The Hands You Keep In Your Pockets

They are good hands. Let us get that in first, because you have not thought it in about twenty years.

They have laid three thousand square yards of stone. They have set gates that will still be swinging when your grandchildren are old. There is a wall on the road out of town that a man on a horse would have been proud of and it is yours and nobody knows.

They are also, at fifty-eight, split at the ends of the fingers most of the winter, black in the creases in a way that no amount of anything will shift, and there is the one that does not straighten any more.

And you have had them in your pockets in that building since about the second year.

You know the exact week it started. There was a Sunday, and there was a woman who took your hand at the door with both of hers, the way people do, and there was a flicker. Just a flicker. A tiny hesitation before she closed her hands, and she covered it beautifully and she has never done it since and she almost certainly does not remember it.

You have remembered it for twenty-six years.

So the hands go in the pockets before you come through that door, and they come out again in the car park, and in twenty-six years not one person in that congregation has ever properly seen them, and nobody knows about the wall.

Jesus asks for the hand in front of everybody

There is a scene in a synagogue with a man who has a withered hand, and everybody remembers the healing and almost nobody notices what Jesus asks the man to do first.

And when he had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts, he saith unto the man, Stretch forth thine hand. And he stretched it out: and it was restored whole as before.Mark 3:5

Stretch forth thine hand.

Think about what that costs. A man with a hand like that has spent his whole life managing where it is. He knows the angle to stand at. He knows which side to walk on. He has a lifetime of small arrangements, and he is in a full synagogue on the Sabbath, and the first instruction he gets is to put the hand out where everybody can see it.

The healing comes after the stretching out. He had to hold it up before there was anything to hold up.

So take this now, twenty-six years on. You are asked to bring your hands out, not to have different ones. The written word has the Lord calling for the hand exactly as it is, in a full room, before anything is done about it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a man the nerve for that.

The flicker was real and it was one second long

Now let me say two things and I will not drop either.

The flicker was real. I am not going to tell you that you imagined it, because you did not, and being told you imagined a thing you actually saw is one of the worst things anybody can do to a person.

She hesitated. It happened.

And it lasted about a fifth of a second, and it was almost certainly not disgust. It was surprise. A woman's hands closed round something she was not expecting, and a body reacts before a person has any say in it, and hers reacted and then she carried on and thought no more about it for twenty-six years.

You built a policy out of a fifth of a second.

That is not stupidity. That is what a certain kind of man does with a wound: he makes a rule so that it can never happen again, and the rule is efficient and permanent and completely unexamined.

Twenty-six years of a rule made in a doorway by a man who was hurt for about a second.

You are welcome with your hands out of your pockets. His word has a man told to stretch out the worst thing he has in a room full of people, and the Holy Spirit is the one who stood him up to do it.

The hall that had no state to arrive in

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 plainness of that room was not decoration, it was the point.

Working men came into that hall. A great many of them. And what the accounts of it keep saying, in different ways, is that people came in from the street in the state the day had left them, and that there was nothing at the door to be got past.

Now I will say the careful part, because it matters and because this site is not in the business of prosecuting anybody. Plainness in that tradition later turned, in some places, into its own kind of dress code, which is exactly the inversion the founding was against. That is a thing that happens to good ideas over a hundred years and it is nobody in your building's fault.

But the original room had no state to arrive in, and no currency at the door, and a man's hands were his hands.

The written word calls for the hand as it is, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a man to change his hands first.