The Sign in the Arrivals Hall

The arrivals hall is the loudest quiet place in the city. Two hundred people pressed to a barrier, every one of them looking at the same pair of sliding doors, flowers going limp in fists, a small boy on his father's shoulders holding a balloon shaped like a number, and the doors opening every forty seconds on somebody who belongs to somebody, and a shout going up from one corner of the crowd, and then the waiting again.

Tariq is here for a stranger. A family from his fellowship asked him on Sunday: could he collect Auntie Hala on Thursday, they are all working, she is coming from her sister's and she is old and she does not know the city. He said yes because he says yes. He is holding a piece of cardboard with her name on it in marker pen, and he is so tired he could lie down on the floor of the hall and sleep.

He is tired because of the thing he does not tell anyone. For three years he has been trying to be holy. Properly. On his own. Up before five to read, the fasts, the lists, the examined conscience every night in a notebook, the constant low hum of not enough. He thought that was what the word meant: a bar, and a man alone under it, jumping. He has jumped for three years and he is worn to the bone and no nearer, and tonight, in the arrivals hall, he resents the errand because it is one more thing on top of the climb.

The doors open. A small old woman with a wheeled cart and a headscarf and a face like a walnut comes through and stops and scans the barrier the way they all do, and her eyes find the cardboard, and she reads her own name, and she comes straight to him. She does not know him. She has never seen his face. She takes it in both her hands, and she pulls it down, and she kisses his forehead the way you kiss a son, and she says, "You are Yusuf's people, so you are mine. Come, habibi, you look tired. Did you eat?"

He has not eaten. He stands there with his forehead kissed and the sign crushed between them and a feeling he cannot immediately name, and then he can name it, and it is this: he has been trying to be holy alone in a hall full of people who were his the whole time.

You have a sign in your hands too. Maybe you have been under the bar for years, jumping, keeping the notebook, holy by yourself and worn to nothing by it. And nobody has told you that the word was never addressed to one person at a time.

The word was always plural

Let me say the weight first, because it has been carried politely under a lot of early mornings.

It is not that you do not want to be holy. You want it more than most people ever will; that is why the alarm has been set for five. It is that you heard the word as a bar and you heard yourself as the only one under it. Holiness as a solo event. A private climb up a private mountain with a private notebook, and nobody to hand you water. And a climb like that has one ending, which is exhaustion, and after exhaustion the quiet conclusion that the word was never really for a person like you.

Hear me plainly. I am not going to hand you a better regime. I am not going to tell you to attend anything, join anything, sign anything; if there is no church in your life tonight, if a church is far from you or has burnt you, not a single sentence I am about to say leaves you outside it. And I am not going to tell you the notebook was wrong; the wanting in it was beautiful. What I am going to do is show you something about the grammar of the word, because the grammar has been carrying the answer the whole time.

Here is Peter, writing to scattered believers across half a dozen provinces, people who mostly did not know each other, and this is what he calls them.

Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.1 Peter 2:10

The verse before it says a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession. Every noun in that list is a crowd. Race. Priesthood. Nation. People. Not one of them can be done by a man alone in an arrivals hall. And when the same letter, a chapter earlier, says be holy, for I am holy, the you is plural in the Greek, as it is plural in the Hebrew of Leviticus it quotes. It is not spoken to a person. It is spoken to a people, the way you speak to a family in a doorway. You are holy the way a stone is holy in a wall, set in by God, held on both sides, and that is written in 1 Peter and made true in you by the Holy Spirit and not by your notebook. I am not consoling you. I am reading you the grammar.

Now stay with me. Paul says it even more plainly to the Ephesians, who had been outsiders, gentiles, the wrong side of every wall: you are no longer strangers and aliens, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God (Ephesians 2:19). Household. Holiness in Scripture is a household word. The saints are not a row of solo climbers who happened to reach the same ledge; they are a family, and the family is what is set apart. Auntie Hala understood that in one second at the barrier. You are Yusuf's people, so you are mine. She did not check his notebook. She checked whose he was. You belong to a set-apart people, and belonging is the thing that makes you holy, not the thing you earn by being holy first; the word says so, and the Spirit is the one who set you in the household.

This is why the climb was so tiring. It was never designed to be climbed. Paul's picture in 1 Corinthians 12 is a body, and a hand does not become a hand by effort; it is a hand because it is attached. Cut it off and it does not become a very disciplined hand. It stops being one. The exhaustion you feel is not the exhaustion of a person who has failed at holiness. It is the exhaustion of a hand trying to be a body by itself.

And here is the part I most want you to hear, because the sentence that has taken up residence in your heart is I have no one. Peter's readers were scattered. Some of them had no gathering within a day's walk. And he still called them a people, because the people is God's before it is anybody's building. If tonight you have no church, you are still in the household; the household is not a zip code. There is one believer somewhere who is yours: a cousin who prays, an old friend, a woman who once handed you bread, someone on the far side of a border you cannot cross. One is enough for the grammar to be true. You have people, in Christ, right now, whether or not you can see them from where you stand, and Scripture calls you fellow citizens with them, and the Spirit who baptized us all into one body did not leave you on the outside of it.

I know two things try to stand between you and this. One says this was for the first churches and not for a tired man in a modern airport. The other says it may be for people, but you have been solo so long that the household has surely closed. Hear me. The Word does not age out, and Jesus said the Spirit He gives stays with His people to the end, which is long enough to reach Thursday night at the barrier. And once you were not a people is exactly the sentence for someone who thinks he is not one. That is who Peter wrote it to. Not a people, and now a people. That is the direction it runs. It has never once run the other way.