Twenty-Two Years And Nobody Asked

Twenty-two years, which is long enough to have watched a building get a new roof, two new carpets and four ministers.

You know where the stopcock is. You know which window has to be lifted before it will latch. You know that the boiler needs to be looked at in September and not October, and you know it because you were there the year they looked at it in October.

And in twenty-two years, nobody has ever asked you what you think about anything.

Not once. Not about the roof, not about the ministers, not about the hymn book, not about whether the evening service should move. You have been asked to do plenty. You have been asked to carry, to drive, to be there at seven, and you have said yes to every single one of them.

But nobody has ever come and sat down and said: what do you make of this.

You have thought about this more in the last month than in the previous twenty-one years put together, and you know exactly what set it off. It was the young couple. They have been there nine months, and at the meeting about the hall the minister said, and I would really like to hear from Rhys and Anna on this, because you two see it differently.

Which was a good thing to say. It was right to say it. They do see it differently and it was worth hearing.

You drove home behind them and you thought, without any heat in it at all, the way a man thinks about weather: he has never said my name in that sentence.

And then you thought the other thing, which is the one that has kept you up. You have stopped having opinions. Not stopped having them privately. Stopped forming them. Somewhere in the last decade your mind quit doing the work, because the work was never for anything.

Peter puts you in the wall, not against it

There is an image Peter uses that I want you to hold in your hands for a minute, because it is not decoration. It is a job description, and it has your name on it.

Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood.1 Peter 2:5

Lively stones. Living stones, in the plainer word. Stones that are alive and are being built into a house, and the house is the church, and every single stone in a wall is load bearing.

Now notice what a stone in a wall is not. It is not an ornament set into a niche. It is not a spare kept round the back. Take one out of a wall and the wall knows.

And he goes further and calls the whole lot of you a priesthood. That is a word about access and about voice. A priest is not a person who is present. A priest is a person who speaks, on behalf of, into the presence of God, and Peter hands that to everybody in the building without exception.

So take this now, twenty-two years in. You are load bearing in that house. It is written, it has been true the entire time, and the Holy Spirit is the one who set you into that wall, and He did not ask a committee first.

Being asked and being a member are two different things

I want to be careful here because there is a cheap version of this message and it would set you against your own church, and I will not do that to a man who has given it twenty-two years.

Nobody there decided you should not be asked. There is no meeting where that happened. What there is, is a habit, and habits form in buildings the way paths form in grass: somebody walks it once, and then it is easier, and then it is the path, and then nobody remembers walking on the grass.

Rhys and Anna get asked because they are new and being new makes a person visible. You are not asked because you are furniture, and being furniture in a church is a strange kind of compliment that costs the person receiving it more than anybody knows. The written word calls you a living stone in the wall of this house, and the Holy Spirit set you there and has never once called you a fitting.

So this is not a grievance and you should not carry it as one.

But the thing that has to be said plainly is this: your place in that house has never depended on being asked. His word calls you a living stone in the wall and a priest in the house, and the Holy Spirit built you in, and twenty-two years of nobody putting a question to you has not loosened one thing about it.

The habit is a fact about the room. It was never a ruling about you.

The hall that would not sell a row

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a plain hall near the middle of Los Angeles and settled one thing about it before anybody sat down: no seat in that building would ever be rented.

Now, a man who has been in a congregation twenty-two years will understand why that is more than a gesture. A room develops a shape. It always does. Somebody sits somewhere for long enough and it becomes their seat, and then it becomes their place, and then it becomes what they are, and none of that requires anybody to be unkind.

Bresee could not stop a room developing a shape. Nobody can. What he could do was refuse to let the shape be bought, and refuse to let it be permanent, and say out loud, in the founding of the thing, that the ones who arrived with nothing came first.

That is a room where a man of twenty-two years' standing is a stone in the wall and not a fixture in the corner.

You have that standing already. The written word gave it and the Holy Spirit set it, and no habit in any building has ever had the authority to review it.