You Learned The Timetable

There are two minutes in that morning and you have never once been standing still for them.

They fall after the last song and before the announcements finish clearing out of people's heads, when the room breaks up and reforms, and everybody who is going to have a conversation has one, and the conversations that get had in those two minutes are the ones that go somewhere.

You are in the corridor for those two minutes. You have been in the corridor for those two minutes for five years.

Sometimes it is the kitchen. Sometimes you are helping someone find a bag. Once, memorably, you inspected a noticeboard you had already read, for the whole two minutes, with your back to the hall.

And you know exactly why, and you could say it in one sentence if you ever said it to anybody.

It is because in those two minutes people ask each other what they do.

Not unkindly. It is the most ordinary question there is and everybody asks it and nobody means anything by it. But it comes about fourth in a conversation with somebody new, and you have not had an answer you could give in a hall since the yard closed, and the answers you do have take four minutes and a chair and a person who will not do the thing with their face.

So you learned the timetable instead. You know when the tea comes out. You know which door the crèche empties from. You know that if you are near the second pillar at the right moment you can be moving in a direction with a purpose, and a person who is moving with a purpose is never asked anything.

Five years of that. And you have never missed a Sunday, and nobody in that room has any idea who you are.

Read the sentence God put over His own house

There is a line in Isaiah that Jesus quoted in the temple courts on the loudest day of His life, and He quoted the second half of it, and the first half is the part I want you to have.

Even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer. For mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people.Isaiah 56:7

Now look at the context, because the context is the whole gift. The people God is talking about in that chapter are the ones with a disqualification. Foreigners, in a nation defined by descent. Eunuchs, in a covenant obsessed with lineage. The two categories of person who could point at a specific, documented, undeniable reason why they did not qualify.

And God says: I will bring them, and I will make them joyful, and My house is for all people.

He does not say the disqualification was imaginary. He says it does not run in this house.

So take this while you are still in the corridor. You are one of the all people, and the written word says it in a sentence God put over His own front door, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brought you up that mountain in the first place.

He also promises them, in the verse just before, a name better than sons and daughters. Read that slowly. Not a name as good as. Better. To the man who had every reason to believe he had nothing to say when the conversation came round to him.

What the route is actually protecting

I want to say the true thing about what has been happening, because five years is a long time and you deserve better than a sermon that skims it.

You have not been hiding a job. You have been protecting a room.

The written word calls that building a house of prayer for all people and the Holy Spirit brought you into it, and none of that changed while you were building what you built. You worked out, somewhere in the first year, that the answer you have would change the temperature of a conversation, and you decided, without ever putting it in words, that you would rather that never happened than risk it happening in a hall where you had to keep standing afterwards. And so you built a route. And the route has kept you in that church for five years, which is not nothing at all, because plenty of people in your position simply stop coming.

But the route has a cost and the cost is the reason you are reading this. Nobody in that room knows one true thing about you. You have five years of Sundays and not one friend, and the loneliness of that has started to be louder than the fear of the question.

You are joyful in His house by decree, not by achievement. That is what is written over the ones with the documented disqualification, and the Spirit of God has been carrying that promise into your corridor every week for five years.

Bresee and the arrangement that disappeared

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a plain hall in Los Angeles and settled one thing before anybody walked in, which was that no seat in that room could be rented by anybody.

The genius of it was not the generosity. It was that a whole apparatus vanished. In a room with rented rows, every person entering runs a calculation about where they may sit and what it says, and the calculation runs every single week whether they want it to or not.

Bresee's people walked in and sat down. There was nothing to calculate.

You have been running a calculation for five years. It is a good one. It is a work of real engineering and it has kept you safe.

It also has to end, because the room God describes in Isaiah has no calculation in it at all, and you have never once been in that room even though you have been in that building two hundred and fifty times. That is what is written over His own door, and the Holy Spirit has been holding it open through every one of those Sundays.