Even On My Servants

He has the keys. He has had the keys for twenty-two years.

He is there at half past six on a Sunday to put the heat on, because a cold building takes three hours and nobody thinks about that except him. He is there on a Thursday for the funeral and on a Tuesday for the toddlers and on a Saturday when somebody has left the tap running again in the small kitchen.

His name is on nothing. There is no photograph of him on any wall. In the folder where the church keeps its documents he appears once, as a line item, under maintenance.

And he is not sad about it. Do not make the mistake of thinking he is sad about it. He loves that building the way a man loves a boat.

But ask him, gently, at half past six on a Sunday in the dark with the boiler ticking, whether he thinks God pours out His Spirit on people, and he will say yes, immediately, and he will mean it entirely.

And then ask him whether he thinks God pours it out on him.

And you will watch a very steady man look for something to do with his hands.

Ah, he will say. Well. That is more for the ones up front.

Twenty-two years of keys and boilers and taps, and a promise he believes in for everybody except the man holding the torch.

So let me ask you.

What do you do all week that you have decided is too ordinary for God to pour on?

He did not have to say that verse

Peter is quoting Joel to a crowd, and the quotation runs the way you would expect until it comes to a verse that stops me every time I read it.

Even on My servants, both men and women, I will pour out My Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.Acts 2:18

Hear the word even, my friend, and hear what it is doing there. You are the reason that clause exists, because the promise was already complete without it, and the Holy Spirit had it written in anyway for the man who would be holding the keys.

Even. It is a small word and it is doing enormous work.

Understand who that verse is naming. In that world, a servant was not a job description. It was a position in a household, and it meant that your time was not your own, and that your name was not on anything, and that when the household was listed you were listed with the property.

And into a promise about the last days, in front of a crowd of religious people from fifteen nations, God has a line specifically for them. Not by implication. Not tucked inside a general all people, though He had already said that too, one verse earlier.

He said it again, separately, about servants.

He did not have to. That is the thing I want you to sit with. The promise was already complete without that verse. All people covers a caretaker. Nobody could have complained.

He said it anyway, because He knew exactly who would need to hear their own position read out loud before they would believe they were in a sentence.

So here is where you stand, my friend, and I want you to hear it in the dark with the boiler ticking.

You are not outside the promise because your work has no title. Scripture names servants specifically, men and women, and it names them in the same breath as the prophecy, and the Holy Spirit has never once read a staff list to find out who was worth falling on.

And there is something else, and I want to put it carefully because it is the whole heart of this house.

The fire that this whole site is named for fell in 1906 in a building that had been a stable, on a street nobody respected, in a meeting run by a man who had been made to sit in a hallway because he was not permitted in the classroom. And the people who filled that room were domestic workers. They cleaned other people's houses six days a week and came in the evening and sat on planks laid across nail kegs.

Nobody there had a title. That is not a footnote to the story. That is the story.

The Spirit did not come down the hierarchy. He fell on the room, and the room was servants.

And you are not standing outside anything, my friend. Acts 2 names servants specifically, men and women, in a promise that already covered them, and the Holy Spirit never once read a staff list before falling on a room.