The Capo Still on the Second Fret

The case is behind the winter coats, standing on its end where the wardrobe is deepest.

Inside it, under the lid, the capo is still clamped on the second fret. It has been there since the last Sunday he played, in a room with a tiled floor and a fan that never worked, in a language he did not have to think about.

He led worship there for nine years. Not from a stage, because there was no stage. From the floor, half turned toward the room, watching for the moment when the singing stopped being polite and became the thing everybody came for.

Then the family moved countries, and the guitar came in the hold of an airplane with a sticker on it, and it went into the wardrobe on the second week, and it is still there.

He goes to church. He goes every Sunday. He stands three rows from the back and he sings, and he sings a half beat behind the room, because he is translating as he goes. The words arrive, he checks them, and by then the congregation is already on the next line.

Once, a fortnight ago, the tune was one he knew from before. His mouth went ahead of the room without asking him. For four seconds he was singing in the old language, at full volume, a half beat in front instead of a half beat behind, and something in his chest opened like a window.

Then he heard himself and stopped, and looked at the hymn sheet, and came back into line.

His wife asked him last spring whether he wanted to bring the guitar out. He said the strings would be dead by now. That was true. It was also the smallest available true thing to say, chosen so that nothing further would have to be said.

Because there is a bigger sentence underneath it, and he has never spoken that one out loud.

Whatever that was, it belonged to over there.

Perhaps your wardrobe holds something else. A keyboard. A folder of songs in a hand you do not write in any more. A voice that led a room of two hundred people and now sings only in the car with the windows up. Perhaps you never played anything and what you packed away was praying out loud, or teaching the young ones, or the way you used to be the one who started the singing at the end of a meal.

Did the gift stay behind at the border, or was it only the room that changed?

The question the psalm asks out loud

There is a psalm that has been sitting in the middle of the Bible for three thousand years waiting for exactly this morning.

The people who wrote it had been moved a long way from home, not by choice. Their instruments were with them. And their captors, of all things, asked them for a song, one of the ones they used to sing back there.

How shall we sing the LORD'S song in a strange land?Psalm 137:4

That is not a rebuke and it is not a failure of faith. It is a real question asked by real musicians in a place where nothing sounded right, and Scripture kept it, unanswered, in the songbook.

Now notice the detail that almost everybody reads past.

They hung their harps on the willows.

They did not sell them at the border. They did not leave them in the last house. They did not break them across a knee on the way out. They carried instruments the whole distance into exile and then hung them up by the water, close enough to sit under.

You are still holding what you were holding then, and the hanging up was never the same thing as the losing. It stands written that the gifts of God are not withdrawn from the people He gave them to, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a change of address, who determines what a person is carrying.

The willows were a season. The harps were not.

Not a rank, and not a stage

Now the part that has to be said plainly, because this is where this subject goes wrong.

None of this is a league table. What is in your wardrobe does not make you a senior believer, and its being in the wardrobe does not make you a junior one. Scripture describes gifts distributed by one Spirit as He wills, which puts the choosing entirely on Him and leaves nothing whatever to compare.

You were never handed a rank. 1 Corinthians 12 says one and the same Spirit works all these things, dividing to every man severally as He will, and that written sentence takes away the tier a person in the third row from the back has quietly assigned themselves, because the Holy Spirit does the dividing and leaves nothing behind to rank.

And this is not a promise of a platform. Nobody here is telling you that a microphone is coming, that a church is about to ask you, or that the nine years are about to happen again in a new accent. That prediction is not mine to make, and a person who takes a step in order to secure an outcome has made the step into a transaction.

The step is smaller than that, and it is nearer.

Paul told Timothy to stir up the gift of God that was in him. Stir up. Not apply for, not qualify for, not wait to be recognized for. The word is the one used for raking a fire that is still alight under the ash, which means the assumption behind the whole instruction is that the fire never went out.

You have a fire under the ash and it does not need relighting. 2 Timothy 1:6 tells a man to stir up what is already in him, and the Spirit of God is the one who has kept it alight through every year the case stayed shut.

The gift did not need a visa

Here is the second half of the psalm's question, and Acts answers it.

On the day the Holy Spirit came, the crowd was made of people from everywhere, and the thing that undid them was not volume and it was not spectacle. It was hearing, every man, in the tongue wherein he was born.

God did not ask them to arrive in the room's language. He came to each of them in the one they dreamed in.

You are heard natively, and you always were. Acts 2 records people hearing the wonderful works of God each in their own tongue, and the Holy Spirit is still the one doing the carrying, so the half beat you sing behind on a Sunday is not a measure of anything except how recently you arrived.

That old melody that came up out of your chest a fortnight ago and made a window open: that was not nostalgia. Nostalgia looks backward and aches. That was the thing itself, still running, briefly audible.