The Man Who Kept the Gate Shut

The lane runs about four hundred yards and there are eleven houses on it and every one of them has a gate, and Graham has worked out, over the course of a year, that the gates are the whole social system of the place.

People do not knock. Knocking is for the meter reader. What people do here is stop at your gate, and lean on it, and say something about the hedge, and then somebody comes out, and forty minutes later they are still there and one of them has a mug.

Graham's gate has a latch that sticks. It came like that. He has been meaning to fix it for eleven months and he has an eleven month supply of reasons, and he knows perfectly well that the real reason is that a sticking latch is an excellent thing to have.

He is fifty-six. He came out here from a city and a job that ate him, after a long stretch where his faith went from a habit to the only thing holding the roof up. It is real. He reads at the kitchen table with the window open. He is not performing anything for anybody.

And somewhere in the first month he made a set of small decisions that never once presented themselves as a set. He would keep himself to himself. He would not get pulled into things. He was not here to be part of a lane, he was here for quiet, and quiet is where he had met God, and there was a sentence forming in the back of his mind the whole time that went something like: this is what set apart looks like.

The gate stayed shut. And it is a village, so people read it in about two weeks and adjusted, politely and permanently.

Two weeks ago the woman at number four left a jar of chutney on his gatepost. Not at the door. On the post. And he stood in his own kitchen with a jar in his hand and felt something he could not name, and he still cannot name it, and it is still on the windowsill unopened.

Tonight he is walking back up from the box at the end and three doors down Ellie and the man from the farm cottage are leaning on a gate in the last of the light, and have been for a while, and will be for a while longer.

He walks past. He says good evening. They say good evening. And he lets himself into his own path, and the latch sticks, and he stands there in the dark with his hand on it and understands, with an unpleasant clarity, that he moved out here to be near God and has spent a year making sure nobody can get to him.

You know that latch. Yours might be a schedule or a commute or a habit of not replying until the next day. But you know the year, and you know what you told yourself it was.

The Word did not send a message

John opens his gospel with the largest possible statements and then, in verse fourteen, does the thing that changes the address of everything.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.John 1:14

Dwelt among us. The word John reaches for there means pitched a tent. It is tabernacle language, deliberately, and every Jewish reader of that sentence would have heard the echo instantly, because the tabernacle was not a building on a hill outside the camp. It was a tent, and it was pitched in the middle, with the tribes arranged around it on all four sides.

You have been moved in on, and God's own way of being holy on this earth was to pitch a tent among people. That is the written word and not my opinion of your latch, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the first chapter of a gospel and sets it down on a lane at dusk.

And then the clause in the brackets, which most people skate over. And we beheld his glory. Beheld is a looking word. It requires proximity. Nobody beholds anything from four hundred yards away with the gate shut, and John is telling you that the glory of God was seen by ordinary people precisely because it came near enough to be looked at properly.

That is the arrangement. He came close, and because He came close, they saw. Distance would not have protected the glory. Distance would simply have meant nobody saw it.

The holiest thing in the camp was in the middle of the camp

Stay with the tent for a minute, because the geography of it is the whole argument.

The tabernacle held the most concentrated holiness on the earth at that time. And it was not put on a mountain, or across a river, or up a valley where you had to be committed to reach it. It was pitched dead in the center, with families camped around it, with children and animals and cooking fires and arguments and washing on every side of it, close enough that people could see the cloud over it from their own tent doors.

The holiest thing in Israel was surrounded by ordinary life on purpose. And God gave the instructions Himself.

This is yours, and the pattern was set by Him and not by anybody's temperament, and you are already inside it. John 1 says dwelt among us, Exodus put the tent in the middle, and the same Spirit who filled that tent is the one making it a present fact in a man standing at his own gate in the dark.

Let me guard it properly. Quiet is not the enemy here, and I would never say it was. Jesus went off alone repeatedly and if He needed it then we certainly do, and the year you have had at that kitchen table with the window open has not been wasted and God has been in it. Solitude is a real thing and this message is not against it.

But solitude has a shape. It is a room you go into and come out of. What you have built is not a room, it is a perimeter, and the tell is that you cannot get out of it either. A man who takes an hour alone with God at six in the morning is doing what Jesus did. A man who has arranged a whole life so that nobody can reach him has done something else, and calling it the same word is how a year goes by.