Where You Would Actually Like to Sit

Two years, and always the same seat.

Third row from the back, left side, on the aisle, where the pillar takes the edge off the light and you can get out fast if you need to. Colette could tell you exactly why she chose it, on the first Sunday, and the reason was that she came in nine minutes late with her coat wrong and it was the nearest place to sit down and stop being looked at.

But that was the first Sunday. There have been a hundred since, and she has never once been late again, and she still sits there.

She has thought about it. She is not a woman who avoids thinking about things. And what she has worked out, over two years, is that the room has a cost of entry and it is not a thing anybody could put a number on.

The people at the front know each other's children's names. They know what happened to the boiler. They know the shorthand, the little in-house words, the way you can say are you on next week and everybody understands which rota you mean. They arrive early and stand about in twos and threes with an ease that Colette has watched the way you watch a language you did not grow up speaking.

She has none of that. She has a coat that is fine and shoes that are fine and a story that does not fit the shape of the stories she hears at the front, and a week that has been very hard in ways she has not told anybody in that building, because telling would require a kind of standing she does not have.

So she sits three rows from the back and she is genuinely glad to be there. That is the part that is hard to explain to people. She is not bitter. She loves the singing. She has cried in that seat more than once and gone home better than she came.

She has just quietly worked out that she is a guest.

Not an unwelcome one. Everybody has been kind. Nobody in that room has ever said one word to make her feel like a visitor, and if you told them she felt like one they would be horrified and they would mean it.

She has simply arrived at the conclusion that there is an inside to this and she is not on it, and that the front of the room belongs to people who can keep up with it, and that the correct and dignified thing to do is to take a seat near the back and be grateful.

And you know the seat I mean, because you have one, and yours might not be in a church at all. It might be the end of the table. It might be the chair by the door. It might be the way you always volunteer for the job that lets you leave the room.

You picked it once for a good reason.

You have kept it for a reason you have never actually said out loud.

The room was built for you before it was built for anybody

There was a man who started a work in a plain hall near the middle of a big city, on one principle he would not move off: the good news goes to the poor, and therefore no seat in the building belongs to anybody in particular.

Not a grand room. Not a beautiful one. A plain hall with plain chairs, on purpose, because the moment a room starts signaling who it is for, it has begun quietly telling somebody they are a guest.

That is where this whole tradition comes from, and it is not a piece of history I am handing you to admire. It is a sentence about a seat, and it was written with you in mind.

Because here is what the New Testament does with this, and it is more blunt than most people notice.

So then you are no longer strangers and foreigners. You are fellow citizens with the saints, and members of the household of God.Ephesians 2:19

Look at the words that got chosen there, because they are legal words, not warm ones. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

Stranger is a status. Foreigner is a status. Those are the words for a person who may be in the building, may be treated well in the building, may even love the building, and has no standing in it. A guest has no vote and no key and no claim. A guest is at the mercy of a welcome, and everybody knows a welcome can be withdrawn.

And the sentence says: that is over. Not softened. Over.

Then it goes further, and this is the part I want you to hold. It does not say you are welcome guests now. It does not say you have been given a nice seat. It says members of the household, which is the word for the people who live there. Not the visitor's status upgraded. The visitor's status abolished, and a different one handed over in its place.

You are not a guest of the household. You are of the household.

And the standing that gives you does not run on whether you know the shorthand. It does not run on whether you can keep up with the people who arrive early. It never once depended on having the right story, or the right week, or the right ease in a doorway.

It was settled about you before you walked in, by Somebody who was not asking the room's opinion.