Do Not Let The Sentence Be Said

The laughter goes up about two seconds before he knows what it was about, and by the time he has it, the room has already moved on to something else.

So he laughs anyway, a beat late, the way you do. He is good at the beat late. He has been doing the beat late for eleven years and he has gotten so smooth at it that nobody has ever once noticed, which is its own particular kind of lonely.

He follows about a third. That is his honest number and he has counted. He catches the nouns and loses the joints between them. He knows the songs by their shape rather than their words, the way you know a road by its curves in the dark. There is a phone in his pocket that would translate any of it in four seconds and he will not take it out, because he is a grown man and he is not going to sit in the back of a room like a tourist reading a menu.

You have done the arithmetic in the middle of somebody's sentence. Everybody laughing, and you running the words you caught, trying to build the bridge fast enough to get across it before the next one starts, and then giving up and just watching their faces to know when to smile.

And on the way home, in the language you actually think in, the one you count in and pray in and swear in when you drop something, you say a sentence to yourself. Not angrily. Almost gently, the way a man states a fact he made peace with years ago.

I am separated from those people. Nobody did it to me. It is just what I am.

God did not answer that sentence. He outlawed it.

There is a moment in Isaiah where God turns and speaks directly to the outsider, and what He does with him is not what anybody expects.

He does not comfort him. He does not reason with him. He does not gather evidence and present a case for the defense. He forbids the man to say the sentence.

Neither let the son of the stranger, that hath joined himself to the LORD, speak, saying, The LORD hath utterly separated me from his people: neither let the eunuch say, Behold, I am a dry tree.Isaiah 56:3

Read what kind of statement that is. It is not encouragement. It is a prohibition, and it is aimed at a man's own mouth about his own self. Neither let him speak, saying. God is legislating against a sentence.

Now ask why a thing gets outlawed. Nothing gets outlawed unless somebody keeps doing it. You do not write a law against a thing nobody was ever going to say. Which means that centuries before you walked home doing the arithmetic, God had already heard that exact sentence coming out of somebody He loved, and He moved to stop it, in writing, permanently.

You are not a guest among God's people and you never have been one. Isaiah 56:3 does not answer that sentence, it forbids it, and the Holy Spirit is the one enforcing that ban inside a man who has been breaking it for eleven years.

And notice what God says the reason is. He does not say the sentence is unkind, or unhelpful, or bad for the man's morale. The sentence is banned because it is false. It makes a claim about God's own act, and the claim is wrong. It says the Lord has utterly separated me, and the Lord has done nothing of the kind, and God will not have His own work misreported by the man it was done for.

You have a place in His house on exactly the same footing as whoever is holding the microphone. A few lines further on He calls His house a house of prayer for all peoples, and it is written that way on purpose, and His Spirit does not check an accent at the door.

The belonging never ran through the language

Here is where I want to be a builder for a minute.

Every house has finish work and every house has framing. The trim, the paint, the way a room is arranged, the words people use for the cupboards: all real, all worth something, none of it load bearing. Take out the framing and the house comes down. Change the trim and it is the same house with different trim.

Language is finish work. So is idiom. So is the pace of a room, and the jokes it makes, and the particular way that group has done things since before you got there. Good things, some of them. Not one of them holds up a person's standing among God's people, and if you have been reading your third as a structural fault, you have been surveying the wrong part of the building.

You were made one of them in the language you think in. The word reached you in a tongue that Isaiah never heard spoken, and the Spirit is the reason it arrived at all.

Look at how God has handled this from the beginning. He did not require the outsider to arrive in the original. When His Spirit fell on that room in Jerusalem, the crowd outside was made up of men from a dozen places, and the whole astonishment of the thing was that every one of them heard it in the language he was born into. Nobody was told to come back when his Greek improved. The room adjusted. God adjusted the room.

That is His method and it has never changed. He is not standing at the far end of a language waiting for you to reach Him. He came the whole distance into a stable and He has been coming the whole distance ever since.

Let me be exact about the ground, since vague warmth is no use to a man in the back row. You are one of God's people because the Lord joined you to Himself, and because He forbade you to say otherwise, and because His house was called a house of prayer for all peoples before it was ever called anything else. That is the ground. Not fluency. Not comprehension. Not how much of the sermon you could repeat in the parking lot.

That sentence has no right to stay in your mouth. Scripture settles it, and the same Spirit who filled a room full of foreigners and gave every man his own tongue is the Spirit who is in you.