I Am the One Who Tells the History

It is about eleven minutes and Naomi has given it perhaps sixty times.

New people, mostly. A young couple who ask where the name comes from, or somebody transferring in who is polite enough to want to know, or once a student writing something, and Naomi is the one they get sent to because she knows it and because she is warm and because she does not go on.

She has the dates. She has the two founding families and what they did for a living and the front room it started in.

And she has, in the middle, a passage of about ninety seconds where she covers the year it became two congregations.

She used to say more.

Eleven years ago that passage had two extra sentences in it, and the two sentences named what the disagreement was actually about, in plain words, without any dressing on them at all.

She took them out after a Sunday when a woman in her sixties, who had transferred in from a long way away and had no history in any of it, said at the end: oh. That is a shame.

Not unkindly. Not as a judgement. She just said it, the way you would about anything, and then asked where the toilets were.

And Naomi went home and could not get it out of her head, and by the next time she gave the talk the two sentences were gone.

The version she gives now is not false. She has been careful. Everything in it is accurate and she could show you the source for all of it.

It simply arrives at the year and moves through it without giving anybody time to feel anything, and then it is on to the building fund and the extension and the work with the school, which is genuinely good and which people enjoy hearing about.

She is fifty-four.

And what she has thought, more than once, and put away every time, is that she is the one who decided that a hundred and forty years of that family's story would be told without the part that hurts.

Nobody asked her to. There was no meeting. She just took two sentences out.

And you may be the one who tells it, wherever you are. And you may have edited it so long ago that you can no longer hear the edit.

James puts confessing to each other in the open, as an ordinary practice

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it eleven years and it was never yours to carry alone.

You are not the family's editor. You never were. Scripture gives an instruction about saying true things out loud to one another and attaches an ordinary, communal purpose to it, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a careful eleven minute talk, who heals what needs healing in a people. Set it down here in this hall. It is heavy and you have taken it out sixty times without noticing.

Now hear it, and hear how plain and how mutual it is.

Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.James 5:16

To each other.

Not up. Not to a person with an office. Across, to the people you are actually among, which makes it an ordinary practice of a room rather than a formal event. That is what is written, and His Spirit is the one who is present in such a room.

And notice what it is for. So that you may be healed, and the you is plural. The saying is not for the relief of the one speaking. It is for the health of the whole set of people, which is exactly the thing a smoothed history quietly withholds.

Saying it out loud is a healing practice and it belongs to ordinary rooms. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who does the healing, and He has never once needed a story tidied before He would start.

Now let me be careful here, because there are ditches on both sides and I have no intention of putting you in either.

Nothing here says the founding families were wrong to want what they wanted. They were not. They wanted the whole church to be one, out of a front room, on their own money, and that is a magnificent thing to have wanted, and His Spirit was in that front room.

And nothing here says the other congregation is where it went wrong. It does not. They have a talk of their own and probably somebody warm who gives it, and Scripture in that verse sorts nobody into camps and neither will I.

The point is only about the two sentences, and Scripture puts saying it to each other in the open as an ordinary practice, and His Spirit is the one who is in the room when somebody does.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. The woman who said that is a shame was not criticizing you.

She was doing the one thing the story is supposed to make possible, which is feeling something about it, and you removed the part that let her. His Spirit was in that response and He has never once wanted it managed out of the room.