The Guest Who Broke The Bread

For the believer who spends that part of the service sitting very still.

Imagine a woman who has worked out exactly where to look.

She's been in this building three years. She loves it here. She loves the woman who runs the coffee. She loves the man who reads from the lectern badly, slowly, meaning every word of it. When the bread comes round she stays in her seat, because of something decided a long way from this room and a long time before she was born, and the people here have been nothing but kind about it.

So she's developed a routine for the four minutes. She looks at the third window from the left, the one with the blue in it. She prays for the couple two rows ahead whose son is unwell. She rests her hands on her knees and keeps her face pleasant, and she has become so good at this that nobody has noticed in three years.

What she's never told anybody is what happens on the way home. It isn't anger. It's a small flat sadness that lasts about as far as the second roundabout, and then she puts the kettle on and gets on with Sunday.

The ache of sitting still is real, and it has never once decided whose table you were sitting at. The written Word shows Christ recognized in the breaking of bread as a guest in a borrowed house, and the Holy Spirit makes that same recognition present in the seat you're in.

The Four Minutes Nobody Sees

The kindness makes it harder, which is a strange sentence to write and a true one.

If anybody in that room had ever been cold to her she'd have something to push against. Instead they're warm, and the warmth means she can't name the ache without sounding ungrateful, and so she doesn't name it at all. Three years of a small weekly grief that has never once been said out loud in a building full of people who'd be sorry to hear it.

That silence costs more than the four minutes do. It teaches her that the part of her life that hurts is the part she must keep pleasant about, and a person can only do that for so long before the pleasantness starts reaching into other rooms.

You know those four minutes. You've got your own window to look at. It isn't rebellion and it isn't self-pity. It's what happens when somebody who loves Christ meets the one moment in the week built entirely out of belonging and finds she can't quite be inside it.

The Stranger at the End of the Table

Here's an account of a meal where the person with no standing in the room turned out to be the one everybody was there for.

Two men walked seven miles out of Jerusalem with a stranger who opened the Scriptures to them the whole way. They still didn't know Him. They asked Him to stay because it was getting dark, which made Him the guest and made the house somebody else's.

And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them.Luke 24:30 (KJV)

He had no standing there. It wasn't His house, His loaf, or His table, and by every ordinary rule of hospitality He should have waited to be served.

You're recognized by Christ in a room before you're ever placed in it by an arrangement. The written Word shows Him known in the breaking rather than in the seating, and the Holy Spirit keeps that recognition alive in you from the third window across.

The Guest Seat Is Where He Was Known

Here's what I'd carry out of Emmaus if I could take a single thing away with me.

Everybody reading that account assumes the householder had the better seat. He owned the room, he'd issued the invitation, and he was the one with the authority to say who ate what. The guest was the one with nothing.

And the guest seat is where Christ was sitting. Not the head of the table. The borrowed chair, the one you put out for somebody passing through, the seat with no claim attached to it at all. That's where the hands went to the bread, and that's where the eyes were opened.

So the four minutes have been telling her a story that the account itself contradicts. She's been reading her seat as the place where nothing happens. In the one meal where He was finally recognized, the seat with no standing was the seat He was in.

You're sitting in the chair where He was known, not the chair where He was absent. The written Word puts Him in the guest's place with the bread in His hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one making Him present exactly there.

I'm Not Telling You to Move

Let me be direct, because there's a version of this message that would do real harm and I refuse to write it.

I'm not telling you to go forward next Sunday. I'm not telling you to keep your seat, either. That question belongs to you, to your own church and to the Lord, and no stranger writing to you has the standing to rule on your conscience or on anybody's table.

I'm also not telling you that the room you're sitting in has got it wrong. They've held that bread carefully for a very long time, and the carefulness is love, even where it produces a distance that costs you the drive home.

You can leave every arrangement exactly as it is and still know whose bread it is. Scripture settles the ownership without settling the practice, and the Holy Spirit gives you rest about the first while you go on honoring the second.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.