The Verse Everybody Knew

The chairs were on sheets of plywood because the ground was soft, and you could feel the plywood give a little every time somebody shifted their weight.

Two rows under the green canopy. The wind kept getting up under the tent edge and letting it drop, and the man from the funeral home kept looking at the corner pole like he was going to have to do something about it. Somebody's grandbaby was asleep against a shoulder in the second row. You had a program in your hand that you had folded into quarters without noticing you were doing it.

You were there for your aunt, and you were sitting where you did not want to be sitting.

Because they were all there. The whole spread of them. The cousin whose posts you muted two winters ago. The couple who send a card every December from the church that made everything difficult. A man in a brown suit from a tradition you had drawn a line through, sitting on the end of the front row with his hat on his knee.

You had done the arithmetic in the car. You had decided what you were going to say and to whom, and how long you would stay, and which door you would go out of.

Then the minister said the first four words of the psalm.

And everybody's mouth started moving.

Not led. Not on cue. The words just came up out of both rows at once, from people who could not agree on almost anything, and yours came up with them before your head had voted on it. Your mouth had it. It had it from a woman in a print dress who taught you a verse a week and gave you a butterscotch if you got it, and it came up now like a thing that had been sitting there the whole time.

And on your left, half a step behind the rhythm, in the exact cadence you learned it in, was the man in the brown suit.

You did not look over. But you heard him, and he heard you, and the whole two rows went through the valley of the shadow together with the wind pulling at the tent, and nobody stumbled.

It lasted maybe twenty seconds.

Then it was over, and the man from the funeral home moved to the corner pole, and everybody stood up, and the folding chairs went back to being folding chairs.

You did not go out the door you had picked. You stood on the grass at the edge of the plywood for a while, holding a program folded into quarters, and you could not get your face to do what you had planned for it to do.

What came up out of both rows

I want to name the thing that shook you, because it was not sentiment and it was not grief making you generous.

It was recognition. For twenty seconds there was evidence, in your own ears, that the ground you thought held nobody but you has other people standing on it. That is a specific kind of shock and it does not wear off quickly.

Paul wrote one of the shortest sentences in his letters about exactly this ground.

For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.1 Timothy 2:5

Count what is in it. One God. One mediator. One name. That is not a summary of a movement, it is the floor of the room, and it was under both rows of chairs whether anybody there had thought about it that morning or not.

So here is what is true of you today. You have more company on that floor than you have been counting, and you did not put yourself there and you cannot be voted off it. That is what is written in 1 Timothy 2:5, and the Holy Spirit moved Paul to say it that short. The same Spirit brought the words up out of your mouth at a graveside before your head had a chance to object.

Now hear the other half, because it matters just as much and this is where a message like this usually goes soft.

The differences are real. I will not tell you they are small, or that everybody is saying the same thing in different words, or that if we were all nicer the disagreements would evaporate. Some of what divides those two rows is serious, thought about by serious people, and none of it is getting settled by me on a page. I am not settling one line of it, and I am not asking you to drop a conviction you came by honestly.

What I am doing is refusing to let the disagreements be the only thing you know about those people. That is the loss you have been living with, and it is not the same as being right.

You were handed something at that graveside that no argument could have handed you. Scripture had already said there is one mediator, and until that afternoon it was information; then it was a sound in your left ear in the cadence you learned it in, and the Holy Spirit is the one who took it the eighteen inches from your head to your chest.

There is a thing that happens when you write somebody off. You do not just put down the disagreement. You put down the person, and everything else they are carrying, including the parts you would recognize instantly if you were ever in a position to hear them. A funeral is one of the few places left where you cannot avoid hearing them.

And you have not been faithless for the writing off. That is not something I will lay on you. People make those decisions out of injury, most of the time, and injury is a reason, not a character flaw. His word says the one who was wounded understands wounds, and it is His Spirit who does the untangling, at the pace He chooses, in a person He is patient with.

But keep what you were given. Do not let it become a nice moment you had at a funeral. You are standing on ground that holds more than you and you have the evidence in your own ears, and Paul put the deed to it in writing before either of those rows was born.