The Silence Has Become The House Rule

Nine people at that table on a Sunday and every single one of them is somewhere different, and nobody has said anything about God at it in about seven years.

She could map it for you. One is deeply in it and would talk all day. One goes because of the children. Two would call themselves believers and have not been in a building since something happened that nobody discusses. One is angry, properly angry, and has reasons. Two are teenagers who could go either way. One is her mother, who prays privately and would rather die than mention it.

And her.

So the table talks about work and football and somebody's car and a thing that happened at a school, and the food is extraordinary and everybody stays four hours, and the whole thing is genuinely warm. That is what makes it hard to name as a problem.

It is not a cold house. It is a house with a rule.

And the rule was never announced. It assembled itself out of about four uncomfortable Sundays years ago, and now it runs itself, and everybody in that family keeps it perfectly without ever having been told what it is.

She noticed it properly last year when her aunt died and somebody said, at that table, that she had gone to a better place, and the temperature of the room dropped about four degrees, and somebody else immediately asked about parking.

She thought: we cannot even do this. At a death. In our own house.

You know that table.

Maybe yours is smaller. Maybe there is one person whose presence sets the rule for everybody. Maybe you have kept the peace so well and for so long that you would not now know how to start, and you have half convinced yourself that the peace is the more important thing.

Nobody in your family is a villain. That is the whole difficulty. The angry one has reasons, the private one has her own way, the teenagers are teenagers, and everybody is behaving reasonably, and the outcome is a rule.

What they complained about

Here is a complaint made about Him, by people who did not like Him, and it is one of the most useful sentences in the gospels.

And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.Luke 15:2

That is the accusation. Not that He taught wrongly. Not that He broke a law. That He ate with the wrong mixture of people.

It came up more than once. It was one of the standing objections to Him, and He never once defended Himself by explaining that He was doing outreach at those meals. He just kept turning up at them.

You are at a table He would sit at, and the mixture at it is the exact thing He was famous for. That is what the complaint in Luke 15:2 records about His habits, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes His presence real at an ordinary Sunday table, which means the composition of your family has never been an obstacle to anything.

And notice what He did at those tables. He ate. The complaints are about meals, not about lectures. Nobody accuses Him of preaching at dinner. He is accused of being there.

Why the rule formed and why it is not wisdom

Now let me separate two things that have got stuck together in your house.

Not preaching at your family is wisdom. Genuinely. Nobody has ever been argued into anything at a Sunday table and the person who tries it will be discussed in three separate cars on the way home.

Never saying anything true is not the same thing, and the second one arrived wearing the clothes of the first.

That is how it got in. Every step was sensible. Do not raise it with the angry one, which is fair. Do not embarrass your mother, which is kind. Do not make the teenagers uncomfortable, which is thoughtful. And the sum of four kindnesses is a household where a woman who has died cannot be spoken of properly.

You have been keeping a peace that has quietly cost more than it was worth, and noticing that is not the same as blaming anybody. Scripture says let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man (Colossians 4:6), and notice it says how to answer, not whether, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the seasoning in real time in a loud room.

Nothing here is a plan for your family

Let me be very clear, because a page like this could get somebody into a fight on Sunday and then close the tab.

Nothing here tells you to raise anything with anybody. Not with the angry one, not with the two who stopped going, not with the teenagers. No conversations are being prescribed, no witnessing strategy is being handed over, and nobody here knows what happened in your family or what it would cost to open it.

You are not being handed a campaign, and no part of this asks you to change one other person. The word says who art thou that judgest another man's servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth (Romans 14:4), and it is the Holy Spirit who does the work in a person that no relative has ever managed, which is why your job at that table was never persuasion.

The whole of what is being suggested is six words in the middle of a meal, said about your own life, aimed at nobody.