Third Church In Nine Years

Fourth Sunday. The foyer is loud in the good way, and there is a table with coffee that somebody's aunt makes far too strong on purpose, and a toddler is running a route through everybody's legs with most of a cookie.

She is standing near the end of that table with a name tag on, because they give you one for the first month and she is on week four, and she is aware of the name tag the way you are aware of a splinter.

People have been kind. Three women made a point of coming over. A man has told her about the Tuesday group twice, because he forgot he had told her the first time.

And underneath all of it there is a sentence running in her that she would not say out loud in this building or any other.

This is the third one in nine years.

The first was where she grew up, and she left when the marriage did. The second she loved, and it came apart from the inside in a way that had nothing to do with her and took two years to finish coming apart. And now there is this one, and everybody is lovely, and she is standing by the coffee at week four thinking the thought that will not leave: at some point you have to consider the common factor.

She has decided, without ever quite putting words to it, that a woman who keeps ending up somewhere else was probably never really planted anywhere, and that people who have a place do not move.

What is not coming

Let me get this off the table first, so you can read the rest without bracing for it.

Nothing here is going to tell you what your gift is. Not by naming it, not by describing you so closely that you take it as a diagnosis, and not with a list at the end that you can measure yourself against. There is no questionnaire coming and there is no gentler questionnaire waiting either.

That is not caution. It is that the chapter people open when somebody asks what am I for does not answer that question, and once you see that it does not, nine years stop meaning what you have been assuming they mean.

You are not a case being reviewed, and there is no file on you being weighed against three addresses. I am not saying that to be kind to you. Scripture is what says it, in 1 Corinthians 12, and the Holy Spirit has never once asked a woman for her attendance history before He would deal with her.

Tempered is a furnace word

Everybody quotes verse 18. I want to go six verses further on, to a line that gets read as filler and is not filler at all.

But God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honour to that part which lacked.1 Corinthians 12:24

Tempered. Not assembled. Not organized. Tempered, which is what you do to metal with heat and time until it will hold a shape under load.

And look who is doing it. God hath tempered. Not the congregation. Not nine years of good intentions. Not the leadership, however fine they were.

A tempering takes heat and it takes time, and a person going through one does not experience it as being carefully made. They experience it as a bad decade.

You have been in the hands of the One who does the tempering, and Scripture is explicit in 1 Corinthians 12:24 that the tempering is His own work rather than something circumstance did to you. I am not stretching a metaphor there. The verb belongs to God in that sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line like that and makes it land in a woman standing at a coffee table with a name tag on.

The foot's arithmetic, done in a foyer

Paul knew the objection was coming, so he wrote it out himself rather than waiting for somebody to raise it.

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

Read what the foot is actually claiming. Not I do nothing. Feet work constantly. It is I am not the other one, therefore I am not really in.

That is precisely the sum a woman runs on her fourth Sunday. Not I have never served. She served through two churches and half of a third. It is people who really belong somewhere do not keep starting over, therefore I must not really belong.

Paul does not soothe that. He corrects it flatly. Is it therefore not of the body. No. It never followed, and it does not follow this morning.

You have been reasoning from a history to a standing, and the written word records that exact reasoning for the express purpose of overturning it. He had the false conclusion put down in ink so a woman could hear her own voice in it and know it, and the Spirit who breathed that line is not standing at your shoulder agreeing with the arithmetic.

Set, and the setting has never been redone

Now the verse everyone knows, read as though you had not heard it a hundred times.

But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him.1 Corinthians 12:18

In the body. Not in the building. The body is the whole company of people who belong to Christ, and a congregation is a place where some of that body meets on a given morning. Moving between congregations is a change of address. It is not a change of membership in the thing Paul is talking about.

Every one of them. Individually. Including the ones whose lives have been loud.

As it hath pleased Him. A decision, taken on purpose, by somebody who wanted it exactly this way.

You were set in this body by God, it pleased Him to do it, and not one of those three moves ever reached that decision or revised it. That is what 1 Corinthians 12:18 says in the plainest words the language had, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a written line hold weight in a person rather than merely inform them.

And none of this is a verdict on the churches behind you or on the people in them. That was never yours and it does not become yours now. This is about one woman and one name tag.