The Oldest in the Beginners Class

The coffee urn in the fellowship room has two settings, scalding and empty, and by seven fifteen it is usually the second one.

Tuesday night, week three of a class called Foundations. Folding tables pushed into a U, a whiteboard somebody has not fully erased since a budget meeting, styrofoam cups, and a plate of the cookies with jam in the middle that nobody has ever bought on purpose in their life.

He is fifty five. He runs crews. Forty guys, four sites, thirty one years of it. The pen the church puts out looks like something out of a doll's house in his hands.

There are three eighteen year olds at this table. One types her notes on a laptop, fast, without looking down. The kid across from him answers before the teacher has finished asking, and is usually right, and is not showing off, which is somehow worse.

He prints. Capitals, all of them, slow, the way you fill in a work order on a hood in the rain. And by the time he has the sentence down, everybody else has finished and is looking up, and the teacher, who is thirty four and kind, waits for him without making a thing of it.

He waits for me. That is the part.

In week one he had to ask what the Gospels were. He wrote it in the notebook, a dollar store spiral with a bent cover: MATT MARK LUKE JOHN. FIRST FOUR. Then last week he asked a real question, one he had been carrying around all week in the truck, and it took him almost forty seconds to get it out, because he had to build it while he was saying it, and the room stayed quiet the whole time and let him, and he could hear himself taking too long.

The teacher said it was a good question.

Driving home he does the arithmetic at the four way stop by the feed store. Fifty five. If a man started at eighteen, like that boy, that would be thirty seven years. Thirty seven years of Tuesdays. Thirty seven years of knowing what the Gospels are. He is not bitter about it and he has nobody to be bitter at, and that is exactly what makes it sit so heavy: there is nowhere to put it.

He parks, and sits, and looks at the spiral notebook on the passenger seat with his own capital letters in it.

You know the notebook. Yours might be a class, a first Bible with the spine still stiff, a question you had to ask out loud in a room, or the number you get when you subtract the year you came to this from the year you were born. And you know the thing that sits heaviest, which is not the learning. It is the arithmetic on the way home.

The psalm was written as an alphabet

I want to hand you a psalm tonight, and before we read a line of it, know how it is built, because how it is built is the pastoral care.

Psalm 25 is an acrostic. The verses run down the alphabet, one letter at a time, aleph to tav. It is a psalm shaped like the chart on the wall of a room where people are learning to read.

And here is what the man who built it that way was asking for.

Make me to know your ways, O LORD; teach me your paths. Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all the day long.Psalm 25:4-5

That is a king. Anointed as a boy, a man of war, a poet whose lines the world still uses to bury its dead, and he lays out the alphabet and asks to be taught his letters. You are in company you did not know you had, and you were never the only slow pen in the room. Scripture keeps that prayer on the page in the handwriting of a king, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put a beginner's request in the mouth of the most accomplished man in Israel and then had it written down for a fellowship hall on a Tuesday.

Nobody graduates out of that prayer. There is no room in the kingdom where teach me is beneath somebody, and the kid who answers fast will pray it at forty and mean it more.

You have a place at that table that was never conditional on the speed of your pen, and it is already settled, the part where God decided who gets taught. His word says He leads the humble in what is right and teaches the humble His way, Psalm 25:9, and the Spirit of truth is the one doing the teaching, and He has never once been in a hurry with anybody.

Remember not the years of my youth

Now the verse itself, and I am not going to rush past what is in it.

Remember not the sins of my youth or my transgressions; according to your steadfast love remember me, for the sake of your goodness, O LORD!Psalm 25:7

Look at what David does. Two kinds of remembering, and he asks for one and not the other. Do not remember the youth. Remember me. And the whole thing rests on a reason that has nothing to do with him: according to your steadfast love, for the sake of your goodness. Not for the sake of my record.

That is a man with years behind him he cannot get back, asking to be remembered on the strength of somebody else's character.

You are not required to bring a clean thirty seven years to that prayer, and you were never going to be, because the reason named in the verse is His goodness rather than yours. Psalm 25:7 says it in the text and I am not softening it, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a king's line and makes it a man's own words in a truck outside his house.

And I am not going to be quick with the grief, because it is real and it is not unbelief. Thirty seven years is thirty seven years. Kids grown, decades run, conversations a man would give a great deal to have again with what he knows now. That is a genuine loss and the weight of it is allowed. David clearly felt it. He would not have written that line if the years behind him were nothing.

I will also tell you what I am not going to do. I am not going to promise that the years still ahead will be made unusually productive to balance the books. Nobody was authorized to promise that, and a man who has run crews for thirty one years can smell that kind of talk coming. What Scripture actually puts in front of you is steadfast love and goodness, now, tonight, in this truck, and a God who remembers the man and not the wasted years.

The eleventh hour and the wage

There is one more picture I want you holding, and Jesus told it, and it is about men standing around at the end of a working day.

And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing. And he said to them, "Why do you stand here idle all day?" They said to him, "Because no one has hired us."Matthew 20:6-7

Hear their answer. Because no one has hired us. They were not lazy. They stood in the marketplace all day where a man stands when he wants work, and nobody came for them until the eleventh hour. There is no scolding in the text. The householder does not lecture them about the ten hours. He says: you go into the vineyard too.

And then the wage. Each of them received a denarius, the same as the men out since morning. Not a prorated eleventh of it. A full day's pay, out of the householder's own generosity, which is the whole point of the story and the reason the early men complained.

You are given the same wage as the earliest man on the crew, and it is already paid out of a generosity that was never calculated from your hours. That is Matthew 20 and not my arithmetic, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old parable land in a man who has spent his life paying crews and knows exactly what a full day's wage means.

You have a Lord who came looking for the men still standing at five in the afternoon, and it is written that He went out at the eleventh hour on purpose. The Spirit who moved that householder to walk back into the marketplace one more time is the same Spirit who moves in a fellowship room on a Tuesday, and neither of them treats a late arrival as a leftover.