The Cousin Who Sits at the Other End

Nobody makes a plan. That is what he keeps coming back to. Nobody sits down beforehand and decides anything. And yet for two years now, at every single gathering, the two of them end up at opposite ends of that table.

It happens by itself. Somebody's baby needs the high chair, so the chairs move. Somebody has a bad knee and needs the end near the door. A tray comes out and everybody shifts. And by the time the food is down, his cousin is at the far end with the young ones, and he is at this end with the uncles, and there are eleven people and about four meters of table between them, and it looks exactly like a family that is fine.

The money was for a van and some equipment, and it came out of his household in a year when it was not easy, and it came out because that is what you do, and he would do it again tomorrow if he did not know what he knows now.

It has never been mentioned. Not by his cousin, not by him, not by anybody. There was a period where it might have been, about eight months in, and then that period closed and now it is a thing that everybody knows and nobody says, which in a family is a completely different kind of object. It has weight. It changes where people sit.

His wife said, in the car after Easter, that it is a shame the two of them do not talk any more. And he said, we talk. And she looked out of the window and said, you greet.

You know that table. Maybe yours is a WhatsApp group where two people never reply to each other. Maybe it is a wedding where the seating plan solved a problem nobody named. There is a debt in your family, and it stopped being about the money a long time ago, and now it is a piece of furniture.

Come and sit down here with me, at this end, and let me tell you about a night in Jerusalem when a man stood up and said one sentence and ended the whole thing.

There is no code, and there is a day it stops

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I am not going to keep a man reading in hope of one.

There is no code. There is no arrangement of Scripture that makes your cousin pay. Nothing in this message is a method for recovery, and if letting go were a way of squeezing repayment out of a man, it would not be letting go, it would be a slower kind of holding, and God has never once handled anybody that way.

Here is what is actually in here. A city is being rebuilt, and it is going badly, because the people rebuilding the wall are in debt to each other. Fathers have put up their fields. Some have handed over their children. And the man in charge, who is owed money himself, stands up in front of everybody and says this.

I likewise, and my brethren, and my servants, might exact of them money and corn: I pray you, let us leave off this usury. Restore, I pray you, to them, even this day, their lands, their vineyards, their oliveyards, and their houses.Nehemiah 5:10-11

Two things in that, and both are for you.

The first is who says it. Not the debtors. Nobody came to Nehemiah with a proposal. The creditor stands up. The man with the stronger position, the one who could quite legally exact, is the one who moves first, and he moves without being asked, and he includes himself in the sentence. I likewise. He does not stand above it.

The second is when. Even this day. Not at the end of the season. Not once everybody has understood what they did. Today, at this table, in this room, with the wall still half built.

You are the one who is allowed to end this, and it was never going to be ended by the person at the other end of the table. That is not a sentiment I am offering over a meal. It is written into Nehemiah 5, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a governor standing up in a half built city and puts Him beside a man at a family table.

You have a God who moved first while nobody had asked Him to, and that is exactly the position you are standing in tonight. Scripture says that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us, which is the creditor standing up before any debtor spoke, and His Spirit is the one who takes that written line and makes it a thing a man can actually do on a Sunday.

Now let me say the honest thing, because this is a family and families do not run on money.

You are not angry about the van. You are grieved about a cousin. The two of you were the ones who carried the tables out. You were the ones who stayed up after everybody went home. And what you have now is a man you greet, and a wife who noticed the difference and said the word out loud in a car after Easter, and four meters of table.

The debt is not what separated you. The silence around the debt did that. And silence is not neutral: it has been quietly making a case, in you, about what kind of man he turned out to be, and that case is what has been rearranging the chairs.

You are not a hard man, and grieving a cousin is not the same as begrudging him money. Scripture says a brother is born for adversity, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old proverb and makes a man realize what he actually lost.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because two years of seating does not change because a man was sad about it at Easter. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what putting up with it never does. So speak, in your own kitchen, out loud. You have the standing to speak to a thing in your own family and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by seniority, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a kitchen door.