The Break Room Door

The laughter comes through the door before she gets to it, and her feet do what they have done for six years, which is keep walking.

She has a lunchbox. It has the same thing in it that it always has. And down the corridor, past the break room, there is a desk with her name on it where she eats every day with the screen on so it looks like she is working, and it is not that she does not like them. She likes them very much. It is that somewhere in her a decision was made a very long time ago, before she was old enough to make decisions, that a person who belongs to God eats somewhere else.

Today it is Dev's birthday. Somebody has brought a cake with too many candles on it and the whole team is in there, and Priya from the front desk is telling a story that involves a great deal of language and everyone is helpless with it, and Marcus is doing the voice he does, and it is loud, and it is warm, and the door is propped open with a fire extinguisher, and she has slowed down. Just for a second. Lunchbox in one hand.

And in that second she sees, very clearly, the people who taught her the word. Good people. Serious people. People who kept themselves so clean that being near them felt like standing in a room where you were not allowed to touch anything. Not one of them would have gone in. And they were the holiest people she knew, and so, without anybody ever saying it as a sentence, holy came to mean: keep walking. And she has. Six years of it. And it is very, very lonely, and she has assumed the loneliness was simply the price.

Somebody sees her at the door. "Come on! It's Dev's birthday, there's cake." And she stands there with everything she was ever shown pulling her down the corridor, and something else, something she cannot name yet, holding her feet exactly where they are.

You know that door. Maybe yours is a break room, or the café after the five-a-side, or the group of mums by the gate, or your own brother's kitchen. But you were shown a holiness that stood back, by people who meant it, and now the word itself feels like an instruction to leave, and you have been leaving, and you are tired of eating with the screen on.

What they said about the holiest man who ever lived

Let me stand at the door with you before I say anything, because the low place needs to be said in words. It is not that you think the people who taught you were wrong. You do not know that. It is that the only picture you have of the word is a picture of distance, and you love God, and so you have kept your distance, and it has cost you six years of birthdays and something in you has started to suspect that this cannot be right, and you have nowhere to put the suspicion without feeling like you are betraying the people who loved you enough to be strict.

I am not going to prosecute them. I want to be very clear about that. Some of them loved you as well as they knew how, and they were handed the word the way they handed it on, and I do not need to make anybody a villain to show you something better. I only need to show you one person.

Here is what the serious people of His day said about Him, and they meant it as an accusation:

This man receives sinners and eats with them.Luke 15:2

Sit with that for a moment. The holiest man who has ever walked into a room, the one whose holiness was so complete that a woman only had to touch the edge of His coat, was accused of exactly the thing you were taught to avoid. Eating with them. Receiving them. And notice what He does not do. He does not deny it. He does not explain that He was only there for a minute. He tells three stories, one after another, about a sheep and a coin and a boy, every one of which ends in a party, and the point of all three is that this is what heaven is like.

You are set apart for God and set down among people, both at once, and the second half is not a compromise of the first. I am not offering you my opinion of holiness there. I am reading you Luke 15, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the record of what Jesus actually did and lets it out from under a picture you were shown, so that you can see the man Himself standing in a doorway with cake on the other side of it.

Which way holiness travels

Now here is the thing that changes everything, and it is in the Bible before Jesus ever came.

The prophet Haggai once asked the priests a question. If a man carries holy meat in the fold of his robe, and the fold touches bread, does the bread become holy? No, they said. Then he asked: if a man who is unclean touches bread, does the bread become unclean? Yes, they said. And that was the way it worked. Uncleanness was catching. Holiness was not. You could lose holiness by touching the wrong thing, and so the sensible thing, the serious thing, was to touch as little as possible. That is the world your teachers were living in. It is not a stupid world. It is just not the world any more.

Because then a man with leprosy came to Jesus and knelt down, and Jesus, moved with compassion, stretched out His hand and touched him. Touched him. And by every rule of the old arithmetic, that should have made Jesus unclean. It did not. It made the leper clean. In Jesus the direction of contagion reversed. Holiness went out. It went into the leper. It went into the tax collector's house and sat down at his table and the tax collector came out changed and the table did not make Jesus dirty.

You have a holiness in you that goes into a room and does not come out with less, because it is His and it travels the way His does. That is what is written in Mark 1 over a leper's shoulder, and it is His Spirit, the same Spirit that was on Him when He reached out, who is the one carrying it in through the break room door on you.

That is the thing your teachers, for all their seriousness, may not have been shown. Not that they were bad. That they were still doing the old arithmetic in a world where the arithmetic had changed.

Set apart is not shut away

One more thing, and then I want to walk you into the room.

Jesus said something to a crowd on a hillside that I want you to hear as a description and not a demand: you are the light of the world. And then He said the thing about the lamp. Nobody lights a lamp and puts it under a basket. They put it on the stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. Everyone in the house. Not everyone in a separate, cleaner house down the corridor.

Do you see what a holiness that keeps walking actually is? It is a lit lamp being carried, very carefully, into a cupboard, so that nothing can blow it out. And it does not go out. It just lights a cupboard. And the house it was lit for eats birthday cake in the dark.

You are the light of the world, He said so, and light that stays out of the room is not more holy for staying out, it is only more alone. That is Matthew 5, and it is the Spirit who lit the lamp in the first place who is the one asking, very gently, to be carried through the door.