The Talks That Quietly Stopped

There were meetings. Rosalind can remember the church being tidied for one.

She was about eleven. There were extra chairs and somebody had polished the floor in the entrance, which never happened, and her mother wore the coat she wore to funerals and weddings and said in the car that they were coming over.

They came four times over about two years, and people from her church went over there twice, and there is a photograph somewhere of about forty people outside a building on a bright day.

Then there is nothing.

Rosalind is fifty-one and she cannot tell you when it stopped, because there was no announcement and no last meeting and nothing was ever said from the front about it having ended.

It simply is not a thing anybody mentions.

She asked her mother once, about fifteen years ago, and her mother said: oh, that all fizzled out, and then said something about the weather in a way Rosalind recognized and did not push.

Her mother died four years ago.

And what Rosalind sat with in the spring, on a Tuesday, doing something else entirely, is that there are perhaps six people left alive who were in the room for those meetings, and she knows all six of them, and she sees two of them every week.

And she has never asked.

Not once, in forty years, and she is not a shy woman and she asks people things for a living.

There is something she has almost said to her husband a few times. It is: I think I do not want to know, and I think the reason I do not want to know is that it will be something small.

And you may have a set of meetings like that in your own memory. And there may be people still alive who were in the room.

Paul asks a divided church a question with only one answer

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

You are not being disloyal by wanting to know. You never were. Scripture has a man writing to a church that had come apart into named groups, and instead of arbitrating he asks a question, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a settled account of who stopped ringing whom, who does anything about a division. Set it down here in this hall. It is heavy and it has been in a photograph in a drawer since you were eleven.

Now hear it, and hear that it is three questions and the first one carries the rest.

Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in the name of Paul?1 Corinthians 1:13

Is Christ divided?

He does not answer it. He does not need to, and the not answering is the force of it: the question is built so that the room answers it themselves, in their own heads, and cannot get out of the answer.

And notice where he goes next. Straight to himself. Was Paul crucified for you? He is the one being followed by one of the parties, and the first name he puts in the way of the question is his own, and he does not use it to establish who was in the right.

You are allowed to ask that question about your own people. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who does anything real about a division, and He has never once required that a person know how it started first.

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 people at those meetings failed. They did not. Forty people stood outside a building on a bright day and had a go at something enormous, and there is a photograph of it, and Scripture has nothing but honor for the wanting.

And nothing here says the other side let it drop. It does not. There is a version of this over there with the same fog in it, and I will not sort forty people in a photograph into the ones who tried and the ones who did not.

The point is only about the never asking, and Scripture puts a plain question to a divided church without arbitrating anything, and His Spirit is the one who is present when somebody finally asks it.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. You were right about why you have not asked.

You think it will turn out to be something small, and the smallness is what you are protecting yourself from, because a large reason would at least be worthy of the photograph. His Spirit is not frightened of a small reason and He has never once needed the story to be impressive before He would work in it.