First Believer in Four Generations

It was the celebrant who asked, at the crematorium, in that small side room with the plastic chairs and the box of tissues on the windowsill.

Was she a religious woman at all?

And she said no. Because her nan was not. Her nan was funny and hard as nails and could take a hem up in nine minutes and swore like a docker at the television, and she was one of the best people this woman has ever known, and she was not religious and never pretended to be.

And then in the car afterwards, with the order of service still in her hand, she did the sum.

Not her nan. Not her mum, who is lovely and who says she is happy for her and means it and would rather change the subject. Not her great-nan, who she knows exactly two things about: that she worked in a laundry, and that her name was Ada.

Four generations. Nothing. She is the first.

She has known that for a while in an abstract way. What she has only recently found out is what it actually costs, and it is not what she expected. It is not persecution. Nobody has been unkind to her. It is much smaller and much more constant than that, and it lives in the ordinary furniture of a life that everybody else seems to have been handed.

Like: her daughter is seven, and at tea last Tuesday she said, do we say something before we eat, like at Ellie's? And she froze. Because she did not know. Not theologically, practically. What do you say? Do you hold hands? Is that a thing you do every meal or only Sundays? Who could she ring?

Like: when her nan died, she did not know what a believer does at a funeral. Whether it was all right to be that sad. Whether she should have said something out loud. She sat there in the plastic chair and improvised the whole thing.

Like: her search history at half eleven at night, which if anybody ever read it would tell them everything. What do Christians do when someone dies. How to pray with a child at bedtime. Is it ok to pray in the car. What do you actually do at Christmas.

That is what nobody warns you about. Not the big questions. The small ones, the ones everyone around her absorbed at somebody's kitchen table before they were nine, and which she is having to look up alone at half eleven like a woman assembling a wardrobe with no instructions in the box.

And underneath it, the sentence she would not say to a soul. If this were really mine, wouldn't I know how to do it? Maybe people like me do not take.

The letter written to people with no precedent

Peter wrote a letter to scattered people who had come in from outside, with no lineage in this, no grandmother who prayed, no family shelf of books. And halfway through it he says the thing you need to hear in the car outside a crematorium.

Which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God: which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.1 Peter 2:10

Read the two halves of that. Not a people. Now the people of God.

He does not say we are on our way to becoming a people, once the ropes have been learned and nobody has to look things up any more. He does not say provisionally a people, pending a lineage. Now. The word is doing the entire job.

And notice what he does not do. He does not go back and prosecute where they came from. He names the absence and moves straight to what replaced it, and that is the pattern, and I am going to stay on it, because your nan is not the villain in this story and neither is your mum.

You are the people of God right now, and you were made that by mercy rather than by inheritance. I am not softening it: 1 Peter 2:10 puts the whole change in the word now, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a sentence written to strangers with no precedent and lands it on a woman with an order of service in her hand. There is no waiting list. There is no probation.

He gave a man a promise, not a manual

There was somebody else with nobody to ask.

Abraham had no precedent in his family for what he was being asked to do, and God did not hand him a book of practice. He gave him a promise and He gave him Himself and He said walk, and the man walked out with no idea what any of it would look like, and the not knowing was never held against him.

This is the bit that will take the weight off tonight. The house you think everyone else was handed is not doctrine, it is custom. Whether you hold hands before tea, whether you pray out loud or in your head, what you say at a graveside, what you do on Christmas Eve: these are family habits, and they are lovely, and not one of them is a qualification.

You have been treating a set of customs as an entrance exam, and no such exam exists.

Right now, as you read, you belong to this as fully as anyone at that kitchen table with the family Bible on the shelf, and it is already yours in Christ. Scripture says there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, in Ephesians 4:5, and the Spirit who wrote that is not running a second tier for people who have to look things up.

What was absent, and what has been put there instead

Now let us be plain about the absence, because pretending it away helps nobody and this site does not do that.

Something was genuinely not handed down. Four generations of women, and not one of them could have told you what to say at a bedside or how to pray with a child, and that is a real thing to be missing and you feel the lack of it every week.

What stands in its place is not a smaller thing. Look at what Peter puts in the gap two verses earlier: a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God. He hands a group of people with no ancestry a family, a standing and a job, in one sentence.

And then, quietly, the word generation. You are one. Not the tail of something that failed. The head of something that started.

You have not walked into a house where you are a guest, and you were given a place in it rather than let in on sufferance. His word says you have received the Spirit of adoption whereby we cry, Father, in Romans 8:15, and the Holy Spirit is the One who puts that cry in the mouth of a person who has never once heard it said aloud at home.