The Seat You Think Is Spare

She is early because the bus only runs twice on a Sunday morning and the second one is too late. So for nine years she has stood inside the entrance at twenty past nine with her hand flat against the door, holding it open, because the closer broke years ago and her hand does the job.

Hundreds have walked in under her arm. She knows most of their names and half of their children's, and she says the same four things every week: come in out of that, you are all right, mind the step, there is tea. Then she takes her seat, fourth row on the left, by the radiator that ticks.

Nobody put her on a schedule. Nobody asked her to hold that door, and nobody asked her to stop. She is a name on a roll and a coat over the back of a chair. Somewhere around the fourth year she came to a conclusion about herself she has never said out loud, because saying it would sound like fishing, and she is not fishing. She only wants to know if she is in this, or near it.

The conclusion was this: that the whole morning would run exactly the same if she were not there.

Then a wet Sunday in February, rain coming sideways off the parking lot. A young man had sat in his car for eleven minutes with the engine off, having talked himself out of going in twice, there only because he had run out of anywhere else to be.

What brought him in was not the preaching, which he had not heard, and not the singing, which he could not hear from the car. It was that somebody stood in that doorway with her hand on it, and by the time he got close the door was being held for him in particular. It takes more nerve to turn away from a person than to walk past a hinge.

He came in out of that. She said, you are all right, mind the step, there is tea. He sat at the back. She never knew. It has never appeared on a sign-up sheet or in any minutes.

It is written down. Not there. Written down where this kind of thing is actually kept, and I will tell you plainly: the Holy Spirit was doing business in that doorway.

You have a door too, and you may have stopped seeing it, because the things our hands do unasked are the first things we stop counting. You have a fourth row on the left, and a conclusion you came to somewhere around the fourth year. Sit with me a while. I want to tell you what God calls that seat.

Unnoticed and unnecessary are two different words

Let me say the low part first. You will not trust the lift if I walk past the pit.

It is not unhappiness. You would defend that church to anybody who said a word against it. When somebody is thanked from the front the gladness is real, and at the same moment something small goes tight under your ribs, and then the tightness shames you, so you put it away with the others. Two weathers at once is not a failure of love. It is what belonging does when it cannot find anywhere to land.

The worst of it is not the tightness. It is the arithmetic. Somewhere in you the sum is already done: take me out of that room and the service still starts, the songs still get sung, the chairs still get stacked, and the only difference in the world is one fewer name on a list. That is the sum you have never said out loud, and I am saying it for you so you do not carry it alone.

So here is the first true thing, and it is not my encouragement, it is the written word over you. You are not a spectator in that room. Scripture says God set the members, every one of them, in the body just as it pleased Him, and set is a word for a thing put where somebody wanted it, 1 Corinthians 12:18. The Holy Spirit did that setting, and He did not run short of thought by the time He reached your row.

Paul makes an anatomy argument in that chapter with a straight face. He lets the eye try to dismiss the hand and the head the feet, refuses them both, and then says the thing nobody expects.

Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary.1 Corinthians 12:22

Necessary. Stay in that word a moment.

Necessary is not a compliment. Welcome is a compliment, and welcome is what you say to a guest at the door of a house that is not theirs. Necessary is what an engineer says about a part that cannot come out, and you have a place in that body that was assigned and not merely tolerated. Notice which members the verse means: not the ones anybody can see working, but the ones that seem more feeble, the ones no announcement is made about. That is the word Scripture puts over them, and the Spirit who breathed the line through Paul did not leave your row out of it.

The conviction under a church of this shape has always been that the church is the people in it. So on Sunday you are not arriving at the church. You are part of what arrives. Scripture has no category for an attender, and the Holy Spirit does not hand His gifts to the front and leave the room watching: the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal, 1 Corinthians 12:7.

A priesthood of all believers means the whole room is priests, not that the room is watching one. You are a priest in that seat, right now, because the Holy Spirit made you one when He put you into Christ, 1 Peter 2:9. Priests do not attend. Priests carry, and bless, and stand in for people, and most of that work has never needed a microphone.

Two things have to move before any of this is any use, and I will move them gently. The first is a suspicion that this was a Corinthian arrangement, a first-century way of running a small church, admirable and finished. But the giving is written in the present tense: the Spirit divides to every man severally as He wills, and wills is a verb He is doing this morning, in that building, over that carpet.

The second is closer to the bone, and it is the one that has you. You believe all of this about everybody else in the room and you are not sure it is about you, because you know what you have to offer and you have been counting for nine years. So let me put it in the second person, where it belongs. You were set. Not welcomed, not accommodated, not squeezed in at the end. Set, by God, on purpose, and the Spirit who did it does not do filler, and 1 Corinthians 12 is written about the room you sit in this Sunday.

Unnoticed and unnecessary are two different words, and only one of them is about you. The doorway never needed a schedule to be a doorway.