Standing Between Two Rooms

There is a pot on the back burner that took two days, and it is the same pot, and the same two days, and the same aunt has been standing over it since before he was born.

The front room is full. Cousins on the arms of chairs, kids underfoot with plates bigger than their arms, the folding table from the shed covered in dishes that only appear on days like this one. His great uncle, ninety one, is in the good chair by the window, and in a while he will say the words over the family the way he has said them at every one of these, in the language the grandmother spoke and this man only half has. An aunt will start the song. Everybody comes in on the second line, even the ones who do not know the words, because you hum the ones you do not know. That is how they carry each other on the day somebody is buried.

Through the kitchen, in the back room with the linoleum and the coffee urn, three men from his church are standing near the door with paper cups. They came, and that meant something, and they are good men. One of them put a hand on his shoulder in the driveway and said, quietly and kindly, we are praying for you, brother. Just be careful in there.

Be careful in there.

And there was a Wednesday, four years ago, when a man he respects said from the front that the new birth means the old is gone, and gave a list, and the list had the word traditions in it, and everybody nodded, and he nodded too.

So now he stands in the doorway between the two rooms with a paper plate in one hand and nothing on it. Behind him, the coffee urn. In front of him, his great uncle, and the song, and the pot that took two days. Thirty five years old, and he honestly does not know which room he is allowed to be in.

You know the doorway. Yours might be a language, or a kitchen, or the way your people sing at a wedding, or a grandmother's hands doing something nobody else does. And you know the sentence somebody handed you, kindly, and the sideways way you have stood in your own family ever since.

The man who preached in Athens

Come sit on the step with me a minute, because I want to walk you through a city where a man of God stood surrounded by another people's everything and did not do the thing that Wednesday would lead anyone to expect.

Paul is in Athens, alone, waiting on his friends. He goes up to the Areopagus and stands in front of the council of the most cultured people in the world, and what he does first is take something of theirs and hold it up with respect: an altar he found with an inscription on it. Then he preaches God the Maker, who does not live in buildings made with hands. And in the middle of it he quotes their poet, one of their own, a man who never knew Christ: as certain also of your own poets have said, for we are also his offspring.

He did not mock them and he did not tell them to stop being Athenians. He found what was true in what their own people had already said, stood on it, and preached the resurrection from it.

Here is the sentence he laid underneath the whole thing.

And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us.Acts 17:26-27

Read that slowly, because it is about your family. He set the times. He set the bounds. He decided which century and which coast and which house, and the reason the text gives is so that people from that place would reach out in the dark and find Him.

You are standing in a place and an hour that God Himself appointed, and He set those bounds so that somebody out of your family would feel after Him and find Him. That is Acts 17 as it is written, and the Spirit is the one who takes a speech given in Greece and lays it across a kitchen doorway so it stops being history and starts being an address.

Your people are not an obstacle He has been working around. Your people are the appointment.

What the old man actually was

Now, the sentence handed over on that Wednesday came out of a real verse, so let us go and look at the verse instead of the sentence.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.2 Corinthians 5:17

Old things passed away. Every time the New Testament stops and tells us what those old things are, it makes a list. Anger. Malice. Slander. Filthy talk. Lying to one another. Bitterness. Greed. That is Colossians 3 and Ephesians 4, and you can read every list in the book and never find a language on one. Never a soup. Never a great uncle in the good chair.

You were never asked to hand back your grandmother, and no list in Scripture ever put her on it. It is written plainly, over and over, in lists that name conduct and never name a people, and it is the Holy Spirit who inspired those lists and knew exactly what He was putting on them.

And the church settled this once, formally, because it came up early and hard. Acts 15. Gentiles were coming in and some were saying they had to become Jews first. The apostles and elders met, James stood up, and the letter they sent out says this: that we trouble not them, which from among the Gentiles are turned to God. That is the ruling of the first council of the church on exactly the question being held in that doorway.

You have a verdict already written on this, delivered by the apostles in a letter, and it came down on the side of not troubling you. Acts 15 says it, and the same Spirit the council said the decision seemed good to has not changed His mind in two thousand years.

Now, that letter did name a short list to abstain from, and I will not hide it from you, because the honest half is part of the mercy. What it named was worship offered to other gods. Not their food, not their language, not their songs, not their fathers. Their worship. That is a real line and a narrow one, and the things on your side of it will be known by their name. Set those down, and set them down without one word of contempt for anybody who still holds them, because the men on Mars Hill were not mocked either, and you are nobody's judge in that house.

The scribe who kept both

I keep ground for a living, and nobody who keeps ground clears a hillside to bare dirt and starts again. You go and find what came through. The old roots still alive underground are worth more than anything you can buy, and the dead ones come out, and you can tell them apart by looking.

Jesus put it better, at the end of a long day of parables.

Every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.Matthew 13:52

Things new and old. Out of his own treasure, which means it was already his. The householder in that picture is not a man who burned his house down and moved into a rented room. He is a man with a full cupboard who has been given something new to set beside what was in there.

You have a treasure with old things in it and new things in it, and the word calls a man who brings out both of them instructed. Matthew 13 is where that stands, and it is His Spirit who does the instructing, which means He is the one who shows you, in your own house, what comes through and what stays behind.

And hear the promise in it: nothing wasted. Not the language you only half have. Not the two day soup. Not thirty five years of being your mother's son. He does not throw out a man's history. He redeems it, and the distance between those two words is the whole gospel.