She Is Very Devout

You have heard it said perhaps a hundred times and it always does the same thing.

Somebody is being described. A new neighbor, a woman at work, somebody's aunt. And whoever is describing them gets to a certain point and says: she is very devout.

And then there is a small pause.

Watch a room when that happens. Everybody's face does something. Not a sneer, nothing so crude. It is a slight settling. A very small readjustment, of the kind people make when they have been handed a piece of practical information about how to conduct themselves.

And what has been communicated, without one word of it being said, is: careful.

Careful what you say. Careful what you mention. She will not be easy.

You have watched that happen your whole life and you have never particularly minded it, and about six weeks ago you heard yourself do it.

You were describing somebody to your daughter-in-law. You said the words and you left the pause, and you saw her face make the adjustment, and you understood in that second that you had just handed a young woman an instruction about a person she has never met.

And that the word you used was the best word in your religion.

Micah gives three things and two of them are about other people

There is a line that gets called the whole of religion in one sentence, and it is worth counting the parts.

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?Micah 6:8

Three things. Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly with thy God.

The third is the vertical one and it is the one everybody hears when the word devout gets used. It is real and it is essential and it is one of three.

The first two are entirely about how a person handles other people. Justly, which is a word about what you do to somebody, and mercy, which is a word about what you do not do to somebody when you could.

And notice that mercy is not simply required. It is to be loved. A person is meant to actually like being merciful, which is a description of a temperament rather than a duty.

So take this now, six weeks on. You are looking at a definition with two thirds missing. The written word puts two horizontal requirements alongside the vertical one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who grows all three, and a word that means all of that has been shrunk to mean only the third.

The word did not do this to itself

Now let me be plain about how this happened, because I am not going to have this page complaining about anybody in particular and it is not one person's fault.

A word takes its meaning from the people it gets used about.

Over about two generations in most communities, the people who got called devout were, on the whole, the ones whose devotion was visible, and visible devotion tends to be the vertical kind, because that is what can be seen from outside. Hours. Attendance. Abstention. Strictness.

Justice and mercy do not look like anything from across a room. A woman who is merciful looks exactly like a woman who is not, until you are the one who needed it. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

So the word drifted, and it drifted honestly, and there was no meeting about it, and after two generations it means a third of what it meant.

And it drifted in your mouth too, six weeks ago, in a kitchen.

You have a word that covers all three. His word puts justice and mercy in the same sentence as walking with God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who works all three into a life.

The plain hall and the two thirds it kept

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a hall near the middle of Los Angeles and made a rule that no seat in it could be rented, and the doctrine that hall existed for was total devotion to God.

And what that hall is actually remembered for is the missions in the streets around it.

Read the two facts next to each other, because they were never separate there. The people who received that doctrine went out and fed people and sat with people and walked people home, and the ones who ran that hall would have been baffled by a definition that stopped at the vertical.

Devotion, in that room, was measured by both directions at once, and the horizontal one was the one people could see.

That is Micah's three, kept together, in a plain hall.

The written word requires justice and mercy alongside the walking, and the Holy Spirit is the one who produces the whole of it.