The Line That Never Closes

Wednesday supper is at six, and the hallway outside the fellowship hall smells like a hundred church basements smell on a Wednesday: coffee, floor wax, and something with noodles in it.

Wendell is standing in that hallway because he came in the side door to use the restroom on his way home from a job in the next county, and now he is reading the corkboard the way a man reads a corkboard when he does not want to walk back past the door.

He is sixty-one. He drove past this building for eleven years without slowing down. Before that there were some years he does not go over anymore, not because they were dramatic but because going over them has never once helped.

The clipboard hangs from a nail. Four sign up sheets, each on its own page.

October work day. Twelve lines, twelve names, and somebody has drawn a neat pen line under the last one and written CLOSED.

Nursery rotation. Full through December.

Meal train for the Hendersons. Every slot taken, two of them doubled up.

Van drivers. Closed, with a note about the license.

And then, at the bottom of the board, on a half sheet of paper in different handwriting, no lines, no numbers, no boxes:

Wednesday supper. Anyone at all. No need to sign.

Wendell reads it. Then he reads it again. Then he stands there long enough that a woman carrying a tray of rolls says excuse me, hon, and goes past him through the door, and the noise of the room comes out into the hallway and then goes back in when the door swings shut.

That is your hallway too.

You know what it is to look at a list of things that closed while you were not there. Not one dramatic exit, just a long stretch of not going, and at some point in it a decision made itself: that whatever door there was, it is a door other people are inside of now, and the correct and dignified thing is not to make anybody explain that to you.

You are looking at an invitation that is open right now, and it has no name and no closing date written on it. Scripture ends on that invitation and it is written down in the last chapter of the book, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named as one of the two voices saying it.

Look at who is doing the inviting

The Bible does not end on a warning or a summary. It ends on somebody saying come, four times in one verse.

The Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let the one who hears say, Come. And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without cost.Revelation 22:17

Read who is speaking. The Spirit, and the bride.

And that second one is the thing I want you to see, because it settles what the word means better than any argument could. The bride here is not sitting still being admired. She is talking. She has a voice, and she is using it to invite other people in.

That is a company. A whole church, all of it at once, standing at the end of the story with the Holy Spirit and saying the same word He is saying. It is not a private romance between Christ and a reader, and it never was. This is the last picture the Bible gives of the church, and in it she is a people at a door calling out.

You are inside the company that is doing the inviting, and that is a settled fact rather than a hope. The word puts the bride's voice right there next to the Spirit's in Revelation 22, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an invitation spoken two thousand years ago land on a man in a hallway tonight.

There is no name on it

Now look at who it is addressed to, because this is the part that has been shut off from you.

Not the one who came back in time. Not the one who kept up. Not those with a good record of attendance. Scripture says the one who is thirsty, and the one who desires.

Those are the only two qualifications in the sentence, and neither of them is an achievement. Thirst is not a virtue. It is a condition. It is the thing you already have.

You have the one qualification the last invitation in Scripture asks for, and you have had it the whole time. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a general word and makes it specific to a person standing at a corkboard reading it twice.

And there is no date. Look for one. The clipboard has a closing date on four sheets and none on the fifth, and Scripture is the fifth sheet. I am not going to put a deadline on you here, because the text does not have one, and any urgency I manufactured would be mine and not God's.

I am also not going to tell you where to go on Sunday. That is not what this is. This is an invitation stated, and a stated invitation is complete without an answer attached to it tonight.

Nobody was keeping the count you think they were keeping

Here is the quiet thing underneath, and I want to name it because it is doing more work than the years did.

You are carrying a number. The years, or the Sundays, or the Christmases. You have added them up privately, and you have decided that the number is what somebody would see first.

Scripture does not run that ledger anywhere in this verse. It says whoever. That is what the word means.

You are not carrying a debt at that door, and the invitation does not have a balance attached to it. His word says the water is taken without cost, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a person able to hear the word whoever as a word that includes them rather than a word about a crowd.