No Room That Is Mine To Offer

Four things this year about opening your home, and she has nothing to open.

She has a room in a house with three other people in it. The kitchen is shared and there is a rota on the fridge. The front room is technically communal and in practice belongs to whoever got there first, and there is a television on in it more or less permanently.

Her room has a bed, a chair, a rail with her clothes on it, and about four feet of floor.

She cannot ask anybody round. Not because she is ashamed of it, though there is some of that. Because there is nowhere for two people to sit.

And every article about hospitality she has read this year has been written to somebody with a table.

She does not think any of them meant it that way. She is fair about that. But the effect has been the same every time, which is a low steady sense of being on the outside of something that everybody else is being invited into, and after the fourth one she stopped reading them.

Underneath that, and worse, there is a thought she has had for about two years now and has never told anybody.

Nobody knows her. Not really. Not in the way that seems to require a kitchen, and she has begun to think that being known might be something that only happens to people with somewhere to put a table.

He will shew you a large upper room

Sit down at the shared table a minute, because the most important meal that has ever been eaten happened in a borrowed room, and nobody knows whose it was.

Jesus sends two disciples into the city. They are to follow a man carrying a pitcher of water, and to speak to the master of whatever house he goes into.

And he will shew you a large upper room furnished and prepared: there make ready for us.Mark 14:15

A large upper room, furnished and prepared.

It is not their room. Not one of the twelve owned it. They arrive, they are shown upstairs, they make ready in a space that belongs to somebody else entirely, and the whole of that night happens in it.

And here is the thing about the owner: the gospel does not name him. He has no name and no speech and no further appearance anywhere. The most consequential evening in history took place in his house and the record does not tell us who he was.

Hear this in the shared kitchen. You are not on the outside of anything, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts the last supper in a borrowed room and never names the man who owned it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you reading four articles this year that all seemed to be about somebody else's table.

Now let me be careful, because those four articles were not wrong.

They were written to a real reader who has a room and keeps it shut, and that reader exists and needed a word, and nobody was showing off at you. But a subject described only in one register makes everybody outside the register feel accused, and the accusation you have been hearing all year was never in the text.

Hear this too, and let it land in the corner. You are not less known because you rent, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts the most important table in a room nobody in the story owned, and the Spirit of God has never once made a lease the condition of being known by anybody.

And now the thing that is actually true about being known, because you have half of it already and you have not counted it.

Being known does not happen because of a room. It happens because of repetition and specifics. Somebody who knows what you are worried about this month, who asks about it again in three weeks without being reminded, and who has a name for the thing you never say to anybody. That is written into the whole shape of that borrowed room, and the Holy Spirit has been doing exactly that kind of work in you all year.

That can happen at a shared table with a packet of biscuits on it. It can happen in a car outside a building. It happens on a bench, in a launderette, on a long walk, in a canteen at half past two.

What it requires is a second time, and a third, and a fourth. Not a room.