The Line I Have Said A Thousand Times

He has said it out loud, by his own reckoning, about a thousand times.

Same sentence. Same place in the morning. He learned it before he understood any of it and now it comes out of him the way a hand finds a bannister in the dark.

And a few weeks ago, standing in the fourth row with his coat over his arm, he heard himself say a particular word in the middle of it and something snagged.

He carried on. You do carry on. But it stayed with him all the way home and it has not gone since.

Because the word he said, and has been saying since he was nine, is a word that means everybody. And he has spent thirty years saying it in a room of about ninety people who all look and sound rather like him, and he has never once, not in a thousand recitals, understood himself to be describing anything larger than that room.

He was not being a hypocrite. That is the thing I want to protect him from, and you as well. He was doing what all of us do with a sentence we learned before we could weigh it, which is to say it accurately and hear none of it.

Now put him down in the fourth row and answer me honestly.

Which sentence do you say out loud every week without hearing it?

It is a count, not a claim

Here is the thing about that sentence, and it took me years to see it.

It is not an argument. It is arithmetic.

Paul writes it out in a letter to a church that was pulling itself into pieces, and he does not defend it, he simply counts. And when a man counts, he is not persuading you, he is telling you how many there are.

There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.Ephesians 4:4 to 6

Seven times. Count them. One, one, one, one, one, one, one.

You are inside the count of Ephesians 4, friend, and the Spirit named in the second clause of it is the same One who is in you as you read this, which means the counting is not a doctrine you are being asked to accept but a fact about where you are standing.

And notice what he does not do. He does not say there ought to be one body. He does not say there will be, some day, when everybody sorts themselves out. He says there is. Present tense, seven times, to a church that was in the middle of a fight.

That is a man describing something that is true underneath a mess rather than a target somewhere beyond it.

So let me say the plain thing, because I care about you more than I care about being interesting.

You have been saying a number out loud for thirty years and hearing it as a name. The word says one body and one Spirit, and the Spirit who was given to you was not given to a room of ninety, He was given to the one body, and you are in it the way a hand is in a body rather than the way a member is in a club.

Nothing about that asks you to change where you worship or to agree with anybody about anything, and I am not going to ask you to. This house does not tell a person where to stand on a Sunday.

It asks you to hear a word you have been saying since you were nine.