The Humper Game Pt. 05 Ch. 08

"That whole section is about their church, which was breaking into factions. I follow Paul—well, I follow Apollos—well, I'm more spiritual than you are, I follow Christ. Remember? He was warning them that those who destroyed the church, which is God's building—God's temple, where his Spirit lives—those who tear that apart will be destroyed."

There was more debate on those two verses than on all the rest. I thought that it was because verse 17 had been used so often as a proof text for condemning suicide, that they had heard it taught that way—probably more than once, given present-day concerns about teen suicide. But maybe I was the one who had it wrong. And Kelly, too, all on her own, if that was the case.

As I said, when Kelly and Ellen and I had gone through that chapter, I had been tremendously proud of her, because she had seen this without my saying a word about it. She had said something like, "When I first read it, I thought that was talking about suicide, but then I thought about the context."

At the end of the class, the teacher, David Scott, took Kelly and the three of us aside to talk a little as everyone else was leaving or else talking in twos or threes. He said to Kelly, "As always, thank you for your contributions to the class. A couple of the points you made were things I had thought I might need to point out, and as you know, it's a lot better for me to have the discussion come from you all." He looked at the rest of us. "If I say something, it's apt to carry extra weight in people's minds because I'm the teacher, and they may accept it as somehow automatically correct or official, you see."

He said to Ellen and me, "Kelly's told me a lot about you, and I was hoping you would contribute. But thank you for coming, in any case."

I looked at Ellen, and said, "I really didn't want to weigh in, though I might well have on verses 16 and 17 if Kelly hadn't said it all for me, and probably better than I would have." Out of the corner of my eye I could see that Kelly was blushing. "We did discuss this chapter at one point, but I assure you that the points she raised in class came from her, not from me. I had been expecting to ask her whether the context didn't militate against any such individual understanding, and she brought that up all by herself. Kelly, it was a pleasure to listen to you this morning."

I went on, "I trust that she told you that we're not believers, though I think we're headed that way in the end. And, well, you must have just discussed chapter 2 last Sunday? Or the Sunday before, with the holiday? At any rate, I really have to be careful, because I do think I have a good intellectual understanding of all this. But what does it say at the end of chapter 2? 'But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.' And then here at the end of chapter 3, 'Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, "He catches the wise in their craftiness," and again, "The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile."' Rightly or wrongly, I tend to think of myself as wise in this age.

"In fact, just last week the sermon we heard, at our hosts' church, really hammered me on that. The text was from Jeremiah 9, 'Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom,' and so on, 'but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me.' I kind of fell apart as he preached on that."

He said, "Kelly has told me that you seem to have most of the Bible memorized."

"Kelly exaggerates. Not intentionally, she just hasn't yet run into some large sections I don't know anywhere near that well. But a lot of it. Most or all of the New Testament. When I was growing up, my grandfather often drilled me, daily."

"Well, I'm pleased to meet you, all of you. I hope we'll see you two again, and often. And Barbara, I'm sorry that there's not time to get to know you. I hope that being here proves to be a blessing to you in many ways."

"I'm afraid I'm not up with either Phil or Ellen on these things. We did have a pretty intense introduction to the Bible in high school, but it's a big subject, and the focus was on making us able to understand how it underlay the thinking of the founding fathers of our republic, as well as so much else in the history of the last thousand years and more."

"That's still a big subject."

"It's an unusual high school. Maybe Phil and Ellen will tell you something of it, eventually."

We said goodbye, and went off to the service. The instrumentalists were playing, and Scott's presence was pretty noticeable. Impossible to ignore, in fact. As we found seats, Kelly said quietly, "I begin to see what Pete meant about what a difference Scott made to that band. They're playing songs they often do, but it sure sounds different."

At the dance, Scott had mostly played mandolin—sometimes a lead part, melody or harmony, sometimes chording in a way that drove the rhythm. There in church, he had his mandolin, but he mostly played guitar. If I recalled correctly, he'd said he had borrowed a guitar rather than carry one on the plane. Anyway, whatever he was doing to the rhythm, the rest of the instruments were following.

We had started to sit—around where Kelly normally sat, at a guess—but then she spotted Martha and Hannah sitting up near the front, and we headed up there and sat right behind them. And then, to my surprise, Pete and Tammy came in! They squeezed past Martha to sit next to her, with Hannah between Martha and a space on the aisle where, presumably, Scott would eventually sit. We quietly greeted them all, and then the music director turned to face the congregation. Kelly murmured, "Charlotte was at the dance last night," and I answered, "I saw her. She's kind of at my level, and Ellen's and Barbara's. A little better than we are, not inexperienced, but not really an expert." As I said that, we all stood up to sing the opening song.

Of course, I myself didn't sing. It wouldn't have been anything better than a distraction to those around me. I paid attention to the words, on a large screen at the front. It was a song not familiar to me, anyway. I could hear Kelly and, later, Ellen singing very enthusiastically and well—not to mention Martha, who was an outstanding singer, audible even to us behind her. Of course, there weren't as many others up that close to the front, to drown her out.

After the singing, there were brief announcements. I'd found in many of the churches I had visited that announcements were treated as if they were second only to the sermon in importance—or maybe first. I asked Kelly later, and she said they were almost always brief in that church. "You really have to read the bulletin, and people really do," she said. The bulletin did not go through the items of the service, but was mostly devoted to announcements, in fact.

There was the offering. Kelly whispered that often the choir was up there and sang while the offering was collected. This time, the music was instrumental, and Scott played mandolin. The piano and a flute shared the main melody parts, and he played above or below them, supporting and harmonizing, and it was beautiful.

Then came the sermon. The passage read was Jeremiah 18:1-11, and the specific text proved to be verses 5-6: "Then the word of the Lord came to me: 'O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the Lord. Behold, like the clay in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.'" Pastor Mac referred frequently to the rest of the passage, especially verse 4, and occasionally to the rest of the chapter, and to other Biblical passages as well, but those verses were truly where his message lay.

And it was like the sermon that had moved Sam so strongly, or the one the previous Sunday that had hammered at me, but it was Ellen's turn this time. This shouldn't have surprised me, given her reaction to that first vision, but I was slow to recognize that she was fighting not to cry. I moved very close to her and put my arm across the top of her shoulders, mostly resting on the back of the pew, and held her left hand with my right. She leaned her head against me, and I hugged pretty hard. I think a few tears escaped, but she never broke into real weeping.

The application of the text was the sovereignty of God, specifically as it applies to human hearts and circumstances. He noted that in the context, the Lord warned them that their attitudes and actions had a great impact on their destiny, and that this was what had been referred to when Jeremiah spoke of the vessel being spoiled in the potter's hand. In the end, the Lord's will is going to be done. If we resist his will for us, we won't succeed. We, and our circumstances, will be shaped so that we are formed into the design the Lord chooses for us.

Pastor Mac referred to the progression of sin in the second half of Romans 1, which he read. Choosing to ignore God and his right to their honor, thanks, and obedience, people find themselves stepping deeper and deeper into the grasp of sin. At each point, it says, "God gave them up," to greater and greater sin.

Had I not been so concerned with Ellen, I might have worried about Barbara's reaction to some verses in this passage—but as it was, that never entered my head until much later. If Barbara was bothered, she never said anything to me, then or later.

Pastor Mac continued, saying that the other side of this is that repentance, a deliberate choice to confess and to cease sinning—to honor God by praise and obedience—can equally be the beginning of sanctification, of being purified and consecrated to God's purposes.

In the passage from Jeremiah, "But they say, 'That is in vain! We will follow our own plans, and will every one act according to the stubbornness of his evil heart.'" And the result is disaster: "And if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, and if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will relent of the good that I had intended to do to it." But equally, "If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it."

He said that those who are believers are secure in God's hands, and that the new birth he has given them will bring them, when all is done, to complete purity and eternal life in God's presence. But those who hear this and trust in having been baptized, or in any good deeds they may have done, or any decision they may have made, and think that they are secure whatever they do, may find in the end that they were never born again at all. They need to cling to the price Jesus paid, not to anything whatsoever that they have done. He appealed to the Lord's words from Matthew 7, "On that day many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?' And then will I declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.'"

He also quoted from another place in Jeremiah, from chapter 7: "Behold, you trust in deceptive words to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, 'We are delivered!'—only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it, declares the Lord. Go now to my place that was in Shiloh, where I made my name dwell at first, and see what I did to it because of the evil of my people Israel. And now, because you have done all these things, declares the Lord, and when I spoke to you persistently you did not listen, and when I called you, you did not answer, therefore I will do to the house that is called by my name, and in which you trust, and to the place that I gave to you and to your fathers, as I did to Shiloh. And I will cast you out of my sight, as I cast out all your kinsmen, all the offspring of Ephraim." He said that their trust in the temple as a guarantee that God would save them was very much the same as the trust of many today, who trust in their having gone forward in response to an invitation, or in their baptism. God's promises aren't voided by our failure to meet the conditions on them.

But in the end, he said, everything will be seen to be shaped to God's plan according to his purpose and will. He reminded them of a previous study of the first chapter of Ephesians, and how those two words had occurred over and over, tied to God's predestination of the saints—his holy people, set apart for and consecrated to him—for every spiritual blessing, in Christ.

He finished by calling on his hearers to truly consecrate themselves to the Lord's will.

For those who were believers, this meant a daily putting aside of anything that tended to pull them to resist what he planned for them.

For any who didn't now believe, in the end, only being born again, God's putting his Spirit in them, could bring them to true repentance and the beginnings of an ability to seek his will instead of opposing it. They needed to be aware of what he had just said to believers, that this meant a daily taking up of the cross, of daily obedience and following Christ, but they first needed to realize that by themselves they could not even repent and pay for their sins, that they had to accept that Christ had paid the price for them, and trust that he would do what he had promised.

As the musicians went up for the closing song, I handed Ellen my handkerchief. That felt very much like a replay of that Sunday in August, with Sam. She blotted around her eyes and blew her nose. Her singing didn't measure up to the level she had met earlier, but I thought it was surely heartfelt:

"You are the potter, I am the clay. Mold me and make me, this is what I pray."

Kelly and Barbara were both looking at us, concern on their faces. As the musicians began playing other music, and people began gathering their stuff and leaving, I said quietly to them, "I'm pretty sure it's all right. But I've heard exactly three sermons in the past four years and more—all in the past four months. The one in August seemed aimed at Sam, last Sunday's seemed aimed at me, and this one at Ellen. It's getting harder and harder to doubt that someone is trying to get our attention." Ellen slipped her arm around me and hugged me, hard.

Martha turned around, and said, "Are you all right?" as she caught sight of Ellen. Ellen nodded, a little hesitantly.

I repeated what I had just said to the girls. I looked down and said, "Hello, Hannah. I saw how much you enjoyed the dance last night. I hope you liked the music this morning, too." She went shy again, but a moment later she took Martha's hand, looked up and me, and nodded. Then I said to Martha, "They must have childcare or activities of some sort for kids her age, so you obviously kept her with you for a reason."

"At home she goes with the other kids. If we're visiting and it will be just a Sunday or two, like this, she's much happier with us. As you saw, she can be very well behaved when she's willing."

Scott came up, with mandolin and guitar cases in hand. He told us, "I really need to return this guitar on the way back, but that shouldn't take all that long. Two o'clock at your apartment? Can you give me address and directions, so that if we're later than Pete and Tammy we can still be sure of finding you?"

Tammy said, "I think we'll be going almost straight over. Ellen, is it OK for them to come early too? Hannah's likely to need some attention, but Pete and I are planning to help."

I gave Scott the address, which he put in his phone. "That's probably enough to let you find us, but here." I drew a small map in an empty area on the bulletin and gave it to Scott, who put it in his pocket after looking at it briefly. I'd showed surrounding streets, but also the route from Pete's and Tammy's. I said, "And if you don't mind waiting around while we're busy cooking, earlier should be fine."

He asked, "Is it OK if I bring my mandolin? That may help amuse Hannah, and it also may help say thank you and make your preparations more pleasant."

"Sure! There's not much soundproofing, we found that out very early, but given how loud some people play recordings, I really don't think you're likely to disturb anyone—or at least that anyone will have grounds for complaint. We got to hear you and Martha some, and I at least would love to hear more. I think there are things to talk about as well, though."

Martha said, "Hannah had a late night last night, despite going to sleep. She won't want to admit it, but she will need a nap. I hope that's OK."

Ellen, sounding much recovered, said, "We left our bed airing—and Barbara's, which is a fold-up couch, too—so we'll have to make them quickly. But she can sleep on our bed, and she's welcome to it. There are shades, so we can darken the room down pretty far."

Pete said, "We'll call before we come over, but it shouldn't be too long."

"Give us long enough to make beds and fold up the couch and change clothes. At least, I'm going to. But that should be enough. And Tammy, we're having stuffed peppers, but they'll be a little different. I can't resist fiddling with recipes, most of the time. I hope you still like them."

She leaned across the pew and reached out to pull me into a hug. "Phil, we're all busy a lot, you know that. But please, really, figure out how you can give me lessons, next semester. And Ellen said she needs them, too."

"Unfortunately, the only way I know to teach is to have you do it, under direction, with occasional comments. I helped Grandmom several days a week, for months out of every year. But you also have to learn to imagine what a change will taste like, and that takes a lot of experimenting. I had Grandmom to tell me not to try something she knew wouldn't be good. Ellen can tell you that we haven't had to decide between choking something awful down or throwing it away, not yet. And if we have to throw something away, well, we can afford to go out or order pizza or something. There are still plenty of people for whom the choice is is choke it down or go hungry.

"At Thanksgiving, for instance, I wondered what would have happened if I had put some concentrated orange juice in my sweet potato casserole. I took a small helping, a large dab, and drizzled on a little made-up orange juice. Kelly and Ellen and I all agreed it was OK, but no improvement. Concentrate might or might not have worked better.

"I'll tell you, though. If you ever are minded to experiment, you can call me and ask what I think. I'll tell you, but there's no guarantee that I'll be right. Just allow enough time to tell me the whole recipe."

By this time we were the only ones left in the auditorium except the sound crew and so on. We all headed out. Tammy and Pete, and Scott, Martha and Hannah, all went on out. Ellen and I, with Barbara and Kelly, stopped to speak to Pastor Mac rather than just shake his hand on our way out.

Ellen told him, "Thank you for your sermon. It definitely raised issues I need to think about."

He looked at her for a moment. "Thank you. I hope you really will think about them, then."

"I will, but it will take some time. Phil, tell him what you said a few minutes ago."