Breakfast On the Corner

Dale is on the low wall outside the closed pharmacy at Ninth and Poplar at ten past seven, which is where he is most mornings, because he stopped sleeping past five about four years ago and there is a limit to how long a man can sit in an apartment with the television off.

He is not out here because he has nowhere. He has a second floor place two blocks up with a good radiator. He is out here because the wall gets the sun first and because there is a difference between being alone in a room and being alone outdoors, and anybody who has done both knows exactly what it is.

The church came about a year and a half ago.

They are small. Thirty on a good Sunday, in a brick building on Poplar with a roof they cannot afford and a fellowship hall that used to hold two hundred. At some point they stopped trying to fill it, and instead of waiting for the corner to come to them, they started bringing Sunday out to the corner.

It is not fancy. Two folding tables, a propane griddle, an urn of coffee and an urn of hot water for tea, paper plates, and a young man with a clipboard who nobody has ever seen write anything on it. A woman in her seventies who calls every single person sir or ma'am, without exception, including the teenagers.

By half past seven there are maybe twenty five people on that corner. Some of them are from the building. Most of them are not. There is a guy who cuts hair out of his kitchen, and two women who work the overnight at the nursing home on Grand and come by on their way home, still in scrubs, and a man in a Carhartt jacket who never takes food and always drinks two coffees and argues about the Bengals.

Dale takes the plate the first time because his hands were cold.

He takes it the second time because the eggs were actually good.

The third Sunday, a man about his age comes over with the pot to top up his cup, and Dale says the thing he has been holding all week, which is: you know I'm not one of yours, right. I haven't been inside a church since 2016.

And the man says, that's fine, that isn't what the plate is for. And pours the coffee, and moves on down the wall, and says the same thing to somebody else about something else.

Dale sits there on the wall with a hot plate on his knees, and he is not thinking about God. He is doing arithmetic. Nine years. Nine Christmases, two funerals he did not go to, a whole building he stopped walking into and never once explained why.

That arithmetic is why you are reading this.

You have done it too, with your own numbers, and you have arrived where everybody arrives: at the quiet conclusion that the length of the absence settled the question. Not that anybody threw you out. Just that a chair left empty long enough stops being anybody's chair, and a name left off a list long enough gets absorbed into the paper. You are still invited, right now, in the present tense, and no amount of time has been able to touch that. That is what Scripture says the errand was, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a membership roll, who keeps a person on the mind of God through nine years of silence.

The errand was to the corners

Let me set the site's whole subject down in plain words before we go anywhere, because it needs saying and it needs saying early.

When Scripture calls anybody the bride, it is talking about the church: a whole people, corporate and plural, a company rather than a person. It belongs with the words household, city, body, flock and nation. It has never meant a private romance between Christ and one reader, and if that framing ever made you uneasy, keep the instinct, because the corporate one is what the Bible is actually doing. What follows is about a gathering with the doors open, and about who gets sent to tell people about it.

Jesus told a story about a king who prepared a banquet for his son and found that the people who had been invited would not come. The story has some hard turns in it and it is not a gentle story. But right in the middle of it there is one sentence that is nothing but an errand, and it is the sentence I want you to have.

So go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.Matthew 22:9

Sit with how ordinary that is.

The king does not lower the standard. He does not cancel. He does not send the servants back to the original list to try again with better arguments. He sends them out to where the roads cross, which in that world is the least curated place there is, the spot where you meet whoever happens to be walking past, and he tells them the qualification out loud: anyone you find.

Not anyone who looks likely. Not anyone with the right history. Anyone you find, which is a phrase built specifically to have no filter in it.

You are inside the reach of that sentence, exactly as you are and exactly where you are standing. That is written down in the plainest words the parable has, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries an errand like that across two thousand years and puts it on a low wall outside a pharmacy.

And notice who does the finding in that sentence. The servants go out. The people at the corner do nothing at all to be found. Being there is the whole of the qualification, which is why the errand names no other one.

You were found, and the finding was never something you had to arrange or deserve. Scripture says we love Him because He first loved us, first being the load bearing word in the verse, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the going out while a man is sitting still on a wall in the sun.

Nobody took your place, because nobody could

Here is the fear underneath the arithmetic, and I want to name it because you probably have not said it out loud.

It is not that God is angry. Most people who have been away a long time do not actually think God is angry. What they think is smaller and colder than that: they think the arrangement moved on. That whatever room they had was needed, and somebody with more energy and fewer complications is standing in it now, and it would be indecent to come back and ask for it.

That fear makes sense in every human institution you have ever been part of. It does not make sense here, and here is why.

Your place was never a slot on a schedule. It is a place in a people, and a people is not a fixed number of chairs. The whole picture Scripture uses is a body, and a body does not replace a part because the part went quiet. It waits, and it favors it, and it is incomplete without it, and that is not sentiment, that is the actual argument in First Corinthians about the members that seem more feeble being necessary.

You have a place in this that was never reassigned, and no one has been standing in it. His word says the gifts and calling of God are without repentance, meaning He does not take them back and He does not reissue them, and it is the same Spirit who set you in the body who has kept you accounted for while you sat outside in the sun.

And let me say the other half of that, because you have probably been told the other half wrong. Nothing here says the nine years were wasted. I do not know what those years held and neither does anybody else at that table. God is not standing over a ledger of what you missed. The errand in that parable is not go and remind them of the lost time. It is go and invite.

You have not been handed a bill for the missing years, and no back payment is being collected here. His word says He restores the years the locust has eaten, restoring being His verb and not a task He set you, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a promise that old land on a man doing arithmetic with a plate on his knees.