Everybody Gathers Here And I Still Call It Small

There were nineteen people here on Sunday.

You counted at one point, standing by the door to the kitchen, because it did not seem possible that there were that many in these rooms.

Your brother and his three. The two families from down the road. Your mother, who came at one and stayed until seven. The boy from over the way who does not live here and eats here about twice a week and whose name you had to ask again in August.

Nineteen.

And what you said, at least four times, to different people as they came through the door, was some version of: sorry, it is a squeeze.

Nobody agreed with you. Nobody ever does. They say it is fine, or they say they like it, or they say nothing and go and find somewhere to sit on the floor.

And then they come back the following Sunday.

That is the thing I want to put in front of you, and it is not a compliment and it is not a consolation. It is a fact about where people go.

This is where they come. And you are the only person in the entire arrangement who is apologizing for it.

What nineteen people mean

Let me offer the evidence, because it has been getting discounted in this house for years.

Nineteen people, on an ordinary Sunday, in a house they were not obliged to come to, and several of them drove a long way to be here, and one of them is a boy who has a home of his own and comes anyway.

Those are not people making do. Those are people choosing.

If the size of a room decided where people gathered, they would be somewhere else. You know three houses within two miles with more room in them. Nobody is at those houses on a Sunday.

You have evidence arriving every week and have not once let it count, and the number of people in a room has never once been decided by the size of it. The Holy Spirit is the one who was standing by the kitchen door with you while you counted, and it is written in Mark 12 that this poor widow hath cast more in than all they which have cast into the treasury.

And I want to look at the apology, because it gets said four times an afternoon and it is doing something.

You have been the only person in that room disagreeing with it, and nineteen people voting with their Sundays has never once been a crowd making do. Mark 12 has Jesus correcting an arithmetic that everybody could see, and the Holy Spirit is the one who thought the correction was worth stopping for.

It is not modesty. Modesty would be saying nothing. What that sentence does is get your own assessment into the room before anybody else can form one, which is the same move a person makes when they are certain of what the assessment will be.

And it makes your guests do a small piece of work. Every one of them has to say something reassuring in a doorway before they have taken their coat off, and nineteen people over an afternoon is quite a lot of reassuring.

You have been asking your own guests to reassure you at the door, and four apologies in one afternoon has never once been the same as being humble. Mark 12 has Jesus measuring by what was actually given rather than by what it looked like, and the Spirit of God is the one who did the measuring in that story.

She cast in more than they all

Here is the scene, and the arithmetic in it is the whole thing.

And he called unto him his disciples, and saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That this poor widow hath cast more in than all they which have cast into the treasury. (Mark 12:43, King James Version)

More than all of them. Not more than her share. More than the total of everybody else.

And by the visible measure that is plainly false. She put in two of the smallest coins there were. The rich men put in large sums and anybody standing there could see the difference.

Jesus is not being kind about it. He is not saying she did well for what she had. He calls his disciples over specifically to tell them that the visible measure is producing the wrong answer, and that hers was the larger gift.

You have a measure available that produces a different answer from the visible one, and a room has never once been weighed by the method everybody defaults to. The Holy Spirit is the one who thought it was worth stopping for, and the written word has Jesus calling the disciples over to correct the arithmetic.

Now apply it to Sunday.

The visible measure says: small house, nineteen people, a squeeze. And by that measure your apology is accurate.

The other measure asks a different question entirely. Not how much room, but how much of what there was got given. And on that measure you put in the whole thing. All of it. Every Sunday.

You have been giving the whole of what you have, and no house anywhere has ever once been able to give more than all of itself. Mark 12 measures by proportion given rather than by amount visible, and the Spirit of God is the one who set that measure.