The Third Committee

The sign-up sheet is on the table by the coffee, next to the pen on a string, and there are eleven blank lines on it.

Frances decided in the car on the way in that she was not going to. She had the whole argument with herself at the light on Pearl Street and she won it. She is already on the property committee, which meets the first Tuesday. She is already on hospitality, which is not a meeting but is every single Sunday. The missions committee is a good committee doing good work and it needs six people and she is not one of them.

She goes for the coffee. And on the way past the table she watches her own hand pick up the pen on the string and write her name on the third line, in her own handwriting, neatly, the way she writes everything.

She is still holding the coffee. She did not slow down.

In the car afterward she sits with the engine off for a minute, and she is not upset exactly. She is more like puzzled, the way you are puzzled by a bruise you cannot account for. She is fifty three, she has been in this church since she was thirty one, and she is on three committees now and she knows exactly why, and she has never said it to a living soul.

It goes like this. When there is something on the calendar, the days have a shape and the shape is enough. When the calendar is clear, usually on a Saturday afternoon in the fall for some reason, a question stands up in the middle of the room and stands there.

It is not a dramatic question. It is four words. Is any of it real?

Not is God real. She has no trouble there. Whether any of it took, in her, actually, underneath. And she has found, over about fifteen years, that the question cannot get a word in edgewise while she is setting out cups for eighty people, and so there have been a great many cups.

She drives home down Pearl Street past the old bank building, which has had scaffolding around it for four years. They finished the stonework three summers ago and nobody has taken it down. Six stories of pipe and plank in the dark, around a building that has not needed it since before her granddaughter was born, and she has driven past it twice a day without once thinking about it.

You know the sheet. Yours might be a rotation, a small group you lead, a job you do not need, a house that never quite gets finished. And you know the Saturday afternoon, and the four words that stand up in an empty room, and what it costs every week to make sure the room is never empty.

Except the Lord build the house

Solomon wrote a psalm that gets quoted at housewarmings and almost never read to the end of the first verse.

Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.Psalm 127:1

Notice what it does not say. It does not say do not build. There are builders in that verse and they are building, and a watchman on a wall and he is awake, and the psalm has no complaint about either. What it says is where the load goes. If the Lord is not the builder, the building rests on the builders, and a house resting on the arms of the men who made it is a house in trouble.

You are not the load-bearing member here, and that was settled before you were on any committee. Scripture puts the building in God's hands in that verse and leaves the builders their work without leaving them the weight, and it is His Spirit who does the holding, which is why the psalm can be read as relief rather than as a rebuke to anybody's effort.

And then the very next verse, which is the one people skip.

It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep.Psalm 127:2

The bread of sorrows. That is the meal you eat standing up at ten at night with a folder still under your arm. Solomon is not scolding the early riser. He is telling a hardworking person that the rising early is not what is keeping the roof on, and then he says the tenderest thing in the psalm: so He gives His beloved sleep.

You have a God who hands out sleep to the people He loves, and the word says He does it while they sleep. Psalm 127:2 puts the giving on His side of the ledger, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a true sentence in a house at ten at night, rather than a nice line for a plaque.

Where Paul put the good works in the sentence

Now the order, because the order is the whole argument, and Paul was careful with it.

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.Ephesians 2:8-10

Read where the works are. They are not before the making. They are not the evidence submitted to obtain the making. They are after it, and Paul puts them in the same sentence as the word workmanship, which means a thing made by a maker, and then says God prepared them in advance for us to walk in.

So the committees are not the problem, and this is important. Missions committee is good work. Setting out cups for eighty people is good work, prepared beforehand, walked in. Nobody here is being told to resign from anything.

You are somebody's workmanship, and the good works were laid out in front of that, not underneath it. It is written in Ephesians 2:10 in exactly that order, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the making, which puts every committee in the same category as walking rather than in the category of holding a roof up.

What Paul does with that order is take a load off a person and leave the work in their hands. Those are two different objects, and he had to write them out in one sentence to pry them apart.

You have work that is genuinely yours and a weight that never was, and Scripture separated the two of them in one line. Ephesians 2:8 says the saving is the gift of God and not of ourselves, and it is His Spirit who makes that land as rest instead of as theory, in a woman sitting in a car with the engine off.

What the scaffolding is actually holding up

Six stories of pipe and plank on Pearl Street, around a building that was finished three summers ago.

Nothing is resting on it. The stone is load-bearing. It has held itself up since the day they set the last coping stone, through four winters, entirely without assistance. And yet the pipes are still there, and they cost: the rental, the inspection, the sidewalk you cannot walk on, the light the ground floor windows do not get.

Frances is not on three committees because the church needs her on three committees. She is on three committees because a question stood up in a room fifteen years ago and she has been putting furniture in front of it ever since.

You are not required to keep anything standing that God is holding, and the word never asked you to. Psalm 127:1 puts the building and the keeping both on Him, and the Spirit does the keeping whether the watchman is awake or asleep, which is precisely what the psalm says out loud.

Here is the honest part. If the scaffolding comes down, the question is going to be standing there. It does not go away because a schedule cleared. But look at what it asks. It asks about her, and Ephesians answers about Him. The whole weight of it has rested on her ability to produce evidence, and Paul, where he addresses it directly, does not ask anybody for any.

You have an answer that was never yours to supply, and it is already settled in the place where the word puts it. Ephesians 2:8 says not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the work in a person and does not put the person in charge of verifying it.