The Root Was Already There

She only went to the museum because it was raining and the granddaughter was eight and the park was out.

They did the animals. They did the thing with the buttons that lights up. They had chips. And on the way back to the doors they went through a room she had not meant to go through at all, a low quiet room with dark walls and small lit cases, and her granddaughter stopped dead in front of one of them and said, "Nan, what's that."

It was a piece of something under glass about the size of a beer mat. Brown, torn along one edge, with writing on it. And underneath, on a card, the plain museum sentence telling you what it was and roughly how old.

She read the card twice. Then she read it a third time, and stood there while a school group went past behind her.

Because the words on that scrap were words she had said in a cold building on a Sunday morning three weeks earlier, and the card was telling her that somebody had written them down before her country had a name.

She has believed for nineteen years. She came to it at forty one, at a kitchen table, through a woman called Bridget who never made a fuss about any of it. And in some part of her she had always understood the whole thing as a fairly recent development. Not stupidly. She knew the dates. She could have told you Jesus was two thousand years ago. But underneath the knowing, the thing she had joined had always felt like it started somewhere around a Wednesday in 2007, in a kitchen, with a woman making tea.

And she stood in a museum in the rain looking at a scrap of a song she had sung, that had been sung, out loud, by people whose language she cannot read, before Rome, before the Saxons, before any of it.

She said, out loud, to a case, "How long has this been going on."

You have had that moment, or you are due one. Maybe you came to faith late, or came back to it after a long way away, or grew up inside it and were somehow taught it as though the whole story began at a particular point and everything before was the run up.

And there is an ache under that which nobody names: the sense of being a latecomer to something small and recent. It makes you tentative. It makes you feel that everybody else has more of it than you do.

I want to put a floor under you, and it goes down a very long way.

You did not start it and it is not holding on to you

Paul is writing to believers in Rome who are not Jewish, and he uses an image from farming that will not let anybody feel clever.

But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive shoot, were grafted in among the others and became a sharer in the richness of the olive tree's root, do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember that it is not you who supports the root, but the root that supports you.Romans 11:17 to 18

You are drawing on a root you did not plant, and it was in the ground centuries before the week you first heard about any of this. That is what the verse says by putting the sharing and the supporting both on the root (Romans 11:17-18), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the life moving up through that tree, which is why nothing about your arrival date changed what is feeding you.

Take the picture at face value before anything else, because the picture is doing the work.

A tree is already standing. It has been standing a long time. It has a root system that goes down further than anybody looking at it can see, and that root is what is drawing everything up out of the ground. A cutting from somewhere else is fitted into that tree, and it lives, and it will bear fruit, and every bit of what it lives on comes up through a root it did not grow.

Not you who supports the root, but the root that supports you.

Which is a warning against a certain kind of arrogance, and Paul means it as one. But hear what it does for you, standing in a museum feeling like a newcomer. If the root supports you, then your youth in this is not a problem. You are not the load-bearing part. You never were. Nothing here depends on how long you have been at it or how much you know, because the whole system is fed from below by something that was in the ground before you were an idea.

And the beginning of it is not vague and it is not everywhere. It happened somewhere.

Every single person who first believed this was Jewish. The first preachers, the first hearers, the first arguments, the first songs. The great controversy of the earliest days was not whether Jewish people could follow the Messiah, because that was all there was. It was whether anybody else could be let in, and the answer that came back, hard fought and settled, was yes, and here you are.

I am not going to argue a position with you about anything beyond that. There are large questions about Israel and the church that faithful people hold very differently and hold with real conviction, and this is not the room where they get settled, and I am not going to pretend otherwise or slide an answer past you while your guard is down. What I am handing you is not an argument. It is an address.

It started there. Among those people, in that land, in that language, in a story that was already old when it happened.

And notice the shape of it, because this is the oldest instinct in this house. When the door opened, nobody was asked to stop being who they were. The wild shoot was not required to become a different species before it could be grafted in. It was fitted into a living tree and fed by a root that had been drinking for a thousand years, and it stayed what it was, and it lived.

That is what you joined in 2007 at a kitchen table with a woman making tea. Not a recent development. Something with a root under it that goes down past everything you can see.