Still Room at the Table

They shut the road at ten and the tables come out of the scout hut on a flatbed trolley, eleven of them, end to end down the middle of the street until the line of them nearly reaches the postbox. Somebody has brought a stack of paper cloths and somebody else has brought bulldog clips, because there is always a wind.

She is good at this and everybody knows it. She counts the chairs, works out where the gap has to be for the delivery van, and lays the places: a cup, a plate, a napkin folded once, all the way down both sides. Eighty of them by half eleven. A boy follows her with the cutlery and gets the knives on the wrong side and she says nothing and quietly fixes it behind him.

At noon she will carry the empty trays back to the hut, take her apron off, and walk home. She always does. Somebody will call after her to stay and she will lift a hand and say she has things on, and she will hear the whole street eating from her kitchen with the window open.

Twelve years ago she walked out of all of it, for reasons that were real, and she has never once said out loud what she actually believes about it, which is this: that there was a place with her name on it, and that after twelve years it went to somebody else, and that the polite thing now is to set the tables and go. If that sentence is living somewhere in you too, stay with me a minute. There is a line in the Gospels that a servant says out loud in the middle of a party, and it is about you.

What the servant says when the room is full

The first thing to be clear about, and it governs everything else here, is that the bride in Scripture is not a person. It is a people. The church, a whole company, gathered from everywhere, and that is who Christ has bound Himself to. Nothing in this is private and nothing in it is romantic. It is a household with a table in it, and the question on the table this morning is whether there is a chair.

Jesus told a story about exactly that.

A man throws a great banquet and the guests all excuse themselves, so he sends the servant into the streets and lanes to bring in the poor and the lame and the blind. The servant does it. Then he comes back and says the line.

And the servant said, "Master, what you commanded has been done, and still there is room."Luke 14:22

Still there is room. Not tidied away, not filled up, not reassigned to the more reliable people who were there the whole time. The room is still there, and the master's answer is to send him out again, further, so that the house may be filled.

So hear it plainly, and hear it about you. You have a place at that table and it was never struck off. The company Christ is gathering is not a fixed number of seats where a late arrival displaces somebody, and your years away did not hand your chair to a better candidate. I am not saying that to be kind to you. It is what stands in Luke 14, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a servant's report from a story and lays it across a woman with an apron on.

And notice who is at that table. The people brought in from the lanes are not the ones who had been keeping the diary clear. They arrive with nothing, some of them by force of an invitation they could hardly believe, and they sit down anyway. Nobody in that room got in on the strength of their attendance record. You are one of the ones brought in from the lanes, and you are seated on the invitation rather than on a record.

Which means the twelve years are not a debt.

Let me say that more carefully, because it is where the hurt lives. Nothing here is telling you those years were wasted, and nothing here is asking you to account for them. Whatever happened, and whoever it happened with, this piece is not going to put you in a room to explain yourself. You are not on probation with God. The word says the invitation goes out to people who were nowhere near the house, and His Spirit is the one who carries an invitation to somebody who has already decided they are not on the list.

Now, what this is not.

This is not somebody asking you to go anywhere. There is no instruction here about Sunday, no deadline, no suggestion about the building you left or any other building. An invitation is a statement about the host, not a demand made of the guest, and a host who keeps a place does not stand over it with a stopwatch. What is being said to you is only this: you have a place that is kept, and it is kept by the One who set the table. Scripture puts the invitation in the host's mouth and never in the guest's, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it down a street with eleven tables on it.

And you have a mouth, which is where this stops being an idea about a story and starts being something in your hands.

Jesus put the working measure of faith at a mustard seed, in Matthew 17:20, and that is a smaller thing than the crumb on the paper cloth beside your hand. The mountain in front of you is not the church and it is not the twelve years. It is a sentence you have believed quietly for a long time: my place went to somebody else. You have standing to speak to that sentence, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the way He appointed. The Holy Spirit is the power in it, not the confidence in your voice, and the result belongs to Him.