The Book Nobody Threw Away

There is a dumpster in the parking lot and six of them working, and the rule for the day, agreed over the first pot of tea, is that if nobody has used it since the boiler was changed then it goes.

So out it all comes. A box of overhead projector sheets. Two hundred hymn books with the covers gone. A nativity donkey with one ear. Somebody's reading glasses from an unknown decade, and a Christmas tree stand with a note taped to it in handwriting nobody recognizes saying do not throw away. There is a lot of laughing. Two of them are having a genuinely enjoyable argument about the donkey.

And then out of the very back of the bottom cupboard, under the tablecloths, comes a hard-backed minute book with a marbled cover, and the woman who finds it opens it standing up, because you do.

She reads for about a minute and a half and then she stops laughing.

It is all in there. The proposal, the amendment, the vote, the numbers. And a sentence recorded in careful fountain pen about a family, named in full, who are still in this village and have not come through that door in thirty-one years. Nothing dramatic. Just the flat, minuted violence that committee language can carry when it is doing its worst work, sitting on the page as calmly as an order for hymn books.

She closes it. Somebody asks if it goes in the skip. And she says no, without knowing why, and puts it on the windowsill.

Twenty years she has given this place. She loves it. And standing there with the dust of that cupboard on her sleeves, the thought that goes through her is not the tidy one, it is this: why has He not just walked away from us. Because she knows what is in that book, and she knows what is not in it: the things nobody minuted, the ones people still carry. And she has a line of her own in the unwritten version, from a Tuesday she does not talk about.

Perhaps you know that thought. Perhaps yours is not a minute book at all, but a thing that happened to you in a building like that, or a thing you did in one. And underneath it, the honest question this whole message is here to answer: if He has actually read it, all of it, why is He still here.

He has read the whole book

Let me be plain before we go one step further, because a great deal of writing on this subject is not.

Nothing on this page is going to tell you that what happened was fine. It was not fine. Harm done inside a church is not smaller for the postcode it happened in, and it does not become part of a plan because somebody found a verse afterwards. If something was done to you by people who sang on Sundays, I am not going to smooth that over to get to a comforting ending, and if anybody has ever asked you to, they were asking you for the wrong thing.

And I am not going to prosecute anybody either. There is no tradition being blamed here and no congregation being made an example of. What is in that minute book is in every minute book, in some form, everywhere, because the church is made of people and always has been.

So both of those are true, and neither cancels the other, and we can now ask the real question. Given all of it, why is He still standing in the room.

If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.2 Timothy 2:13

Read the reason at the end, because the reason is everything. Not because we are worth it. Not because it will probably improve. He cannot deny Himself. His faithfulness is not a response to our performance, it is a property of His own nature, which means it is not on a scale that our failures can move. He would have to stop being who He is before He could leave.

So take this as settled rather than as hoped for: you are inside a keeping He has never once put up for review. He has not left, and He is not leaving, and that is not a comment on how the church has behaved. It is a statement about Him. Scripture puts the whole weight of it on the fact that He cannot deny Himself, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line written to a young minister in a hard century and makes it land on a woman with dust on her sleeves.

Now let me show you the most extraordinary thing about how He deals with churches, because it is not what people expect.

At the beginning of Revelation, John turns round and sees seven golden lampstands, and one like a son of man standing in the middle of them. The lampstands are the churches. Read that again: the very first picture we are given of the risen Christ and His churches is Him standing in the middle of them. Not observing from a height. In among.

And then He dictates seven letters, and He is devastating in them. He names what is wrong with a precision no committee would dare. He tells one church it has left its first love. He tells another it has a reputation for being alive and is not. He does not soften a single thing and He does not pretend not to have noticed.

And to the worst of them, the one He describes in the most unflattering terms in the whole book, He says this: behold, I stand at the door and knock. Revelation 3:20. He is outside the door of a church that has locked Him out of its own building, and what He is doing there is knocking.

So hear it, as a people and not merely as a person: you are not being tolerated here and neither is anybody else in that hall. He has read the whole book, He has said out loud what is in it, and He is still at the door with His hand raised. That is what stands written, and His Spirit is the one who takes an ancient letter to a church that thought it needed nothing and lays it across a Saturday clear out.

And notice where that puts you. You are not standing outside this keeping, hoping to be included on the strength of your own record. You are held inside a covenant that is being kept from His side, along with everybody else in that hall and everybody named in that book. The promise was made to a people, and being part of a people means His faithfulness reaches you the same way the roof does.

The last thing is the smallest, and it is what turns all of this from information into something you actually say. Jesus put a seed against a mountain and said the seed speaks, Matthew 17:20. Not the seed campaigns, not the seed proves itself first. A word said out loud, from the smallest possible starting point, about a thing far larger than the person saying it.

So say it. You have the standing for it, and it is not something you worked up: you speak as somebody representing the King, carrying what He has already said, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives the sentence its weight rather than the state of your feelings about church this week.