Why Do We Never Stay For The Coffee

You have got it down to under ninety seconds.

Coats in your left arm from the second the last song starts. The two little ones out along the side wall while everybody else is still turning to talk. The middle one collected from the door of her class before the teacher has finished handing out the sheets. Out the side, down the ramp, into the car.

Under ninety seconds, every Sunday, for about four years now.

And two weeks ago your eldest, who is ten, said it in the back seat before you were even out of the road.

Why do we never stay for the coffee.

Not upset. Not accusing. Just genuinely asking, the way she asks about anything, and then looking out of the window while she waited for you to answer.

You said something about the roast. There was no roast.

Here is what she does not know and what you have never once said. It is not the coffee. It is the twenty minutes on either side of it. It is standing in a hall holding a cup while a woman you like asks how the summer went, and having no summer to describe, and hearing yourself say that you kept it quiet this year, and then watching her be kind about it.

It is that your children are dressed beautifully and you know exactly what it cost to keep them that way, and that a hall full of standing people is a place where somebody will eventually ask what you have been up to.

So it is ninety seconds and out the side door. Four years of it. And now the ten year old has noticed, and what she is going to learn from it is not that her mother is busy.

There is one sentence that closes this whole question

I am not going to walk you around this. Let me put the verse down first and then we will talk.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.Galatians 3:28

Bond nor free. Do you understand what that sentence walked into?

In the room Paul was writing to, that distinction was the whole architecture of a life. It decided where a person stood, who they ate with, whether they spoke first, what happened to their children. It was not a feeling anybody had. It was the frame of the world, in the walls, in the doorways, in the seating.

And into that room comes a sentence that says the frame is not in this house.

Not softened. Not adjusted for. Gone, because a different thing has happened that outranks it, and the different thing is that everybody in that room is now in Christ and is therefore one.

So hear it while you are still holding your coats. You are one in Christ Jesus with every single person in that hall. That is not a hope and it is not an aspiration and it is not a thing to grow into. It is written, it is present tense, it is finished, and the Holy Spirit is the one who baptized you into that body and did not ask what kind of summer you had.

Nobody in that hall is above you

I want to say this part clearly because the enemy has been whispering the opposite version to you in a car park for four years.

There is no one in that building who outranks you. Not the woman with the summer. Not the family whose children have the shoes. Not the man on the platform. In Christ there is no seat that is higher and no seat that is lower, and any measuring anybody does is measuring with a ruler God has already thrown out.

And the other half, because I will not sell you half a gospel. You do not outrank them either. This is not a message about how the ones with less are secretly the real ones. That is the same ruler held upside down, and it will make you just as lonely in exactly the same hall.

One. That is the word. Not equal in some legal sense while everybody quietly knows the truth. One, in the way a body is one, and the written word says so and the Spirit of God made it so, and the woman asking about your summer is your sister and does not know she is standing next to a woman doing arithmetic.

You have been running from a hierarchy that God dissolved before you were born.

And a plain hall in Los Angeles

A man named Phineas Bresee opened a hall near the middle of Los Angeles in 1895 and made one rule about it that everybody remembers, which is that not a single seat could be rented.

That was a sentence about that verse, put into furniture. He understood that a room can preach one thing from the platform and something else entirely from the seating plan, and that when they disagree, the seating wins, every single time, because people believe what they can see.

So he took away the thing that could be read. Free seats, all of them. The ones with nothing came in first, out loud and by design, and everybody in that hall walked in without having to work out what they were.

Your hall may already be like that. Most are, in intention. But intention does not reach a woman who is out of the side door in ninety seconds, because she is not in the room long enough to be reached.