She Will Not Let Anyone Do Anything

There is a covered dish on the step when she comes back from the mailbox, a green casserole dish with a foil cap and a dish towel folded over it, still warm on the underside.

She stands and looks at it for a second the way you would look at an envelope in a hand you do not recognize.

Then she carries it in, and she eats two forkfuls standing at the counter, and she washes the dish, and she dries it, and before the light is gone she has made a pan of rolls and put them in that same dish and walked it back down and left it on the neighbor's step with the towel washed and folded on top.

Nine hours. That is her record, and it is not accidental, and the neighbor has noticed and stopped saying anything about it.

She is seventy-four. She carries her own groceries in three trips because she will not let the boy at the store bring the cart out. She got the ladder down herself in March for the gutter over the porch, and her son found out and was upset, and she said, I am perfectly capable, which is true and is not the reason. At the church supper she does not sit until every person is served, and then she does not really sit, and she is at the sink before the tables are cleared, and if you try to take the dishrag out of her hand she will laugh and hold on to it.

Everyone in that hollow thinks she is the strongest woman they know. Half of them have said so at one time or another. She hears it the way you hear a compliment on a coat you are wearing because your good one is at the cleaners.

Because it is not strength. She knows that. She could tell you the year it started, and roughly the month, and she is not going to, and there is no confusion in her about it at all. There was a year in the middle of her life when she quietly came to a conclusion about herself, and the conclusion was that whatever standing a person has to be looked after, she no longer had it. She did not announce it. She did not cry about it. She simply reorganized her whole life around never being on the receiving end of anything again, and she has kept to it for thirty years with a discipline that would frighten you.

She has never once said the word penance. She would tell you flat out that she does not believe in earning anything from God, and she means it, and she could hand you the verses. And she is up at five making bread for a woman down the road whose hip is bad, and she will not let that woman's daughter drive her to town.

The dish is on the neighbor's step by dark. The towel is folded. The account, as she keeps it, is clear again.

And you know that dish. Yours might be a ride you would not take, or a meal you would not sit down to, or the way you cannot let a kindness stand for one single day without discharging it. You know exactly how fast you move when somebody does something for you.

Freely is a legal word, not a mood

There is a sentence in Romans that most people have read past a hundred times because the middle of it is doing all the shouting and the important word is at the front, small and quiet.

Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.Romans 3:24

Freely. In the Greek that is a word with a hard edge on it, and it does not mean generously and it does not mean warmly. It means without a cause. It is the same word used elsewhere for hating a man without a cause: no ground, no reason found in him, nothing on his side that brought it about. Applied here it means you were declared right with God on grounds that had nothing whatever to do with you, and there was no cause in you for it, and there is therefore nothing in you that can be added to it or worked off against it.

You are justified freely, which means there is no cause in you and there is no charge against you, and both halves of that are the same word. I am not softening a doctrine to make you feel better. It is written, in that verse, in that order, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the tidiness of the argument, who takes a word out of a letter and sets it down on a back step beside a warm dish.

Now hear what that does to your nine hours. The whole system you built, the returning and the discharging and the not sitting down, is a payment schedule for something that was never charged. You are servicing a debt that does not exist, with a diligence that is frankly magnificent, and the diligence is the saddest part. You have been out of the payment business since the day Christ was made your redemption, and you have gone on keeping the books anyway. His word says justified freely through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, and it is the Spirit who lets a woman put a pen down after thirty years of totals that never once needed adding.

Take away the payment. Do not take away the life.

Now I want to be very careful here, because there is a way of preaching this that does real damage, and I have heard it done and so have you.

The bread you get up at five to make is good. It is not a symptom. The woman down the road with the bad hip eats it and it does her good, and God is not embarrassed by it, and nothing I say this afternoon takes one loaf of it away from you. The ladder in March was maybe not your finest hour, but the gutter is clear. You are not being told that your life of service was a mistake or that the whole thing was neurosis with an apron on.

What is coming off is not the work. It is the charge stapled to the work. You are keeping every good thing your hands have done and losing only the debt that was never owed. Scripture says you were justified freely through the redemption in Christ Jesus, and it does not say your labor was worthless; it says your labor was never the ground it stood on, and it is His Spirit who can lift a charge off a life without lifting the life with it.

Here is the one specific thing being bought back this evening, and it is small enough to hold in two hands. It is the right to let a covered dish stand. Not the right to be waited on hand and foot, which you would not want anyway. Just the ordinary human standing to let a kindness sit there overnight, unreturned, unmatched, unpaid, and to say thank you and nothing else. That is what left you in the year you do not talk about. That is what is being handed back.

And it is handed back without the year being unmade. The conclusion you came to about yourself was real, and you came to it honestly, and I am not going to tell you it never happened or that you were being dramatic. You are standing in a changed verdict over a record that is still entirely true, and the verdict is not a kinder opinion, it is a legal fact. It is written that you are justified, which is a courtroom word and not a mood, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a legal fact land in a kitchen where a woman is drying a dish she did not need to wash. The record stands. The verdict is changed. And she is a woman who is allowed to sit down.