Somebody Has to Do the Cups

The yellow gloves live on the tap and they belong to nobody.

By the time the last song is finishing there is already a man wearing them. He has a system, and the system is genuinely good. Cups first, because the cups come back fastest and the rack only holds so many. Then the big steel jugs. Then the urn gets topped up and switched on for the second wave, because there is always a second wave. Then the tea towels get shaken out and hung along the rail by the window where the sun gets at them, and by twenty past he could walk out of that kitchen and no one coming in behind him would know anybody had been there at all.

The best part, the part he would never say out loud, is that the hatch is open. From the sink he can hear the whole room. He can hear who is laughing and who has gone quiet, he can hear somebody's mother explaining the hospital letter for the third week running, he can hear the running joke about the biscuits that started before he ever walked into the building. He is in it. He is completely in it. He is simply in it through a hatch, with his hands in the water, which means that nobody in that hall ever has to wonder what he is doing standing there.

And neither does he. That is the real function of the gloves.

People thank him constantly. That is the other thing, and it is not a small thing. He gets thanked more than almost anyone in that building. Where would we be. Look at him, straight in there. Every single time he gives the same answer, which is, somebody has to do the cups, and everybody laughs, and it is actually funny, and it is also the truest sentence he says all week. As long as somebody has to do the cups, he has a reason to be in this building that does not require him to be interesting.

Let us be careful with the words here, because he is not hiding and he is not sulking. He loves these people. He prays for them by name on a Thursday. He would get in the car for any one of them at two in the morning and not mention it afterwards. It is not that he wants to be out of the room. It is that the kitchen is the one part of that building where his presence explains itself, and the room is the part where it does not.

You know this from the inside. I do not think it is a sink for you, necessarily. Maybe it is the chairs, and you are up and stacking before the last chord has finished ringing. Maybe it is the door, the car park, the projector, the coats. Maybe it is a little post you invented so quietly that nobody in eleven years has noticed it is a post. Whatever your version, you know the exact moment in the morning when the job runs out, and you know precisely what happens in the ninety seconds after that.

Those ninety seconds are what this is about.

A job in your hands is not the same as a place at the table

Let me weigh this properly first, because a man at a sink is rarely asked how he is doing and almost never asked why he is standing there.

The serving is not the problem. The serving is good and the cups do genuinely need washing and there is nothing accidental about the fact that God keeps putting towels in the hands of the people He loves most. The ache is not in the work. The ache sits in the arithmetic underneath the work, in a sum nobody in that building ever set and nobody has ever asked for: a man with a task is allowed to be here, and a man without one has to account for himself. That sum runs every week at about ten past twelve. By half past, the gloves are on and it is settled for another seven days.

The cost is not the washing up. The washing up takes eleven minutes. The cost is that the room where the friendships actually get made has become a room your body has learned to leave.

So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.Romans 12:5

Members one of another. Not the staff and the served. Not the useful ones and the ones being entertained. The picture the written word keeps reaching for is never an operation with a rota pinned to a corkboard. It is a body, and in a body the hand has never once applied for membership of the arm.

You are a member of that body and not the help. Scripture calls the many one body in Christ, every one of them members one of another, and it does not add a clause about who carried the jugs. The Holy Spirit is the one who lifts a sentence like that off a page and sets it down inside a man whose hands are in the water, and He does not wait for the drying up to be finished before He says it.

Where I come from, a house is judged by its table. Not by the meal, which can be bread and oil and a bowl of figs and be perfect. By the table: how long it is, how many can be pushed round it, how late the lamp stays lit. And the one thing you never do at such a table, the thing that would shame the host, is stand at the edge of the room holding a tray while everyone else eats. Not because carrying is beneath anybody. Because a guest standing is a guest not yet received, and the host will not have it.

You have a chair at that table which was never issued for services rendered. The word says you are no more a stranger and a foreigner but a fellowcitizen with the saints, and Ephesians 2:19 was not written to the impressive. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes citizenship land in the chest of a man who has spent years quietly working out what his rent is.

What the hatch cannot do

A hatch is a beautiful invention. It lets you hear everything.

It is also, and this is the thing that took me a while, a shape that nobody can reach through. Somebody who wants to sit beside you has to come round, find you, stand slightly awkwardly by the drainer, and hold a conversation over the sound of running water while you keep half an eye on the rack. Some of them do it. Some of them have been doing it for years, faithfully, in the wrong shaped room, and they have never once said that it is hard.

And there is a version of this message that would leave you feeling foolish, and this is not that version. The kitchen was never cowardice. It was care. Underneath it is a real conviction that a person ought to be worth having about, and that conviction did not come from nowhere and it certainly did not come from these people. Someone taught you, early and probably without meaning to, that welcome is a thing you pay for at the door.

You were received into this house long before you were ever useful in it. His word says that while we were yet without strength, Christ died for the ungodly, which settles the order of things permanently: the welcome came first and the usefulness came a long way afterwards. The Holy Spirit did not draw you in on a trial basis, and there is no probation clause anywhere in what He has written.

You are known in that room by the One who does not need your job description to recognize you. Scripture says the Lord knoweth them that are his, and it says it without a list of duties attached. The Holy Spirit knows the man at the sink by name, not by function, and He has never once confused the two.