The Name They Made Me Afraid Of

The hall empties in about eleven minutes and then it takes forty to put away, which is the ratio in every hall in the world.

Verlene is on chairs. She has been on chairs for nine years. Eight to a stack, along the wall, and she is fast at it and she likes it and she has never once let anybody take the job off her.

She is fifty-eight. She loves this church. She would tell you so and she would mean it and she has cried in this building more than once for good reasons.

And there is one thing she has never told a living soul.

When somebody prays out loud and uses the word holy, her body does a small hard thing. Not a shiver. Something more like a door closing somewhere back in the house. It happens every single time and it has happened every single time for thirty years, and she has covered it for so long that the covering is automatic: at the exact moment the word arrives, she bends down and picks up her bag, or reaches for a tissue, or says amen slightly too loud.

She has never worked out what to do about it because there is nothing to do about it. It is not a belief. Her beliefs are fine. It is a thing in her body, put there in another building a long time ago by people who are mostly dead, and it does not answer to argument.

Tonight the young woman on the other end of the row, who is about twenty-four and new and stacks chairs badly, says something into the middle of nothing at all.

She says: I love that word. Holy. It is my favorite word in the whole Bible.

She says it the way you would say you loved a song. No weight on it. She is not testifying. She goes back to getting four chairs into a stack that only holds three.

And Verlene, who is fast at this and has never dropped one, sets a chair down and goes and puts the kettle on, and stands with her back to the room and her hand flat on the trestle table.

Because that girl loves the word she flinches at. And they are talking about the same God.

You have that flinch. Yours might be a different word or a different building. But you know the door closing somewhere back in the house, and you know you have a cover for it, and you have never told anybody what it is.

God says His own name got damaged, and He takes the repair

Ezekiel 36 is a chapter where God speaks about His own reputation, and the honesty in it should stop us all where we stand.

And I will sanctify my great name, which was profaned among the heathen, which ye have profaned in the midst of them; and the heathen shall know that I am the LORD, saith the Lord GOD, when I shall be sanctified in you before their eyes.Ezekiel 36:23

Read what He says happened. My great name, which was profaned. Not misunderstood. Profaned, which means made common, dragged down, used badly. And He says who did it: which ye have profaned. His own people. Not outsiders, not enemies. The ones carrying His name are the ones who damaged it.

He says that out loud, about Himself, in His own book.

You are not imagining the damage, and God named it before you did. That is the written word and not my sympathy in a cold hall, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence from a prophet in exile and lays it on a trestle table with a kettle going behind you.

Now the part that should undo the last thirty years. And I will sanctify my great name.

He does not turn to the people who were injured by the misuse and tell them to try harder to feel differently. He does not say, you ought not to flinch. He looks at a name that was made ugly by the people who carried it, and He says: I will clean it. I will do the sanctifying. It is Mine and I will see to it.

He does the repair inside people

Then the last clause, which puts you inside the sentence rather than outside it. When I shall be sanctified in you before their eyes.

In you. That is where the repair happens. Not in an argument, not in a book, not in a well worded correction of everything that was said to you in 1994. In a person, in view of other people, over time.

Which means what is happening in you tonight, with your hand flat on a table and a kettle coming to the boil, is not a spiritual problem you are having. It is the project. It is the exact thing God said He would do, being done, in the only place He ever said He would do it.

This is yours, and the cleaning of the word is His work in you, and it is already under way. Ezekiel 36 says I will sanctify in the first person future and then says where, and the same Spirit who moved that prophet is the one making it a present fact in a woman standing with her back to a room she loves.

Let me guard this carefully, because there is a way to preach it that would flatten somebody.

I am not asking you to decide tonight that you are over it. Thirty years of a physical response does not get argued out of a body in an evening, and anybody who tells you it should is adding a second weight to the first one. The flinch is not disobedience. It is not weak faith. It is what happens to a person when a good word is delivered inside a hard year, and God, in this passage, puts the responsibility for the damage exactly where it belongs and it is not on you.

And I am also not putting anybody on trial. Not the building, not the people, not whoever said the thing that put the door in the house. Ezekiel names the damage without giving anybody a name to hate, and that is the pattern here. You do not have to prosecute a single person in order to have the word back. In fact you cannot; the prosecution and the reclaiming pull in opposite directions, and one of them will cost you the word for another thirty years.