One Wrong Opinion From The Door

She has started sitting nearer the back, and she could not tell you exactly when that began.

Nothing has happened. That is what makes it so hard to explain to her husband, who keeps asking what is wrong and getting the answer nothing, because nothing is the truth.

What she has is a view. One view, on one contested question, held quietly and thoughtfully over about four years, and she has never said it out loud in that building and she is not going to.

And so she has developed a set of skills. She knows which conversations to walk past on the way to the tea. She knows how to nod in a way that is not agreement but reads as agreement to anybody not looking closely. She has a stock of neutral sentences. She has become, in her own home church of eleven years, extremely good at not being found out.

The exhaustion of that is a particular exhaustion. It is not the tiredness of conflict. It is the tiredness of vigilance.

And here is where it has landed her, on a Tuesday, in the car, at some traffic lights, with a thought that arrived fully formed as if it had been waiting.

I should go before they ask me to.

Not because anybody has asked. Nobody has asked. Nobody there has done a single unkind thing to her. She is loved in that place, and she knows it, which is somehow part of the problem, because she has decided in advance that the love is conditional and she has never once tested it.

She is going to leave a room that has never told her to leave, to avoid a rejection that has not happened, over a sentence she has never said.

And she will call it integrity, and it will feel exactly like integrity from the inside.

Welcome came first, and it was not a reward

Now, I am not going to touch your question.

I mean that plainly. I do not know which one it is, and if I did I would not adjudicate it here, and anybody who uses your ache as a way of getting you to their side on a contested matter is using you. That is not what this is. Your view is yours and I am not asking to see it.

What I am going to do is take one sentence and hold it up in the light.

Therefore welcome one another as Christ welcomed you, to the glory of God.Romans 15:7

Notice what is not in there.

There is no clause. There is no list of matters on which agreement is first required. The measure given is not as far as you can agree, it is as Christ welcomed you, and the whole of the letter around it is written into a room of people who were arguing about real things and were not told to stop being different from each other.

They were told to receive one another. While still disagreeing. That is the actual instruction and it is much harder than the one we would have written.

And hear the second half, because a room where nobody thinks anything is not the answer either, and I refuse to sell you that.

I am not asking you to become vague. Having no strong views is not holiness, it is just quieter. There are people who have made a virtue out of never landing anywhere and they are not more spiritual than you, they are less trouble, which is a different thing entirely.

You are allowed to hold your view. Hold it. Hold it with your whole chest. Nothing written in Scripture takes it off you, and the Holy Spirit is not asking for it.

The question on the table tonight is only this: does holding it mean you have to go?

And the answer that the middle of that letter gives, and the answer that a parish was built on, and the answer of a table where people who did not choose each other are handed the same bread, is no. Welcome came first. It was never the prize for agreeing. If it had been, none of us would ever have been let in, because not one of us agreed with God about very much on the day He received us.