Somebody Already Set the Date

The line of bulbs is crooked and everybody can see it is crooked, and the man on the ladder is not going to say so, and the boy holding the coil at the bottom is not going to say so either, and that is how the whole street knows a wedding is coming.

It is Thursday. The wedding is Sunday. Chairs are coming out of houses where nobody is getting married, carried two at a time by men who did not need to be asked. Somebody has been cooking since before noon, because the smell got to the top of the road an hour ago and has been going up and down it ever since like a child with news.

Marta watches it from her kitchen window with her hands still in the water.

She does not need to turn round to know what is on her own calendar. It hangs by the door. Tuesday, the nurse who comes for her mother. Thursday, the shift she picked up because the money was short. The bins on the Wednesday. And a hospital number in red in the corner of April, in her own handwriting, from a year she has decided not to look at again. Thirty small squares in a grid, and not one of them belongs to her, and not one of them belongs to God.

There is a knock. It is the neighbor with flour halfway up her forearms.

"We practice tonight. Seven o'clock."

"I am not family."

"Nobody is family at a rehearsal," the woman says. "That is exactly what a rehearsal is for."

So Marta goes, holding a song sheet she does not need, and stands at the back of a hall with the chairs pushed against the walls. For an hour, twenty people walk a walk they will walk on Sunday. Somebody's grandmother tells the bride's brother he is going too fast, four separate times, and each time she says it louder. The children have the song by the third run through and then refuse to stop singing it. A man practices carrying a tray of glasses across a floor he will cross full on Sunday, and he tips it, and everyone shouts, and he does it again.

And Marta, standing at the back with a sheet of paper she is not using, notices that she is praying. She did not decide to. Something under her ribs that has been lying flat for two years lifts about an inch, and then stays there.

Walking home she stops under the strung bulbs. They are not lit. They will not be lit until Sunday. She stands under them in the dark anyway, looking up, and she can see them perfectly well, and she knows exactly what they are for.

Now, beloved, let me say the part that is actually about you. Maybe your calendar looks like hers. Maybe every square in it has somebody else's name on it and you have not written your own in there for years, and you have stopped expecting to, and you have called that being sensible. Come and stand under the lights with me for a minute. They are not lit yet either.

He named the days after Himself

Here is what gets missed, and it gets missed because we were handed this as a list of duties instead of hearing it as a voice.

When God gave a people a year, He did not staple a schedule to the wall and walk out. He picked out certain days and He named them after Himself.

These are the appointed times of the Lord, the holy gatherings which you shall proclaim at the season appointed for them.Leviticus 23:4

Sit on that word. Appointed. An appointment is not a chore. An appointment is two parties and a time, and it falls apart if either one of them does not come. He set them. He put His own name on them. And then look what He put inside them: food, and singing, and branches carried in from the trees, and one whole week every autumn when the entire nation moved out of their houses and slept in shelters made of leaves.

Seven times in a year, that God said: come. Stop working. Bring the family. Eat something good. Tell the children why.

That is not the diary of an employer. That is the diary of a Father who likes having everybody at the table. You are on that guest list, and not on approval. Leviticus 23:4 puts His own name on the days before it says one word about who kept them, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an old calendar sound like an invitation with your name inside it.

And every one of those days was pointing at something.

A lamb in the evening. Blood on a doorframe. A family eating standing up with their coats on because they were leaving in the morning. A rehearsal. And centuries later Paul writes it plainly: Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.

One armful of the first grain, waved in the air before the field was anywhere near in. A rehearsal. And then: Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.

Fifty days counted out on the fingers, and then a harvest feast with two loaves of real bread with leaven in them, baked at home. A rehearsal. And then a room in Jerusalem, and a sound like wind, and people who could not stop talking.

Trumpets. A day of covering. And then, right at the end of the year, the strangest one of the lot. Everybody out of the house for a week, into shelters, so that the grandchildren would ask why, and be told: because God camped with us once, when we had nothing.

That last one has not had its Sunday yet.

Look, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be His people, and God Himself will be with them.Revelation 21:3

Do you see what the whole year was doing? Every appointment was the same sentence sung in a different key. I am coming to be with you. The lamb said it. The grain said it. The bread said it. The shelters made of leaves have been saying it every autumn for three thousand years, and they are still saying it, because the day they are pointing at is still ahead. You have something ahead of you, and that is not a mood I am talking you into. Revelation 21:3 says where all of this is going, and His Spirit is the deposit on it, which is why the waiting has weight in your chest and not just in the argument.

Now let me take something out of your hands that was never yours to carry.

I am not going to tell you which of these days you must keep. Nobody on this page is handing you a verdict for keeping none of them, and nobody here is pinning a medal on you for keeping all of them. That argument has its own rooms and its own long nights, and this is not one of those rooms.

Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.Colossians 2:16 to 17

Read what that verse actually does before you read what somebody told you it does. It takes the clipboard out of everybody's hands. It was never written to cancel the party. It was written so that nobody could stand at the door of the party deciding who is allowed in.

And once the clipboard is gone, look what is left standing there. A year with real appointments in it. A God who sets a table seven times and calls it His. A Son who has already been the Lamb and already come up out of the ground. And a day out ahead of all of us when the dwelling of God is with us and nobody has to go home afterwards.

That is not a duty. That is an invitation, and your name has already been said over it. You are invited, present tense, with nothing outstanding, because that is what is written and not what I am hoping for you. The same Spirit who carried every one of those rehearsals is the one holding this seat open.