Standing at the Back by the Font

The font is right by the door in that church, which is deliberate and about a thousand years old, and it means that anybody who comes in late walks straight into the middle of the most photographed part of the morning.

Her great niece. Eleven weeks old. There is a shawl that has been on four generations and is now more repair than shawl. There is a churchwarden who has done this so many times he could do it in his sleep and who still gets something in his throat every single time. There is a two year old who is going to say something loudly at exactly the wrong moment and everybody in that building is quietly looking forward to it.

There is a seat kept for her. Third row, on the end, with somebody's coat on it so nobody takes it.

She came in four minutes late on purpose and she is standing at the back by the font.

That is not an accident of timing. She left the house late on purpose too. The whole morning has been engineered, very carefully and entirely privately, so that she could be at this christening without being in the middle of it, and so that she could go at the end without anybody watching her go.

And underneath it, if you asked her, and nobody ever will, is a way she has come to hear a particular word. The word is light. She hears it as something that goes looking for people, and she has been arranging herself out of its way for a long time.

Sit down here in the back pew with me. Today I am speaking to the one who did something a good while back, took it to God straight and meant every word, and has been coming in late and standing at the back ever since.

And before you brace: nobody is setting you a pace. Coming in late is not a sin, this site will not call it one, and there is no timetable in this message.

Read what the verse actually says light is

There is a line in Ephesians that has been used as a warning so often that most people have never read it as a sentence.

But all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light: for whatsoever doth make manifest is light.Ephesians 5:13

Read the second half. Whatsoever doth make manifest is light.

That is not a threat and it is not even a rule. It is a definition. Paul is telling you what light is: light is the thing that makes things visible. That is its nature. That is what it is for.

He is not saying light hunts. He is not saying light is out looking for people in the back row. He is saying that anything which lets a thing be seen is, by definition, light, and then in the very next verse he says: awake, and Christ shall give thee light.

Give. It is a gift in the next sentence. He hands it to a person.

You are given light rather than searched by it, and you were never being hunted through a building by the thing God calls a gift. I am not offering you a softer reading. The written word defines light in that clause and hands it over in the next one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it into a woman standing by a font on a Saturday morning.

What light is actually for

Now let me say what light does in an ordinary house, because that is nearer the truth of this than any amount of theology.

You put a light on so you can see the step. You put a light on to find the thing you dropped. You put a light on because somebody is coming in and you want them not to fall over the boots in the hall.

Light is a kindness in every house I have ever been in. Nobody puts a light on in order to catch somebody.

And God is not running the world on a different principle from the one He built into a hallway. The purpose of being able to see is that things can be seen to, and that people can find their way about, and that a person coming in through a door does not go over on the step.

You are standing in a light that was put on so you could see where you are going, and you were never what it was switched on to find. Scripture gives light as a gift in the sentence immediately after, and it is His Spirit, not a better nerve on a Saturday, who makes a lit room feel like a lit room.