Somewhere With More History

He has never said it out loud because it would sound like a complaint about home, and it is not that.

It is a picture he carries, and he did not choose it, and he could not tell you when it arrived.

In the picture, the real version of this is happening somewhere else. Somewhere with stone in it. Somewhere with centuries stacked up under the floor and names carved into the walls and a way of doing it that goes back further than anybody can remember.

And what happens here, on this coast, in a building with a tin roof that his uncle helped put on, is a copy. A good copy. A sincere one. But downstream of the real thing, and later, and smaller.

He would defend this place to anybody. That is not in question. If you insulted it he would go quiet in a way you would not enjoy.

The trouble is that he has been praying for about twenty years inside a picture where he is at the edge of something whose center is four thousand miles away, and that picture does something to a man over twenty years.

It makes him a guest at his own table.

So let me ask you, and take your time.

Where do you imagine the real version of this is happening?

The list is not in an order

There is a song in Revelation that gets sung around the throne, and John writes down what is in it.

Not the melody. The contents. Who is there, and where they are from, and I want you to notice the shape of the list rather than the poetry of it.

And they sang a new song, saying: You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because You were slain, and with Your blood You ransomed for God persons from every tribe and language and people and nation.Revelation 5:9

Four words for the same thing. Tribe. Language. People. Nation.

You are inside the ransom of Revelation 5 and not adjacent to it, and the Spirit who is described in that same book as speaking to seven ordinary churches in seven ordinary towns has never once ranked the places He speaks in.

And here is the thing about the list. It has no order.

He does not begin with the important ones. He does not say from the great nations and also from the small. Four words, piled up, meaning the same thing, and the effect is not a hierarchy, it is a refusal of one.

Now, I want to say the careful thing before the plain thing, the way we do here.

The places with the stone are real, and the centuries under those floors are real, and I am not going to be clever about them or pretend that a long memory is nothing. It is not nothing. People kept something alive for a very long time and we are all downstream of that, including you and including me.

But downstream is not the same as lesser. A river is not thinner at the mouth.

The word says every tribe and language and people and nation, in a list with no ranking anywhere in it, and the Spirit has never treated a tin roof as a lower grade of shelter. You have been standing at what you think is the edge of something, and the thing you are standing in does not have an edge, because a ransom from every tongue does not have a center you could point at on a map.