The Chapel at the End of Ward Nine

Four in the morning is the quietest hour a hospital has, and it is not silent. It is the hum of a floor polisher and the click of a door on a slow closer and somewhere two corridors away a machine reminding somebody of something.

Bernice has the buffer. She has had the buffer for nine years. Ward nine, then the corridor, then the little room at the end with the sign on the door.

The sign says CHAPEL, in the same style as every other sign in the building, screwed on with two screws. Inside there are eight chairs in two short rows, a small table, a window with frosted glass, a shelf with two Bibles and a box of tissues that is refilled by somebody Bernice has never met. And it is a nice room, and she polishes it once a night, and she has never once sat down in it in nine years.

That is not modesty and it is not shyness. It is arithmetic, and she could do the sum for you in her sleep. The word holy means a level. She knows people who are at that level, or near it, and she is fond of them and she is not one of them. She has a temper. She has a marriage that took work nobody saw. She has thoughts at four in the morning that she would not read out. So the chapel is a room she keeps clean for the people who are entitled to sit in it, and she has never resented that once, and she has never questioned it either.

Except that tonight the buffer catches the edge of a floor tile near the far wall, and she goes down on one knee to look at it, and she can see the ghost of the old shelving brackets in the wall. Four of them, filled and painted over, the way you can always still see them.

This was a store room. She knew that. Everybody who has been here more than five years knows that. It was linens and spare drip stands until they ran out of anywhere else and somebody made a decision and somebody else came with a screwdriver and put a sign on the door.

The room did not improve. Nobody rebuilt it. Nobody made it worthy. It is the same eleven feet of vinyl floor it was when it held boxes, and it is a chapel now because it was designated, by a decision, by somebody with the authority to decide.

You have knelt on that floor. Maybe your sum has different numbers in it. But you know the feeling of keeping a room clean for other people, and never once thinking the sign on the door might have anything to do with you.

God puts Himself at the front of the verb

Ezekiel 37 is the chapter with the bones in it. A whole valley of them, dry, scattered, past any argument about whether they can help themselves. And after God has raised them and put breath in them and set them on their feet, He says this.

And the heathen shall know that I the LORD do sanctify Israel, when my sanctuary shall be in the midst of them for evermore.Ezekiel 37:28

I the LORD do sanctify. Read who is at the front of that sentence. Not, Israel shall sanctify itself and I will confirm it. Not, when they reach the level I will call them holy. I the LORD do sanctify, first person, present tense, His hand on the verb and nobody else's anywhere near it.

You have been sanctified by a God who put Himself at the front of the sentence. That is the written word and not a kind thing I am saying to you at four in the morning, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line out of a valley full of bones and lays it down on a vinyl floor in a corridor with a buffer still warm.

And now look at what the evidence is. When my sanctuary shall be in the midst of them. The proof that a people is holy is not their standard. It is His presence, sitting in the middle of them. That is the whole test. Not the quality of the room. Who is in it.

Which is exactly what that sign on the door means. Nobody sanded the walls. Somebody put a screwdriver in his pocket and walked down the corridor and made a decision, and now what happens in that room is different, because of who meets people there.

The bones did not contribute

I want you to stay in that chapter a minute longer, because of where the sentence sits.

He says it after the bones. Not before. He says I the LORD do sanctify to a people He has just described as dry, disconnected, and entirely without resources. They did not rattle themselves together. They did not grow their own sinew. The prophet was told to speak and God did every single thing that happened in that valley, and then, standing over the result, He says the sanctifying is His too.

It is already done, and you contributed exactly what the bones contributed. Ezekiel 37 wrote it down in that order deliberately, and the same Spirit who breathed into a valley is the one making it a present fact in your chest tonight rather than a chapter you once heard read badly.

Now hear me guard it, because I am not handing you a soft word. Holy is serious. It is more serious than the level you have been failing, because a level can be reached and forgotten and a designation made by God does not move. I am not lowering anything for you. I am telling you the sign was screwed on by somebody with the authority, and it is heavier than the sum you have been doing, and He carries it.

And the people at the level you have been measuring yourself against? Most of them are doing the same sum in a different room. Nobody is on trial here. There is just a wall with four filled holes in it and a sign on the door.