Forty Pairs of Hands

The husks come out of the soaking tubs a little after six, and by half past, the hall smells the way it only smells one week a year.

Five tables down the middle of the room, pushed end to end under the strip lights, and about forty people working them. Table one sorts and dries the husks. Table two spreads the masa, thin, with the back of a spoon, and there is a right way to do that which nobody can explain and everybody can see. Table three fills. Table four folds them and stands them up in the pans like books on a shelf. Table five steams, and table five is where the arguing happens, because table five is where the timing lives.

Ramon is on table three. He has been on table three for six years.

He gets there before the coffee is on. He brings his own spoon, a battered one from his own kitchen with the handle bent at an angle that suits his wrist, because the church spoons are too shallow and he is not going to say so out loud to anybody. He fills. Pork on the left pans, chicken and green sauce on the right, the sweet ones with raisins at the end, because the sweet ones are for the children and the children come last. He does not talk much. He laughs at the jokes about a beat behind everybody else, the way a man laughs when he is listening carefully and does not want to interrupt.

And every year, when the last pan goes into the steamer and somebody claps and somebody's aunt starts singing, Ramon puts the spoon in his coat pocket and goes home before the coffee.

He has never signed the sheet on the wall by the door. The sheet says MINISTRIES across the top in marker, with a column ruled under each one, and he has worked in that kitchen for six Decembers and his name is not in any column. It never seemed right to put it there. He fills. That is not a ministry. That is a man who happens to be all right at filling.

Then this year Dona Carmen, who has run that kitchen since before those strip lights went in, cannot find her reading glasses. She pushes the clipboard across the masa table at him without looking up and says, read it out for me, my eyes are gone.

So he reads. Forty pans for the vigil. Twenty for the ones who cannot get out of the house. Fifteen for the men who come on Thursday nights. And halfway down the page, in Dona Carmen's handwriting, in ink, from a list she wrote in November before anybody had been asked anything:

Ramon's table does the pork.

He reads it twice. The room keeps going on around him, the spoons keep scraping, somebody drops a lid. He is standing there holding a clipboard with his own name written in ink, inside a sentence he never applied for.

You know this from your own side of it. Somewhere there is a room you have been useful in for years without ever once believing you were counted in it. You do the thing you are all right at, and then you leave before the part where people stand around with cups, because standing around with cups is for family, and at some point you cannot even date, you decided quietly that you are the help. So here is the sentence to start with, before any of the teaching. You are inside the company Christ bound Himself to, and you were inside it long before anybody asked what you were good at. That is not warmth I am generating to move you. It is what Scripture says God did with a whole people, out loud, in front of everybody, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence like that off the page and sets it down in a man's chest where he can feel the weight of it.

The promise was made to a whole people

Something has to be said plainly here at the start, because this word gets misheard constantly, and a misheard word cannot comfort anybody.

When Scripture calls the church a bride, it is not describing a private romance between Jesus and one person. It is not a feeling you are supposed to work up in a quiet room, and it is not an intimacy you have been failing to produce. The bride in Scripture is the church: one whole people, gathered out of every nation and every century, the living and the long dead, millions of them, most of them ordinary, almost none of them impressive on paper. Christ committed Himself to that company. The picture is a covenant, made publicly, over a crowd, and the crowd is the point.

That is why the language of Scripture keeps going plural on this subject. He is not the head of a person. He is the head of a body. He does not keep a favorite; He keeps a household, and a household is a lot of people in one kitchen, most of whom privately think somebody else is the real family.

You have a covenant standing over you that was never written to one name at a time. His Spirit is the one who holds that standing steady in a man who has never once written his own name on the sheet. Look at how God said it the first time, at a mountain, with the smoke still on it, to a nation that had been slaves eleven weeks earlier and had already complained twice about the water.

Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine.Exodus 19:5

Read who is being addressed there. Ye. Ye, ye, ye, plural in every clause, spoken over the whole camp at once and not into anybody's ear privately. There is no version of that sentence where the treasured possession is one impressive Israelite and everyone else is staff. The treasure is the company. That is what stands written in Exodus 19, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it land on a person as fact rather than as a nice idea about somebody else. You are inside a treasured possession that God named in the plural, and no vote was ever taken about you.

Help can quit. A covenant cannot be resigned from quietly

Here is the difference the whole thing turns on, and it is not a small one.

A role is something you hold. You can hold it well or badly. You can put it down. Nobody has to fire you from a role you never officially had, which is exactly why a man can work six Decembers and still consider himself a visitor with a spoon: he never signed anything, so nothing has to be torn up. It is a status you can leave without a conversation, and men who are afraid of being asked to go often prefer it that way. If you never joined, nobody can unjoin you. You are in something sturdier than a role, and it does not depend on your handwriting appearing anywhere. Scripture calls it a covenant on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a word like that stop being vocabulary.

A covenant does not work like that. A covenant is something done to you and over you by somebody with the authority to do it, and it does not run on your estimate of your own contribution. Christ did not enter an arrangement with the church that gets reviewed at the end of the quarter. He bound Himself. That is the whole force of the word, and it is why Scripture reaches for covenant language rather than employment language every single time it describes what He has done with His people.

So the question of whether you belong is not a question about how you are getting on. You are held by a promise you did not negotiate, and it is already settled from His side. His word says Christ gave Himself for the church, and the Holy Spirit is named there as the seal on it, the deposit, the down payment God does not go back on.