The Certificate That Expired

It ran out in the March of a year she would rather not name, and she has never renewed it.

There was no scandal. Nobody took it off her. Her life got very complicated for about eighteen months in a way that was nobody's fault, and there was a fee, and there was a form, and there was a day, and she missed all three.

And then she was on the other side of it, and going back felt like an admission, and the longer she left it the bigger the admission got.

Nine years.

Here is what she still does. She sits with dying people. She has done it for nineteen years and she is extraordinary at it and every hospice within twenty miles knows her name. She prays with families in the worst hour of their lives and she does not flinch and she does not rush and she never once says the wrong thing.

And here is what she has done for nine years, every single time, without exception. When somebody asks what she is, she says: oh, I just visit.

Just.

Nine years of a word doing a job it was never meant to do.

She is not lying to anybody. She is not passing herself off as anything. Nobody in any of those houses has ever asked to see a document, and if they had she would have told them the plain truth without hesitating.

But inside, in the place where a person knows what they are, there is a woman behaving like a fraud.

So let me ask you.

What piece of paper are you behaving as though you no longer have?

Paul was asked for his papers and this is what he said

There was a real problem in Corinth and it was exactly this problem.

People had turned up with letters of recommendation, which was the normal and proper system of that world, and quite right too. And the question was being asked, not unreasonably, about Paul: where are his?

And Paul, who could have produced a great deal if he had wanted to, answers with one of the most audacious sentences he ever wrote.

You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.2 Corinthians 3:2 and 3

Look at what he does. He does not say credentials are worthless. He does not sneer at the system; Paul was a man who knew exactly what his own training was worth and said so elsewhere.

He says: the letter exists. It has been written. And it is written in people.

Now let me be precise, because I teach this way and vagueness here would rob you.

There are two different things in your situation and you have been treating them as one, and that is the whole trouble.

There is a professional and legal standing, which is a real thing, which lapsed, and which matters in the settings where it matters, and which you should probably deal with. I am not going to pretend that away and I am not going to tell you paperwork is unspiritual. It is not unspiritual. It is administration, and administration is a gift listed in the same chapter as prophecy.

And then there is what you are.

Those are not the same thing, and one of them expired in March, and the other one has never had an expiry date printed on it anywhere, in any document, in any covenant, in the whole of Scripture.

Hear where you stand. You are not operating without authority. Second Corinthians says the letter is written with the Spirit of the living God on human hearts, and the Holy Spirit never once issued a calling with a renewal fee attached.

Nineteen years of dying people. Ask yourself, precisely and honestly, which of those two things has been in the room with you.

The fire this house is named for fell in 1906 in a stable in Los Angeles, and the man it fell on had no credential of any kind that anybody in that city recognized. He had been made to listen to the class from the hallway. Every letter of recommendation in that story belonged to the people who wrote the newspapers.

And the letter that has actually lasted is the one written in the people who were on the planks.