Eleven Years Of Making The Tea

Eleven years on the tea.

She is not being taken for granted, and she would be the first to tell you so, and she would be annoyed if you suggested it. People thank her constantly. She is thanked more than anybody in that building.

That is not the problem. The problem is much quieter than being unappreciated, and it does not have a word for it, so let me try to build it for you.

There is a shape a person takes in a room over time. And once the shape has set, everybody in the room, including the person, stops being able to see any other shape.

She is the tea. She has been the tea since a Sunday eleven years ago when the woman who did it before moved away and somebody said could you just for this week.

So when there is a thing being planned, and people are being thought of, her name comes up in exactly one context. Reliably. Warmly. Every time.

And she has never said she wanted anything else, because that would sound like a complaint, and because she is not sure she does want anything else, and because underneath both of those there is a third thing which is the real one.

She thinks it might be true.

That is the ache. Not that they think she is only good for the tea. That she has slowly come to suspect they are right.

So let me ask you.

What have you been useful at for so long that nobody can imagine you doing anything else?

He defended her before anybody attacked her properly

There is a scene a few days before the crucifixion in a house in Bethany, and a woman comes in with a jar of something extremely expensive and breaks it open over Jesus, and the room turns on her.

The objection is a good one. It is not a wicked objection. That money could have fed a great many people, and everybody in the room is entirely correct about the arithmetic.

And Jesus stops it, and He says something that I think is one of the kindest sentences in the Gospels, and it is kind in a way that is easy to walk past.

Leave her alone, He said. Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to Me. She did what she could.Mark 14:6 and 8

Notice what He does not say. He does not call it a small thing kindly meant. You have done what you could for eleven years, and it is the Holy Spirit who decided that counts as a beautiful thing rather than a useful one.

She did what she could.

Now hear what that sentence is not. It is not a consolation prize. It does not mean it was not much, but bless her. If that were the meaning, the next line would not be what it is, and the next line is that wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.

He put it in the story. Permanently. In every language. Because of one unasked act by a woman with no standing in that room, whose whole contribution was a thing she happened to have and happened to bring.

And notice what nobody in that house did. Nobody asked her. Nobody put her on a list. There was no rota with her name in the appropriate column. She did a thing that was not her job, in a room where she had a settled shape, and the shape did not survive the evening.

Hear what this makes true of you.

You are not the sum of a function. Scripture puts a permanent memorial on one unasked act by a woman who had no role at all, and the Spirit has not once decided what somebody was for by reading a rota.

And I want to be careful about the tea, because there is a cheap version of this message that despises it, and that version is wrong and would hurt you.

The tea is not beneath you. Eleven years of it is not eleven years wasted, and I will not stand here and call a decade of quiet faithfulness a cage. Some of the deepest people in any building are the ones by the urn, and everybody who has ever been in real trouble knows to go and stand near the kitchen.

The lie is not that the tea matters. The lie is that it is the boundary.

The word says she did what she could, and what she could was never a ceiling in that sentence. It was a description of a woman who reached for the whole of what was in her hands.

The fire this house is named for fell in a stable in 1906 on a room full of people whose whole public identity was what they did for other people six days a week. Domestic workers. Servants. People defined by function.

He fell on the room. He has never once poured Himself out according to the job description.

So you are not the sum of a function. Nobody in that house at Bethany had put her on a list or asked her for a thing, and Mark 14 makes one unasked act permanent in every language the gospel would ever be preached in, and the Spirit He poured out never once read a rota to find out what somebody was for.