, lavender-scented travel pillows, we're prepared for anything, anywhere, anytime.

Or so we'd like to think.

But what happens when the plane for your winter sun-vacation gets snowed in at New York and you have to spend two days in JFK airport in shorts and a beer belly swaying the palm trees of a Hawaiian shirt?

What happens when half-way through the trip your child develops a frightening high fever?

What happens when one of those dreaded phone calls catches you just as you reach your destination and you must immediately turn around and go back?

We can never know what it is we have to be ready for. The unexpected is by definition unexpected. In today's gospel text Jesus tries to demonstrate just how unexpected the presence of God-in-our-midst will be and how always surprising, even shocking, the divine's actions can be in our lives.

At first Jesus likens our waiting-for God, waiting-for-the-Son, with that of a household of servants waiting up for their master's arrival home. The watchful, faithful servants are awake and alert, prepared to jump up and open the door the moment the master crosses the threshold.

But no matter how prepared these servants may have thought themselves they may have the master's night clothes laid out, a favorite wine ready to pour, a late-night snack ready to be served there's no way these watchful domestics could have been prepared for what Jesus next suggests.

Once the master arrives home, when he's greeted promptly by his household servants, this master suddenly takes on the role of servant to the servants. His unknown arrival time pales in significance to this unexpected, unbelievable behavior.

In the first century world of strict hierarchies and class stratifications to have the master of the household sit his servants down in fact, recline them at table while he offers them his service was an absurd notion. Put in today's standards, it would be like offering your vacuum cleaner a steak dinner, or putting your washing machine in a bubble bath. Ridiculous.

Yet this is exactly how Jesus would have us think. How absolutely strange, unexpected, beyond-our-imagining the presence of the Son in our midst will be. With such an unpredictable, seemingly unrecognizable master, how can we ever possibly be ready, be prepared, for the wholly unexpected?

Faithful, watchful servants need to have three rather casual qualities.

We need to be sun-burned or more accurately, Son-burned.

We need to be wind-blown.

We need to be earth-stained.

Son-burned: As aging baby-boomers watch in horror as their once youthful, tanned skin inevitably wrinkles, spots and sags, they reach for thick SPF 4O sunscreens, hide in the shade, and sport big hats. Porcelain skin is in.

But skin-safety is different than the faithful servant who willingly sports a Son-burn. We're son-burned because we actively face towards the Son toward the gospel, towards the cross, towards the resurrection, towards the Eastern sky, the rising sun, and the return of Christ. We're Son-burned because we refuse to hide in the quiet, cool, safe, shady places. Instead we expose ourselves, our minds, and hearts, and souls, to open scrutiny, open criticism, open conflict, with the shady standards of the world.

Every living thing grows towards the sun.

In our natural state, we can't look directly at the sun without going blind. In our spiritual state, if we don't look directly at the Son we go blind. Even though we see through a glass dimly, and only know in part, are we staring at the Son? Or are we staring at moons of reflected glory like success, riches, and fame that end up being only moonshine?

I know someone (my friend Landrum Leavell III) who signs-off his letters and e-mail with this adios: "Keep the Son In Your Eyes."

Do you always, everywhere, in every season, Keep the Son in your eyes?

Wind-blown: Faithful servants of the Son are never perfectly coiffed, never freeze-dried into rigidity. Although the master hasn't yet returned home, the Holy Spirit, the companion whom Jesus promised to send to all his disciples, blew into town long ago, ruffling feathers and tossing aside our pre-conceived, hair-sprayed notions of our limitations and inabilities. The still terrified, tongue-tied disciples were suddenly transformed into bold, articulate witnesses when wind-blown by the Spirit.

To be a prepared servant today means we too must be willing to sport the wind-blown look for our master's sake. Unexpected bursts of the Spirit may suddenly blow us off the course we thought was ours to hold and sail. In fact, John's gospel says that the wind blows where it will, and you can't tell from whence it comes and where it goes: so is everyone who is born of the Spirit. In other words, if you're born of the Spirit, you're unpredictable. You're wind-blown.

Christians don't go with the flow. But Christians do go with the blow when the breezes blast forth from the wind of God's Spirit.

Earth-stained: To this Son-burned, wind-blown, generally mussed up looking presence we must be willing to add one more component a little dirt.

Grubby knees, greasy hands, grungy fingernails. I'm a wannabe gardener, but some people are born with green thumbs; others of us are born with gangrene thumbs. I'm part of the latter. My wife is part of the former. I had always thought that having a green thumb was just an expression. But I discovered that it's literally true. After hours spent dead-heading various flowers, I noticed that her right thumb-nail had a definite greenish-stained hue to it that wouldn't go away, even after repeated washings. Her thumb was green from hundreds of pinched off stems that had given her a classic green-thumb.

Likewise, watchful servants of the Son have a similar work-worn, earthy appearance. When we aren't down-in-the trenches (teaching the children, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, working for just peace amidst violence and hatred), we must be down on our knees.

Steven A. Ballmer is the CEO of Microsoft Corporation. He's Bill Gates' hand-picked successor. Earlier this year he was seen crawling on the floor of the General Motors' executive conference room, trying to fix a connection that would enable him to make a pitch to GM engineers. The image of the Microsoft CEO on his hands and knees to please some customers made such an impression on the author that he wrote a whole article based on this one incident. (Steve Hamm, "Why High Tech Has to Stay Humble," Business Week, 19 January 2004, 76.)

Corporate executives will get on their hands and knees to show customers how much they care. Will Christians get on our hands and knees to show people how much God cares?

At the Transfiguration, when Jesus took Peter and James and John up on the holy mountain, there was Moses and Elijah with him. Moses and Elijah were representatives of the law and the prophets.

Or so they would have been understood by the witnesses of the transfiguration. Moses the law-giver standing for the God who speaks through tradition, through order, through established ways. Elijah the prophet standing for the God of surprises, who speaks through the outside, with freshness and unpredictability. And here they are, both of them, law and prophet, establishment and outsider, both affirming Jesus. (Michael Perham, Signs of Your Kingdom [SPCK, 2002], 51.)

We'd rather have Moses standing next to us than Elijah. But this morning's gospel lesson reminds us that God is a God of surprises, a God of the unexpected, a God who does things that are outside the box, outside what our little two-pound box of brains can comprehend or predict.

Are you ready to walk that path? Only if you're . . . what? Son-burned, wind-blown, earth-stained. I pray for you this summer week seven days of being Son-burned, wind-blown, and earth-stained.