In No Wise Cast Out

He goes twice a year and he stands at the back both times, near the font, on the left, where the draft comes under the door.

It is the church he was baptized in and the church where his grandmother's funeral was and the church where he served at the altar from eight to fourteen in a cassock that was always too long. Everybody in that building knew him as a boy. Several of them still recognize him and say his mother's name when they see him, which is how it works there.

When he was twenty two, standing outside on the night before he left for a job three states away, he told God he would never leave that parish. He meant something real by it: that he would keep coming back, that this would stay his, that he was not going to become one of those men who has a hometown church he mentions and never enters.

He became one of those men in about four years.

Now he is forty six. He comes at Christmas and he comes in August when his mother has the family down. He stands at the back. He does not go up for anything. He sings, quietly. When the line forms he steps back against the wall and lets people past him, and if his cousin catches his eye he does a small thing with his hand that means it is fine, I am fine, go on.

He would tell you, if you pushed him, that it is respect. That a man who does not come has no business at the front.

It is not respect. It is a sentence he passed on himself twenty four years ago in a parking lot with a packed car, and he has been serving it two days a year ever since.

You may have a wall you stand against. A back row, a doorway, a place you position yourself so that nobody has to decide about you. And you may have called it humility for so long that you have stopped noticing what it actually is.

The sentence with two negatives in it

Now I want to put a verse in front of you, and I want to warn you first that translators have softened it, because English is embarrassed by what the Greek does.

Jesus is speaking to a crowd who have followed Him across a lake for the wrong reasons, and He says something about who comes and what happens to them.

All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.John 6:37

You are covered by a promise with exactly one condition in it, and the condition is walking forward. John 6:37 stacks two negatives so that no arrangement of circumstances could get underneath it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has walked you into that building twice a year.

In no wise

The phrase in no wise is not decoration. In the original there are two negatives stacked on top of each other, and Greek does not treat that as canceling out the way school English does. It doubles down. It means: not, and absolutely not, and there is no arrangement of circumstances under which.

He could have said I will receive him. He said the other thing, the harder thing, the one that closes a door on the possibility rather than merely opening one.

And notice how few conditions there are. One. Him that cometh. Not: him that cometh worthily. Not: him that cometh having attended. Him that cometh.

You are covered by a sentence with only one condition in it, and the condition is walking forward. John 6:37 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it off a page and stands it beside a man against a wall by a font.

I want to press on something, because the thing keeping you at the back is not a belief that He would refuse you. If you interrogate it honestly you will find you do not believe that at all.

What you believe is that going forward would be a claim. That to walk up that aisle is to assert something about yourself in front of people who watched you serve at that altar in a cassock, and that the assertion would be false, and that a man should not stand up in public and say a false thing with his feet.

You are being asked to come and not to claim anything, and He is the one making the claim in that sentence. Scripture puts the whole action in His mouth, the receiving and the not casting out, and the Spirit of God is the one who has walked you into that building twice a year for twenty four years, which nobody made you do.

The back wall is not humility

Let me be blunt, in the way my grandfather was blunt, which was affectionately.

Standing at the back is not modesty. It is a self-imposed status. It is a man deciding what tier he belongs to and then physically enacting it, twice a year, in a building where his own baptism is recorded in a book.

And here is the thing that should undo it: nobody else in that room is operating a tier system. The people going up are not going up because they qualified. Half of them are in pieces. Two of them have not spoken to each other since a funeral. They are going up because that is where the thing being given out is, and it is given out to people who come.

You are the same species of person as everyone walking past you, and there has never been a tier. That is exactly what one condition means in John 6:37, and His Spirit is the one who has been standing next to you against that wall, on the left, near the draft, for a very long time.