The Press Runs Again In October

The old screw press sits on a wagon frame under the maples, and it takes four men to load it and one boy to be in the way, and the whole yard smells of cut apple and wet burlap and diesel from the tractor that hauled it up.

Marlin Yoder has not been down this road in nine years.

He is here because Ellis Kanagy asked him for the truck, and a man does not say no to that, and because his granddaughter Nell has been talking about cider press day since the middle of August. He told himself he would drop the truck and go. He has been standing by the tailgate for forty minutes.

Marlin had eleven acres of apples. He had them from his father, who set the first rows in the fifties, and Marlin took over the block in the good years and put in four more rows himself. Then the blight came through. Fire blight in a wet spring, and then a second wet spring on top of it, and by the end of the second one there were more black shepherds' crooks in that orchard than there was fruit.

He pulled the rows out with a rented excavator over two weekends. He sold the sprayer at a consignment sale in Kalona. He took a job driving a school bus, and he drives it well, and he has never once turned down the orchard road since, not even to get to the gravel pit, which adds four miles to a trip he makes twice a week.

There is a block he did not pull. Eight rows at the bottom of the hill, past where the ground gets soft, and the machine could not get in there without sinking, and he told himself he would get them in the fall and then he did not.

He is standing by the tailgate looking at a crate on the ground and he cannot make it come out right in his head.

It is full of apples. Small, some of them scabbed, all of them real. And they are the bottom-block variety. He knows them the way you know a handwriting.

Ellis comes over with his sleeves pushed up and says they have been picking those eight rows for three seasons. Says they do not look like much, says they press better than anything else in the yard, says the acid is right.

Then Ellis points with his chin at the barn wall. There is a sheet of plywood with a schedule chalked on it, half-hour slots from nine to four, names beside them.

Nine thirty, Kanagy. Ten, Bontrager. Ten thirty, the school. Eleven, Yoder.

Marlin says he did not sign up for anything.

Ellis says nobody signed him up this year. Says the eleven o'clock slot has said Yoder on that board every October for nine years, because that was always the Yoder hour, and nobody was going to be the one to rub it out.

Marlin looks at the board for a while. The chalk is fresh, but the handwriting is the same handwriting it has been since he was thirty.

It is quarter to eleven.

You have a road you do not turn down.

Maybe it is a church, maybe it is a family table, maybe it is a room full of people who once knew you well. And you have been certain, with the kind of certainty that never has to be checked because checking would cost too much, that the slot with your name on it got rubbed out and reassigned about a season after you stopped coming.

You are still inside the company Christ gathered, and your place in it was never handed to anybody else. That is what the written word says about the church He purchased, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the length of your absence, who keeps that fact true while you stand at a tailgate.

Nobody rubbed the name off the board

Let me be plain about who is being talked about here, because this site stands or falls on it. When Scripture talks about a people God has bound Himself to, it is talking about the church: the whole company of everyone who belongs to Christ, in every century and on every continent. Corporate, countable, ordinary. Not a private arrangement between Christ and one reader, and never a romance. A nation, a household, a body, a flock.

Now. There is a line in Joel that gets quoted badly, and I want to hand it to you the way it was actually written.

And I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the crawling locust, the consuming locust and the cutting locust, my great army that I sent among you.Joel 2:25

That is spoken to a nation, out loud, in public, after a disaster that everyone in earshot had lived through. Not to a private individual about a private wish. To a people about what God intends toward that people, and every person standing in the crowd is covered by it because they are in the crowd.

And notice what it does not say. It does not say the years were nothing. It does not say the locusts were imaginary or that the blight was a misunderstanding. The loss is named, four times over, in four kinds of insect, by the God who is speaking. Nobody in this is being told that their nine years were a fuss about nothing.

You are not being asked to pretend the years did not cost you anything. Scripture is willing to name what the locust ate before it says one word about restoring, and the Holy Spirit does not need your losses minimized in order to work in the middle of them.

What I am handing you is not a forecast about your orchard. I do not know what God will do with your ground and neither does anybody else, and I am not going to stand here and promise you a harvest so that you feel better for an afternoon. You have an invitation that stands right now, in the present tense, and that is a separate thing from an outcome. The written word says the door of this house was opened by Christ and not by anybody's attendance record, and His Spirit is the one who makes an open door feel like an open door to a person who has been staring at the driveway.

Your slot was never reassigned

Here is the part that I think has hold of you, and it is not really about the road.

It is the arithmetic you have been doing. A body of people needs somebody in the eleven o'clock slot. You were not there. Therefore somebody else was put in it. Therefore going back now means asking a room full of people to make an awkward adjustment for a man who left, and no man with any pride in him is going to do that.

The arithmetic is sound. It is also wrong, because it is arithmetic about a work schedule, and what the written word describes here is not a work schedule at all; it is a covenant, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that difference from staying an abstraction.

You were included by a covenant rather than by a slot on a board, and covenants do not get reassigned when a man stops showing up. That is written all over the way God has dealt with His people, who left and were brought back and left again, and His Spirit is the one who keeps that shape recognizable in a person who has only ever seen it done the other way.

And the invitation on this page comes with nothing attached to it. I am not telling you where to be on Sunday. I am not naming a building, a date, or a thing you owe anybody. There is no appeal being made here at all. There is a fact being stated, and the fact is that the name is still on the board and the chalk is fresh.

You have this invitation free and clear, and there is no bill standing behind it. Scripture puts the whole footing of the church on what Christ gave rather than on what anybody repays, and His Spirit is the one who keeps an invitation from quietly turning into a demand.