The Wedding Where He Stayed Sitting Down

They cleared the floor at about half past nine, which took eleven men and four minutes and a certain amount of shouting, and the band came back on, and now the whole room is up.

Everybody. The grandmother is up. The boy of six who has been asleep under a chair since eight is up, and has been handed to somebody. Two of the cousins have started something that they will be reminded of at Christmas for the next forty years.

Beto is at the table on the edge with a glass of something in front of him that he is not drinking, and he is smiling, and he is not moving.

He is fifty-six. This is his niece's wedding and he loves her more than almost anybody in that room and he has cried twice today already, at the right moments, quietly, and been teased about it, and enjoyed being teased about it.

He has been sitting at weddings for eleven years.

Nobody told him to. That is the part that would take an outsider some time to understand. There was no rule handed down and no leader who said anything and no verse anybody quoted at him. If you asked him tonight he could not name a single person who ever told him to sit.

Eleven years ago something hard happened, and out of it he got serious about God in a way that changed his whole life and that he would not undo for anything. And somewhere in the first year of that, without a decision he could point at, he divided himself.

There is the part of him that prays. That part he trusts and feeds and takes seriously and would defend to anybody.

And there is the part of him that moves. The part that used to be the first one on a floor, that used to carry that bride around this same hall on his shoulders when she was four, that laughed with his whole chest. That part got folded up and put away, like a jacket a man decides he is too old for, and he never once said out loud why.

Halfway through the second song, the bride comes over.

She does not try to pull him up. She knows better; she has watched this for eleven years and she is not going to embarrass him in front of two hundred people. She sits down beside him, in her dress, for the whole of a song, which at her own wedding is an extravagant thing to do.

And she says, over the noise: Tío, you used to be the first one up. I remember you carrying me around this room.

You have that folded jacket. Yours might not be a dance floor. But you know the year you divided yourself, and you know you cannot name who told you to.

The Spirit's stated address is a body

Romans 8 is the chapter about life in the Spirit and it is the highest ground in the letter, and right in the middle of it Paul says where the Spirit actually lives.

But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you.Romans 8:11

Your mortal bodies.

Not your spirit. Not your inner life. Not the part of you that goes quiet at six in the morning with a book. Paul says mortal bodies, which is the most physical phrase available to him: the body that gets tired, that ages, that will one day stop. That one.

You have a mortal body and Scripture names it as the place the Spirit is at work. That is the written word and not my opinion of your evening, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the highest chapter in Romans and lays it on a table at the edge of a dance floor at half past nine.

And then the verb. Quicken. It means to make alive. Paul is not describing a body being tolerated or endured or held at arm's length until something better arrives. He uses a life word about it, and he attaches that life word to the same power that raised Christ out of a tomb.

Now, honestly: that verse looks forward as well. There is a resurrection in it and Paul means it, and I am not going to pretend the whole of that sentence is about tonight. I am not promising you anything about what your body does or does not do, this year or any year, because that is not mine to promise.

But the address is not in doubt. Whatever He is doing, the place He is doing it is a mortal body, and that is stated twice in one verse.

Dwelleth is a living-in word

Say the other word slowly, because Paul says it twice in that sentence too and he does not waste repetitions. Dwell in you. That dwelleth in you.

A dwelling is not a place you visit. It is where somebody lives, keeps their things, sleeps, gets up in the morning. When Paul wants a picture of the Spirit's relationship to you he does not reach for a visit or a touch or an influence. He reaches for a residence.

So the arrangement you made eleven years ago has a difficulty in it. You put the part of you that moves in storage and kept the part that prays, and the Spirit of God has been living in the whole building the entire time.

This is yours, and He dwells in the whole of you, and it is already settled. Romans 8 says dwelleth in you twice in one verse, and the same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead is the one making it a present fact in a man at a table with an untouched glass in front of him.

Let me guard this properly, because there is a version of this article that would be a rule with the sign turned round, and I refuse to write it.

Nothing here tells you what to do at that wedding. I am not going to hand you an instruction about your feet, and this site does not issue that kind of thing in either direction. If a man sits down at a wedding tonight because he wants to sit down, that is a man sitting down at a wedding, and there is no lesson in it.

What is being handed back to you is not permission. It is the arrangement. The division you made, where the moving part of you got quietly excluded from the holy part of you, is not in Romans 8 and it is not anywhere else either, and the Spirit has been living in the excluded part the whole time you have had it in storage.

And there is nobody to blame for the division. That is what makes it hard to see. You cannot go and have a conversation with whoever made this rule, because nobody did. It formed in you in a hard year, and hard years teach us things about ourselves that God never taught us.