The Table Down the Middle Of the Street

The street closure permit says twelve to eight and Yousef has had it taped inside the window of number eleven for three weeks like a diploma.

Nine trestle tables. Two of them are from the school, four from the community center, one from a man on the next block who wanted to know exactly what it was for and then brought two more. They are all different heights, which is going to be a problem and is not going to be a problem.

He has laid them end to end down the middle of his own street, from the fire lane at the top to the mailbox at the bottom, and taped brown paper along the whole length of it, and put out jars with whatever the flower stall had left.

By half past four it looks like a runway.

By five it starts.

They come from both ends. That is the part nobody planned and nobody could have. From the top end the family at number 22 who moved in during March and have said good morning to precisely four people since. From the bottom end the couple at number 4 who have been on this street forty-one years and know the history of every wall on it. The students from the basement apartment, carrying a pot with a towel over it. The man from 17 who does not talk to anybody, walking down the middle of the road with a folding chair under his arm like it is the most normal thing in the world.

Two lines of people, coming toward each other along a street that has never once in its life eaten together.

Somebody's speaker starts up. Somebody's uncle takes over the grill without being asked and turns out to be extremely good at it. A small girl runs the entire length of the brown paper with a marker held out sideways, drawing a line from one end of the street to the other, and nobody stops her, and it becomes the best thing on the table.

And Yousef is standing halfway down with a stack of paper plates in his arms, watching both ends fill in.

He does not know where to sit.

He counts the chairs the way you count anything you have arranged, and they are all spoken for, and it takes him a second to understand why: he never put one down for himself. Not on purpose. It genuinely did not come up. He has been organizing this for three weeks and at no point did the seating include him, because in his own head he is the one who sets the thing up, not the one who eats at it.

The woman from number 4 leans back, hooks a chair out with her foot, and points at it without stopping her conversation.

You do that too. Maybe not with tables.

You are the one who books the room, keeps the group going, remembers the dates, drives people home. And somewhere along the way you stopped counting yourself into the thing you were arranging, and it is so old a habit now that it does not even register as a decision. You have a place at a table you did not arrange, and it was laid before you started counting chairs. Scripture says many come to that table from the east and the west and sit down, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept a place there while you were busy being useful.

Many, from the east and the west

Here is the sentence, and I want you to notice who Jesus was looking at when He said it.

He was standing in front of a Roman officer. A foreigner, an occupier's soldier, a man with no claim on anything and every reason to expect a closed door, who had just said the most extraordinary thing anybody in that Gospel says about authority. And Jesus turned to the crowd and said this:

And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven.Matthew 8:11

Many. Not a few, not a shortlist. From the east and west, which is to say from both ends of the street, from directions nobody was watching. And sitting down, which is the posture of somebody staying, with people they have never eaten with in their lives.

This is the church, and it always was. The bride in Scripture is a whole company, gathered out of everywhere, and the feast ahead is the company at a table rather than any private arrangement between Christ and one person. It is not a romance and it is not a photograph of two people. It is a street full of neighbors who did not know each other.

I am not going to tell you when. Jesus did not, and anybody who does is selling something. No dates, no calendar, no reading of the signs. Just the table, and the many, and the two directions they come from.

You are inside the company He was describing, and He named them as coming before a single one of them had arrived. That is what is written, in a sentence spoken over an outsider, and it is His Spirit who makes a promise about a table land on somebody standing in a street holding paper plates. He did not say some would try to come. He said many come and sit down.

The man who made the table did not have a seat

Now the part I actually want to hand you, because I think it is what has been sitting on your chest for years.

There is a particular kind of person who is always the arranger. Sometimes it is temperament. More often it is what happens to somebody who arrived somewhere as a guest and learned very early that being useful is a safer way to be in a room than simply being in it. If you carry the food, nobody has to decide whether you were invited.

It works. That is the trouble with it. It works so well that you can run a whole life on it and never once be told you have gone wrong.

But look at the cost, because it is exact. Yousef got the street. He did not get the meal. And the reason was not that anybody excluded him, it was that he did the counting himself and left himself out of his own arithmetic, and nobody noticed because he had made it look effortless.

You have been expected at this table the whole time you were arranging other people's chairs. The word says many come from the east and the west and sit down in the kingdom, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been holding that place open, and nothing in the sentence separates the ones who serve from the ones who eat.

And I want to be careful with the serving, because the serving is good. Scripture is full of it and Christ Himself took the towel. The problem is not that you carry things. The problem is the quiet clause you added underneath, the one that says carrying is the only ticket you have.

You were counted into that company before you were any use to anybody. Scripture puts an occupying soldier at the head of that story and calls him the one with the faith worth naming, and the same Spirit who recorded it is at work in you now, and usefulness was never the entry.