You Were Set Apart To Sing

The microphone stand lives under the stairs, behind the ironing board, in a case with one latch that does not shut any more.

Margie put it there eleven years ago. She could not tell you now what day, and she could not tell you who said anything to her about it, and the honest truth is that she is not sure anybody ever did. It was more like weather. She moved into a season where the whole shape of being serious about God seemed to be about what you set down, and she looked around at what she had, and what she had was a voice.

So she sang at one more wedding, in April, and then she did not sing at anything.

She was good. That is not vanity, that is just a fact about a person, the way some people can throw and some people can fix a car. She had a low warm sound that made people at the back of a hall put their forks down. Two hundred people once went completely quiet in a room with a bad ceiling because Margie was singing at the front of it.

Now she sings on Wednesdays.

Wednesday is the day she vacuums, and the vacuum in that apartment is an old one that roars, and under the roar of it Margie sings. Full voice sometimes. She has worked out, without ever admitting to herself that she worked it out, that the machine is loud enough to cover her, and she moves it around a rug she has already done twice to keep it running.

Then she switches it off and the apartment is very quiet.

In August, on a Wednesday, she was carrying two bags of shopping up to the third floor and she met Arlo on the landing. Arlo is six. Arlo lives on the other side of her living room wall and owns a plastic dinosaur that goes everywhere with him, including, apparently, the stairs.

He planted himself in front of her.

"Do the Wednesday song."

Margie put a bag down. "The what?"

"The Wednesday song. The one that goes up." He did a thing with his hand, lifting it, to show her where it went up.

"Sweetheart, I do not sing."

Arlo looked at her the way children look at adults who have said something plainly untrue, which is to say without any cruelty at all, only patience.

"You do though," he said. "On Wednesdays. Through the wall. My mum stops washing up."

Margie stood on a concrete landing with a bag of shopping leaning against her ankle for what felt like a long time.

"Teach me it," said Arlo.

And there, in a stairwell that smelled of somebody else's cooking, with the machine off and the door shut and nothing at all to hide behind, a woman of fifty eight sang four bars out loud for the first time in eleven years, to an audience of one boy and a dinosaur.

Her voice shook on the second bar. He did not notice. He was already trying to copy it, badly, at enormous volume.

Beloved, come and sit down here on the step with me. Something in you went quiet. Maybe it was a voice, maybe it was your hands, maybe it was the thing you were doing at twenty three when you were most alive and you have not touched it since. Let us go and see what the setting apart was actually for.

Washing was step one of five

Go and stand at the door of the tent with Aaron and his sons on the day they were set apart, because the order of that ceremony is the whole argument.

First, Moses brought them and washed them with water.

That is where a great many of us think the story ends. Cleaned up. Sorted out. Rinsed off, and now try very hard not to get dirty again for the rest of your life.

Look what happens next.

He clothed them. Coat, sash, robe, ephod, the breastplate with the stones. Then he took the anointing oil and poured it, and the oil ran down. Then he took blood and put it on the tip of the right ear, and on the thumb of the right hand, and on the great toe of the right foot.

Washed. Clothed. Anointed. Marked at the ear, marked at the hand, marked at the foot.

And then, at the end, this.

And he put all upon Aaron's hands, and upon his sons' hands, and waved them for a wave offering before the LORD.Leviticus 8:27

Their hands were filled. That is what the old wording for this ceremony actually says, and it is the exact opposite of the picture most of us are carrying. The ear was marked because from now on there is something to hear. The thumb was marked because there is something to do. The toe was marked because there is somewhere to go. Nobody stands in the doorway of a tent for a week being emptied. They were being commissioned.

So hear this, in the tense it is written in. You have not been set apart to be a quieter version of yourself. What is written puts a filling at the end of that ceremony and not a stripping, and the same Spirit who kept that chapter in front of us for three thousand years is holding it in front of you right now.

Now let me put the New Testament sentence beside it, because it says the same thing and it is aimed directly at you.

But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.1 Peter 2:9

That ye should shew forth the praises. There is the purpose clause, sitting right there in the middle of the verse, and it is not about abstaining from anything. You were set apart to make a sound.

Read what that verse actually hands you. You are a royal priesthood, present tense, already, and the purpose named in the same breath is that you would show forth His praises. 1 Peter 2:9 has never once read like a warning. His Spirit is holding that purpose clause open in front of you while you read it, and that is what stops a sentence like that being a nice idea and starts it being an address.

And in case anybody hears all this as a new assignment they have to be strong enough for, listen to who is doing the walking.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes.Ezekiel 36:26 to 27

I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk. Not and then you must manage it. The new heart is given, the Spirit is put in, and the walking is caused. That is the whole reason nothing here is a burden: the One who set you apart is the One doing the walking in you.

So it is already yours. The heart is new, the Spirit is in you, and His word says the point of the setting apart was praise coming out of you. Nobody is waiting for you to earn back what you put under the stairs.