The Altar I Kept Going Back To

She has gone forward eighty seven times about the same thing, and she counted.

That is not a criticism. I want to say that at the top and mean it. In my tradition going forward is a good thing, and it is a brave thing, and a woman who has done it eighty seven times has more courage in her than a room of people who have never once left their seat.

But she counted, and the counting tells you something.

It goes like this. There is a moment near the end when the music comes down and the invitation opens, and something in her chest lifts and moves, and she is out of the row and down the aisle before she has really decided, because she has decided this eighty six times before and the body remembers.

Somebody prays with her. It is genuine. She cries, most times, and the crying is real.

And on Tuesday it is back, or something like it, and by Thursday she is fairly sure that Sunday did not take, and by the following Sunday she is in the aisle again.

Eighty seven times. Two years. And here is what nobody in that building would guess, because on the outside it looks like a woman who is serious about God: she has begun to be tired in a way that she cannot name, and there is a small hard thing forming in her that sounds like this does not work on me.

Let me tell you what is actually happening, because it is not what she thinks and it is not a failure of anything.

She is going forward about two different things at once and treating them as one thing. One of them is finished and cannot be repeated. The other is a life's work and was never going to be done on a Sunday. Nobody has ever separated them for her, so every week she goes down that aisle to redo the finished one, and comes away without the thing she actually came for.

That is you in the aisle.

You keep going back to get something you were given the first time. And because the thing you keep noticing on Tuesday is real, you conclude that Sunday failed, when in fact Sunday did what it does and Tuesday is a different department entirely.

One verse, two tenses, and the whole thing turns on it

This is the sentence that separates them, and it does it in a single line. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes it land, and once you have seen it you cannot unsee it.

For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.Hebrews 10:14

Two halves. Watch the tenses.

He hath perfected for ever. Done. Completed. Past tense with a permanent result, and the words for ever are sitting right there so nobody could read it as temporary.

Them that are sanctified. Present, ongoing, in progress. Being made holy, continuously, over a life.

The same people, in the same sentence, at the same time. Perfected already, and being made holy still.

You are perfected for ever and you are being made holy right now, and those are both true this morning without either one canceling the other, and I am not softening anything: Hebrews 10:14 puts both tenses in one line, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my volume who can get that into a woman who has counted to eighty seven.

Here is what that does to your Tuesdays. What you notice on Tuesday belongs to the second half of the verse. It is the ongoing work, and it is meant to be ongoing, and its presence is not evidence against the first half. It never was. You have been reading progress in one department as failure in the other.

You have been going forward to receive something you have held since the first time, and the receiving was never in question, which is written into the first half of that verse rather than being my encouragement, with the Spirit of God able to settle it where eighty seven Sundays could not.

Now, my tradition makes noise, and I love that we do, and I will defend it to anybody. When somebody comes down that aisle we celebrate, because a hush is what shame sounds like and we will not have it in the room. But there is a way of using an altar that turns it into a place where the finished work gets redone weekly, and that is not what an altar is for, and a woman can wear herself out on the wrong errand while everybody claps.

This is yours already, in your seat, before the music comes down, because Scripture says perfected for ever, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a hall on a Sunday rather than leaving it in a chapter.

Go forward when you want to. Go forward to worship, to be prayed with, to stand up in front of everybody because that is a good thing to do. Just stop going down there to get what you were handed the first time.