It Is For People Raised In It

Third Sunday, and Sam is sitting at the back again, on the end of the row, near the radiator that clanks.

He is fifty two. He came because a man at work asked him twice, and the second time Sam ran out of reasons. Everyone has been kind. Somebody found him a chair the first week and somebody else remembered his name the second, which he thought about all the way home.

And then they stand and sing, and the whole room does the thing that Sam cannot do.

Nobody looks at the words. Four hundred people, more or less, and the words are up on a screen and not one person in the front half is reading them. They know where the tune drops. They know the pause in the third line, the one that is not printed anywhere, and they all take it together like a room breathing. When it comes round to a response, they say it in one voice and Sam is half a beat behind on every syllable, and by the third line he has stopped trying and is just listening.

It is beautiful. That is the trouble. If it were cold he could leave.

Instead he sits down at the end and folds the paper in half, and thinks the thought he has been thinking since the first week, and it is not bitter at all, which is what makes it so hard to shift: this is a lovely thing, and it belongs to people who were raised in it, and I arrived about forty years late.

You know that thought. Maybe your version is about a family that all knows a story you were not there for. Maybe it is a whole tradition with a vocabulary you did not grow up hearing. Whatever it is, you have worked out that there are people on the inside of this, and you have quietly accepted a good seat near the door.

So come and stand on a road at a border, because there is a woman here who came from further outside than you did.

Three widows on a road, going nowhere good. The older one turns round and tells the two younger ones to go home. She means it kindly and she means it practically: there is nothing for you where I am going, go back to your mothers, go back to your own people, go back to what you know.

One of them does. Nobody blames her. And the other one, a foreign woman with no history in any of this, no bloodline, no upbringing, not one childhood memory of the God she is about to name, plants her feet on that road and says the sentence.

Where you go, I go. Where you stay, I stay. Your people are my people, and your God is my God.

That is not a poem about friendship. In that world, said on a road, in front of a witness, that is covenant language, and she uses it, and she means every clause of it. She did not know the tune. She did not know the pause in the third line. She said the sentence anyway, from outside, out loud, before anybody had confirmed that she was allowed to.

Knowing the tune is not the door

Follow her a few weeks on, because what happens next is not private and it is not sentimental.

A town gateway. Ten elders sitting down. A crowd, because this is where legal business is done in public. A man who has the first claim on the family land stands up and says he cannot take it, and then, to make it binding, he pulls off his sandal and hands it across. In that world that gesture closed the matter in front of witnesses in the same way a signature closes one now.

And when the shoe changes hands, a foreign widow who arrived on that road with nothing becomes part of a household, part of a family line, part of a people. Publicly. Legally. In the gateway where everybody could see.

You are inside this in exactly that way, and you were inside it before you learned where the tune drops. Ruth 4:7 is the gateway with the sandal changing hands, and the Holy Spirit is doing the same kind of business in a room where a man is folding an order of service in half.

Read the line she said again and notice what is not in it. No qualification. No length of service. No family history. One sentence, spoken out loud, by an outsider, on a road.

Not a people, and then a people

Here is the sentence in Scripture that puts the whole matter beyond argument, and it was written to people exactly like Sam.

Which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God: which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.1 Peter 2:10

Not a people. That is the starting position, and it is not a criticism, it is an address. The whole letter is written to a scattered crowd of people who had no shared history in this at all, and it calls them, on the same line, the people of God.

There is no seniority in that verse. There is a before and there is a now, and the hinge between them is mercy and not tenure.

You have obtained mercy, and you obtained it on a day that had nothing to do with how long anyone else has been coming. It is written in the plainest possible terms, past tense and settled, and the Spirit of God who wrote it to strangers is speaking it into a back row this morning.

The people at the front got in the same door

Now let me take away the last thing still in your hands, gently.

The people who know the tune did not get in through a different entrance. Every single person in that room who belongs, belongs for the sake of Christ, and not one of them earned a longer claim by singing longer. Some of them were carried in as babies and some of them arrived at fifty two, and the door was the same door and the mercy was the same mercy.

So put your arithmetic down, because it has been counting the wrong thing for three Sundays. You are in on the identical terms as the man in the second row who has known that tune since he was four. 1 Peter 2:10 hangs the whole matter on mercy and never on tenure, and His Spirit is at work by the clanking radiator at the back of that room exactly as He is at work in the front half of it.

I am not going to make a pronouncement about anybody in that building, because their standing before God is not mine to announce and never was. What I can tell you is what the terms are, and the terms do not have a clause about upbringing anywhere in them.

His side is finished: the oath, the mercy, the open gateway. Your side is not a probation period. Your side is that you say something to Him, out loud, from wherever you happen to be sitting, the way a woman said it on a road with nobody confirming she was allowed.

And hear those terms land on you rather than on somebody hypothetical. You were brought in at the gateway where the sandal changed hands, and you were brought in there with no year of attendance counted against you first. Ruth 4:7 has that business done publicly and legally in front of the whole town, and the Spirit who carried a foreign widow into the family line of a King is not now holding a man of fifty two at the door of a room he is already inside.