The Man Who Carries the Chairs

He is there at quarter past eight for a meeting that starts at half past nine, and the hall is cold and completely empty and the light is coming in low across the floor.

He takes the chairs off the rack four at a time, two in each hand by the frame, the way you learn to do it if you have done it enough. He knows this room. Six across and eight deep with a middle aisle, and a wider gap at the end of the third row because the radiator is there and people put their bags down. Nobody told him that. He worked it out over about a year of Tuesdays and now it is simply how the room goes.

He sets the last row and stands the rack against the wall and goes and fills the urn, and while it is heating he wipes down two tables that do not really need it. Somebody will be here at nine. Until then it is him and the dust turning in the light.

Two years ago he sat in the second row of this room, on a chair somebody else had put out, and he did not know what he was doing there.

He could not tell you what happened to him in this hall. That is the honest position and he has stopped apologizing for it. A man he did not know sat next to him for the best part of ninety minutes and said very little, and at some point in there something came off him that he had carried since he was nineteen, and he has never been able to describe it. Somebody asked him once, kindly, at a meeting like this one, if he would say a few words about it. He got four sentences in, went red to the ears, said thank you and sat down. He has not tried again.

So he has drawn the obvious conclusion, and it is the wrong one, and he has been living inside it for two years. It goes like this: the people with something to give are the ones who can say what happened. They have the words for it, and the words are the thing, and since I do not have them, I have nothing. But I can carry chairs. So I will get here at quarter past eight and carry the chairs, and that will have to do instead.

That is the whole of it. A free man in a cold hall doing the only thing he believes he is qualified for, and privately filing it under making up the numbers.

You are the one with the chairs. I am not going to ask you what happened to you, and I would not do it if we were in that hall together and the urn was on, because it is yours and God knows it and that is enough. What I have come to tell you is that you have been holding an entry requirement that Jesus refused to issue.

He had no words either

Let me name the weight before I go near lifting it, because it is a strange one and it gets mistaken for humility.

It is not that you cannot speak. Plenty of people cannot speak. It is that you have been sorting the room into two kinds of people, and putting yourself in the second kind, every Tuesday, for two years. The ones who can tell it, and the ones who set out the chairs for the ones who can tell it. And the cost is not that the chairs go unset. The cost is that a man who was genuinely and enormously set free is walking around convinced that his freedom did not come with anything on the other side of it, because the receipt was in a language he never learned.

Hear who did the sending, because it was not the man's own idea. Mark 5 records Jesus refusing a man one thing and handing him another, and the Holy Spirit is the one bringing that exchange into a cold hall at quarter past eight. You were sent, and the sending did not wait for you to be able to describe what happened.

And he did not permit him but said to him, "Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you."Mark 5:19

Look at who that is being said to. A man who had been living outside the town, outside society, outside language as anybody around there used it. He had not sat at a table with people in years. Whatever vocabulary he once had for ordinary life was gone. And the one thing he asks for is to get in the boat, which is the request of a man who knows he cannot manage on his own, and Jesus says no.

Read the no carefully, because it is the kindest no in the Gospels. He did not permit him. And then, in the same breath, He gave him a place and a direction and a subject: go home, and tell them how much. Not how. How much. He was not asked for a mechanism, an account, an explanation or a theology. He was asked for the size of it, which is the one thing a man in that condition actually had.

That is not a compliment I am paying you. It is written in Mark 5, and the Spirit who inspired it is the one who does the telling in rooms where somebody only carried the chairs. You have a commission that never once had an entry requirement attached to it.

The size of it is not in the words

Now here is the thing I want you to see about that man, and it takes a minute to land.

He went. And the very next line says he began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him, and everyone marveled. Ten cities. A man who had not had a conversation in years is somehow all over ten cities. And nobody who reads that ever stops to ask what he actually said, because it obviously was not eloquence. It was a man walking back into towns that remembered exactly what he had been, sitting down at tables, being present in his right mind, and the being present was ninety percent of the proclamation. The words were the smaller half.

Because Mark 5 says he went and began to proclaim, and because the same Spirit who sent him is the one who fills a room like the one you are standing in, hear this: this is yours, a direction for your freedom that is already running, whether or not you ever get four sentences out.

And your hands are not the consolation prize.

For God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name in serving the saints, as you still do.Hebrews 6:10

God said that about work like yours, in Hebrews 6, and the Spirit who wrote it keeps an account that nobody else in that building is keeping. Overlook is the word. God is not unjust so as to overlook it. Which means it is possible to overlook it, and everybody does, including you, every single Tuesday. Twenty six people sit down at half past nine on chairs they did not put out, in rows measured by a man who worked out where the bags go, and not one of them thinks about it, and God is not one of them.

It is already settled that your work is seen, and Hebrews 6 puts it under the heading of love shown for His name, and the Holy Spirit is the one who filed it there and not you.

One plain thing before we go on, and I would rather say it and not be needed. If the not being able to say it has gone somewhere dark, if there is weight on you in that hall that will not put down, tell one human being today, and if there is any danger at all reach the crisis line where you live and stay with a real voice. Reaching for a person is not a failure of your freedom. It is your freedom being used for the first thing it was for.