He Did Not Pick the Obvious One

The urn is still ticking as it cools, and everyone has gone except the two of them, and he is stacking chairs.

Eight to a stack, that is the rule, because nine falls over. He knows this because he is the one who picks them up when they fall over. He has been stacking these chairs for eleven years and he can do it without looking, which is useful tonight, because he does not particularly want to look at the trestle table by the door where the sheet is still lying with a pen on top of it.

They had asked for someone. Not loudly. It came up near the end, after the roof and the rota, when people were already reaching for their coats. Somebody said they needed a person to take the Thursday group, the one with the men who come in from the hostel, and there was that small silence a room makes, and he felt his own heart go over like an engine turning.

He wanted it. He has wanted it for about two years, quietly, the way you want a thing you have not told anybody you want.

And then the vicar's daughter said Andrew would be brilliant at that, and everyone agreed, because Andrew would be brilliant at that. Andrew has the training. Andrew speaks well. Andrew has that way of standing in a doorway that makes people come in.

So he said nothing. He carried the urn back to the kitchen and rinsed the cups and put them upside down on the tea towel.

Now the hall is empty and the sheet is still on the table with one name on it and the pen sitting across the middle of the page, and he could pick that pen up. Nobody would see. There is not a single person in the building.

He turns the light off at the panel by the door and goes out to the car.

And I am going to stop saying he now.

Because you have your own hall and your own sheet and your own Andrew, and everything I have just described happened to you, in some version of it, and you have never said it out loud to anybody because saying it out loud would sound like envy, and it is not envy. You like Andrew. You would have voted for Andrew.

It is something much quieter than envy and it lives much further down. It is the settled belief that when God was handing out the real work, the work with weight in it, He looked at the room and He picked the obvious one, and He was right to. You have made your peace with it. You are useful. You stack the chairs. You are glad to.

And there is a thing in you that has been waiting eleven years for somebody to ask whether you were even in the room.

Are all your sons here

I am not going to argue you out of this. I could. There is a case to be made and I could make it and you would nod and it would last about four days, until the next Tuesday and the next sheet.

I would rather show you something.

There is a day in the Scriptures when the prophet Samuel walks into a small town to anoint a king, and the whole thing is a family occasion. Jesse gets his sons washed and lined up. The eldest comes past first, tall, obvious, exactly what a king looks like, and Samuel is already reaching for the oil. And God stops him and says a sentence that has been ringing for three thousand years: people look at the outside, but the LORD looks at the heart.

Seven sons go past. Seven. Every one of them presentable, every one of them there.

And then Samuel asks the question that this whole message is about, and I want you to hear how ordinary it is: are all your sons here?

There is a pause in that house. Because there is one more. He is out in the field with the sheep. Nobody sent for him. It genuinely did not occur to his own father to bring him in for this, and I want you to notice that nobody in that story is a villain. Jesse was not being cruel. He was doing what everyone does. He counted the ones who count.

And Samuel says, send and bring him, we are not sitting down until he gets here.

Read that again. A room full of qualified men, standing about, not allowed to sit down, because the one they left in the field has not arrived yet.

That is what God is like about the person nobody wrote on the sheet.

But God chose what the world counts foolish to shame the wise, and God chose what the world counts weak to shame the strong.1 Corinthians 1:27

Now, be careful here, because there is a way of hearing that verse that leaves you flattened, as though you were picked to make a point. That is not what it says. Look at the verb. God chose. It is deliberate. It is not a shortage and it is not a consolation. He was not stuck with you. The Spirit who put that verb in Paul's hand has been spelling it over you for eleven years, in a kitchen with the cups turned upside down on the tea towel.

He chose the one out in the field, on purpose, when there were seven perfectly good candidates already standing in the room in their good clothes.

And here is what I actually want you to take home tonight, and it is not an argument, it is a fact about you.

You were seen before you were counted.

While the room was agreeing about Andrew, you were already known, by name, by the One who does not need a sign up sheet, who never once in the entire history of the world found out about somebody by asking around. He knows what you have wanted for two years. He knows you say nothing because you would rather be overlooked than presumptuous. He knows what you do with the cups, alone, in an empty kitchen, when nobody thanks you, and I promise you that not one of those evenings went unwitnessed. Psalm 139:16 says every one of your days was written down before a single one of them happened. While the room was keeping its own list, the Spirit was keeping that one.

Andrew is not your rival. God is not running a small operation where a calling given to Andrew is a calling taken from you. The field you are standing in tonight is not the place where you were forgotten. It is the place where you were found.