The Spare Leaf in the Closet

For the caretaker who keeps putting the joining piece away and has stopped noticing.

It's ten past nine on a Thursday, and he's carrying the leaf back to the closet for the second time this week.

It's a heavy piece of oak about eighteen inches across, with two brass pegs on one edge and a felt strip along the other. When it's in, the hall's dining table seats eighteen. When it's out, the table splits into two halves that seat nine each, and the two halves can be pushed to opposite ends of the room.

Tuesday's group uses the halves. Thursday's group uses the halves. Neither has ever asked for the leaf, and he stopped offering about four years ago, and he can't now remember the conversation where that was decided because there probably wasn't one.

So twice a week he takes a piece of furniture whose entire purpose is joining two halves together, and he stands it upright in a closet behind the folded chairs, in the dark, where it lives.

He's never thought about it as anything other than a job. Tonight, for no reason he could name, he stands in the closet doorway with his hand still on it and thinks about how long it's been in there.

The piece that joins the two halves has been in the dark, and it was never broken. The written Word calls the bread and the cup a communion in Christ rather than in a room, and the Holy Spirit keeps that true in the hall you're locking up tonight.

What Four Years in a Closet Does

Nobody decided this. That's the part worth sitting with.

There was no meeting, no falling out, and no policy. There was a run of weeks where it was easier not to bother, and then a season where nobody asked, and then a point where offering would have felt like making a statement. Four years later the arrangement has the weight of something agreed, and not one person ever agreed it.

Most inherited distance works like that. It isn't built by anybody's decision. It accumulates out of small convenient choices, and then it hardens, and then it looks like conviction from the outside because nobody can remember it being anything else.

He isn't taking sides, and he hasn't got an opinion he'd defend. He's a caretaker who's been putting a joining piece into the dark twice a week and calling it tidying.

What the Bread Is a Communion Of

Here's the sentence that sits under the whole question, put as a pair of questions by a man writing to a badly divided church:

The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?1 Corinthians 10:16 (KJV)

Read what the communion is named as being of. Not of the congregation. Not of the agreement, or the tradition, or the group that's worked the practice out most carefully.

It's the communion of the blood of Christ and of the body of Christ. He's writing to people who were sorting themselves into parties at the time, and he doesn't ground the bond in their unity. He grounds it in His body, which was one while they were still arguing.

You're joined to Christ Himself before you're joined to anybody's agreement about Him. The written Word ties that bond to His own body rather than to a consensus, and the Holy Spirit keeps it live in both halves of a hall.

The Leaf Was Never the Broken Part

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

When a table comes apart, everybody looks at the two halves. That's where the gap is, that's where the plates fall through, and that's what people point at when they say the table's broken.

But the halves are fine. They've always been fine. They're solid oak and they do exactly what they were built to do. The piece that decides whether there's a gap has been standing in a closet behind the chairs the whole time, unsplintered, with its brass pegs still bright.

That's the thing about most of this distance. Nothing is broken. Something is simply put away, and it's been put away long enough that everybody has stopped seeing the closet.

Nothing in this hall is broken, and the joining piece is intact in the dark. The written Word keeps the communion whole in Christ's body whatever the furniture does, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has never once stopped holding the two halves together.

I'm Not Telling Either Group What to Do

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

I'm not telling you which group has understood Him better, and I'm not hinting at it. Both are full of people who love Christ and who've held that bread carefully for a very long time, and the care itself is love even where it leaves a distance.

I'm also not telling you where to go up or where to stay seated, and I'm certainly not telling you to put the leaf in without being asked. That belongs to the people who use the room, and nothing here is a ruling on anybody's practice.

You can leave the furniture exactly as it stands and still know whose table it is. Scripture answers whose it is and leaves the approaching alone, and the Holy Spirit gives you peace about the half that is fixed.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.