Down One Aisle

The line starts at the back doors and runs the whole length of the center aisle, and it does not hurry.

It is harvest Sunday and everybody has brought something. A crate of butternut squash goes past on a man's shoulder, and he is holding it the way men hold things they intend you to notice they are holding. Two boys carry one sack of rice between them, arguing the whole way about whose end is heavier. Somebody's grandmother has sent a foil tray of callaloo with the corners folded down tight, and the girl carrying it is carrying it level at chest height, the way you carry a baby, because she has been told exactly once what will happen if she tips it.

Verna is about forty rows back with a plastic bag of yams.

She bought them Friday at the corner store on Halsey. Three yams. She picked them slowly, and the slowness was not about the yams, it was arithmetic. There is a folded envelope in the pocket of her coat with a number on it and a date, and the date is the ninth, and today is the second. She has some of the number. She does not have the rest of it. She has been carrying both of those facts around all week, one in each hand, like buckets.

The line moves. The organ is being generous with a hymn everybody knows, and the volume in the room is the volume of people who are enjoying themselves. Up front the tables are filling in a way that has stopped being orderly. There are crates going underneath the tables now. Somebody has put a bag of onions on a chair.

When it is her turn Verna sets the bag down on the corner of the near table, and she turns it so the store label faces away from the room, which she is aware is a small vanity, and she does it anyway.

Then she steps back to let the woman behind her through, and she turns around.

And what she sees is the line still coming. Coming from the doors, all the way up, still coming. And the thing at the front is not two hundred gifts. It is one harvest. Her bag has already gone under a crate of apples, and if she wanted to she could not pick her own three yams back out of that table now, not if she got down on her knees and looked.

Maybe you know that arithmetic. Maybe your envelope is a different envelope and your number is a different number, and the ache underneath it is the same one: that whatever God is doing on the grand scale, in the big room, with the singing, it is a size that does not seem to have anything to do with the size of your Tuesday. You are inside a company that is not the sum of what its members brought, and you are inside it right now, at your actual size. Scripture put you there, not sentiment, and the Holy Spirit is the one making these words land somewhere in you instead of just passing through.

The word was always plural

Let me be plain early, because the word this whole site is named for gets read wrong constantly, and the wrong reading is the one that would hurt you.

When Scripture calls the church a bride, it is not describing a private feeling between one heart and Christ. It is not a romance and it was never handed to anybody as one. It is a covenant word, a legal and public word, and it is spoken over a whole people: the church, all of it, across every century and every language, the ones in the pews and the ones in prison and the ones who have not been inside a building in eleven years. One people. Christ bound Himself to that people. That is what the word carries, and the moment it gets read as a private arrangement it has been made smaller than it is, and a promise handed to a crowd ends up alone in a room with one person who is sure they are not enough for it.

So the sentence you are looking for is not I am His bride. It is we are His, and I am inside that we. And that is far better news for a woman with a plastic bag, because a promise made to a people does not have to be earned by any one member of it before it covers them.

You are inside that we, and you were inside it before you understood a word of it. Ephesians 5 says Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her, corporately, a whole body, and the Holy Spirit is the one who joins a person into that body, which is why a feeling of belonging was never what put you there.

Here is the ground under it.

who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.Titus 2:14

Read what that verse is doing. He gave Himself. He redeemed. He purified. Every verb in the sentence has the same subject, and the subject is not you. And the object of all that work is not an individual, it is a people for his own possession, and the church is that people. You are part of a people He bought and purified at His own cost, and your place in that people is already settled. That is the written word and not a warm feeling about it, and the same Holy Spirit who moved Paul to write a people for his own possession is the one standing over you while you read it.

Nobody in that harvest line bought their place in the harvest with what they carried. The boys with the rice did not, and the man with the squash did not, and the grandmother who sent callaloo she was too unwell to bring herself did not. The table was set before any of them left the house.

What a people has to do with the ninth of the month

Now the honest question, because I am not going to float over it.

What does any of this have to do with the number in Verna's coat?

Not what you might be braced for. Her three yams did not buy anything. There is no exchange running here, no arrangement where what she carried up front comes back to her as a figure on the ninth, and if anybody has ever taught you that, put it down. That is not what a covenant is. A covenant is one party binding Himself, out loud, and then keeping it because of who He is rather than because of how the other party is doing.

What it has to do with her rent is this. The God who bound Himself to a whole people is not a God who then loses track of the individuals inside it. He purified a people. He also numbers hairs. Both of those are His, in the same Scriptures, in the same character, and the second is not a smaller hobby He does on the side.

So the ninth is still the ninth, and I am not going to stand here and tell you what happens on it, because I do not know and nobody honest does. You are held inside a covenant Christ keeps from His side, and that is true today whatever your arithmetic says tonight. His word says He purified a people for His own possession, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact you can stand on rather than a nice line you read once.

And there is one more thing a people is for. Zealous for good works, the verse says, and it says it about the people, not about you on your own. That is a table with crates going under it. That is two boys and a sack of rice. Whatever comes to you through hands like those is not charity you have to be ashamed of, because a people purified for Himself is where the kindness of God usually walks around wearing shoes.

You are on the receiving side of that people as much as the carrying side, and neither side is where your standing comes from. Titus 2 says the good works belong to the whole company He purified, and the Holy Spirit is the one who distributes what each part of it does, which means no member of it is ever only a contributor.