She Just Sat and Listened

He can name what everybody else does and he cannot name what he does.

The two who run the sound. The three on coffee. The woman who has done the children's work for nineteen years and is a saint and would hate being called one. The man who is always the last to leave because he is stacking. His own brother-in-law, who leads the singing and is good at it.

And him. In a chair, in the fourth row, listening.

He is fifty-seven. He has offered, over the years, and it has never quite worked. He is not practical in the way the stackers are practical. He tried the coffee rota for about six months and was not good at it and knew he was not. He cannot sing.

So he sits. Every week, for twenty-odd years, he sits and he listens, properly, with his whole attention, and he could tell you the substance of almost every sermon he has heard in that building.

And what he believes about that, without ever having decided it, is that it is what you do when there is nothing you can contribute. That the people doing things are participating and he is attending. That listening is the residue left over when the real activities are taken out.

Two sisters, one house

There is a scene in a house in Bethany that goes at your assumption directly, and the striking thing is which one Jesus defends.

And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus' feet, and heard his word.Luke 10:39

One sister is serving. She is doing real work, necessary work, hospitality that somebody has to do, and she is not being lazy or wrong to do it.

The other one is sitting down and listening.

And when the serving sister complains, which is a completely reasonable complaint from where she is standing, Jesus does not split the difference. He says Mary has chosen the good part, and that it will not be taken away from her.

The one sitting and listening is the one He names as having chosen well.

You are doing the thing He defended out loud in somebody's front room. That is not me elevating your situation to be kind; Luke 10:39 puts Mary sitting and hearing, and He answers the complaint about it in her favor, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a scene from a house and lays it beside a chair in a fourth row.

What this does not mean

Now I have to guard this hard, because there is a lazy reading and this site does not sort people.

It does not mean the stackers are Martha and are getting it wrong. That reading has been used for centuries to make useful people feel spiritually second class, and it is a misuse. Jesus did not rebuke serving. He answered a complaint about somebody else, which is a different thing, and the woman who has done the children's work for nineteen years is not receiving less from God than you are.

And it does not make you the deeper one. You have spent twenty years assuming a hierarchy with you at the bottom, and turning the same hierarchy upside down would not be a mercy, it would be the same error wearing your face.

What it does mean is narrower and it is the thing you actually need: receiving is not the residue. It is not what is left when the activities are removed. It is a chosen thing, and it was chosen by somebody in the presence of Christ, and He said so.

You have been treating as leftover something Christ named as chosen. The written word has Him defending the one who sat and heard, and the Holy Spirit does not rank a congregation by function.

And the sentence underneath all this, which you have never said and which is the real subject: I have nothing to contribute. Twenty years of that at the back of your mind, in a building where you have listened harder than almost anybody, is why the whole thing has gone quiet on you. Not the sitting. The verdict about the sitting.

You are not attending something other people are participating in. Scripture puts the listening at the center of that house rather than at its edge, and the Holy Spirit has been meeting a man in the fourth row for twenty-odd years.