A Guest In Somebody Else's House

Eight years and he still says they.

He notices himself do it about once a fortnight. They do it this way. They have a thing they say here. They always sing that one at this time of year.

Nobody else has ever remarked on it. He is on two rotas. He has a key. There is a man who has asked his advice twice about something serious.

But he came in at thirty-four, out of nothing, and everybody around him did not.

That is the arithmetic he runs. The woman on his left has a grandmother buried in that churchyard. The family in front of him have been in that building for four generations and there is a plaque with their name on it near the door. A man he likes very much once said, entirely innocently, that his own father had done the same job in the same building for twenty-two years.

Everybody has a grandmother in this. He has eight years and a car park he could not make himself walk out of the first time.

So he is careful. He does not offer opinions on how things are done. He has views, some of them quite strong, and he has never said one, because a guest does not rearrange the furniture.

And he would tell you he is happy, and he is, and this is the only thing in his life he has never told anybody at all.

The letter is addressed to latecomers

Let me be exact about the letter I am taking you to, because the precision is the comfort here.

That letter is not written to people with long standing in it. It is written to the ones who came in from outside, with no history in it whatsoever, into a house that already had centuries of story and custom and a plaque by the door.

They knew exactly what you know on a Sunday: that everybody else in the room had a grandmother in this.

Now hear this and take it as settled rather than as reassurance: you are not a guest, and the sentence that says so was written to people whose position was precisely yours. That is not my sentiment talking, it is what stands written in the second chapter of Ephesians, and the same Holy Spirit who could not get you out of that car park at thirty-four has been in that building with you for eight years.

Read it, and notice that it moves through three positions in one line.

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God's people and also members of his household.Ephesians 2:19

Foreigners and strangers. That is the position being denied. He names it because they were feeling it, and a man does not deny a thing nobody is thinking.

Fellow citizens. Standing, rights, a place in the polity.

Members of his household. And he does not stop at citizenship, which would have been generous enough. He goes into the house, and puts them in the family, and the word does not have a probationary period attached anywhere.

So take this now rather than after some length of service: you are not on the guest list of a house you have been in for eight years, because the written word denies the words foreigner and stranger outright and puts latecomers in the household, and the Spirit of God is the one who brought you through that car park door in the first place.

And the guard, because there is a way to hear this that would make you tiresome.

Nothing here says the four generations do not matter. They do. That family kept the roof on through a war, the woman on your left buried her grandmother out of that ground, and history in a place is a real thing and honoring it is not servility.

What is written simply refuses to make history the condition of belonging, and the Holy Spirit put you in that household on the same terms He used for everybody in it.