A Class Of Three

Loretta gets to the room at nine, the way she has got to that room at nine since the Reagan administration, and puts the heater on, because the basement holds cold like a grudge.

The table seats twelve. She sets it for twelve out of habit and then stops herself and takes nine of the paper cups back off, and pours the crackers into the three that are left.

Trey is coming, probably, unless his grandmother's shift changed. And the two sisters, Nia and the little one whose name Loretta will not risk in print because she gets it wrong half the time and the child has started correcting her with great patience.

She has cut nine felt sheep. She counted them out last night at her kitchen table without thinking about it and she is not going to admit that to anybody.

Thirty-one years. In 1997 this room had twenty-six children in it and two helpers and a waiting list for the Christmas program, and there is a photograph on the wall by the light switch to prove it. She has taught the parents of two of the children currently attending. She knows the felt board so well she could tell you which sheep has lost its backing and needs a fresh piece of tape.

Nine o'clock becomes twenty past. Trey comes down first, then the sisters, and the little one has a scab on her knee she is extremely proud of and needs everybody to see.

They do the lesson. The lost sheep, again, because it is the one that works. Nia is genuinely interested and asks a hard question about whether the ninety-nine were scared, and Loretta says that is a very good question and gives an honest answer, which is that the story does not say.

Then it is the felt board, and there is glue involved, and Loretta is on her knees on that basement floor at sixty-eight years old, which she will feel tomorrow.

And the little one, halfway through pressing a sheep on upside down, says, "Miss Loretta, are you here next week?"

And Loretta says, "Yes, baby."

And the child says, "Okay," and goes back to the sheep.

That is all. That is the whole moment. But Loretta stays on her knees for a second longer than she needs to, because the yes came out of her mouth before any part of her was consulted. Automatic. Thirty-one years of automatic. And she has been calling that automatic thing deadness for about two years now.

Maybe you have your own automatic yes, and maybe you have been calling it the same thing. Hear this before we go on: you are keeping a covenant, and a covenant that runs when you feel nothing is a covenant working exactly as designed. That is the written word's account of faithfulness and not a compliment I am paying you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been carrying the automatic yes you have been ashamed of.

He opens with the words I know

In the book of Revelation there are seven letters to seven congregations, and they are letters to churches, plural, whole rooms of people, which is the thing this entire site is about: the bride in Scripture is the church, a people, corporate, across every century, and never one person's private arrangement with Christ. He writes to companies. He always has.

And to one of those congregations, at Thyatira, He opens like this.

I know your works, your love and faith and service and patient endurance, and that your latter works exceed the first.Revelation 2:19

Sit with the first three words for a moment, because everything is in them. I know.

Not I have reviewed. Not I have been informed. He knows, the way you know a thing you have watched from the inside. And then look at what He lists, because He is precise: love, faith, service, patient endurance. Not attendance. Not growth. Not the Christmas program in 1997. And then the last clause, which is the one that should sit you down: your latter works exceed the first.

The later ones. The tired ones. The ones done in a smaller room with fewer people and less feeling. You are being watched by a Christ who ranks the later work higher, and He has already said so in writing. That is Revelation 2, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps the record He is reading from, which means He is not consulting a headcount to work out what your Sundays have been.

The felt sheep and the dry Sunday

Now the two things you are quietly convicting yourself with, and I want to take them one at a time.

The first is the number. Three children at a table for twelve, and a photograph by the light switch with twenty-six in it, and the arithmetic between those two facts running in your head all week like a tap left on. You have started reading the count as a verdict on you.

It is not a verdict. It is a count. Numbers in a room are made of a hundred things: neighborhoods change, shift patterns change, a factory closes, a generation moves out of a zip code. You are not the reason the room is smaller, and no line of Scripture makes a servant responsible for the size of the crowd. He said I know your works, your love and faith and service and patient endurance, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been present at every one of those Sundays, and there is no attendance column anywhere in that sentence.

The second thing is the dryness. That you feel nothing now. That the yes comes out automatically and it used to come out warm, and you have decided that the change is evidence of something rotten in you.

Let me be careful and plain here, because this is where people get hurt.

Dry feeling is not distance. Dry feeling is not sin. It is not God withdrawing and it is not you backsliding quietly, and the fact that you cannot manufacture the 1997 feeling on demand is not a verdict either. Feelings are weather. Covenant is climate. And a covenant that only holds on the days the weather is good was never doing any work at all.

You are held in a covenant that does not run on your emotional temperature, and it is holding this morning at whatever temperature you are. The word says He knows the service and the patient endurance, which are both words for things done without a feeling attached, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping you in the room, which is why the automatic yes is evidence of Him rather than evidence against you.

And I am not going to hand you a routine to fix it. No regime, no five practices, no thing you have to maintain to get the warmth back. You have been maintaining something for thirty-one years already, and the last thing you need is somebody adding a program to it.