Would You Mind Moving Down

You were early. That is the detail that keeps coming back to you, and it should, because it is the one that matters.

You were forty minutes early. You had the whole row to choose from and you took the fourth one back on the aisle, which is a good seat and not a grand one, and you sat there and you read the notices and you prayed for a while and you were, honestly, quite happy.

At about ten to, it filled. Properly filled. It was the anniversary service and there were people there you had never seen in your life and a good deal of standing about at the back.

And at four minutes to, Ruth came down the aisle with a small party behind her, and she crouched next to you, and she put her hand on your arm, and she said it in the warmest voice you have ever heard anybody use.

Would you mind terribly moving down. They have come all the way from Bristol.

And you said of course. Because what else does a person say. You said of course and you got up and you took your bag and you went to the back, and there were no seats at the back either by then, so you stood by the doors for the first twenty minutes until somebody brought a chair through from the hall.

You could not hear the reading. That is a small thing and you know it is a small thing and it is not what this is about.

What this is about is that you have thought about it every day for eleven weeks, and you cannot say a single word about it to anybody, because the moment you describe it out loud it becomes a woman complaining about a chair.

James is describing your Sunday and he is not being gentle about it

I am going to put this passage in front of you exactly as it stands, because it is the only place in the whole book where the specific thing that happened to you is written down.

And ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, Sit thou here in a good place; and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool.James 2:3

Sit thou here in a good place. Stand thou there.

That is not a passage about welcome. It is a passage about the assignment of seats in front of everybody, and it is written by a man who had clearly stood in the back of a room and watched it happen.

And the sentence he lands on afterwards is not are you not being a bit thoughtless. It is: are ye not then partial in yourselves, and are become judges of evil thoughts.

Judges. That is the word. Not hosts making an awkward call under pressure. A court, sitting, deciding whose presence in a room outranks whose.

So take this before another day of eleven weeks goes by. You were not the flexible one that morning, and you were not the gracious one, and you were certainly not the one whose seat mattered less. You are an heir of that kingdom and it is written, and the Holy Spirit put you in that room and did not put a scale in it.

Ruth was not the villain and that is why it hurt

Here is the part I have to get exactly right, because it is where most preaching on this passage goes wrong and does real damage.

Ruth was not being cruel. Ruth was four minutes from the start of the biggest service of her year with visitors in the aisle and nowhere to put them, and she looked down the row for the person she knew would say yes.

That is the whole mechanism. Not malice. She looked for the person who would say yes.

And that is precisely why it went in so deep, because the calculation was correct. You would say yes. You did say yes. Being the reliable yes in a building is a thing that gets noticed and then gets used, and it gets used most on the days when the room is full.

So do not go looking for someone to be angry with, because you will not find one, and the hunt will make you strange.

Look instead at the thing that is actually true. You are an heir in that house and not the give in the system. His word says the sorting of seats is a partiality, and the Holy Spirit set you into that body as a daughter, and no full morning has ever changed which of those is real.

What Bresee refused to let a room do

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a plain hall near the middle of Los Angeles and made one rule about it that outlived him by more than a century: no seat in that building could be rented.

Now understand what a rented pew actually is. It is not just a seat somebody paid for. It is a seat that cannot be reassigned. When the room is full and somebody important arrives, the household in the bought row is not asked to move down, because everybody knows they cannot be.

Which means that in every church with rented pews, there was a category of person who could be moved and a category who could not, and everybody knew which they were, and the knowing was permanent.

Bresee's answer was not to make the moving fairer. It was to abolish the categories entirely, so that a full room had no one it was allowed to move, because it had no one it was in the habit of moving.

You are in the second category by the decree of God. The written word makes the poor the heirs of the kingdom in the very next verse, and the Holy Spirit seated you Himself, so no crowded morning ever had the authority to sort you.