He Has Not Sat Down In Four Years

The courtyard is full most weeks and it has been for a long time.

Not a program. Nobody organizes it and there is no list. People come, and there is always food, and if you turn up at eight on a Friday there will be somewhere to sit and something in front of you within about four minutes.

He does the tea. He has done the tea for as long as anybody can remember, and he pours it the old way, from a height, which the children in that street find hilarious and which he does partly for that reason.

It is worship. He would say that and he would be right, and anybody who has sat at that table would agree with him.

And he has not sat down at it in four years.

He noticed it in a strange way. Somebody took a photograph in June, a good one, of about fourteen people round that table with the lanterns on, and when he looked at it later he was in the corner of it, standing, with a pot in his hand.

He looked at some others. There are perhaps a hundred photographs of that courtyard across four years and he is standing in every single one.

Not once seated. Not once with a plate in front of him.

He is not tired and he is not resentful. He loves it and he would not change it and if you offered him a chair he would probably decline it and mean the decline.

What he cannot work out is this: that courtyard is the place where God is, in that street, on a Friday, and he is the only person in it who has never sat down in the presence of God there.

Everybody else has been fed. He is fed somewhere else, or perhaps not, and he has begun to wonder about that.

And you serve something like that. It is genuine worship, and everybody in it is fed, and you have been standing up in the middle of it for four years.

Be still, and know

There is a line in Psalm forty-six that everybody knows and almost everybody softens, and its actual force is a command to stop moving.

Be still, and know that I am God.Psalm 46:10

Be still.

The word is not about the mind, primarily. It carries the sense of dropping something, letting your hands go slack, ceasing from an activity that is currently in progress.

And it is addressed into a psalm about upheaval, where the earth gives way and the mountains go into the heart of the sea. It is not a quiet room instruction. It is spoken over a great deal of noise.

And know that I am God is what the stopping is for. The knowing is placed after the ceasing, and the order is not accidental.

You are commanded to stop moving and the knowing is on the other side of it. It is written, be still, and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10), and it is the Holy Spirit who supplies the knowing in that verse, which is placed after a man has put something down.

Now the serving, and it needs defending before anything else.

Pouring tea from a height for four years, in a courtyard where anybody can turn up and be fed within four minutes, is worship, and it is a rarer and better thing than most of what gets called worship anywhere.

Nobody here is going to tell you to do less of it or to hand the pot to somebody else on principle.

You have been worshipping for four years with a pot in your hand and none of that is being reclassified. Scripture says whoever would be great among you must be your servant (Matthew 20:26), and it is the Holy Spirit who has made a man in a street into the person a stranger can eat with on a Friday, which is not something anybody arranges for themselves.

And the photographs.

A hundred of them and standing in every one. That is a strange piece of evidence to come across in June and it is worth taking as seriously as you have.

What it shows is not that you are neglected. It shows that a hospitable man has one posture, and that it is a good one, and that he has never once been in the other one in that courtyard.

You have one posture and there is a second one that you have not been in for four years. It is written that Mary sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his teaching (Luke 10:39), and sitting is named in that account as the thing she was doing, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a chair into as real an act of worship as a pot.

And the thing you cannot work out.

That courtyard is where God is on a Friday in that street, and you are the only person in it who has never sat down in His presence there.

That is precisely stated and it is the whole matter, and the fact that you found the words for it means it has been working on you since June.

You are entitled to be a guest in the room you keep, and hosting has never been a condition of being fed. Scripture says He makes me lie down in green pastures (Psalm 23:2), and lying down is the least active thing in that psalm, and it is His Spirit who does the making, which suggests some of us need it done to us.