The Words You Both Knew

Ten past two in the morning, third floor, the relatives' room.

There is a vending machine that hums and then stops humming and then starts again, and a stack of magazines with tea rings on them, and a box of tissues that somebody has folded the top of neatly, which is somehow the saddest object in the building.

Her father went down at half nine. Nobody has come out since.

At some point another woman comes in with her coat still on and sits three chairs along, and puts a small worn book with a ribbon in it on her knee and does not open it. They do not speak. Not out of coldness. There is a particular silence that two strangers keep at two in the morning and it is one of the kindest things people do for each other, and neither of them breaks it for about forty minutes.

Here is what our reader has done to herself over the last four years, quietly, without ever announcing it.

She has crossed them all off.

It was not one big row. It was a slow list. That lot, after what happened at the old church. That lot, because of a man on the internet. That lot, because of the way they talked about her sister. That lot, because she went twice and it was like a sales conference. That lot, because of the book with the ribbon in it, actually, if she is being honest, which she is not usually at two in the morning but is now.

And she has arrived, without noticing the moment it happened, at a room with nobody left in it. Not nobody left in the faith. Nobody left she would let pray for her.

Then a nurse puts her head round the door and says a name that is not hers, and the other woman half stands up and sits back down again, and the door closes, and the other woman starts saying something under her breath.

Our Father.

And our reader hears her own mouth join in on hallowed be thy name before she has decided anything at all.

They go all the way through it, three chairs apart, at completely different speeds, both saying trespasses, and neither of them looks up, and at the end neither of them says amen out loud because they both said it in their heads at the same time.

Then the vending machine starts humming again.

What was handed over first

Paul is writing to a church that is arguing. It is the most argumentative church in the New Testament and he has spent fourteen chapters on their arguments, and then he stops and does something you can almost hear him take a breath before.

He tells them what he handed over first.

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.1 Corinthians 15, verses 3 and 4

Of first importance. Which is a phrase that only makes sense if some things are not.

Now, straight away, before this goes anywhere near where you are afraid it is going. Nothing here is telling you that your differences are small. They are not small. Some of them cost you something real and you have the receipts. A few of them are about how people are treated, and those are the ones that do not evaporate in a warm sentence at two in the morning, and this message is not going to hand you a shrug and call it peace.

You will not be told which side you should have taken. Not here, not on any page of this. That is not a dodge, it is a boundary, and it is there because the one thing you cannot afford right now is another person with an opinion about your list. What is written to a church in the middle of an argument was never a verdict on your list. It is a floor under it, and His Spirit is laying it under your feet in this room at ten past two.

What you are being handed instead is a floor.

Christ died for our sins. He was buried. He was raised on the third day. That is the ground you are standing on at ten past two in the morning in a room with a vending machine in it, and here is the thing you had genuinely stopped believing: it is not a small piece of ground. It is the widest piece of ground on this earth. Those three lines are not mine to hand you and not mine to take back. They are what 1 Corinthians 15 calls of first importance, and it is His Spirit setting your weight down on them while you sit there with the paper cup.

The woman three chairs along is standing on it.

So is the man who runs the food bank in the church you walked out of. So is a farmer somewhere who has never heard of any of the arguments that took four years off you. So is a grandmother in a language you do not speak, saying the same few words in her own tongue, tonight, while you are reading this. So are people who would lose an argument with you and people who would win one, and it does not make them right about the argument and it does not make you wrong, and it does not settle a single thing on your list.

It just means you were never standing out there on your own.

You thought the ground had got narrower and narrower until it was the size of one person. What actually happened is that you learned the shape of a floor by being made to look for it, and the floor turns out to run under most of the rooms you have walked out of. That is not sentiment. It is the word Paul says he received before he handed anything on, and His Spirit has been standing you on it through every one of those four years, including the ones you counted as lost.

He is doing this now, tonight, in you. And He is doing it for you personally, not as a general truth about the church. You, in the coat, with the paper cup.