The Place Card With No Name

For the host holding a blank card and a pen she can't quite put down.

Who told you the guest list was yours to keep?

I don't mean who told you to cook. Cooking you were taught properly, by somebody who let you stand on a chair to stir. I mean the other job, the invisible one, the one where you sit down on a Saturday with a pen and work out who can be in a room with whom.

She has eleven cards written and one blank, and she's been holding it for nearly ten minutes.

The blank one is for the place between her uncle and her husband's sister. Both of them love Christ, both have for decades, and both belong to traditions that can't share bread with each other. Nothing has ever been said out loud about it. She just knows, the way a host knows, and she has spent three years building seating plans around a silence.

The pen is still capped. Outside somebody's mowing. She could write either name and the afternoon would be perfectly fine, but she can't make her hand do it. By now she's starting to wonder whether the problem was ever the card at all.

The welcome on that table was issued long before you sat down with a pen. The written Word tells of a supper where the master kept sending out for more people rather than fewer, and the Holy Spirit makes that same welcome present at the table you're laying today.

The Job That Was Never in the Recipe

There's a tiredness that belongs to the woman who always writes the cards.

She arrives at her own lunch having already hosted it twice in her head. She knows which subject can't survive before the potatoes, which one is safe after, and which two people must never be put within earshot of a third. Nobody else in the family does this work, and nobody knows it's being done, because the whole art of it is that it looks like nothing.

The cost lands slowly. You start to think of your own family as a seating problem, and you begin measuring love in feet of tablecloth. On a bad Saturday you catch yourself wondering whether the people you're arranging would be easier to love if you weren't responsible for keeping them apart.

You aren't controlling. You're somebody who loves people who can't fully reach each other, so you've taken on the work of standing in the gap. That work is honorable, it is exhausting, and it was never your assignment.

The Supper Where the List Kept Growing

Here's a story He told about a man who made a great supper and found that the people he'd invited all had reasons not to come.

One had bought a piece of ground he needed to go and see. Another had bought five yoke of oxen. A third had married a wife. Every excuse was ordinary and most of them were reasonable. So the master sent his servant into the streets and lanes instead, to bring in the poor, the maimed, the halt and the blind.

The servant came back and reported that it was done as commanded, and that there was still room. Here's the line that follows:

And the lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.Luke 14:23 (KJV)

The whole movement of that story runs one way. Every time the list is short, the answer is a wider circle, never a tighter one.

You're laying a table whose owner has only ever widened the list. The written Word shows Him filling a house rather than protecting it, and the Holy Spirit keeps that impulse alive in the room you're preparing.

The Host Wasn't the One Who Wrote the List

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

Notice who the servant is. He doesn't decide who's worthy of the highways and hedges. He doesn't weigh whether the halt will get on with the blind, or whether the man from the lanes will have anything in common with the one from the streets. He carries an instruction and opens a door.

That's the whole job, and it's a far smaller one than what you've been doing on Saturdays with a pen, which is deciding in advance who can bear to be near whom.

The master kept the guest list. The servant kept the door. You have been trying to do both for three years, and you've been doing the harder one, and it was never given to you.

You've been carrying a list that belongs to somebody else entirely. The written Word leaves the inviting to the master and the door to the servant, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding the weight you've been holding with a capped pen.

I'm Not Ruling on Either of Them

Let me say this plainly, because there's a version of this message that would do harm and I won't write it.

I'm not telling you which of those two traditions has understood Him better. Both are full of people who love Christ and who've held that bread carefully for generations, and the care itself is love even where it leaves a distance that costs you every Christmas.

I'm also not telling you what to do at anybody's church table. Where you go up and where you stay seated belongs to you, to your own church and to the Lord. Nothing in this message is a ruling on your practice or on theirs.

You can honor both traditions completely and still be released from arranging them. Scripture tells you whose the table is and says nothing about the seating, and the Holy Spirit rests you in the first while you go on honoring the second.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.