They Kept Going To The Temple

She was seventy one and she had read Acts more times than she could put a number to, and it went past her the way a familiar road goes past.

Peter and John went up together into the temple at the hour of prayer.

She stopped. Not for any reason she could have explained if her daughter had walked in.

Went up. Into the temple. At the hour of prayer, which is a fixed hour, the same hour it had been for centuries, the hour their mothers had kept.

And she sat there with the reading lamp on and thought: they were still going.

Because she had a picture in her head that she had never once examined, and it had been in there since she was a girl in a wooden church with a coal stove, and the picture was this. Something happened at Easter, and everything before it stopped, and the people who believed walked out of the old building and started the new thing somewhere else.

That is not a doctrine she was taught. Nobody stood at the front and said it. It was just the shape the story had in her, the way a road has a shape in you whether or not you have ever drawn a map of it.

And here they are in chapter three, walking up the same steps, at three in the afternoon, which is what the hour of prayer was, and they are not doing anything unusual and Luke does not think it needs explaining.

She said out loud to the lamp: well, I have had that wrong for sixty years.

And she was not upset. That is what surprised her most. She felt like somebody who has been carrying a bag with a broken strap for a long time and has just been shown the handle.

You know that picture, if you have it.

Maybe you were never taught it either and you have it anyway. Maybe the story in you starts with a break, with a leaving, with something old set down and something new picked up. Maybe you have felt, without saying it, that this faith of yours began by getting rid of things.

Nobody told you that. It is simply the shape a story takes when a person is handed the second half of it first.

Read what is not being explained

Here is the verse, and the whole weight of it is in how ordinary it is.

Now Peter and John went up together into the temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour.Acts 3:1

There is no note attached to that. Luke does not pause to say that this was permitted, or that it was a transitional arrangement, or that they were doing it to reach people.

He says it the way you would say two men walked to the post office. It is a sentence about a Tuesday.

Which tells you what the beginning of this actually looked like from the inside. Not a demolition. Not a break. A group of people who had met the risen Christ, going up the same steps their families had gone up, at the same hour, and praying.

You are part of something that began inside what came before it, and it did not start by tearing anything down. That is what the plainness of this verse says, that two of them went up at the usual hour and nobody thought it needed a footnote (Acts 3:1), and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept that ordinary sentence in the book for two thousand years so that nobody would have to guess at the shape of the beginning.

Now here is what I am not saying

I want to be very plain here, because this is exactly where a page like this goes wrong, and I have read enough of them to know.

Nothing on this page is telling you to keep anything. Not an hour, not a day, not a custom, not a calendar, not one single practice. That question is not being decided here and it will not be, in either direction, because good and faithful people have landed in different places on it and this site does not sit in judgment over any of them.

And nothing here is telling you that your church has lost something. That is an argument, and an argument is a different kind of writing, and it would take something off you instead of handing something to you, and you are seventy one and you did not come here to be told the last sixty years were a mistake.

You have not been standing in a lesser version of this and there is nothing you need to go and retrieve. Scripture says one man esteemeth one day above another, another esteemeth every day alike; let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind (Romans 14:5), and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that persuading in a person, which is why nobody gets to do it for them from a page.

So what is left, once you take the instruction out of it?

Comfort. That is what is left, and it is more than it sounds.

Why an ordinary sentence rearranged something

If the story began with a break, then you are a person who belongs to a faith that discards. And whatever else you believe, some part of you is quietly waiting to be discarded, because a house that started by throwing things out is a house that might throw you out.

If the story began inside something, continuing, at the usual hour, then you belong to a faith that keeps.

You have been joined to something that keeps, and that is why an ordinary sentence about three in the afternoon rearranged something in your chest. The word says that Jesus said, think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill (Matthew 5:17), and it is the Holy Spirit who takes fulfill out of a debate and makes it a floor under an old woman with a reading lamp.