Already In The Choir

The folders are black, A4, ring bound, and there is a strip of masking tape on each spine with a surname on it in marker.

Winston is sixty one and he has been in the third row for five weeks.

He joined because his neighbor asked him twice and because Tuesday evenings had become the longest three hours of his week since Cynthia died. He did not know it was a choir that actually performed. He thought it was people singing in a hall. On the first night a woman called Delphine, who conducts with her whole upper body and stops the room by simply lifting one eyebrow, put a folder in his hands and told him he was a baritone, which was news to him.

Inside the folder is sheet music.

Winston cannot read sheet music. He can read a menu, a meter, a football table and a coach timetable, and he cannot read a single one of those five lines with the dots on them. He knows the dots go up when the sound goes up. That is the entire extent of it.

So here is what happens on a Tuesday. Delphine says something like from bar forty two, gentlemen, watch the anacrusis, and twenty people find a place on a page in under two seconds, and Winston finds it by counting the little numbers along the top and losing his nerve halfway. Then they sing, and he is a beat behind for the first phrase and dead on for the rest, because his ear is actually very good, and by the third pass he could sing it in the bath.

But he mouths. He has mouthed for five weeks in the parts he does not have yet, because a man who cannot read the page assumes he is a guest in the room.

And on the second night, when he tried to hand the folder back and say he had made a mistake and would leave them to it, Delphine did not take it.

She said, "Hold it open on your knee anyway. Everybody in the front row started where you are. The reading comes when it comes. The belonging happened when you walked in."

He has kept the folder. He still cannot read it.

Here is why I am telling you about a man in a third row.

Winston reads his Bible exactly the way he reads that score. He opens it and sees a page of instruction he is failing, written in a language for people who already know it, and he has read it that way for about forty years. He can find the parts he knows by ear, and he loves those genuinely, and everything else is dots. So mostly he does not open it, because opening it makes him feel like a guest in a room he is not sure he was ever put in.

If that is your Bible too, stay with me. The very first sentence at that mountain is not what you think it is.

The sentence that comes before the list

Nearly everyone can recite the commandments, or most of them, or at least the ones about stealing. Almost nobody can recite the sentence that comes immediately before them, and that sentence is the one doing all the work.

I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.Exodus 20:2

Read it again and notice the tense.

Brought. Already done. Before there is one command, before a single thou shalt or shalt not, God introduces Himself by naming a rescue that is behind them. They are not at that mountain as candidates. They are standing there because He already came down, already broke a nation open, already walked them out through water they did not part. The instruction is being given to people who are out.

So this is the ground under you and not a target ahead of you: you were brought out before you were ever taught anything. Exodus 20:2 puts the rescue in the sentence before the list, in the order God Himself chose to speak it, and His Spirit is not standing over your shoulder waiting to see whether you have earned the room you are already sitting in.

The word your Bible prints as law is worth a moment too. Underneath it is a word much closer to instruction, the kind a parent gives to a child who is already in the house. It is the vocabulary of a father with a son, not of an examiner with a candidate. That is why Deuteronomy tells them to talk about it sitting in the house and walking by the way and lying down and rising up. You do not put an exam syllabus into the conversation of an ordinary Tuesday. You put family business there.

Which is exactly what the psalm assumes when it opens.

But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.Psalm 1:2

Delight. Not compliance. Not survival. The man in that psalm is not clinging on. He has his folder open on his knee because he wants it there.

And I want to be very plain about something, because it is probably the thing that has kept you out of this room longest. I am not going to tell you which of those instructions are on you today and which are not. People argue about that with real conviction on every side, and that argument belongs in rooms built for it. It is not what is hurting you. What is hurting you is the belief that you are outside until you can read the page, and that belief is answered by a sentence that has been sitting in Exodus 20 the entire time.

You are in the room. You are in it now, in the middle of a week you have handled badly, and Psalm 119:32 says it is God who enlarges a heart so a person can run in His way; His Spirit is the teacher here, and He has never asked anybody to arrive already fluent.

But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things.John 14:26

He shall teach you. That is Jesus describing the arrangement, and the arrangement has a teacher in it who lives in the learner, which is not how any exam has ever worked in the history of exams.