The Plates We Never Used

Somebody hands her a stack of the good plates out of the locked cupboard at the end of the hall, and her hands do not want to take them.

Harvest supper. The hall smells of floor polish and the first of the soup, and there are eleven people setting long tables in white cloths, and a boy going down the middle putting a spoon at every place. The cupboard has been unlocked for the first time since Easter and the plates are coming out along a line of hands, the ones with the gold rim, the ones that live behind glass. A girl at the front of the line is carrying one with both arms out straight in front of her the way you carry a thing that could get you into trouble.

She takes the stack. And what comes up in her, unasked, from a house a long way back and a long time ago, is not the supper. It is a cupboard in a front room she was not allowed in, and a table set once a year and not sat at, and a word that hung over the whole house like weather. Holy. In that house holy was the room you did not go into. Holy was the plates you did not eat off. Holy was the list of what we did not do, and mostly holy was the sound of a door being shut, gently, so you would know it was your fault. The people who taught her that word loved her, in the way they had been taught, and she is not here to put any of them on trial. But the word came to her broken, and she has been carrying it broken for forty years, and it still shuts a door in her when somebody says it in a sermon.

She sets a gold rimmed plate at each place. Somebody laughs down the hall. The soup is coming through. And it dawns on her, plate by plate, that these were never holy because they stayed in the cupboard. They are being brought out. They are going to have soup in them and bread crumbs on them and a hundred hands round them tonight, and that is what they were kept for.

You are the one with the stack in your hands. You learned the word in a house where it mostly meant what you were not allowed to do, and the word still means that in your body, whatever your head has read since. I want to hand it back to you tonight, and I want to hand it back the way it was written, and it is bigger than the cupboard.

The word came to you broken, and that is not your fault

I want to say the ache before I say the answer, because a word that has been shutting doors in a person for forty years does not stop at the first verse. You heard holy and heard a bar. You heard holy and heard a room you could not enter, a thing you could not touch, a version of yourself that was never going to be allowed in. And because the people who said it were the people who fed you, you could not throw the word away; you just learned to flinch when it came near. That is a real wound. It was done with the best word in the language, which is what makes it so hard to clean.

Now let me set the word down in front of you as it actually reads, and hear who is setting it down, because it is not me. You are set apart, and the setting apart was done to make you His, and it was never done to keep you out of a room. I am speaking the written word, not my own kindness: God says I have separated you from the peoples that you should be Mine, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that sentence out of the book and puts it back into a woman holding a stack of plates.

You shall be holy to me, for I the Lord am holy and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine.Leviticus 20:26

Read the end of that verse slowly, because the house you grew up in stopped reading before the end. Separated, yes. Set apart, yes. That much the house had right. But separated for what? That you should be Mine. The whole weight of the word lands on that last clause. Holy in the mouth of God is not a cupboard word; it is a belonging word. It means His. A holy plate is not a plate nobody eats off. It is a plate that belongs to the table and comes out for the feast. A holy field is not a field left fallow behind a fence; it is the field marked out to be sown for the King. Set apart, in Scripture, is always set apart to, never only set apart from. You have been set apart to Him, and His Spirit is the one who does the setting and the keeping, and none of it was ever your job to earn by not doing things.

I have stood on ground that was set apart. Not fenced, not roped off, not empty. Planted. Watched over. Named as somebody's. The land does not become holy by being unused. It becomes holy by being claimed and worked by the one it belongs to. That is what happened to you, and it happened long before you learned the word wrong.

Bigger than the house

Here is the lie that has lived in the word for you, and I want to name it so it can be evicted rather than described. It says holy means less. Less room, less table, less life, less you. It says the holy version of you is the shut away version, and it says God is the one shutting the door.

He is not. You are a treasured possession, and Scripture says so in exactly those words, and a treasure is a thing brought out and used, not a thing locked behind glass. God called His people a treasured possession and a kingdom of priests, and priests are the people who go in, not the people kept out. The Holy Spirit is the one who carries the plates down from the shelf and puts them on the table. He is not the door being shut. He is the cupboard being opened.

And I have to say the thing a site about holiness gets wrong at this exact bend. I am not handing you a new list. I am not going to tell you what to do or stop doing, and neither is this site, because the moment holy becomes a code again it has become the cupboard again, and you have had enough of the cupboard. What you do with a set apart life is between you and the Spirit who set it apart, and He is a good teacher and He is patient. What I am doing is giving you back the word. You were given the word broken, and it is being handed back to you whole, and it is the written word and not my opinion that says what it means: His. His Spirit does the rest, in His time and in His way.