He Never Once Laughed

Forty-one years he was in that chapel and there is not one person left alive who saw him laugh.

I do not mean he was miserable. He was not. He was courteous, he was steady, he was the first man there in a hard winter and the last man to leave a funeral, and there were three families in that valley who would not have got through the seventies without him.

He was, by common consent and without anybody ever putting it to a vote, the holiest man any of you knew.

And he did not laugh.

Not at the harvest supper. Not when the marquee went over in eighty-four and everybody else was on the ground. Not when a child said the thing at the front that people in that valley still repeat.

He would do a small movement with his mouth and then he would look away.

You were about nine when you noticed it and you did not think anything about it at the time. You are sixty-two now and you have thought about it a great deal in the last year, since your own grandson said something to you in a kitchen that you have not been able to put down.

He said: you go all serious when we talk about God.

The complaint against Jesus was that He was at the table

There is a sentence the religious people of His own day used about Him, and it was meant as an accusation and the church has been quoting it ever since as a summary of the gospel.

And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.Luke 15:2

This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.

Think about what that means about how He spent His evenings. That accusation only makes sense if He was at those tables often enough for it to be a pattern, and it only lands if He was welcome there, and a man is not repeatedly invited back to a table where the company is not glad to have him.

He was good company. There is no way round that. The holiest man who has ever walked on this earth was somebody a room was pleased to see arrive.

So take this now, at sixty-two. You were handed a shape and the shape was not the thing. The written word records that the standing complaint against the Lord Himself was that He was too much at the table, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put that accusation on the page and let it stand as a description.

He was not wrong. He was one man.

Now I want to be careful with him, because he carried three families through the seventies and I am not going to have a page under my name that puts a man like that on trial after he is gone.

He was not a hypocrite and he was not cold. He turned out in the snow. That is a warmer thing than most people ever do.

What he was, I suspect, was a man who had been taught, in a particular chapel in a particular decade, that lightness was the beginning of a slope, and he took it seriously because he took everything seriously, and it cost him something he never got back.

I would guess he was funny at about nineteen and put it down on purpose, and that he could not have told you afterwards when.

That is a sadness and it is not a sin, and it certainly is not a doctrine.

But here is what happened next, and this is what you have to deal with rather than him. A boy of nine watched him for years, and never once heard anybody say out loud that the not-laughing was a personal thing rather than the shape of the thing, and so it went in as the shape.

Fifty-three years, and a grandson in a kitchen.

You are not being called into that manner. His word has the Lord at the table so often it became an accusation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who reproduces His likeness, and not one line anywhere makes gravity the evidence.

What the founding room was actually like

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a hall near the middle of Los Angeles and would not let anybody rent a seat, and the doctrine that hall was built to preach was holiness.

Now read what the room was like, because I think it will surprise you.

It was loud. There were suppers. There was singing that went on and on, and people who had come in off the street sat down and ate with people who would not have eaten with them anywhere else in that city. The written accounts of that hall are full of the word joy, and it is not a decoration in them, it is a description of the atmosphere.

That is what this word looked like where it started. Not solemn. Not careful. A plain room where the food went round and nobody was too holy to be at the table.

Whatever came later in some quarters, and something did, the original had a supper in it.

The written word has the Lord's own reputation built on where He ate, and the Holy Spirit is the one who fills a room, and the shape you were handed at nine came out of one man and one decade.