I Am The One Who Makes The Tea

She has been in that building since 1985 and she could tell you where everything is with her eyes shut.

Which cupboard the spare fuses are in. Which of the two urns takes twenty minutes and which takes forty. Where the key to the outside tap went in 2011 and who has it now. The name of the man who comes about the boiler and the name of his wife and the fact that you do not ring before ten.

She is not the caretaker. There is a caretaker. She is simply the person who has been there longest and knows everything, and every single one of those things is in her head because at some point something went wrong and she was the one who sorted it.

Forty years.

And on Sunday there was a visiting speaker and he was very good, and the subject was the power of the Holy Spirit, and she listened properly the way she always does.

And she went out to the kitchen at the end to get the urn on, which she does every week, and she stood there while it came up to temperature and had a thought she has never quite had before.

Nothing in that talk had a woman like her in it.

Not because he excluded her. He was warm and he was generous and he would have been horrified. It is that every example, every picture, every illustration of what the power of God looks like in a person involved something being done in front of somebody.

And she has spent forty years doing things nobody has ever seen.

And she is not bitter about it and she would be furious if you thought she was. She likes the kitchen. She would not want the front.

But she stood there with the urn ticking and thought: I have never once been in the picture, and I do not think it has occurred to anybody, including me, that I should be.

And that is you at your own hatch, or you would not still be reading.

Paul saw this coming and wrote one sentence about it

Let me give you the passage, and then let me give you the sentence in it that almost nobody quotes.

Paul is describing the church as a body, and he is doing it because they have started ranking each other. And he works through the obvious bit, the eye and the hand and the foot, which everybody knows.

And then he says this:

On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.1 Corinthians 12:22

Read it slowly, because two words in it are doing enormous work.

Seem. He is not saying some parts are weaker. He is saying some parts seem weaker, which is a comment about the observer rather than about the part.

Indispensable. Not valuable. Not appreciated. Not important too, in the way people say important too. Indispensable, which means the thing cannot be dispensed with, which means if it goes, the body does not function.

You are not a lesser part of that body and Paul wrote a sentence specifically to stop anybody thinking so. It is written that the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable (1 Corinthians 12:22). The Holy Spirit is the One who distributes across that body, and He did not put a woman in a kitchen as a consolation.

Now let me be careful about two things, because this is where an article like this usually goes wrong.

I am not going to flatter you. I am not going to tell you that the tea is secretly the most important ministry in that building, because it is not, and you would know instantly that I was patronizing you, and you have had forty years of people being nice at you.

And I am not going to run down the man who spoke on Sunday. He was good. What he described is real. There are people whose part is visible and that is genuinely their part, and Paul spends the whole chapter refusing to let the body be ranked in either direction.

What I am saying is narrower.

You have been given a picture of His power that has one shape in it, and Scripture describes a body with many. It is written that the body does not consist of one member but of many (1 Corinthians 12:14), and Paul had to write that because a church was already assuming otherwise. The Holy Spirit apportions to each one individually as He wills, and the apportioning is His and not the congregation's.

And here is the part I most want you to sit with, and it is the strangest thing in the chapter.

Paul does not say the invisible parts should be made visible. He does not propose that the kitchen be thanked from the front, which is what a modern person would suggest and which you would hate.

He says something better. He says the invisible parts are already indispensable, and that the body knows it whether or not the body says it.

You are already indispensable to that body and no announcement from the front would add anything to it. It is written that God has so composed the body that there may be no division, but that the members may have the same care for one another (1 Corinthians 12:24-25). The Holy Spirit composed it that way on purpose and has never treated the kitchen as the overflow.