Out Of Every Kindred, Which Includes Yours

The book cost almost nothing, at a stall between a man selling phone cases and a woman selling onions. A Bible in a language she reads, printed in 1931, the leather gone soft as cloth and the gilt worn off the edges by somebody else's thumbs. She bought it because she has been in this country two years now and has not been in a room with another believer for about that long, and she wanted something in the apartment with weight in it.

Halfway through the first evening the pages stop turning cleanly. Something is pressed in there. A flower, flat as paper, all the color gone out of it, and the shape of it perfectly kept, five petals and a stem, the way a flower is kept when somebody meant to keep it. In the margin of that page, in ink gone brown, there is a name in a woman's handwriting and a date. Ninety years ago. A spring.

She looks at what the flower was marking. Revelation 5. Somebody she will never meet, in a country she will never visit, in a year when her own grandmother was a child, read this page, put a flower in it, closed the book, and eventually died. And the flower waited in the dark for ninety years to tell a stranger in a rented apartment which verse to read.

You have been counting. Two years, or five, or since the funeral, or since the move. However long it has been since you were in the same room as somebody who believes any of this, you know the number, and the number has stopped being a fact and started being a status. A believer with no people. But the list you are on was not drawn up by anybody in your city, and nobody in your city has the authority to take you off it.

The list was made a very long way from here

There is a song in Revelation that heaven sings, and the interesting part is the reason it gives. Not that the Lamb is strong. Not that He is beautiful, though He is. Listen to the grounds.

And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.Revelation 5:9

Out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation. Those are the categories heaven uses when it counts. Not congregations. Not attendance. Not the ones who lived near enough to each other to make something of it. The categories are the ones you cannot resign from and did not choose: your bloodline, your language, your people, the piece of earth you came out of. Every one of them is represented in that room, and yours is not an exception that got overlooked in the drafting.

You are named inside a category that was written down before your city had a name. Revelation 5:9 counts by kindred and tongue and people and nation, and the Spirit tied you into a redeeming that was never measured in miles.

And notice that the song is sung in the past tense. Hast redeemed. It is not a plan being announced. It is a finished thing being celebrated after the fact, by a crowd that already knows how it turned out. Nobody in that scene is waiting to find out whether the far-off ones will be included. The far-off ones are the ones singing.

You are in that song, and the singing has never required a second voice in your building. It is written that the redeemed came out of every kindred, and His Spirit does not check the room before He says amen to it.

Joined without being anywhere near

Here is something worth sitting with. A large part of the New Testament is letters. Letters are what people write when they are not in the same room. Whole books of the Bible exist because believers were separated by sea and distance and prison walls, and not one of those letters opens by apologizing for the arrangement or treating it as a temporary irregularity to be corrected as soon as travel improves.

Paul writes to the Colossians that though he is absent in the flesh, he is with them in the spirit, joying and beholding their order. He says it in Colossians 2:5 as a plain statement of where he actually is. Not as a comfort. Not as a figure of speech to soften a disappointment. He reports his location twice and gives two different answers, and both are true.

You were joined to that body by one Spirit and never by proximity to anybody in it. 1 Corinthians 12:13 says that by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, and the same Spirit is the joint itself rather than a stand in for one.

That is the difference between a club and a body. A club is constituted by its meetings, so when the meetings stop the club stops. A body is constituted by what runs through it, and what runs through this one is not a schedule. Distance can keep two members of a body from seeing each other. It has never yet detached one.

You are inside it tonight, and the miles hold no authority over it of any kind. Colossians 2:5 reports a man present in two places and reports it as fact, and the Holy Spirit is why a sentence like that lands as honest rather than sentimental.