Arriving Empty-Handed

The car has been parked outside the house for eleven minutes with the engine off.

It is a good street. The porch light is on because they always leave it on, and through the front window you can see the blue flicker of a television nobody is watching and the top of somebody's head on the sofa. Tomas has been coming to this house since he was fourteen. He knows which board on the second step gives, and he knows they keep the spare key in a coffee can on the shelf by the door, and he has been told twice this month that he does not visit enough.

The passenger seat is empty.

That is the whole problem, and it would sound ridiculous said out loud, which is exactly why it has never been said out loud. Normally there is something on that seat. A box of pan dulce from the place on the avenue. A bag of oranges. A jar. Something, anything, because you do not knock on a door with nothing in your hands, everybody knows that, it is not even a rule, it is just what a person does.

This week there was nothing to put there. It happens some weeks. So he drove over anyway, because he wanted to see them, and he has been sitting here for eleven minutes with his hands on the bottom of the steering wheel, and now he is going to start the engine and drive home and text them that he got held up.

Here is the thing. Nobody in that house has ever looked at his hands. Not once, in twenty years. If he walked up those steps with nothing at all they would shout his name from the kitchen and somebody would come and get him because he was standing too long in the doorway, and within four minutes they would have put something in front of him. He knows this. He could tell you it in those exact words. He is still reaching for the ignition.

Ask him who made the rule and he cannot tell you. It is not from his mother, who would be hurt to hear it. It is not from that house, which has no rules at all beyond taking your shoes off in the hallway. It came from somewhere, it has been running for years, and it has cost him more evenings than he could count.

You are the one in the car.

I do not know what your rule is and I am not going to guess at it, and I am certainly not going to trace it back for you to some year of your life, because that is a thing people do to the free and it has never once helped one of them. But you know the shape of it. There is something you cannot do without first having something, and nobody on the other side of that door has ever required it, and the not going has become so ordinary that it has stopped feeling like a loss.

And I have come to take one rule off you tonight. Only one, and it is a real one, and I am not going to hand you a better rule to put in its place.

Jesus lifted this exact rule off somebody, in her own kitchen

Let me name the weight first, because a rule this small never gets said out loud and that is precisely how it survives.

It is not the box of pan dulce. It is what the empty seat has quietly convinced you that you are. It is the arithmetic that runs while the engine ticks and cools: I am welcome here as somebody who brings, and tonight I am somebody who takes, and taking is not what I am for. It is sitting in the dark outside a house full of people who love you, feeling like a debt.

Here is God's own ruling on it, and it is not a suggestion of mine. Luke 10 carries it, and the Holy Spirit is the one saying it again over a parked car on a quiet street. You are wanted at that door in the state you are actually in, and you were never the delivery.

There was a house in Bethany where Jesus was a guest, and one sister was doing the thing this whole message is about. Martha was not being petty. She was doing what a good host in that culture did, at speed, with real love, and the standard she was holding herself to was a genuine standard that everybody around her recognized. And she came out of the kitchen and asked Him to send her sister in to help.

He did not agree with her and He did not humiliate her. He said her name twice, which is what you do with somebody you are about to be very gentle with, and He told her she was anxious and troubled about many things.

but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.Luke 10:42

One thing. Not none, which would have been a shrug. One. And He does not say the table is bad, or that food does not matter, or that Martha should have thought less of her guests. He says the necessary thing was already happening in the other room, and it had nothing in its hands. You have a place in the good portion, and it is a portion rather than a payment, which is Luke 10 and not my kindness, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my warmth who reads a kitchen door ruling onto your street.

The same rule, from the other side of the door

Now here is the turn, and it is worth sitting with.

Martha's rule was about what a host must produce. Yours is about what a guest must carry. They are the same rule wearing different clothes, and Jesus put it down in the only house where it was actually being enforced, which was the house of the person keeping it on herself.

Think about what that means for your evening. If the Lord took that weight off the woman who was cooking, in her own home, in front of witnesses, with the guest of honor sitting right there, then the version of it you have been keeping in a parked car has no standing at all. This is yours in the present tense, tonight, on that street, and it is written in Luke 10, and the same Spirit who was in the room in Bethany is in the car.

And notice how gently He does it. He does not mock her for having the rule. He does not tell her the years of hospitality were wasted or that she has been a fool. He is not embarrassed by her at all. He calls her by name, twice, and then He takes the many things off her and hands back the one. That is how God removes a rule, and if the voice in your head that talks about your rule has any contempt in it anywhere, that voice is not His. Luke 10 shows you the actual tone He uses, and the same Spirit carries that tone into the car tonight. You were never held in contempt for keeping it.

One plain thing before we go on, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the not going has spread, if there are weeks now where you do not go anywhere or answer anybody, tell one human being today, and if there is any danger in it for you, reach the crisis line where you live and let a real voice stay with you tonight. Walking toward help is one of the ordinary things a free man does, and it is done empty handed.