I Stopped Saying We

She heard it in her own mouth at a funeral, which is a bad place to hear anything about yourself.

Somebody from another town, standing outside afterward, asked Delroy's widow a question and then turned to Sharon and asked, kindly and generally, how things were at her church.

And Sharon said: well, the part of it I am in is doing all right.

She has said versions of that for about three years and she has never once heard it. She heard it that day because she was tired and because she was standing in a car park with somebody she did not know, and the sentence came out and hung there and she thought, distinctly, when did I stop saying we?

Nothing has split. She wants that clear and it matters. There is one building, one Sunday, one name on the sign, and if you looked at it from outside you would see a church.

What there is instead of a split is a set of arrangements. Two people who are not put on the same rota. A subject that is not raised at the Tuesday thing because of who comes to the Tuesday thing. A quiet understanding about which of two men leads which sort of service. A whole architecture that everybody maintains without ever having agreed to it.

And the language has followed the architecture. Nobody says we any more without a qualifier. Our lot. The people I sit with. The part of it I am in.

She is fifty-four and she has been in that building since she was nine.

And what she has been carrying since the funeral is not anger at anybody, because there is no villain and she has looked hard for one. It is grief for a pronoun, which sounds ridiculous until you have lost one.

She said it out loud in the car: I used to be able to say we.

And you may know that car park. Yours may be a different room and nothing there may have split either, and you may have three qualifiers ready before anybody asks.

The appeal is made to people already calling themselves by different names

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it for three years and it was never yours.

You are not the one who has to reassemble that room. You never were. Scripture makes an appeal to a church already sorted into camps, and it makes it as an appeal rather than as a job assignment, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your vocabulary, who makes anybody one. Set it down here at the urn. It is heavy and it has been on you since that funeral.

Now hear the sentence, and hear the tone.

I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you.1 Corinthians 1:10

I appeal to you.

He does not command it and he does not organize it. He appeals, which is what a person does when the thing they want cannot be produced by instruction, and he does it in the Name, which is where the weight comes from.

And look at what he names first. That all of you agree with one another in what you say. The language. Before the practices, before the arrangements, before anything else, the words people use about each other.

Which means what you heard in that car park is not a small thing and it is not silly. It is the first thing named in the first appeal to the most divided church in the New Testament.

You have not lost your standing in that room by losing the pronoun. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who makes people one, and He has never once done it through anybody's careful phrasing.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch on this side and I have no intention of putting you in it.

Nothing here says your church has failed or that anybody in it is at fault. There is no villain, you have looked, and I am not going to hand you one from a page. Most of those arrangements were made by tired people trying to keep the peace, and several of them have probably prevented real damage, and Scripture is patient with tired people and His Spirit has been in that room throughout.

And nothing here is telling you to go and start saying we loudly at people, or to raise the architecture at a meeting. That is a decision with forty other people in it and it is not one this page can make for you.

The point is only that a pronoun went, and Scripture names the words people use as the first thing in the appeal, and His Spirit is the one who does the actual joining behind whatever anybody says.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. You are grieving something real.

Losing a pronoun sounds like nothing and it is not nothing, because a pronoun is where belonging lives in a sentence, and a woman who has been in one building since she was nine has been quietly saying that she is a guest in it for three years without noticing. His Spirit heard every one of those sentences and He has never once agreed with them.