The Ordinary Years

Twenty to seven on a Sunday morning in February, and the key is cold enough to hurt.

He does the lock the way you do a lock you have done ten thousand times, with the small lift at the end that nobody else in the building knows about. Then the porch light. Then the boiler cupboard, and the hot pipe tick, and he stands there for a minute the way he always does while the building starts to come up to temperature, because if you do not stand there for a minute the whole day goes too fast.

Thirty-four years.

He worked it out in the car and then wished he had not. Thirty-four years of this exact lock. He has put the heating on for two ministers and an interregnum. He has done it with a broken wrist. He did it the morning after his father died because it did not occur to him not to, and somebody found him sitting in the back row at half seven and did not know what to say.

He has never had a moment.

That is the thing. He is not bitter and he is not fishing, and he would be embarrassed to hear this said out loud. But in thirty-four years there has been no night that split his life in two. No word that came. No time when the room went thick and he knew. He has read about people who have those, and he is glad for them, genuinely, and he has served alongside a few of them and loved them.

His own faith has been more like the boiler. It comes on, early, in the dark, and by the time anybody arrives the room is warm and nobody thinks about where that came from.

And there is a young man who was in this church for two years, who is doing remarkable things now in a city three hours away, and everybody here is proud of him, and so is he.

So why, this morning, standing in the boiler cupboard with his hand flat on a warm pipe, does he have the feeling that his whole life has been the part that gets cut?

And now I am going to stop saying he.

Because you have been at something for a long time. A marriage. A parent. A class of children. A congregation. A job you took for good reasons and have done properly for a very long time in a place where nobody is watching.

And you would never say this to anybody, so I will say it for you: you have started to wonder whether duration counts for anything, or whether the real thing was always the moment, the story, the turn, the testimony people ask you to tell, and you have not got one, and the years just went.

The last line of the biggest chapter

Paul has just spent an entire chapter on the resurrection. It is the highest thing he ever writes. Trumpets, the dead raised, death itself swallowed up, the whole cosmos turned over.

And then he has to land it, and watch what he lands it on. Not a vision. Not a strategy. Four ordinary words and a promise about work.

Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labour is not in vain.1 Corinthians 15:58

Steadfast is a building word. It means settled, seated, founded, the way a wall is founded. Immovable means it cannot be shifted out of position. And the word he uses for labor is not the tidy word for a career. It is the word for exhausting physical work, the sort that leaves you aching, the sort a person does with cold hands at twenty to seven.

So the crown of the resurrection chapter is a man with a key.

And then comes the line that is for you specifically, and I want you to hear the tense of it. Not will not be in vain. Paul says is not. Present. Already. It is not a promise that one day the ledger will be balanced and your decades will be shown to have counted. It says they are counting. Now. This morning, in the boiler cupboard, while the pipes tick.

You have been asking the wrong question, and you asked it honestly, and nobody corrected you.

You have been asking whether anything came of it. He is telling you that the labor itself is not empty. Not the fruit of it. The labor. The turning up. The lock with the lift in it. It is not a receipt God is holding until later; it is a thing He is holding now, and it is full and not hollow, and it never once slipped through.

Let me say what this is not, because you are a fair-minded person and you would spot it.

This is not a message that the quiet way is the holy way and the dramatic is for shallower people. That is a comfort available to the long-serving and it is a lie. God gives moments. He gives them to whoever He wants and He does not explain Himself, and the young man three hours away did not steal anything from you, and God is not rationing.

And it is not a rebuke to anyone who left. People leave for real reasons, some of them good, some of them because staying was doing them harm. Nobody in this message is more faithful than anybody else for having stayed in one building.

It is one thing only: your thirty-four years are not the part that gets cut. They are the part the chapter ends on.

So hear this said over you, at twenty to seven in a building with nobody in it. You are not doing something small and you have not spent thirty-four years on nothing, and the reason your work is not in vain is Christ raised rather than anything you could point at. That is written as the last line of the longest argument Paul ever made, and it is the Holy Spirit who works in you both to will and to do, and He has been in every one of those mornings.