The Chair at the King's Table

They had a chair. That is not a figure of speech. There was a chair with a wobbly leg at the end nearest the kitchen, and after the second Christmas the youngest daughter had started calling it his, and by the third year nobody sat in it at any meal of the year, which is the kind of thing a family does without discussing it.

He was seventeen when it started, and what had happened at his own house is not going to be described here, and that is not squeamishness, it is the whole architecture of this place. It is enough to say that in the November of his sixth form year a woman he barely knew, the mother of a boy in his class, drove to where he was and put his bag in the trunk of her car and did not ask him any questions on the way home.

He stayed until he was twenty. And on the Christmas night before he moved out for good, standing in that kitchen drying a pan, he told God that he would be at that table every Christmas for the rest of his life. He said it out loud. The woman heard him and pretended not to.

He managed four.

Then a job that made travel hard, and a relationship that made Christmas complicated, and one year where he simply did not phone, and after that year it became impossible, because the not phoning had become the thing that would have to be explained.

Eleven years. He knows the father died four years ago because somebody put it on the internet. He did not go.

And what he assumes, and I want to name it precisely because he never has, is that the chair got absorbed. Not thrown out. Absorbed. That there came a Christmas when somebody sat in it because there were more people than places, and nobody said anything, and after that it was just a chair.

You may have a chair somewhere. And you may believe the same thing about it, on no evidence, and the belief may be exactly what keeps you from finding out.

A man who ate at a table he had no claim to

There is a story in 2 Samuel that almost nobody preaches and I do not know why, because it is one of the most beautiful things in the Old Testament.

David is king. The old dynasty he replaced is finished, and by every convention of that world what you do next is eliminate anything left of it. And David asks a strange question: is there yet any that is left of the house of Saul, that I may show him kindness for Jonathan's sake?

There is one. A grandson, dropped by a nurse in a panic when he was five years old, lame in both feet ever since, living in a place called Lo-debar, which means, roughly, no pasture. A nowhere.

They fetch him. And here is how the chapter ends.

So Mephibosheth dwelt in Jerusalem: for he did eat continually at the king's table; and was lame on both his feet.2 Samuel 9:13

You are seated on the strength of an agreement you were not party to and did not sign. 2 Samuel 9:13 ends its chapter with a man eating continually and still lame, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept that chair pushed in for eleven years.

Read the last clause again

And was lame on both his feet.

The narrator puts it there deliberately, in the same sentence as the table, as the last thing said about the man. Not: and he was healed. Not: and he became useful to the king. He ate continually at the king's table, and he was still lame, and both of those things are true at the end of the chapter and neither one cancels the other.

Which tells you exactly what the seat was for. It was not a reward for capacity. It was not a position he could lose by not being able to do things. He was there because of a covenant made between David and Jonathan years before Mephibosheth was born, and the seat had nothing to do with him at all except that he was the one it landed on.

You are seated at a table on the strength of an agreement you were not party to. That is what 2 Samuel 9 is doing when it ends the chapter that way, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of an old court record and stands it in a kitchen with a pan in a man's hands.

And notice the word continually. Not: he was invited a few times. Not: he was welcome when he could get there. Continually, which in that world meant a standing place, laid whether the man came or not.

You have a standing place that is laid whether you come or not, and that is what a covenant seat means. Scripture uses the word continually on purpose, and the Spirit of God has kept that setting through eleven Christmases you did not phone.

The thing about being absorbed

Now let me say the part I think you most need, and I will say it as gently as I know how, which is not very, because I am a pastor and not a poet.

You are afraid of something quiet. Not of being turned away. Nobody in that family would turn you away and you know it. You are afraid that there was no moment, that nothing happened, that the space just closed the way a space closes when it is not needed, and that the worst thing about your absence is that it was survivable.

And here is the truth: it probably was survivable. They ate. They had good Christmases. The father died and they carried it. That is not a wound to you, that is a family being alive.

But a place is not kept warm by whether it was missed. That is the mistake underneath all of this, and it is the mistake this whole site exists to take apart. A place is kept because of who laid it.

You are held by the one who set the table and not by how loudly anybody noticed the gap. 2 Samuel 23 puts the whole reason in David's covenant with Jonathan, and His Spirit is the one who has been keeping your seat on exactly that basis and not on the basis of anybody's grief.