Holy Written on the Cooking Pots

Two hundred and eleven people came, which is thirty more than they catered for, and it worked out because it always works out, and now it is twenty past ten and there are three of them left and one of those is on his coat.

Tom is at the sink. He is forty and he has been on that sink for eleven years and it is genuinely his favorite part.

The hall is dark now except this end. Somebody has stacked the chairs badly and they will fall over in the night. The urn is off. There is a plate of something on the side that nobody wanted and somebody will take home tomorrow.

He works through it. Glasses, plates, cutlery in the big tray, and then the pans.

And in his head, without him ever having thought about it once, there is a line down the middle of the evening.

On one side of the line is what happened in the main hall between seven and nine. The singing. The thing that was said. The part where a woman he does not know well stood up and told everybody something she has never told anybody, and the room went completely still, and something happened that everyone in it will remember at Christmas. That is the holy part. That is what the building is for.

And on the other side of the line is this. The sink, the trays, the wringing out of a cloth. Which is good. Which he loves. Which is serving, and serving is fine, and he would never complain about it for a second.

Two categories. He has never questioned it in eleven years.

Then he gets to the pot.

It is aluminum, it is enormous, it is dented on one side, and it is older than anybody currently in the building. It does soup for a hundred and forty and it has done since before Tom was born. He turns it upside down on the drainer to let it go and there, scratched into the base with something sharp, are two sets of initials and a year: 1974.

Somebody stood at this sink in 1974 with a nail in their hand.

Tom stands there with a towel over his shoulder doing arithmetic that has nothing to do with soup. Fifty-two years. Every week. That pot has fed people through three roofs, two boilers, a fire, and everything that has ever happened in this town.

You have that line down the middle. Your building might not have a sink in it. But you know which part of your week you have quietly filed under the word and which part you have filed under everything else.

The inscription comes off the headpiece and goes on to a saucepan

Zechariah ends his book with a vision, and the last two verses of it are the strangest and best thing in the whole prophecy, and almost nobody preaches them.

To feel it, you have to know one thing first. The high priest wore a gold plate on the front of his headpiece, and engraved on that plate were two words: HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD. That inscription was the most concentrated statement of set-apartness in Israel. One man, one plate, one day a year at the highest point of the whole system.

Now read where Zechariah puts it.

In that day shall there be upon the bells of the horses, HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD; and the pots in the LORD'S house shall be like the bowls before the altar. Yea, every pot in Jerusalem and in Judah shall be holiness unto the LORD of hosts.Zechariah 14:20-21

On the bells of the horses. On the harness. On the tack of an animal that pulls a cart through a market, jingling, in the dust, where anybody can hear it.

You are living in the day that verse is describing, and the inscription has already moved. That is the written word and not my encouragement over a sink, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the last vision of a prophet and lays it on a drainer at twenty past ten.

And then he goes further, because he has not finished. The pots in the LORD'S house shall be like the bowls before the altar.

There were two grades of vessel in that system and everybody knew the difference. There were the bowls used at the altar, which were consecrated and handled by priests, and there were the pots in the kitchens, which were for boiling meat. Two categories, a line down the middle, exactly like the line down the middle of your evening.

Zechariah says the line is gone. And note carefully which direction it goes: the pots become like the bowls. He does not lower the altar. He raises the kitchen.

Every pot in Jerusalem

Then the last move, and it is the one that takes it out of the building altogether.

Yea, every pot in Jerusalem and in Judah.

Not the pots in the temple kitchen. Every pot in the city. Every pot in the region. Domestic saucepans in houses where nothing religious ever happened, in streets, in ordinary homes, belonging to people who were not on any schedule.

This is yours, and the word has already been written on the ordinary, and it is already settled. Zechariah 14 says every pot in exactly those words, and the same Spirit who gave that vision is the one making it a present fact in a man with a dish towel over his shoulder.

Now let me guard it, because there is a way to preach this that empties out something we need.

I am not telling you the main hall was nothing. Something did happen in that room tonight when that woman stood up, and it was not the same as washing a pot, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest and would cheapen what God did in front of two hundred people. Gathered worship is real, and Scripture never treats it as interchangeable with anything else.

What Zechariah abolishes is not the altar. It is the idea that everything outside the altar is a lower grade of existence. Both things are true at once: what happened in the hall was holy, and this pot is holiness unto the Lord, and the second one does not diminish the first. It extends it out through the door and down the corridor and into your Tuesday.

And nobody taught you the line on purpose. Almost every building has it and almost nobody notices it. There is no one to blame in this kitchen. There is a pot, and a year scratched into the base of it, and a prophet who saw where the writing ends up.