One Of Our Faithful

He meant it warmly. I want to say that at the top, because you have been carrying this for five weeks and half of the weight is that you cannot work out whether you are allowed to mind.

There was a visitor. A man down from somewhere for a fortnight, standing with a cup, and the introduction went round the little circle the way it does.

This is Dr Whoever, who is heading up the thing at the university. This is Lena, who is doing extraordinary work with the young people. This is Marcus, who I am hoping we can persuade onto the board.

And then it came to you.

And he put a hand on your shoulder, which he does, and which is genuinely affectionate, and he said: and this is one of our faithful.

The visitor smiled. You smiled. The circle moved on to something else within four seconds and not one person in it thought anything at all.

You have thought about it every day since.

Because here is what you heard, and I do not think you were wrong to hear it. Everybody else in that circle was introduced by what they do and where they are going. You were introduced by how long you have been standing still.

It is a compliment about durability. It is the thing you say about a coat.

And you cannot object to it, ever, to anyone, because objecting to being called faithful makes you exactly the person the phrase quietly suspects you might be, and so it has been five weeks and you have said nothing to anybody and it has gone down into you and settled.

Name it before you lift it

I am not going to hurry you off this. That is the temptation with a small wound, because it is small, and because everybody involved was kind, and because there is no villain anywhere in the story.

But a small wound in a place you cannot reach is exactly the kind that goes septic, and you have been carrying this one for five weeks without being able to say a word about it, which is why it is still there. The written word has a description of you that predates the introduction, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can get to a place your own hands cannot.

So let it be named accurately, once, and then we will move.

A man was described, in front of a stranger, by a phrase that placed him as the furniture of a room rather than as a person going somewhere. It was said with affection. It was received with a smile. And it landed as a verdict, and it landed on a man who has been quietly wondering the same thing about himself for a while, which is the only reason a four second sentence has lasted five weeks.

Now here is what is written, and it was written before the introduction and before the room and before you.

Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.Psalm 139:16

Read what that says about the order of things. There is a book, and you were written into it, in continuance, before a single part of you existed.

You were described by God in a book before anybody in that hall got the chance. That is not a comfort somebody is offering you. It is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the author of the description, and no phrase said over a cup of tea gets to overwrite it.

The kind word and the true word

I want to hold two things here without dropping either.

The first is that the phrase was not a lie. You have been faithful, and the written word never treats endurance as scenery, and the Holy Spirit has been in every year of it. Eleven years. Through the split, through the two bad winters, through the year nobody wanted to run anything. That is not scenery, whatever the word did to you when it landed, and God has never once looked at endurance and thought furniture.

The second is that a true word can still be used to place a person, and being placed is a real thing, and pretending it is not will make you strange and quiet.

Both of those are true at once. And the way through is not to reject the word or to swallow it, but to put a bigger one underneath it.

You are written in His book, described by God in continuance, fashioned toward something. That is the word underneath. And the Holy Spirit has been fashioning you the whole eleven years, including through the split and the two bad winters, and none of that was standing still.

The kind word describes what people have seen. The written one describes what God has been doing, and only one of those two has ever had a vote on your future.

The hall that refused to rank a room

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a plain hall near the middle of Los Angeles and made one decision that outlived him, which was that no seat in that room could be rented by anybody.

The gift in that is not generosity, and reading it as generosity misses what he did. He removed the room's ability to rank the people in it.

Because a room will rank. Give it any mechanism at all and it will use it, and the ranking will run underneath every good sermon preached from the front, all the way through, every week. The households in the bought rows are the ones the church runs on and everybody knows it without being told, and the ones at the back learn a word for themselves that nobody ever says out loud.

Bresee took the mechanism away. Free seats, all of them, and the ones with nothing came first as a founding decision rather than as an act of charity extended later.

You are seated in that room on those terms. His word wrote you before anybody in it had an opinion, and the Holy Spirit set you there, and a warm phrase over a cup of tea has never had the authority to place you anywhere.