The Ones Who Set Out The Chairs

An hour before you get there, the room is already full.

Not of people like the ones who will fill it later. Of about six. One doing the urn, two on the chairs, somebody up a ladder with the projector that has never once worked first time, somebody in the kitchen counting cups, somebody outside moving a bin because the bin men came on the wrong day again.

Six people, every week, for years.

And then you arrive at four minutes past, and the chairs are out, and the heat is on, and the words are on the wall, and the tea is hot.

Now let me ask you something and you must answer it honestly, in your own head, where nobody can hear you.

How many of those six can you name?

Not recognize. Name. First name, said out loud, in a sentence to their face.

I ask because I have been in a lot of buildings, and there is a pattern in them so consistent that it has stopped being a coincidence. The people who set the room up are known by each other and by the caretaker and by God, and they are largely invisible to the room they set up.

Nobody is unkind to them. Everybody says thank you. There is a slot in the notices twice a year where somebody thanks the team, and everybody claps, and nobody in the room could tell you a single name being clapped for.

And after, when you have gone home to your lunch, the same six put it all away.

James used a much harder word than we would have

There is a passage in James that most of us have read as being about money, and it is about money, but the mechanism he is describing is not about money at all.

Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in filthy old clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, Here is a good seat for you, but say to the poor man, You stand there or sit on the floor by my feet, have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?James 2:2 to 4

Now put the passage down and think about who was in that building an hour before you were. You have been served every week by people the Holy Spirit knows by name, and there is no reading of that sentence in which any of them are furniture.

Judges with evil thoughts. That is not soft language, and James was not a harsh man. He picked it deliberately.

And notice what he does not say. He does not say you insulted the poor man. Nobody in his example insults anybody. Both men are spoken to politely. The rich man is offered a seat and the poor man is offered a place, and every word said is civil.

The sin is the sorting.

The moment a room decides, before anybody has spoken, which people are worth the good chair and which people are furniture, that room has taken up a bench it was never given and started handing down rulings.

Now hear me, my friend, because I teach this way and I am not going to leave you standing under a verse with nothing to hold.

You are not a judge with evil thoughts. You are a person who has never looked, and there is an enormous difference, and the word says God shows no favouritism and the Holy Spirit is the One who has just made a room visible to you that you have walked through a thousand times.

That is not accusation. That is sight, and sight is a gift, and He does not give it in order to leave anybody condemned.

And here is the doctrine underneath, which is the part I actually want you to keep.

The room in Los Angeles in 1906 was in a building nobody respected, led by a man nobody had credentialed, and the people who kept it running were domestic workers who cleaned other people's houses six days a week. The fire did not fall on a platform and trickle down. It fell on the room, and the room was mostly people who were used to being furniture.

That is the founding shape of this whole house. The Spirit was poured out on all people, and the ones He landed on first were the ones nobody had asked the names of.

So when you cannot name the six, you are not committing a crime. You are standing in a room that has quietly organized itself the way every room on earth organizes itself, and Scripture says that sorting is a bench you were never meant to sit on, and the Holy Spirit is inviting you to get off it. Politely. Today.