First in My House

Karim has a way of doing it now, and the way is eleven months old, and he made it up standing at the sink.

It happens at the end of the meal, before anybody gets up. He puts his hand flat on the table, which was not a decision, it is just what his hand does, and he says a few lines, and one of them is always thanks for the day itself and one of them is always the name of somebody who is not at the table. Then he says the last bit, and the children say the last bit with him, because after eleven months they know it, and the youngest says it a half second behind everybody else and shouts it, which has become the funniest part of the evening.

That is his family's way. His family has a way.

He has never once told anybody that he invented it in a kitchen with a tea towel over his shoulder, and he would find it very hard to say out loud.

Because here is his position. He is the first. Not the first to believe in God, his people believed in God, that was never in question. The first to stand where he is standing now, in this, in the way he is in it. And it means there is nobody behind him to ask.

He could give you a list. When his eldest was born he did not know what you say over a newborn, and his wife's family had something they said, and he did not want to take theirs and could not have explained why, so he stood in a hospital corridor at four in the morning and said something he made up, and it was fine, and it has bothered him for nine years.

For the first eighteen months he did not know whether you are supposed to read out loud or silently. That is the actual level of it. Not a question of doctrine. A question of what people do with their mouths, which everybody who grew up in it absorbed at six years old and never had to ask, and which he was thirty-four and could not bring himself to ask a stranger.

He does not know what you do on the anniversary of a death. He does not know which things are the important ones to keep and which things are just how one family happened to do it. He has watched other men at other tables with the quiet confidence of people who are simply doing what was done, and he has envied it in a way he is not proud of.

And none of this is anything against his father, who was a generous man, who taught him how to work and how to be honest about money and how to sit with somebody in trouble without talking. He gave him everything he had. This was not among the things he had.

Two weeks ago the middle boy, who is seven, asked him a question at the end of the meal, with his hand still flat on the table.

Baba, when you were little, who did this with you?

And Karim said, because it is true, nobody.

The boy nodded, entirely satisfied, and asked whether he could get down.

And Karim sat there at the head of a table in a house where a thing had just been said that had never been said in his family before, and felt the floor go strange under him, and could not have told you whether what he felt was shame or something else that has no name.

Somebody says it out loud on ground where it has not been said

At the very end of his life, in front of a whole assembly, Joshua stood up and drew a line where everybody could see it.

As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.Joshua 24:15

Look at the shape of that sentence, because it is not what people usually think it is.

It is not a bargain. Joshua is not offering God terms and God is not waiting to see whether the house delivers. The covenant with that nation had been sworn generations earlier and it was not up for renegotiation in a public meeting. What Joshua is doing is stating, out loud, where he stands inside something already sworn, and naming his household with him while he does it.

And notice that he says it. He does not think it, absorb it, or inherit it quietly. He puts it into the air in front of witnesses, in the first person, with a house attached.

That is what a man at the head of a table with his hand flat on the wood is doing, and you are doing it whether or not anybody has told you that is what it is. Scripture put those words in the mouth of a man who said them out loud on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes the same sentence live rather than merely echo when it is said in a kitchen in your century.

Every line that exists started with somebody making it up

Now the thing I most want you to have.

Go back far enough in any household on earth that keeps anything and you arrive at one person who had nobody to ask.

Abraham had no example. Nobody had shown him how to pitch a tent and build an altar beside it, and there was no family practice for what he did at Bethel or Mamre, and there was certainly nobody he could turn to and say, what do you do at this point, because he was the first in his house and everything downstream of him came out of a man and God working it out on open ground.

Every settled tradition anybody has ever envied was somebody's improvisation before it was anybody's inheritance. The confident men at the confident tables are performing, beautifully and sincerely, something that a nervous man invented at a sink.

You are standing exactly where every line that has ever existed started, and you were not put there by accident or by deficiency, and the written record of that family says so plainly, and His Spirit is the one who gets a man from where you are to a table with a way of doing things.

What was absent, and what God put there instead

So let me name the absence honestly, because pretending it is not there helps nobody.

There was nobody to ask. You did not get the thing that is absorbed at six and never has to be taught. You worked out with your own hands what other men received without noticing they were receiving it, and some of it you got wrong and some of it is still guesswork.

That is true, and it is not a small thing, and it is not a verdict on your father, who gave you what he had.

Now name what God put in its place, and this is the part that changes the room. He gave it to you directly. What is not handed down a family can be handed straight across, and Scripture is full of men who received it that way and nobody in the book treats them as second class for it. Paul says the promise comes by faith so that it might be sure to all the seed, and sure is the operative word: a thing that has to come down a family line is only as sure as the line, and a thing that comes from God is as sure as God.

You have the same covenant in your hands tonight as the man four tables over whose great-grandfather kept it, and it is not a copy or a lesser edition, and that is what the word settles and what His Spirit witnesses in you rather than something you have to feel your way to.

Your hand goes flat on the table. Your youngest shouts the last line half a second late. Eleven months old, homemade, and entirely real.