Nobody Was Holding Auditions

The trick is the second song.

Not the first one. During the first one there are still coats coming off and seats being found and somebody's toddler doing a slow lap of the hall with a tambourine nobody handed him, and if you come in during the first song there is every chance a kind person will spot you and stand up and make a whole production of shuffling along the row. The second song is the one. By the second song everybody is settled and facing forward and nobody turns round, and a man can come through the side door, take the third row from the back on the aisle, and be sitting down with his coat still on before anyone registers that the row was ever empty.

He has been doing this for nine years. He knows how long the walk from the car park takes at his normal pace and how long it takes at his faster one. He knows the point in the second song at which he needs to be pushing the door. He has never once been late by his own reckoning, because his own reckoning has nothing to do with the printed start time. It is a private timetable he wrote himself, he has kept it faultlessly for nine years, and nobody in that building has ever asked him for it.

He does the same thing at the end, in reverse. Coat on during the last announcement. Mug of tea collected on the way out, because a mug gives your hands a job, and a man with a job in his hands is not a man standing on his own. Eleven or twelve minutes near the edge of a conversation, nodding in the right places. Then the side door again.

And here is the part that would never fit in a strip, because there is nothing funny in it at all. He loves these people. That is the whole of it. He has loved them for nine years and he still gets in and out like a man who is not certain the building is his to be in.

You know the timetable. You know it because you wrote one. Maybe yours is not the second song. Maybe yours is the volume you sing at, calibrated carefully so you are neither the one nobody can hear nor the one people turn round for. Maybe yours is the tray you always bring. Maybe it is the sentence you have ready before you are through the door. Whatever your version is, you know precisely what it costs you to run it, and you have been running it so long that you have stopped calling it a cost.

Nobody plants a thing on approval

Before anything else, let me say the true weight of this out loud, because I do not think you have said it and I do not think anyone has said it to you.

And you have carried something nobody handed you. Scripture says come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and it is addressed to the ones still carrying rather than the ones who put it down neatly, and the Spirit is the one who makes an invitation land on a man mid arithmetic.

Nine years is a long time to keep a private timetable. It is not the arriving that tires a person out. It is the arithmetic. It is the part of you that never gets to sit down, that stays half a step outside the room measuring how you are landing, checking your face, checking your volume, checking whether the thing you just said was the right amount of thing. You can love a room and be working in it at the same time. You can be surrounded by people who would carry you across a river and still be quietly doing sums about whether you are allowed to ask them to.

And you were welcomed long before you started measuring the welcome. Scripture says receive ye one another, as Christ also received us, and the receiving it points back to is His, already done, and the Spirit is the one who gets that past the arithmetic.

And you have never once suspected the people. That is what makes it lonely. If they were cold you would have somewhere to put it. They are not cold. They are kind, and they are glad you are there, and none of it has ever reached the part of you doing the arithmetic, because that part is not listening for kindness. It is listening for a verdict.

So let me put something under your feet that is older and heavier than the verdict you keep waiting for.

Those that be planted in the house of the LORD shall flourish in the courts of our God.Psalm 92:13

Planted.

Stay with that word a moment, because it is not a word about you. It is a word about the one holding the shovel. A seed does not plant itself and a tree does not choose its slope. Somebody carries it, somebody opens the ground, somebody sets it in and closes the soil around it and stands up with dirt on both hands. The plant never auditions for the garden. It is put there, and from the moment it is put there the ground belongs to it exactly as much as it belongs to the ground.

I have replanted a burned slope with my own hands, and it taught me something I did not go up there expecting to learn. The ones that took were the ones I left alone. The ones I kept lifting out to check the roots never rooted, and it was not because those ones were weaker. It was because a thing that gets lifted every week never gets one quiet fortnight in the dark to do the only work it knows how to do.

And you are seated in a place that was assigned rather than won. 1 Corinthians 12:18 says God has set the members every one of them in the body as it hath pleased Him, and the setting is His act rather than your audition, and the Spirit is the one who makes that reach a man who has been timing his arrival for nine years.

Nine years of Sundays, and you have been lifting yourself out to check.

Paul says the same thing in a different picture. He says God set the members in the body, every one of them, exactly as it pleased Him. Not that the members set themselves. Not that the members were admitted on review, with a probation period and a quiet word after. God set them, it pleased Him to do it, and the seating was finished before you ever built a timetable to earn one.

And you are already inside the thing you have been auditioning for. His word says ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular, and in particular means you specifically rather than the general idea of somebody, and the Spirit is the one who makes that personal at the third row from the back.

That is why the row you sit in is not a stage and the hall is not an audition room, whatever nine years of habit have trained your body to believe. And this is not a general kindness about congregations that you may apply to yourself if you feel bold enough this morning. You are in Christ and Christ is in you. The placing is personal and it has your name on it, the way a planted tree has one particular hole in one particular slope, dug for it and for nothing else.