We Came One Generation Too Late

Three tables pushed together end to end, which is the only way this hall has ever done a Sunday lunch and the only way it ever will.

Forty people. Children under the table conducting some business of their own. Two women carrying dishes in from the kitchen at a speed that would frighten you if you did not know them. Somebody's uncle standing up to say something and being talked over affectionately and sitting back down without finishing.

And a man of sixty-eight at the far end, eating slowly, watching all of it with a great deal of love and one small stone in his shoe.

He has been in that congregation nineteen years. His wife came first and he followed, which is how it usually goes. They love these people. He would say so plainly and mean it.

But he has noticed something over nineteen years, and it is not a complaint and he would be mortified if anyone heard him say it out loud.

The kitchen has been three families since before he arrived. The music has been two. The man who reads has a father who read and a grandfather who read. Nobody arranged that. Nobody sat down and decided that this is how it would be. It is just what happens in a place where people have been faithful for forty years and their children stayed, and it is beautiful, and it is also a door he does not know how to walk through.

So he has come to a private conclusion and put it away where nobody can see it, which is that in a place like this a person's place is inherited, and his family came one generation too late.

Before anything else

Let me clear this off the table so you can eat in peace.

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 for a diagnosis, and not with a list at the bottom you can measure yourself against. No questionnaire, and no kinder questionnaire either.

And nothing here is going to put you against those families or that hall. Not one line of it. They are not gatekeepers. They are people who stayed, and staying is a good thing that a church cannot live without, and the ache you are carrying is not their doing.

You are not on the outside of anything this morning, and there is no lineage you are missing that would have qualified you. That is not me being gracious about it. Scripture is what says it, and the Holy Spirit was settling exactly this question in the first century when the same problem had a different accent.

Paul had this exact argument, and it was fiercer

The church at Corinth had people in it who had been in the covenant since birth and people who had come in from outside a year ago. That is not a modern discomfort. It was the first great fault line of the church, and the language was much harsher than ours.

Here is what Paul does with it.

For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit.1 Corinthians 12:13

Read what he refuses to allow.

Whether we be Jews or Gentiles. Which means: whether your family has been in this for a thousand years or you walked in last spring.

Whether we be bond or free. Which means: whatever your standing is in the room, and whoever your people are, and whatever everybody knows about where you came from.

By one Spirit. Singular. The same one. Not one route in for the born and another for the newcomer.

You were put into this body by the Holy Spirit Himself, on the same terms and by the same means as every person at that table, and there has never been a second door for people whose families arrived late. I am not stretching that verse. 1 Corinthians 12:13 lists the exact categories a person uses to feel outside and then flattens all of them under one Spirit.

What a body is not

There is a reason Paul reaches for a body rather than a village.

A village has founding families. A village has people whose name is on the road, and people who moved in, and everybody knows which is which, and it is not cruelty, it is just how a village remembers itself.

A body has none of that. A hand is not the founding member of an arm. There is no part of a body that was there first and no part that is still settling in.

For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.1 Corinthians 12:12

You belong to that body the way a hand belongs to an arm, and nineteen years and ninety years are exactly the same length of time inside that sentence. The word chose the image of a body rather than a village on purpose, and the Spirit who inspired the choice is the one who makes an image like that land in a man at the end of a long table.

Set, and set by name

Then the line everybody knows.

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

God set. Not the history of the hall. Not the good habits of three faithful families. Not the way things have always been done, however lovely the way things have always been done actually is.

Every one of them. Individually. By name. Including the one who came nineteen years ago because his wife came first.

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

You were set in this body by God, it pleased Him to do it, and no length of anybody else's history was ever consulted about it. That is 1 Corinthians 12:18 in the plainest words the language had, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and makes it sit down in a man rather than merely be true near him.

And hear the rest of it: this does not hand you a grievance and it does not make you an assessor of who deserves the kitchen. That was never yours. The families are not the problem and they never were. The stone in your shoe was a conclusion, not a person.