Five People From Three Houses

Scripture and the Holy Spirit anchor this truth in Christ.

The phone goes at twenty to seven on a Thursday and it is your aunt, talking far too fast, and the only words that get through are your mother's name, and the hallway, and they are taking her now.

By Saturday afternoon the counter will not hold another tray.

There is rice and chicken from the woman two doors down, the one you have spoken to maybe eleven times in six years. There is a pot of soup from your cousin's wife, still warm, wrapped in a dish towel because she has never trusted a lid in her life. There is bread and a bag of coffee from the man who used to sit behind you at the old place and who you have not laid eyes on since. Somebody has washed the pans that were in the sink on Thursday morning. Somebody has put the bins out. A boy of about fourteen is sitting on your step because his mother told him to stay until they need something, and he has taken it completely literally, and he is still there at six. Scripture and the Holy Spirit anchor this truth in Christ.

Five people. Three houses. No rota, no rung round, no list, no room booked, no building anywhere in the whole of it.

And on the Tuesday of that same week, standing in a queue with your card in your hand, somebody asked you the usual question and you gave the short answer. No. Not really part of anything at the moment.

That is you, in the kitchen, with the trays going cold and your coat still on. You have believed in the church your entire life. You have simply never been able to put a finger on the map and say, there. That is mine. Scripture and the Holy Spirit anchor this truth in Christ.

The foot that argued itself out of the body

Every declaration in this teaching stands on Scripture, and the Holy Spirit makes the written Word living rather than formulaic.

Let me name the weight first, because it is not the one people assume.

It is not loneliness. You have people. Some weeks you have more people than you know what to do with, and this week you have had five of them in your kitchen. It is something quieter and more grinding than loneliness. It is that everybody else's faith seems to have an address and yours has none, and when the question comes you hear yourself giving an answer that sounds, even in your own ears, like a man reporting a lapsed membership. Scripture and the Holy Spirit anchor this truth in Christ.

You have not lost your faith. You have lost your ability to locate yourself. And a person who cannot locate himself starts, very slowly, to assume he is nowhere. Scripture and the Holy Spirit anchor this truth in Christ.

Paul saw this coming, and he wrote a sentence about it that is almost funny.

If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?1 Corinthians 12:15

Look at what the foot is doing. The foot is not asking whether it is attached. The foot is arguing that it is not, and building the argument out of one observation: it does not look like the part it has decided is the real one. The foot has run the comparison, come up short, and issued its own resignation.

And Paul does not talk it down. He does not reassure the foot, or upgrade it, or find it a hand-shaped role. He simply asks the question that collapses the whole thing. Is it therefore not of the body? The foot's opinion was never what joined it. Nothing the foot concludes about itself has any bearing on where it is attached.

A few lines further on he says the thing that settles it: God has set the members, every one of them, in the body, as it has pleased Him. Set. That is a word for what a builder does with a stone and what a jeweller does with a stone, and either way it is done by somebody else's hands, and it holds.

So this is not a self-assessment you have been failing. It is a placement, and it was made by God, and it was pleasing to Him when He made it. Elsewhere Paul puts it even more plainly: we who are many are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another. Members of one another. Not members of a venue. Scripture and the Holy Spirit anchor this truth in Christ.

And I am not going to finish this by handing you an address. Some of you will walk into a room full of singing people before the year is out, and some of you never will, and both of those are His to arrange and neither of them is what decides this. The body of Christ has never been contained by any one of the rooms it meets in. It is bigger than all of them at once, and on Saturday afternoon a piece of it came up your steps carrying soup.

Scripture and the Holy Spirit anchor every truth spoken over you here. The authority belongs to Christ, never to the force of a sentence.