You Do Not Carry The Root

Nobody ever sat Wilhelmina down and told her that the church had taken over from somebody else. She would like that noted, because she is fair minded and she does not want to blame a person who never said the words.

It simply arrived. It came in through the way the chapters were grouped and the way the halves of the book were named, and through a hundred small phrases in a hundred ordinary talks, and by the time she was fifteen she held it the way you hold the shape of your own kitchen in the dark. There had been a first arrangement, and it had not worked out, and then there was this one, and this one was hers.

She has never once said it out loud in that form. Said out loud it sounds coarse, and she would flinch at it. But it has been quietly sitting under everything, doing two things she never connected to each other.

The first is that it made her faintly proud in a way she did not enjoy and could not locate.

The second is stranger and it is the one that brought her here. It made her homeless. Because if you inherited a house from people who were put out of it, you never quite unpack. Something in you keeps the coat on. She has been a believer for thirty years and she has never in her life felt like she was standing on ground that was hers, and she has always assumed that was a personal failure of assurance.

It was not. It was a bad map, drawn early, that nobody meant to hand her.

And you may have the same one folded in your pocket. You may never have thought about it directly at all. But there is a low hum in a lot of believers that goes something like we are the ones who came after, and it produces a strange mixture: a little unearned pride, and a little unexplained homelessness, and no idea that the two are the same thing.

Paul saw this coming and he stopped it in one line

There is a passage in Romans where Paul takes an olive tree and starts talking about branches, and he is doing something very specific. He is talking to people exactly like Wilhelmina, in the very first generation, before anybody had had time to draw the bad map, and he sees it forming and he puts his hand out.

Do not boast against the branches. But if you do boast, remember that you do not carry the root, but the root carries you.Romans 11:18

You are carried, and you have never once been the thing holding this up. That is what the sentence says in the plainest words it could use, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee (Romans 11:18), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the life going up into every branch on that tree, which means the load you have been bracing under was never assigned to you.

Look at the direction of the weight.

The instinct in the bad map is that we are the ones now holding the thing up. The branch, in that picture, is where the life is, and the old root is history: a beginning, honored, over.

Paul turns it round completely and the turn is physical. Which one is carrying which? Go and stand under a tree and answer it honestly. The root carries the branch. There is not a branch alive that has ever held up a root, not for one hour, not in any orchard in the world.

And notice how gently he says it. He does not say the branch has no place. He does not say the graft was a mistake or a mercy that ought to embarrass you. Grafted in is a wonderful thing to be, and he says so a few lines earlier, and there is real gladness in it.

What he forbids is exactly one thing, and it is the one thing the bad map produces: boasting against the branches. Standing in a tree you did not plant and behaving as though you brought the life with you.

Now here is what that does to the homelessness, and this is the part I most want you to have.

If you replaced somebody, then your standing is a transfer, and a transfer can be reversed, and some part of you knows it. That is why you keep the coat on.

If you were grafted in, your standing is not a transfer at all. It is a joining. A graft is not a swap. Nothing was removed to make room for you in the sense the map implied, and the sap that is in you this morning came up through a root that was there long before you and is holding you right now, while you read this, without effort and without complaint.

You are not a tenant in somebody's repossessed house. You are a branch in a living tree, and the tree is not shorter for having you on it.

I am not going to take you further than the passage takes you. There are large questions here that people have argued for centuries and I am not the one to settle them and this page is not the room for it. Paul does not settle them in the paragraph either. He says one practical thing and moves on: remember which way the carrying goes.

So remember it. And then, when you have remembered it, notice what happens to your feet.

A person who knows they are carried can finally take the coat off, because you do not brace yourself in a house you were welcomed into. The pride goes, because there is nothing to be proud of in being held up. And the homelessness goes with it, because the thing that made you homeless was the story that you had taken something. You did not take anything. You were brought in.