Every Word Right And Nothing Behind It

He has become, over about two years, the best technician that building has ever had.

Nothing is late. Nothing overruns. The readings are chosen with real care and they speak to each other, and if you were paying attention you would notice that the second one answers the first, and that the hymn after them picks up an image from both. He leaves four seconds of silence after the reading, which is exactly right; three feels rushed and six starts to feel like a mistake, and he found that out by paying attention.

People have said to him, more than once, that there is something about the shape of it. A woman told him in the spring that his services are the only hour in her week where nothing is being sold to her.

He knows all of that. He is not falsely modest and he is not fishing. He has got very good at this.

And he could not tell you the last time any of it did anything to him at all.

There was a Sunday in Advent when he noticed what he was doing. He was standing at the front during the last verse of something, with the room singing, and he was listening to the room the way a man listens to an engine. Third row, flat. The organ is too loud in the second half of the line. The candle on the left is going to go out before the end.

Assessing. All the way through. And at some point in that verse a sentence arrived from nowhere and would not go away, and the sentence was: you are curating this.

That was in December. It is not December now.

He has not stopped and he has not slipped. If anything the services have got better, because a man with nothing behind the words will put a great deal of care into the words. But he has begun to understand that the precision is doing something other than what it looks like it is doing. It is not devotion any more. It is a place to stand.

And he cannot say that to anybody in his building, because the way he would have to say it is: I think I have become a very good curator of a museum I used to live in.

Read what he asked to have back

There is one line in Psalm 51 that is worth taking on its own, and I want to be careful about how we get to it, because the psalm has an occasion and the occasion is not yours.

David wrote it after a specific and terrible failure. That is its setting and I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I am not putting that on you. Your situation is not his situation. What transfers is not the cause. What transfers is the anatomy of what he asks for, because it is startlingly precise.

Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.Psalm 51:12

Read what he asks for and then read what he does not ask for.

He does not ask to be saved again. He does not ask for the salvation. He asks for the joy of it. The salvation is treated throughout that request as a thing still in place, not in question, not up for discussion, and the thing that has gone missing is the gladness attached to it.

That is an enormous distinction and almost nobody makes it. A man can lose the joy of a thing while the thing itself has not moved an inch.

So hear this over you, on a Sunday morning with the candle guttering: nothing has been taken away from you. That is not my reassurance; it is what His word has the most broken man in the psalter assuming while he asks, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who takes a distinction that fine and makes it land in a man who has been quietly writing himself off since Advent.

Now let me get at the curator.

The word you used about yourself is doing a lot of work and most of it is unfair. A curator preserves objects nobody uses any more. That is not what you are doing at four seconds of silence after a reading. Four seconds is a judgement made by somebody who knows what a room needs in order to receive something, and that knowledge did not come from technique. It came from years of standing in that room caring what happened in it. It is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who carries a sentence like that out of its own century and sets it down where you are standing.

Your precision is not a substitute for devotion. It is what devotion looks like in a man who has gone numb and refuses to let the numbness cost anybody else anything.

And read the second half of the verse, because it is the half that answers your Advent.

Uphold me with thy free spirit. He does not say, help me hold myself up. He asks to be upheld, by God's Spirit, which is the only kind of holding up that works when a man has run out of the ability to generate his own. His word puts the upholding in God's hands in the same breath as the request for joy, and the Holy Spirit has been doing exactly that in you every Sunday since December while you stood at the front assessing the organ.

You are not in a museum. You are in a house whose lights have gone down, doing the work by touch, and the house is still yours and you have never once been evicted from it.